Why the late artist Darwyn Cooke took the job drawing Catwoman's 3rd volume

Since the subject of pretentious writer Ed Brubaker recently came up, I found this fluff-coated Popverse article from last May, telling why the late artist Darwyn Cooke accepted the assignment of drawing the Catwoman volume Brubaker wrote in the early 2000s:

Catwoman has nine lives, and one of her most notable lives was her 2001 revamp by Ed Brubaker and Darwyn Cooke. The character’s previous run had mostly portrayed her as a cunning thief in skimpy clothing, but Brubaker and Cooke gave her a new look, a new supporting cast, and a new mission as the protector of Gotham’s East End. According to Darwyn Cooke, who passed away in 2016, this was a dealbreaker for him.

“Going back to Catwoman, when I was asked if I wanted to get involved in that, I said, ‘On one condition. She has to be completely redesigned. And I have to know that the writer believes, as well as I know, that this is a book that should be aimed at women, not at teenage boys,’” Darwyn Cooke says during a panel at Toronto Fan Expo 2009.

“And I said if that’s the approach we’re going to take, then I’m happy to get involved, because this is a great character, and it gives us an opportunity to build her back up and redeem her as a person and get girls reading comics again and excited about a character that they can relate to. I’ve always felt that this is an important thing that any sort of creator should be trying to consider.”

It’s good to have nine lives, and it’s even better if one of them is penciled by Darwyn Cooke.

I think a challenging query to be raised here is - what's so wrong with writing a story appealing to teen boys? Or, who says the same approach won't appeal to teen girls as well? In hindsight, I'm really not impressed with Cooke as an artist, and IIRC, at the time this took place, DC made efforts to do away with the blue shadings from previous designs for Batman's costume, and make entirely black. Catwoman's costume underwent a similar change, of course. But was her previous outfit really skimpy? I think during the 80s, Selina Kyle had one with cleavage, but I don't recall if what she wore in the 90s drawn by Jim Balent had, so this is another unshockingly sloppy take on history.

That said, did women really flock en masse to Brubaker and Cooke's take on the Feline Fatale? Perhaps the following I found on CBR's forums from 2016 can give a clue:

I did some research on Catwoman's sales from 1994 to 2016 on comichron.com and diamondcomics.com. I've been wondering why Catwoman sales have been so low, especially why they plummeted a few issues ago since they've been the best issues I've read in many years. Now it is assumed the comic is cancelled because it was not mentioned as being included during the Rebirth event.

Catwoman vol 2 (1993-2001) maintained much, much better sales than vol 3 or vol 4. In fact, the final issue of vol 2 in 2001 (the worst selling of the series) sold almost as many copies as vol 3 issue 25 (by Brubaker) in 2003, about 26,000 copies. The 90's Catwoman never ranked below 100 in the monthly Top 100 Comics chart. It only dropped below a rank of 75 around the Fall of 2000. It almost always sold as many issues as Robin, Supergirl, Birds of Pray, often outselling them and usually outsold Wonder Woman consistently.

Volume 3, which ran from 2001-2008, did not sell near as well. Its sales dropped from 49,000 copies of issue #1 to 26,500 copies of issue #12 in only a year. It consistently ranked well under 75 on the Top 100 chart, oftentimes dropping below 100. Its final issue only sold 15,000 copies.

Volume 4, the New 52, sold a little better than vol 3. Issue #1 sold 53,670 copies, but issue #20 was down to 26,900 copies, ranking 85th on the chart and was then one of the 3 worst selling DC titles. Sales from that point on were consistent until issue 42 only sold 22,000 copies. Then issue 47, Frank Tieri's first issue, plummeted to only 15,000 copies, ranking 166 on The Top 200 chart for December 2015.

These sales figures make it pretty obvious that the stories told and the artwork used used in Vol 2 in the 90's was significantly* more desirable than that of Vol 3 & 4.

