For National Comic Book Day, more news about speculators came up

Here's some recent UPI coverage of National Comic Book Day, which tells how, wouldn't you know it, there was quite a bit of auction-style news brought up as they discuss 5 times comicdom appeared in "odd news". First:

September 25 is National Comic Book Day, celebrating the heroes, villains and stories that have filled comic book pages for generations. UPI is marking the occasion with a look back at five times superheroes -- and their fans, collectibles and real-life counterparts -- made their way into Odd News.

You know, it's very ill-advised to make it sound like the villains are something to celebrate, yet that's what they're certainly risking here, and it's quite the dismay indeed. And then, there's the sugarcoating of speculation:

Also in July, the piece of comic book art that first introduced readers to the Marvel Comics hero Iron Man sold for a record-breaking $3,875,000.

Heritage Auctions announced the sale of the original Don Heck artwork from page 1 of Marvel's Tales of Suspense No. 39 from March 1963.

The final price set a new world record for the highest price paid for a piece of original comic art. The previous record of $3,360,000 was set by a piece of Mike Zeck art from 1984's Marvel Super-Heroes Secret Wars No. 8. The artwork, which depicts the first appearance of Spider-Man's black costume, was sold in January 2022.

Again, why must we hear about how much it sold, and not say, what the best stories throughout the ages are? And just a single page too. This is getting ridiculous, and no clue whether the audience for comicdom overall has grown as a result. Then comes the following about Wonder Woman:

A Georgia woman paid tribute to her favorite superhero by amassing the world's largest collection of Wonder Woman memorabilia: 1,581 items.

Guinness World Records announced in June that Cedartown resident Aleshia Wiley's collection of memorabilia, including comic books, Funko Pop figurines, action figures, specialty toys and branded merchandise, officially took the title.

Wiley said she likes that Wonder Woman stands for female empowerment.

"Wonder Woman is a beacon of hope for girls and women everywhere, and a reminder that we need to support one another more," she said. "She shows that true strength comes from within and together we have the strength of the Amazons. Over the years, her character has evolved alongside new generations, but one thing has always stayed the same: women can do anything, and together we are unstoppable!"

Now this beggars some challenging questions: does WW still stand for anything positive regarding women? It's been far from the case for years, and the stories haven't been entertaining in a quarter century, with Greg Rucka making it worse when he was writer for at least 3 years. Some recent problems and incidents explain why whatever "female empowerment" is supposed to mean now stand as a joke, and make clear women never really had the backing they needed. Certainly not from leftists. All that aside, can women in real life do virtually anything? Are they "unstoppable"? Sadly, reality says otherwise. And then, more items involving villainy come up on UPI's list:

Also in 2025, a 22-year-old comic book fan from Indiana earned a Guinness World Record for her collection of 2,318 items related to Batman villain the Joker.

Bloomington resident Megan Pierce said she started collecting in middle school, and soon she had amassed items ranging from action figures and comic books to Joker rollerblades, a skateboard and milk caps from 1966. [...]

She said her hobby has allowed her to make connections with Joker fandom figures including actor Mark Hamill, who voiced the character in several animated and video game projects, as well as other collectors.

They were manufacturing merchandise for the Clown Prince of Crime that far back as 60-plus years? Even if that was before the darker angle of Batman was restored in the comics proper, to emphasize a villain who was often written as a murderous man is disturbing. And what's so great about veteran actor Hamill anyway? It's long turned out he's one of the most disturbingly leftist activists around, and I don't want to admire somebody who seems to consider a villain the most ideal role to play. Certainly not a supervillain as nasty as the Joker's often been characterized. Why, even a villain with a seemingly honorable persona as Doctor Doom's been written with is a character to give pause about, mainly because even Doom's been written as a nasty monster too decades before.

If that's the kind of material UPI thinks is a big deal for NCBD, something is terribly wrong here alright.

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.

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.

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.

Back issue bins can turn up interesting items, but why not trade collections?

CTV News wrote about what people find in back issue bins, at conventions like FCBD and the Calgary Expo:

If you’re the right kind of geek, there’s a good chance you’ve spent some time lately rooting through comic book back issue bins.

Calgary Expo and Free Comic Book Day are just freshly behind us.

Maybe you were hoping the next flip would bring you a particular something on your list for a mere dollar or two.

Maybe a successful dive through the cheap reads means getting exactly issues 520 and 521 of Journey Into Mystery.

Or maybe you were flipping aimlessly, and it was by the Comic Book Gods’ good grace you hit on the “fear-filled final issues” of that specific Marvel Comics series that someone else either didn’t want anymore or couldn’t sell at face value.

It was a rescue mission, regardless.

How comic book collectors approach it is what can vary, says Bill Bateman from Alpha Comics in Calgary.

“While some are looking for anything to fill in the blanks in their collections, others are looking for that elusive rare book that may have been missed by the store,” Bateman told CTV News.

“Some people show up with a binder of notes showing what they’re missing, (while) some have apps on their phones that do the job a lot faster, and some just know all of the books well enough.”

Sure, there can be gems to find in back issue bins, but if the same issues have been reprinted in trade collections, why must we hear about would-be collectors zeroing in almost entirely on said bins and not searching for paperback/hardcovers reprinting the very same issues? Why not even whether anybody wants specific issues reprinted, if they haven't yet been? That's what I never seem to see these news outlets bring up, nor do they interview people who do. But trade collections or paperback/hardcovers are what comprise the bulk of my collection now, and I think it's working a lot better that way, because thanks to the Marvel Epic Collections and the more recently launched DC Finest archives, I now own hundreds, perhaps thousands of old issues reprinted through these forms of collections for older comics. And these news companies don't want to talk about how great those can be for everybody who hopes to acquire a complete run of various classic series? That's just the problem here.

Rhiannon Mesler says comic book bin diving “runs on the same machinery that powers a slot machine.”

Likewise, the University of Lethbridge marketing professor and expert in consumer behaviour and decision-making says, “the same machinery social media platforms have spent fifteen years optimizing.”

“What makes it irresistible isn’t the find. It’s the unpredictability,” she says.