I believe there were a few problems with Vol 3 from the beginning of it. First, I believe the new costume was simply unattractive. Darwyn Cooke said he wanted to tone down Catwoman's sexiness and make her look more practical and utilitarian. And he gave her bug-eye goggles. Catwoman became the opposite of sexy and I think that was a bad idea.

Next I think focusing on Catwoman in the role of a vigilante sworn to protect Gotham's seedy East End, where she has a controversial history of working as dominatrix, probably wasn't ideal for most comic readers. I think it was too dark and controversial for general audiences to get into. This was not the Catwoman that the public was used to seeing, and not what they wanted for her comic. She has always been glamorous and sensuous. She was fun because she was naughty, but still helped people often. This new Catwoman was a complete opposite, so people didn't buy it.

Vol 4, the New 52, had prettier artwork but the same bug-eye goggles, Emma Peele outfit, and bulky boots. She was a theif again but she was younger and dumber. And she was having sex with Batman while the two of them kept their masks on in the first issue. Yeah because when you wear a mask over the top half of your face, the person you are frequently screwing will never find out your true identity. This is just bad writing, which simply got worse over the next few years and the sales kept dropping.*

It's tragic that the past few issues have such low sales, and that Catwoman won't be included in DC's Rebirth. Frank Tieri's issues have been recieving great reviews, especially issue #50.

But I hope that DC has big plans for Catwoman to make her more attractive, more exciting, and more successful.

Thoughts??

Unfortunately, as the wokeness of the past decade made clear, there was no reason for optimism, and besides, Identity Crisis also led to ruination. IIRC, there was a story with Catwoman shortly afterwards where a retcon took place claiming she'd been influenced by Zatanna, quite possibly at Batman's request, to reform Selina. In other words, according to that tale, Selina did not reform of her own accord and thinking, which makes a mockery and insult to the older works of better writers.

Cooke's claims also ring hollow when you consider that at least a few women actually worked on the Feline Fatale years earlier. For example, Mindy Newell, and then Jo Duffy, who wrote the first 14 issues of the 90s series. So Cooke and Brubaker were insulting a woman who had no issue with depicting Selina Kyle as sexy. A most disgraceful distortion Cooke pulled there, and if memory serves, Brubaker not only implausibly revived Holly Robinson, a character originally seen in Frank Miller's Year One tale from 1987, Brubaker even turned her into a lesbian for the sake of it.

Now I'll give Cooke this: he did the right thing to say he didn't want to see the kind of one-sided sexual violence seen in Identity Crisis become normalized as offensive, sensationalistic plot devices. But if he once said he didn't want to see once heterosexual characters be turned LGBT overnight, he contradicted that, in a manner of speaking, by working with a writer as overrated and exploitive as Brubaker, who did something like that, certainly in Gotham Central with Greg Rucka, where they changed the Renee Montoya character to lesbian. Cooke also continued to work with DC even after Identity Crisis came out, and it can be validly argued that in doing so, Cooke wasn't following through on his arguments convincingly. Besides, he also once led a chummy connection with the disgraced Gerard Jones, and that too doesn't reflect well on Cooke in hindsight.

Cooke may have made a few valid statements, but he was apparently an early example of a wokester, and one can only wonder what he thought of his take on Catwoman selling considerably lower than the volume drawn by Balent, and first written by Duffy. Cooke not only insulted the aforementioned two, he also insulted plenty of other, more talented artists who came before Balent, like those who drew Catwoman in the 1970s. Having artists like Cooke on the job is sadly not better at all.

And as for the mention of Frank Tieri, wasn't he the writer who derailed Wolverine in the last 2 years of the 1988-2003 series? One more reason why I'd rather not buy his take on Catwoman either.

A lawsuit was filed against Ed Brubaker, but because of the politics involved, judgement should be withheld for now

Brubaker, a comics writer who's been in the business for 35 years, may be one of the most left-wing around, and overrated. But the following news on Deadline about a sexual/racial harassment lawsuit that's been filed against him contains clues why it may not be a good idea to take it at immediate face value:

What may or may not have gone down on Prime Video‘s upcoming Criminal now looks set to end up in a California courtroom.

“This action arises from the sustained sexual, racial, national origin, and religious harassment that Plaintiff ljaaz Noobu, a Sri Lankan American filmmaker with fourteen years of experience in the film industry, endured while working on the production of the forthcoming television series Criminal,” states a 12-claim complaint filed earlier this week in L.A. Superior Court. [...]

“Hired in February 2023 as a production assistant to showrunner and Executive Producer Ed Brubaker, Plaintiff came to the production eager to contribute his talent and technical knowledge to a marquee project, the pretty plainspoken jury trial-seeking document from Burbank attorney Fahim Rahman says. “Instead, he was subjected to a workplace made toxic and abusive by the very individuals entrusted with authority over it.”

With claims that Noobu was subjected to cracks about rape and “demeaning stereotypes” for being the only Muslim on set and asked by Brubaker if the PA was a supporter of Hamas, the suit seeks a variety of unspecified damages. Also named in the complaint as defendants alongside Brubaker are Amazon Services, MGM, Criminal EP Phillip Barnett and others as defendants.

Now, Brubaker is but one of many pretentious scribes in today's landscape, and in hindsight, I don't like his Batman work from the early 2000s. But when I noticed the plaintiff's an Islamic adherent, I had to give pause to taking the claims at face value, realizing it's possible this could be trumped up accusations. That doesn't mean it's impossible for a non-Muslim leftist to abuse a Muslim though, recalling there was an incident in NYC over 15 years ago where a leftist attacked a Muslim cab driver, and a few years ago, a Pakistani Muslim in Seattle, Washington, nearly had his son taken from him for the sake of "transing". But it's clear in the long run that negativity from leftists towards Islamists is rare, especially based on where they're going now with choosing political candidates.

I do wonder however, what Brubaker thinks of Hamas? Or the plaintiff himself? That's what isn't clear from this article. Somehow, it's scarier to think what Brubaker could think, based on any leftist credentials he retains. But if it turns out the plaintiff comes within even miles of supporting such a repulsive bunch, then I'm not sympathetic to him.

For now, we'll have to withhold judgement and let any ensuing trial determine whether the accusations are factual or false. However this turns out though, I'm not interested in Brubaker's resume.

A sloppy article about Frank Miller's work on Daredevil

When it's not the Dark Knight Returns that's the overemphasized focus of so many puff piece news articles, it could be Miller's work on Daredevil instead, and that's what Inverse wrote about recently, since some recent TV shows drew from Miller's stories, but this is yet another news item that's decidedly not interested in maintaining consistency, let alone assuring us that Miller's work, good enough as it was there, isn't the beginning or end of what we could find impressive about Hornhead's original series, in sharp contrast to what came post-1998. First:

Whenever people discuss superheroes who have it rough, there are a couple of names that usually stick out. Spider-Man’s day-to-day life is notoriously bad, so the term “Parker luck” was coined because of it. Batman has had his back broken, several of his sidekicks killed, and consistently fights monstrosities and aliens all while just being a normal human being.

But it’s safe to say that few comic book characters have trials and tribulations comparable to those of Matt Murdock, aka Hell’s Kitchen’s own Daredevil. Those who love him can’t quite seem to stay alive, those who hate him can’t quite seem to stay in jail, and the Man Without Fear himself can’t quite seem to keep a handle on his own secret identity (a problem that has just recently followed him to the MCU in Daredevil: Born Again). But 40 years ago, one of the most celebrated comic book writers of all-time took it upon himself to drag Matt Murdock through hell and back, and in the process wrote not just one of the best Daredevil stories ever but one of the best comic arcs of all-time: the original 1986 Born Again.

Did it ever occur to them that if they describe DD's life as that bad, it could actually become less appealing to the audience? Also, since Batman does come up here, yes, there were a few, but if Spoiler's the one who matters, interesting there's no objective take here on a character who was a more notable recurring cast member of the Robin series begun by Chuck Dixon in 1993. And how Stephanie Brown was initially turned into a sacrificial lamb in the War Games/Crimes crossover, before this was eventually reversed 3 years later, and there were a few other bad directions that came at the time of Identity Crisis that were reversed later as well, though still too late at this point.