“Neuroscientists have shown that the brain’s dopamine system fires hardest not when reward arrives, but when reward arrives unexpectedly.

“And that the dopamine signal actually peaks when the odds are roughly 50-50, when you genuinely don’t know whether the next comic in the box is going to be ‘The One.’”

They make it sound more like a game of hide-and-seek than searching for the best reading material. Another clue the speculator mentality plays a part in this whole affair, which effectively ruins any attempt to sound convincing in their fandom.

In addition to the above, ComicBook also told about a guy who, with aid from his dad, managed to purchase at least 400 of the Amazing Spider-Man issues printed up till around the mid-90s:

Many times, comic book collectors are only interested in building a collection for bragging rights or to hopefully one day make money off of the collectibles. However, there are other times when a collector has a more personal reason for collecting memorabilia, and it has a purer meaning than just looking for the big bucks. In some cases, the idea of collecting comics or other items of memorabilia is passed down through the generations. In those cases, it is more about the relationship between a person and their parents, and that makes completing a collection something that means so much more.

This was the case for a Redditor known as joeltheconner, who just revealed that he finally completed his Amazing Spider-Man run of the first 400 issues. He then added that he has his father to thank for this fact.

In his post, joeltheconner wrote that his dad was a comic book collector and would take him to comic shops when he was a kid. However, he said that he was never as interested in comics until he was nine years old. “At the age of 9. My dad gave me a copy of ASM 300 to read. I was hooked instantly,” he wrote. “From then, we started collecting together. For two years we took our vacations to Chicago so we could go to the big convention up there.”

Around 1998, he said he lost interest and stopped collecting, and then moved on. However, he admitted there was something his dad had said to him before that he thought was cool. They discussed having the full run of a specific comic book title. He chose Amazing Spider-Man and decided he would collect the run of the first 400 issues. That led to a few years ago, when his dad asked if he was still interested in completing that collection. His dad then did something that meant the world to him.

His dad had his “prized” Silver Surfer comics, and he offered to sell those to the local shop to get credit so that his son could work on finishing his Amazing Spider-Man run. “I honestly tried to talk him out of it, but it sounded like a really fun thing for him and I to do together again,” he wrote. “From the first time I stepped back into a shop, it took me right back and I was hooked again. 2 years later, today I bought the last book that I needed to complete the run.”

That book was Amazing Spider-Man #2, which was the first appearance of the Vulture and which was the first book where Spider-Man fought a superpowered villain (Chameleon was the first villain in the debut issue). This man’s dad gave up a prized possession to work with his son to help fulfill a dream. It was obvious that it meant the world to this man. “It’s so hard sometimes for sons to tell their fathers what they mean to them, and I’m going to figure out a way to really tell him,” he wrote. “But thank you, Dad. I owe more to you in this life than I could never repay.”

While it's great for dads and sons to do all sorts of things together, it's simply ludicrous how somebody would like to get as much of Spidey when it mattered in pamphlets, but not in trade collections, which at this point is precisely what I own. As of now, I own, for example, the first 12 ASM Epic archives, and have plenty more coming after that, and hope the ASM run will be more or less completed eventually, so that then, I can try to buy complete sets myself, though admittedly, at this point I'm hesitant to buy those collecting the Clone Saga, which, while it may not be as awful as some other artistic humiliations to come down the pike later, was still very damaging to the Spidey legacy, and certainly the part where Peter assaulted Ben Reilly in frustration and accidentally injured Mary Jane when she tried to get him to stop, after which Peter just ran out of the laboratory in horror instead of doing what he could to mend the damage to MJ. That kind of scene is far more reprehensible than claiming Ben was the protagonist all along between 1975-95 (and it was soon confirmed by writers that Peter was the protagonist within that time frame, not Ben, in their efforts to apologize to Spider-fans they alienated).

And I have plenty more Epic Collection and Finest archives I've bought, including a few dedicated to Superman's series and spinoffs, all 3 for Black Panther, several for Daredevil, Iron Man, Fantastic Four, Wonder Woman, Catwoman, Dr. Strange, Justice Society/League, Punisher, Luke Cage, X-Men, Capt. America, Thor, Hawkman, Defenders, Moon Knight and even Excalibur. I also have several omnibuses to boot. And I hope other Spidey spinoffs like the 1976-98 Spectacular will see some Epic archives eventually too. That's what serious "collectors" should really be buying, and considering the back issues are highly likely to become increasingly expensive over time, if they really want to read this stuff, that's why they'll buy the trade collections.

So again, why are we still seeing this otherwise absurd news about people searching for back issues instead of paperbacks/hardcovers? That's another huge letdown with modern news coverage of comidom. Because in the end, it only hints they still don't take the medium seriously, otherwise, they would talk about all these reprint collections and how they can introduce new generations to older classics as a great reading pastime. And this demonstrates how the MSM continues to belittle the medium, by not highlighting a far more convenient approach to collecting notable stories of the past decades by today's standards. Unless something is done to dissuade speculators and collectors from back issues and try trade collections instead, the problem's going to continue for at least another decade or three.

Stamps based on famous comics and cartoon characters

The US Postal Service has an article about some special commemorative stamps they've developed, based on at least a few comics and cartoon characters in recent times, which includes the following:

• 1997’s Bugs Bunny featuring the animated rabbit leaning on a mailbox with a carrot in hand;
• 2006’s DC Comics Super Heroes, featuring portraits of Batman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, Green Arrow, Aquaman, Supergirl and Plastic Man in a 20-design pane;
• 2015’s Batman, featuring four versions of Batman drawn from different comic book eras, paired with four “bat-signals” that trace the evolution of his character; and
• 2016’s Wonder Woman, featuring four portraits of the Amazon princess from different comic book eras, emphasizing both her physical power and her sense of purpose.

Well at least this kind of venture is more appealing at this point than the artistic fiasco DC degenerated into by that time. But for all we know, even this could end up being craved by the speculator market, and that wouldn't be any better than how pamphlets are repeatedly bought by such decidedly misguided and embarrassing people for the sake of money, and in hopes the newer ones will actually make the same, which first brought down industry in the mid-90s.

Putting comics and cartoon characters on stamps can be creative, and might be preferable to some other forms of merchandise, but even that's no substitute for artistic quality in terms of storytelling.

DC/WB approved an adult cartoon based on Tom King's Mister Miracle series

It's sad but hardly shocking to discover that WB/DC are going to produce an adult animated cartoon based on overrated Tom King's Mister Miracle story, news which Comic Book Movie gushes over so predictably:

Last June, DC Studios announced that it was moving forward with an adult animated TV series adapting Tom King and Mitch Gerads' Mister Miracle.

The subversive comic book series picks up with a suicidal Scott Free infected by Darkseid's Anti-Life Equation, taking both the character and reader to some unexpected places on what proves to be a mind-bending, Jack Kirby-inspired adventure. It has the potential to make a great show, especially if it sticks closely to the source material.

Fortunately, King will serve as showrunner on Mister Miracle, while Gerads is involved with helping create the visual style of the series alongside the animation team.

Talking to Comic Geek Speak, King confirmed that the casting process is underway and teased an imminent announcement. He also hinted that we'll learn how the character fits into the wider DCU, something that makes sense when James Gunn has repeatedly said that actors who star in animated projects will also reprise their roles in live-action movies and series.

I'm far from shocked they'd lecture everybody that the "source material" is the most wonderful storytelling ever, without even explaining why the premise works or is even remotely consistent with what Kirby first developed 55 years ago. And to say this is "Kirby-inspired" is equally insulting to the intellect, because in all the stories he wrote that I read, he never came up with the kind of depressed, unheroic and traumatized personalities and premises King's made a whole career out of. And who watches this stuff on TV today?

What they're working on decidedly makes clear something's unhealthy about how Gunn's DC movieverse is being developed. Speaking of which, the Algemeiner reported that Simu Liu, who starred in Marvel's live action Shang Chi movie, wants an anti-Israeli actress to play Wonder Woman:

Canadian actor Simu Liu said he thinks Mexican actress Melissa Barrera, his costar on “The Copenhagen Test,” would be a great Wonder Woman to replace Israeli actress Gal Gadot in the upcoming DC Universe film by James Gunn about Diana Prince.

“James Gunn or anybody else out there, I think she really pushes herself,” said Liu, who starred in Marvel’s “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” during a recent interview with JoBlo. “There were a couple of moments during stunt training where I was like ‘That’s Wonder Woman-esque.’ I’m just throwing it out there. I don’t know who’s watching or listening to this interview, but I just think she’s a total badass. And she puts in the work.”

Barrera came under fire in November 2023 for sharing posts on social media that accused Israel of genocide and criticized the Jewish state during its war against Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip, following their deadly rampage across southern Israel on Oct. 7 of that year. The actress uploaded posts on Instagram that described Israel as a “colonized” land and suggested that the Jewish state controls the media. “Western media only shows the other side,” she wrote. “Why they do that, I will let you deduce for yourself. We don’t need more hate. No Islamophobia. No antisemitism.”

If it weren't for the seriousness of the issues involved, her attempt to justify her positions with moral equivalence between "islamophobia" and antisemitism might've been funny. But truly, it's not.

Barrera and Liu were among the many celebrities who signed an open letter by Artists4Ceasefire in October 2023 that called for an immediate ceasefire to end the Israel-Hamas war, a release of the hostages taken by the terrorist organization after its invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, and an end to “the bombing in Gaza.” The letter makes no mention of the Hamas terrorist organization by name, which slaughtered 1,200 Israelis, took more than 200 civilian hostages from Israel. and led to the start of the Israel-Hamas war.

The Shang Chi movie definitely won't be aging well based on the politics of its star, and his vehement refusal, like so many modern Hollywooders, to keep his mouth shut. But it won't be shocking if Gunn does hire Barrera, given how the Superman film used anti-Israel and anti-American metaphors at the beginning. And all this is being forced into adaptations of comics that were overseen by Jewish publishers, in a medium whose early incarnations were built up by Jewish contributors. Gadot's WW movies were no classics, but if a new take on the Amazon princess casts an actress with such repellent positions in the role, that'll really make things worse, and be a slap in the face to all the Jewish publishers who helped William Marston and H.G. Peter's famous creation to fruition. There's no reason to waste money on these movie messes anymore, just as there's no reason to support the modern comics.

More about the back issues on the speculator market

The UK Times wrote more about the topic of the speculator market, and the old back issues that're held hostage to the cyclical sales mindset. And in the following about Spider-Man, they say:

More than 60 years on, the world is still marvelling – not just at Spider-Man’s awesome might but at his impressive market value. In 2021 a copy of the same magazine sold in the US for $3.6 million (£2.7 million). It cost 12 cents when it was bought in some suburban drugstore 62 years ago. At the time, that was the highest price paid for a comic book, but since then the record has been smashed on several occasions – a solid indication of the rising global market in collectable comics. Last year, a copy of Action Comics from June 1938, which introduced the Superman character to the world, sold for $6 million at auction. And just this week, a copy of the first comic dedicated entirely to Superman, dating to 1939, astonished the collectibles market when it went for $9.12 million.

I'm afraid it's just at the market value, considering what a joke sales of monthly pamphlets have become. Does anyone truly marvel at how Joe Quesada destroyed the Spider-marriage? And the damage to Spidey didn't stop there. How can anybody consider it a celebration when artistic value's been massively damaged and left unrepaired? Also note how none of these press sources today ever delve into sad moments like those from the past 2 decades, nor anything else that brought down comicdom, and you see how the inflicted damage will continue apace.

Superman’s debut belongs to what collectors and dealers call the golden age of comic books – the pre-war or wartime era when other patriotic, all-American characters such as Wonder Woman and Captain America arrived on the scene and spent their early years fighting Nazi stormtroopers and the Imperial Japanese Army. Spider-Man is a product of the so-called silver age of the 1950s and 1960s, when new-minted superheroes were allowed to be more flawed and personally conflicted, and when they deployed their powers primarily as crimefighters. Batman, though he first appeared before the Second World War, found his métier in the 1950s when he became a kind of masked special constable, constantly at the beck and call of the Gotham City Police Department.