Since they speak of lovers, even Batman had at least one who was turned into a forced sacrifice in 2002 for the sake of a shoddy crossover, Bruce Wayne: Murderer?/Fugitive. Her name was Vesper Fairchild, and if there's any way to handle such a curtain call for a character that's less than organic, it's crossovers. So it's not like DD's the only one story-wise who underwent such incidents, whether the writing was good or bad. And of course, even overrated writers like Kevin Smith have turned out some of the worst storylines in DD based on exactly what Inverse unobjectively spoke of: wiping out Karen Page in the Marvel Knights imprint just 5 issues in. And to Inverse's writers, it means nothing. By the way, if any of DD's adversaries were written cheating death, doesn't that make Karen's death extremely hypocritical?

When Stan Lee and Bill Everett first created Daredevil all the way back in 1964, they were responsible for many of the character’s everlasting traits: he’s a blind lawyer named Matt Murdock, his father was a murdered boxer named Battlin’ Jack, and he works alongside Foggy Nelson and secretary Karen Page at a legal firm named Nelson and Murdock. But the original depiction of the character was a quippy, lighthearted Spider-Man-adjacent swashbuckler – it wasn’t until the late 70s and early 80s, when the title was in danger of cancellation because of declining sales, that Frank Miller took over as writer and forever changed the perception of the book. Instead of fighting vampires or villains pulled from science fiction B-movies like Stilt-Man, Miller emphasized the psychological turmoil of a Catholic vigilante and fleshed out the contours of Hell’s Kitchen’s criminal underworld (converting The Kingpin from a Spider-Man villain into a Daredevil villain), ultimately giving the book a hard-boiled, seedy film noir atmosphere that was instantly popular and has influenced other Daredevil writers to this day.

Umm, I think even before Miller came about, it was dark enough. And while it may have come with a bit of a twist, Stilt-Man did make an appearance in DD during Miller's run, though a crook Miller introduced stole Wilbur Day's mechanics so he could make use of them himself. Even Dr. Octopus made one appearance in DD at the time. So let's not think the series ever strayed far from more sci-fi oriented concepts.

What's more, how is it Ann Nocenti, who succeeded Miller in writing later, didn't provide an enjoyable perception too? I think Miller's DD run is good, but I'm not buying that favoratism at all costs. And IIRC, didn't Mark Waid at one point write DD with a brighter perspective in the past 15 years? It may have been at a time when Marvel's artistic quality collapsed, but the lecture Inverse delivers again becomes sloppy. And one more thing about Waid's run: whether he wrote DD bright or dark, he did a terrible disfavor at the time with heavy handed leftism.

After briefly stepping away from the title, Frank Miller returned with what is maybe his greatest narrative contribution to the Daredevil mythos: 1986’s Born Again storyline, which played out from February to August in the pages of Daredevil #227-233. A culmination of everything he'd built up over his original five years writing the character, Born Again opens with the reveal that Karen Page, who had been absent from Daredevil comics since 1969 (she left Nelson and Murdock to become an actor after discovering Matt’s secret), has become an adult film actor and heroin addict. In the throes of her addiction, Karen sells Matt’s secret identity for a fix, and that information ends up in the hands of The Kingpin, who decides that if he can’t defeat Daredevil the vigilante, he’ll defeat Matt Murdock the civilian by systematically destroying his personal life.