Is that a joke? "Allowed"? Back then, while there were problems with censorship, which tragically made a comeback in the past decade, personality flaws weren't something anybody in the business knowingly objected to. That was something that was up to the writers/artists to decide if they wanted to emphasize. During the Golden Age, most stories were at least half the length of what followed during the 50s/60s, and Action Comics, in example, was more an anthology of several entries, some lasting longer than others, like Superman's. And in those early years, it's not like anybody was immediately interested in emphasizing what became more common in the Silver Age. At that time, working on the kind of publication deadlines that they did, the primary objective was entertainment value, and they succeeded well with that. They make it sound, again, like comics characters are real people instead of fictional figures, and as I've said before, I find that galling. I think that part about Batman being an unofficial "employee" of the GCPD is also exaggerated, because there were times when he'd be seen investigating crimes without their immediate request back in the day too.

It is likely that prices for silver-age comics have been boosted in part by the popularity of the Marvel movie franchises, according to Jamie George, Stanley Gibbons Baldwin’s specialist in collectable comics, trading cards and video games. “It’s difficult to point to a causal link, but there are definitely people who buy comics speculating that when a movie hits, that comic’s going to go up in value,” he says. “The Iron Man movies were great, so were The Avengers, and prices for those books seem to have risen. When an Eternals movie was first rumoured to be coming out, I saw many collectors buying issue one of the comic book – from July 1976 – because they figured they would be able to sell it at a profit.”

Obviously, the movies had some influence on encouraging speculators. But the alleged value went down once the movies' popularity subsided. And it wouldn't be surprising any value the Eternals back issue were assumed to have didn't work out well following the film's failure. Most annoying about this otherwise fluff-coated item is what got one of the interviewees to try reading:

Many comic enthusiasts are men who bought and read the comics as teenagers. “Jonathan Ross is one of the biggest collectors in the UK,” Pace says, adding that Nicolas Cage and Eminem own collections in the US. As middle-aged men, all three are the core demographic. The urge to collect comics is at least partly a nostalgic form of escapism. But Pace also stresses the visual impact of the best comics. “The first book I ever picked up was Batman, The Killing Joke, which was published in 1988,” he says. “I never read as a kid, couldn’t stand it, but that comic had an iconic cover depicting the Joker with a camera held to his face. I just loved the artwork, so read the comic constantly.”

Once again, a very sad situation where somebody was hooked on the medium not just because it was a Batman book, but also because one of the most notorious supervillains in comicdom was on the cover. Of course, if it had been a Superman comic with Lex Luthor emphasized, that too could be dismaying. Same with supervillainesses like Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn, and there are Marvel supervillains where a similar point could be made that villain worship is troubling. That the interviewee would imply a comic like the Killing Joke is literally the "best" is ludicrous at worst, ditto that the reader apparently only got into the hobby because of something like the Joker, and what the comic in question emphasized. It's not difficult to guess he never cared for Stan Lee's creations at Marvel, if at all, unless maybe Bullseye in Daredevil is what he considered delightful. Amazingly, the article does reference a certain issue from the 50s, though in a context that ignores the present, and says:

Still others concentrate on what are known as pre-code comic books. In 1954 a psychologist named Fredric Wertham wrote a book called Seduction of the Innocent in which he argued that comic books were causing a storm of juvenile delinquency. The criticisms in the book spooked some comic publishers who, to reassure advertisers, agreed to adhere to a code of conduct. The code stated, among other things, that “good shall triumph over evil and the criminal shall be punished for his misdeeds” – hence all the depictions of rueful gangsters being bagged up by Batman and Spider-Man. It also said that “females shall be drawn realistically without exaggeration of any physical qualities” – a bid to censor what were known in the trade, somewhat lasciviously, as headlight covers. Those comics are now, of course, eminently collectable.

Interesting they bring this up, because the past decade had serious problems with mainstream publishers censoring female imagery, making it sexless. Does it concern anyone involved that such a horrid mentality made a comeback of recent, and is still affecting mainstream comicdom in some way or other? If not, there's no point complaining about the past if they don't have a problem with it in the present. And near the end:

But is it art? Should comic books be seen as a sophisticated design genre on a par with other mass-produced ephemera such as, say, interwar adverts for ski resorts, the futurist posters of the Russian Revolution or the postage stamps that have long been Stanley Gibbons Baldwin’s stock-in-trade?

If anybody truly recognized comics as art within the context of entertainment and education value, they wouldn't be reducing it all to a joke of speculation market sales. Nor would they be ignoring modern issues with censorship, destruction of established characters and franchises, and above all, how writing and art in mainstream today is otherwise very bad, and held hostage to the worst editorial mandates, including company wide crossovers. There's also no discussion of how, less than a decade after Jack Kirby's passing, Marvel under Quesada and Bill Jemas spared no expense in humiliating one of the finest icons for patriotism and crimefighting adventures, Capt. America. No one's held accountable for how the Marvel Knights imprint turned the Star-Spangled Avenger into an apologist for anti-American propaganda, and today, it's become farcical how Marvel's editors/writers repeatedly make efforts to replace Steve Rogers under the cowl with diversity tokens, including Falcon and Dani Moonstar. Nor does anybody ask how that alone even so much as amounts to a talented story. So why do these papers even waste time talking about speculator market value? The modern pamphlets definitely won't see the big sums of their Golden Age predecessors so easily, that's for sure.

Far-left Twitch streamer supposedly likes Jewish-created comics despite his hostility to Gal Gadot and Israel

Warner Todd Huston at Breitbart reported about a left-wing Twitch streamer named Hasan Piker, who attacked Gal Gadot for all the wrong reasons, with the most bizarre part being that he supposedly likes a franchise originally sheparded by Jewish publishers:

Left-wing, antisemitic streaming personality Hasan Piker is attacking Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot, calling her a “dog shit actress,” and blasting her for her steadfast support for Israel.

The radical Twitch streamer was interviewed by Variety and asked about the campaign signed onto by New York City Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani’s mother to have the Israeli-born Gadot banned from the Oscars for daring to support Israel. The paper asked Piker “if such a campaign was fair.”

Hasan responded by taking a swipe at the Fast and Furious star’s acting abilities.

“I think she should be banned from the Oscars for being a dogshit actress. I think she has no business being there for the crime of what she has done to not only the DC franchise, but really any movie she’s been a part of,” Piker said.

He followed that attack up acting as if he was joking with that broadside and then blasted Gadot for her support for Israel, couching it in a sexist diatribe.

“All jokes aside, Gal Gadot serves an important role in normalizing Israel as not a fascist ethno-state, but instead a place where a lot of beautiful women come from,” he continued. “And those beautiful women happen to serve in the IDF, because there’s also this weird sexualization of the forces as well that takes place, and it plays another role in normalizing Israel and its activities and actions, and whitewashing it.”

So he blames Gadot for doing...what exactly to the DC franchise? What's ironic is that the 1st WW movie had a Turkish soldier as one of the members of Steve Trevor's group, and the 2nd had anti-American propaganda making it look like the USA was to blame for all the troubles that could be found in the middle east/north Africa, yet all the creep cares about is Gadot, and he even says exactly what sex-negative wokesters would want to hear, about Israeli soldier girls. Another thing that's also horrific about this Piker is that:

Piker has also said that American ”deserved” to be attacked on 9/11.

“America deserved 9/11, dude. Fuck it I’m saying it,” Piker said back in 2019 during an expletive-laced tirade.

Piker later doubled down on blaming America for 9/11, a terrorist attack that killed nearly 3,000 in New York, Pennsylvania, and at the Pentagon.

This is exactly why it's stunning Variety would ever give this man a platform, seeing how he's desecrated the memory of thousands of 911 victims. In the interview itself from Variety, Piker even opportunistically sought to laud James Gunn's Superman movie (which is based on the classic creation of 2 Jewish 18-year-olds, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster):

Gadot may have ruined the DC franchise for Piker, but James Gunn is redeeming it. When “Superman” opened on July 11, Piker made viral the idea that the fictional nation of Boravia is a stand-in for Israel. In the film, Boravia, backed by U.S.-made weaponry, drops bombs on and oppresses its desert neighbor, prompting Superman to intercede. Gunn has since denied that the plotline has “anything to do with the Middle East.”

“James Gunn is a lot more woke than he lets on. And he lets on how woke he is all the time,” Piker says, still certain of the director and DC chief’s intention all these months later. “Come on, man, you made the [Boravian leader] look like David Ben-Gurion. He just straight-up looks one-to-one like the first prime minister of Israel. We don’t even care what you say about this. We know exactly what we’re looking at.”

Well, like I said before, this is exactly why I don't find these modern live action superhero movies worth wasting dough on. But it's definitely a bizarre oxymoron how somebody that antisemitic actually wants anything to do with Jewish-developed franchises. Though WW's own creators may not have been Jewish, the editors/publishers certainly were, and Superman's having Jewish creators is already old news. Which beggars the query - aside from how Variety wasted tons of space giving a platform to somebody who led to sponsors withdrawing their support for Twitch, was even accused of electrocuting a dog, and was accused by another streamer of sexual misconduct with a minor in Germany. What is so special about such awful people that they simply must be given a platform to spew their repellent drivel? Addtionally tragic is that Piker has feminist defenders at sites like The Mary Sue, and one exploited the opportunity to attack Gadot in turn:

We also can’t forget when she blamed the box office flop of 2025’s Snow White on how the cast was asked about Israel. Gal, it bombed because Rachel Zegler was the only good thing about it, and she can only carry it so much.

Frankly, it’s tiresome to listen to her continuously deflect blame. Maybe look inside yourself and see where the real problem is. More people should speak out like Piker is doing.

Frankly, it's tiresome and disgusting how the writer even normalizes his repulsive screeds, right down to the use of profanity. Though it does make clear that, no matter how left-leaning the screenplays for movies like the two WW movies could be, it won't convince antisemites and racists to abandon their loathsome ways. Perhaps this is exactly why it's atrocious in retrospect that the film studio and Patty Jenkins applied anything potentially woke to the screenplays for the WW movies, and Gadot approved/went along, because it's clear that, in the long run, it will not change the minds of anti-Israelists.

Anyway, again, it's bizarre how men like Piker could actually embrace anything to do with entertainment franchises, whether comics, movies or both, that originally had Jewish overseers decades ago. But, chances are he's not really a fan, despite what he's saying, so much as he is a fan of the politics Gunn stealthed into the Superman movie. There do indeed appear to be quite a few unpleasant people out there who, if they do read/watch certain corporate-owned products, it's only because they agree with the politics applied, not because they actually admire the Israeli-descended creators and publishers who originated specific comics in their time. But all men like Piker do is indicate they really don't have any solid positions, and apart from the loathsome things they say, they're laughable in the extreme.

Why neither Wonder Woman nor the rest industry needs Jodi Picoult as a writer

Almost 2 decades ago, the novelist Jodi Picoult had a brief stint writing Wonder Woman, for about 4-5 issues. According to this old CNN report:

So Picoult rearranged elements of her hectic work schedule and dove into research. (She admits to not being much of a "Wonder Woman" fan growing up -- "X-Men" was more her speed.) Looking back on the character's six decades in comics, Picoult found the story focused more on Wonder Woman's exploits as a superhero and less on the life of her alter ego, Diana Prince.

That angle baffled her. Diana Prince is a far more interesting character, she says, and offers plenty to work with.

"Over the years, she has had many different incarnations in the human world, some that I thought were pathetic," she says. "[But[ there's never been something that a reader could sink their teeth into and say, 'Oh yeah, this is why I'm like her.'"

If that's how she was going to put it, I don't think she could write up a convincing civilian life for any superhero character, and besides, if she wasn't into WW before, that could disqualify her. Also, if all she can do is put down virtually every characterization of WW except perhaps her own, no matter the merit of the completed story, that's a serious mistake.

Now, years later, this same author has caused controversy with musical theater plays and books considered unsuitable for children, according to Breitbart:

The superintendent of Mississinewa High School in Gas City, Indiana, canceled a production last week of “Between the Lines,” saying concerns were raised over “sexual innuendo” and alcohol references in the musical. Jeremy Fewell, the superintendent, did not respond to a request for comment.