Here too, we have quite a flaw in history. Karen made appearances in DD at least until 1972 and issue 86, and afterwards, she made several appearances in comics like Ghost Rider and Marvel Two-In-One (and one more guest appearance in DD 138 from 1976) until about 1978, before going into limbo for 7 years. Inverse has just confirmed ever further they're unqualified for history jobs. Also, notice how they refer to a woman becoming an "actor" instead of actress? I've seen that woke PC tactic in the past few years, apparently their whole sick idea of how to belittle the fairer sex in an era where LGBT ideology was pushed all over the place. One more problem undermining this puff piece. Near the end, it says:

Frank Miller didn’t just write arguably the greatest Daredevil story ever told, but he also changed the way that superhero stories deal with human drama. Matt Murdock is a running joke for comic book fans because he’s a character who can’t escape his own suffering, but over four decades ago, Frank Miller showed us that the reason why Daredevil can handle it is that the hero is the man underneath the costume, not the bright red costum he’s known for.

If Matt can't escape suffering, isn't that a problem? It's also one if Marvel's adamant about keeping Karen in the grave, after what happened to her in the Knights imprint. Supposedly, Aquaman's been a running joke because he could communicate with undersea animals, but I don't recall Hornhead ever been described as a joke. Are they aware the original costume was yellow in 1964, changed after 6-7 issues? You might think that's a joke, but the problems Matt faced as both superhero and lawyer certainly weren't. What's certainly a joke are the inaccuracies in the puff piece, decidedly another example of somebody who doesn't want to say a word in depth about the runs coming before and after Miller's. Seriously, what's so hard about discussing Nocenti's run in the late 80s-early 90s at length? This elevation of one specific run at the expense of others has long gotten way out of hand. There's also plenty about Spider-Man that hasn't been brought up by these tabloid news sites. On which note, maybe early Hornhead was "lighthearted", but "quippy" was something he could've been written as even well after Stan Lee relinquished the job to other writers. I assume they mean DD could be written dishing out wisecracks like Spidey and the Thing, and in the stories I read, Matt certainly came close.

So let's be clear. Of course I recommend Miller's DD run, but I'm not going to say what came before and after wasn't worth the effort and the price you could pay for the reprint archives. Just because there've been TV shows adapting notable Hornhead storylines is also not a reason to focus almost solely upon Miller's run either. The original comics scripts are what should count, far more than any two-bit TV adaptation.

Actor Andrew Garfield repeats insult to Spider-Man, and Mary Jane Watson

The Daily Wire says actor Andrew Garfield, who'd played Spidey in the past decade, has repeated a woke pitch for how to tell the story:

Former “Spider-Man” star Andrew Garfield still thinks the character should be gay.

The 43-year-old actor said his mind hasn’t changed since the infamous interview in 2013 when he pitched that idea for the first time.

Garfield reflected on his initial comments during a press tour for “The Uprising,” as Entertainment Weekly reported earlier this week.

“It was an exercise in rebellion that I felt passionate about,” Garfield told the outlet of his previous comments. “I just still believe that anyone can be in that suit. That’s the point of why it’s such a kind of universally beloved character, one of the greatly beloved characters in the history of fiction is because you don’t see skin color, you don’t see gender, you don’t see sexuality. Anyone can project themselves into that suit.”

This is stupid. Even Black Panther's original costume was similar, and there are a number of superhero costume designs from past decades where you don't see what they look like at all, although, if the artists wanted to, they could draw breasts on a female protagonist to differentiate whether men or women are wearing the costume. But I guess in an era where women's sexuality is desecrated, Garfield must think insulting the fairer sex is easy.

“I like the idea of a place where everyone is being honored and everyone is being included, and it was just a kind of act of saying, ‘Well, why not?’ And you’ll be telling on yourself if you have a strong opinion either way,” the actor went on.

This was a reflection on his suggestion in 2013 that Spider-Man could be gay. Garfield even had a love interest picked out for the character.

“I was kind of joking, but kind of not joking about MJ. … I was like, ‘What if MJ is a dude?’” the actor said at the time, referencing Spider Man’s love interest, Mary Jane. “Why can’t we discover that Peter is exploring his sexuality? It’s hardly even groundbreaking! … So why can’t he be gay? Why can’t he be into boys?”

I think this sums up 2 terrible things. He's insulted MJ's womanhood, and he also implies Spidey should be into underaged youngsters?!? Where has Hollywood's moral compass gone these days?