“It’s devastating for us to know that these kids who put in hundreds of hours of hard work had that torn away from them because of the objections of a single parent,” says Picoult.

“What I know, perhaps better than most people, as someone whose books have been banned, is when one parent starts deciding what is appropriate and what is inappropriate for the children of other parents, we have a big problem.”

Picoult noted that the same Indiana high school has previously produced “Grease,” where the sexual innuendo and alcohol abuse is much greater, including a pregnancy scare, sex-mad teens and the line “Did she put up a fight?”

“Between the Lines” centers on Delilah, an outsider in a new high school, who finds solace in a book and realizes she has the power to write her own story and narrate her own life. “It is a very benign message. And it’s actually a really important one for adolescents today,” says Picoult.

The original work, which features a nonbinary character, had already been edited with licensed changes to make it more palatable for a conservative audience, including removing any reference to the nonbinary character’s gender orientation.

If that's what the original novel/play was like, there's really not much point reading/watching even an altered edition, because why put money into the pockets of somebody that left-leaning, who's perfectly willing to concoct a story pandering to what the left today wants to see? Besides, I'm sure more than one parent was concerned, and if Picoult's most questionable books were ever stocked in school libraries, it was uncalled for. As for Grease, I've seen both the 1978 movie directed by Randall Kleiser and at least one theater play years ago, and whatever sexual innuendo's in there, it was tame compared to what Picoult could've brewed up. I can't recall if there was any alcohol consumption though. That she'd pander to LGBT ideology just compounds why she wasn't suited to write Wonder Woman back in the day, and I hesitate to think of what she'll brew up next if DC/Marvel decide to hire her again to write their comics.

Some fishy and troubling panels from the portfolio of the disgraced artist Justiniano

In past years, I'd taken a look at the shoddy resumes of terrible writers like Gerard Jones and Neil Gaiman, who were both accused of sexual misconduct, but until now, I don't think I'd ever looked at the works of artists who were accused/prosecuted/convicted of similar offenses. So now, I thought it could come in useful to take a look at a number of panels from the portfolio of the disgraced artist Justiniano (whose real name is said to be Josue Rivera), the earliest comics contributor I know of to be arrested and convicted for possession of child porn, which was almost 15 years ago.

To be sure, figuring out the mindset of a corrupt artist can be trickier than that of a corrupt writer, since the artist's job is primarily to realize the visions of the writer for a comic, but of course there are plenty of artists who're as much part of the creative process in developing a story as there are writers, and can be just as responsible for certain ingredients going into the script, maybe even more. So I guess that's what I wanted to investigate here, and while some of the fishy going-ons in these samples could be more the responsibility of the writers, the artist still could be just as responsible for anything terrible that occurs in them. Justiniano, from what I know, originally began his undeserved career in 1995, and most interesting is that while he was in the business for 15 years, much of his pretentious resume was largely guest roles; almost none of his portfolio contains any regular runs, save for maybe 2 miniseries, which are decidedly some of the worst stuff I've ever seen, having reevaluated whatever artwork he did within that time. One can also wonder if the abusive mindset Justiniano went by that got him jailed for at least a few years explains why he signed almost his entire resume under a pseudonym. He began with at least 2 stories for Marvel, and much of the rest of his career in mainstream was for DC. So, let's take a look for starters at a panel he drew for Incredible Hulk #434, which had been written for over a decade by the late Peter David:

Now, I know David was, sadly, quite a leftist himself, and this looks rather oddly like an early insult to Donald Trump, but for all we know, even Justiniano could've been just as negative towards conservatives back in the day. Next is a fishy item from What If's 2nd volume, issue 69:

So there's an odd comment made about who designed the costumes in this tale, as though Justiniano was trying an absurd defense for how uninspired they really are, and a precursor to something else that came along a few years later, which is coming up next. But first, from Young Justice 80-page Giant, written by the aforementioned David:

Viewed in the context of Justiniano's offenses, one could say the irony here is that somebody may have to watch in horror at how Justiniano turned out to be somebody abusive to children. Something which, if realists want to prevent it, should not be just a distant memory, nor any of Justiniano's other insults to the intellect when he was working in mainstream comicdom. And then, look at how the dialect speaks of "evil preying upon the weak", and somebody having "no imagination". Because that can just as easily sum up what a scumbag like Justiniano was doing, and what he was like too. Now, for a 4-part miniseries spotlighting Beast Boy from the Titans, which was co-written by Geoff Johns and Ben Raab, and decidedly did no favors in the long run for Flamebird/Bette Kane. For example:

The story is weak, and decidedly so is the whole cliche of a woman who turns out to be a villainess being drawn as sexy, not to mention how the sexual harrasment scene in the story turned out to be a setup. Based on Justiniano's behavior, or viewed in that context, that's why it could be argued what he did here was almost like a bizarre denial that sexual misconduct exists, making it look like, not only do all women lie about being victims of sexual misconduct, but that such lies are routine, and this was about 4 years before the offensive Identity Crisis miniseries was published.

And here, what's annoying is how Flamebird's made to look stupid, as though she couldn't figure out the police won't take checks by masked superdoers if they don't have the actual identity and credentials of the signer. In other words, the writers and artist made Bette look like a bimbo, and certainly worse than "ditzy". Also, regarding the costume design, did I mention it looks like she's wearing trousers in this story? When George Perez designed her post-Crisis outfit in the late 80s, it had bare leg style. I guess this was Justiniano's way of virtue-signaling, by toning down how hot Bette could be under better creators. (Update: there do also appear to be some early art samples from the times where Bette does appear to be drawn with trousers, but the poorly designed outfit by Justiniano seen below still stands as a shoddy example of virtue-signaling.) And then:

So first, Nightwing puts her down, and her way of proving she's up to the task of being a "serious" crimefighter is to design a more modest outfit - with decidedly unappealing shades of color, I might add - and she even has shorter hair in this redesign. This too, if to focus on the artist, reeks of another example of tasteless virtue-signaling. Obviously, even the writers have to shoulder blame for what I think is a most shoddy costume design, but again, if the artist has fault here, then this is quite possibly another example of how Justiniano sought to conceal what a scumbag he really was, an early example of wokeness, and for the time, it's amazing he still drew Bette as busty, because today, without a doubt, the disgraceful people now minding the store at DC would make sure even that was destroyed. Back at the time, I may not have particularly minded the costume design when I first saw it, but today, I think it's one of the most horrible I've ever seen, and an insult to the original creators of Bat-Girl/Flamebird. Next is another atrocious scene, along with one more panel:

Gee, that's all we need, a shoddy excuse to see Beast Boy hitting a woman, in a comic illustrated by a man who was arrested/convicted for child porn possession, right? As for that panel where Bette is helping unpack accessories and furniture, perhaps based on Justiniano's rancid behavior that got him jailed and destroyed his career, it could be argued he had no business drawing the alleged cousin of Gar staring at her rear, though even that's watered down, along with her hair. Also, the whole idea of Madame Rouge having a daughter who's as shape-shifting as she was is contrived, as the scene where Gar socks her is disgusting. I don't think the daughter character was ever seen again, but regardless of that, this was an early example of how DC was losing direction when Geoff Johns became a writer for them. Here's also a letter page from the miniseries:

What makes Justiniano's artwork here a "revelation"? His art for the time was otherwise uninspired and overrated. And neither Johns nor Raab did a good writing job here. The miniseries may have been reprinted as part of the subsequent Teen Titans series Johns also wrote, but today I'd recommend it not be reprinted for a long time so as not to finance Justiniano's wallet, and besides, IMO, nobody would be missing anything; it's just so tiresome.

Now, since the Titans are one of the items to which Justiniano had art credits, here's at least 3 panels from issues 3-4 of the 1999-2003 series for starters, which was initially written by Devin Grayson, and the 1st annual, which was again written by Johns and Raab:

Now, as you'll notice here, Starfire's wearing a less revealing outfit. How fascinating, viewed in the context of Justiniano's offenses, that one of the most beloved cast members of the Titans is being drawn with an outfit that conceals her legs and arms, if anything. It's certainly enough to wonder why Wonder Woman sometimes seems like the only DC superheroine whose hot outfit anybody in or out of the company is willing to respect and defend. This is also what some tend to call a form of virtue-signaling, and obviously, an attempt by the artist to hide behind "morality" while concealing his dark side. Oddly enough, when Johns and Mike McKone penned their shoddy take on Teen Titans in 2003, they actually had Starfire wearing the classic outfit, but by the following decade, DC were forcing designs similar to what Justiniano drew here onto her and the stories. Perhaps we have Scott Lobdell, another creator with a questionable record of his own, to partially blame for that.

Now here, we see a guy making a lewd-looking pass at whom I think is the "Joker's Daughter", and next comes a very questionable moment where sexual abuse is brought up, and there's 2 reasons why that part's been damaged: one is Justiniano's being the artist, but there's also Grayson's own embarrassingly bad subsequent story in Nightwing where she depicted a crook named Tarantula sexually assaulting the former Teen Wonder, although to Mrs. Grayson's credit, she did later apologize, unlike Brad Meltzer, who to date has never apologized for minimizing the subject in Identity Crisis. Next, from the Titans annual:

There's 2 reasons why this would-be "joke" tanks - one is because of the artist, and the second is because it also evokes an Islamic belief that it's okay to have sex with goats. Let's also recall Johns later came up with a Muslim character in Green Lantern, all written for the sake of making a political statement, so perhaps it's not too surprising he, along with Raab, would come up with a "joke" involving animals that doesn't hold up well when one considers what goes on in the Islamic world.

I don't like what reeks of an allusion to video games like Mortal Kombat either, and the way the Japanese guy is written calling Flamebird "stupid American" is decidedly also annoying. Also notice how the flat-tire sex jokes continue here. (Also, the way the name of the team uses logo-style letters in the word balloon was laughable long ago.) That aside, note how Justiniano's shoddy, poorly colored redesign of Bette's costume is also on display here, and funny how Flash and Arsenal are written insulting both the costume and her "new attitude", which in the following panels includes bleeped profanity:

Wow, so in order to depict her as more "serious", she has to be portrayed as more profane too? More of what the world needs, naturally. Johns, Raab and Justiniano's take on Flamebird is decidedly one of the worst. Now, here's some panels from 2 issues of the Flash's 2nd volume that were illustrated by Justiniano, 190 and 219. First:

Now, if we were to comment on Justiniano's behavior through this stuff, one could say he didn't listen to victims of sexual abuse when he hoarded child pornography that later got discovered after he accidentally gave a computer memory plug to a staffer at a funeral home. Also, if to comment on the premise of the Trickster himself becoming an FBI agent, even by the surreal standards of a fictional world like the DCU, that's still asking readers to buy a lot, based on all the criminal activities James Jesse performed in earlier stories. And the way the Pied Piper, Hartley Rathaway, is depicted calling upon rats as a backup is honestly disgusting. It should be noted this story alludes to the homosexual status William Messner-Loebs bestowed upon the Piper back in 1990, and one can only wonder if Justiniano took the job guest-penciling this issue as another way to virtue-signal from a leftist perspective. Now from issue 219:

In addition to crude and overrated the artwork looks here, a sign of how Justiniano's art was becoming more mediocre over time, we see for example the disgusting sight of how the Cheetah appears to have murdered a man for the sake of blood as a sacrifice ritual, and then, if we put in again in the context of Justiniano himself, that's awfully rich to depict somebody claiming he's not a villain, when the artist must've thought the same in his own insane way at the time, his criminal offense notwithstanding. Also note how this issue alludes to the repellent Identity Crisis and Dr. Light made out to sound like he's the victim, not Sue Dibny. And then:

How can the artist have committed a serious crime and thought he wasn't crazy? His brain clearly didn't grow with the rest of himself either. Not to mention that again, his artwork looks increasingly galling here too, as is the next panel:

Which again alludes disgustingly to Identity Crisis, and the way some heroines are dragged into the mess in the dialogue is also atrocious. So too is the following:

A few pages prior, Johns' shoddy caricature of the Reverse-Flash told Cheetah he was only seeking to make the Flash a "better hero", but here, this is the result of his causing a police car to explode, murdering 2 officers inside. And then:

An elderly woman is murdered by the Cheetah, making for another atrocious example of how death-violence was becoming much too emphasized at the time. This story was wrapped up in an issue of Wonder Woman it crossed over with. But even there, it was embarrassingly bad, and this story hints at how Justiniano was lending his "talents" to increasingly dark storytelling. On which note, here's another something horrific, a page from Day of Vengeance, which was closely tied to the Infinite Crisis crossover, and written by none other than Bill Willingham:

This is decidedly the only page I'll be posting here, because the way it forced Jean Loring into such a repulsive position - turning her into a much more twisted female version of Eclipso, was unbearably sick. I remember an Ohio newspaper writer saying it looked like one end of a conversation in which a woman is being sexually harassed. This is another example of the kind of increasingly dark and vile stories Justiniano was contributing to, and he must've really enjoyed what he was doing, based on how negative the scripts were to women. As for Willingham, this is exactly why, to date, I couldn't bring myself to buy Fables, because his willingness to write such repellent stories that contradict whatever positive messaging he allegedly had to offer in the Fables series. As a right-winger, one could say he gave the standing a bad name, and in an industry now dominated by leftists, he has to shoulder some blame for perpetuating some of the tactics they uphold, like insulting fanbases. How does Willingham feel about having worked with an artist who turned out to be a pervert? Who knows? All I know is that any continued refusal of his to apologize for participating in Dan DiDio's repellent conduct 2 decades ago speaks volumes. If there's something that shouldn't be reprinted based on the artist's offenses in real life, this would have to be it. Now, here's at least 2 panels from Justiniano's work on a volume of the Creeper back then:

Somehow, this reeks of more liberal propaganda, and honestly sounds stupid regardless. Yet that could explain why the disgraceful Justiniano took this art task.

And when this scene more noticeably makes it sound like the Creeper is some sort of a right-wing villain controlling a left-winger, that's got to be telling too. All that aside, it's disgusting. Now, here's some panels from a miniseries Justiniano drew called - are you ready for this? - Reign in Hell, and it was written by Keith Giffen:

Another disgusting example of where Justiniano was going in terms of art assignments, and the part about the lead "not getting married" decidedly speaks volumes too; notice how the girl's made to look like she's an idiot and the guy with the hat implies women are all jerks or worse. In context of Justiniano's offenses, that could be giving another vital clue what was wrong with him. Now, here's some panels from one of the last projects he worked on, some series DC published based on Will Eisner's Spirit, in a sad example of how a mainstream company that's no longer qualified to handle a famous artist's creations got their mitts on them...and has now tainted them with the art of a bad man:

There's something troubling about the above panels for starters when it involves "bratty" kids causing an annoyance with their sobbing.

And then, what's this? Some attempt to make it sound like the villain called Octopus is trying to brainwash the lady into something perverse? When an artist as awful as Justiniano turned out to be draws something like this, something is terribly wrong.

Oh, and is this some kind of subtle insult to Ellen Dolan, made worse by conveying it through the mouth of another woman? It certainly serves as an example of how profanity was really becoming used in ridiculous, heavy handed ways by this time.

"Through with female bodies"? Again, we have something that, viewed in context of the scoundrel artist, winds up being fishy.

And what's this, an attempt to disguise the artist's twisted mindset by having a woman be the one to do something potentially scummy? Well, it's certainly fishy and irritating viewed in that context. I know there were a number of Golden Age stories where Dennis Colt took on villainesses, but here, it all takes on a whole new meaning under Justiniano.

Now here, this is a rare example for its time where Islamic terrorism is alluded to, but they make it look like even Indians pull such monstrosities, for example, and that's offensive. Also disturbing is the realization the Octopus here could be a metaphor for the USA, which would make it another leftist example of claiming westerners sell and fund their own destruction.

Now it's not like the French are saints, but the way this story makes them out to look bad, as in the case of the lady crook, or just plain stupid, as in the case of the male detective, has gotten old and rotten 10 million years ago. And again, when somebody like Justiniano is the artist, what's seen here takes on a whole new meaning. Not to mention that by today's standards, considering what France has been victimized by today, that's another reason this story hasn't aged well.

Here's another something that's been massively damaged viewed in light of Justiniano's crimes. Also note how the broadcast is on "Pox News", apparently their idea of a stealth insult to Fox broadcasting, and the following character in the next panels reeks of a potential metaphor for conservative-run companies:

It wouldn't surprise me if the bigwig Dennis Colt is confronting were a metaphor for figures like Rupert Murdoch. Otherwise, chances DC would actually publish this drivel misusing Eisner's creation are minimal. And then, look how they bring up Andy Warhol's point about 15 minutes of fame. That's what Justiniano brought himself in the end when he was arrested for illegally storing child porn.

Anyway, it's been about 15 years since Justiniano's worthless career collapsed, and while I realize the above panels may not all entirely reflect his political outlook alone, since the writers obviously are the primary source of such viewpoints, it's still possible they could offer what to think about when it comes to Justiniano's twisted viewpoints, and could explain why he took the assignments in his shoddy career that was built almost entirely upon guest penciling, and became increasingly mediocre or worse by the time he was arrested. What he did to Flamebird - and especially to Jean Loring - is decidedly inexcusable. I find it embarrassingly bad that any artists on Deviant Art would draw illustrations of Bette Kane wearing the outfit Justiniano concocted, which pales horribly next to the design Perez drew for her in the late 80s, and hope there's artists out there who're willing to draw something dedicated more to Perez's designs. It'd also be highly appreciated if there's any artists willing to draw illustrations of Jean Loring dedicated to her image as a good girl too. Thank goodness what I've seen of Starfire on Deviant Art has more that's dedicated to Perez's costume designs for her from 45 years ago.

And let's hope we never see Justiniano trying to reenter the art profession again. He really was a bad influence, and his use of a pseudonym has to be quite telling too.