One of the commenters on the article said:

Andrew Garfield is the Spider-man superhero that never should have been and we never needed.

I will never watch his entries in the franchise ever again. He's just another two-bit actor who clearly lacks the confidence to sell his movies by merit, and clarifies this bankruptcy by following up on Joe Quesada's desecration of Stan Lee's creations. Assuming Garfield reads the modern comics, it wouldn't be hard to guess where he stands on the destruction of the Spider-marriage. What occurs in the comics has extended in a way to the movies.

How Tony Isabella turned to LGBT obsessions

Far-left veteran comics writer Isabella, who joined the transsexuality cult the previous year, spoke with the Buckeye Flame about how he took up the position he's sticking with now in his mid-70s, and predictably, they fully comply with his wishes to be regarded as a woman:

Cleveland’s own Jenny Blake Isabella, who previously wrote under the name Tony Isabella, has been a prominent comic book writer for decades. Recently, she has also become a queer icon in the comic community after coming out as transgender in 2025, at age 73.

The catalyst to Isabella’s transition journey came when she attended a queer comic book convention, Flaming River Con, just one year earlier. There, she had an epiphany: “I realized I was so comfortable around queer people because I was one of them… when I realized I was trans, you know, I started feeling better, more adjusted, and more like myself.”

Is it possible he's the kind of guy who was once described as "coming out of the closet" in past decades - meaning that he's homosexual, but until recently wasn't up to acknowledging it? Okay, that may not exactly be the problem, but what he strongly suggests is that he's become a self-hating man?!? If so, that's disturbing, and it's similar to self-hating Jews.

“I was thoroughly embraced by the comics community,” she said. “By and large, the comics book industry was so welcoming, and this Comic Con was the first Comic Con I did presenting as my authentic self, and it couldn’t have gone better. Nothing but love and respect and acceptance all across the board.”

Not only has there been more acceptance in the comic world, but there’s also been an expansion of what it means to be a superhero on screen. Queer characters and actors, like DC Comics’ trans superhero Nia Nal, played by transgender actress Nicole Maines, show the industry’s strides towards inclusion. The writers’ rooms, too, are diversifying.

“There’s a bunch of queer and even trans creators in comics,” Isabella said. “I was on a trans and non-binary creator panel at Comic Con, I was on an outed comic panel in Comic Con, and the people on that panel were just a fraction of the queer representation in comics.”

The way the industry went miles out of its way to accept such degrading beliefs and cultures, especially at the expense of heterosexuality - is disturbing, and one of the reasons why, despite their efforts to fluff-coat the whole subject, has plummeted in sales and respect over the past decade. And what "inclusion" are we talking about here anyway? I don't see serious efforts made to emphasize Armenian backgrounds in comicdom, or even Arabs who're Christian/Hindu/Buddhist/Zoroastrian adherents. Also, while it may not be mentioned, something tells me Isabella's unlikely to take issue with hostility to LGBT practitioners in the Muslim world, no matter what he says here. And if he has no concerns over such issues, then what he's telling them here is a sad joke and a blatant lie.

The publication turns to the time when Isabella created Black Lightning, and says:

What motivated Isabella to write Black superheroes came from the influences she received growing up in Cleveland, especially her time attending a comic book club at the Cudell Recreation Center as a high school student.

“My first Black friends were comic book fans who came from the East Side to the West Side for these meetings,” she said. “And I’m 17 years old. Diversity wasn’t in my language. I just thought it was unfair that my Black friends didn’t have more characters they could relate to. So I told myself that if I ever got into the business, I would try to work with and create characters of color.”

Well he sure seems to have largely abandoned that interest now, all for the sake of LGBT ideology, and he seems much more obsessed with that now, along with leftist political ideologies, and hostility to right-wingers like Donald Trump.

Eventually, Isabella saw her creation, Black Lightning, come to life in a different medium: television. Black Lightning, starring Cress Williams, aired on The CW Network from 2018 to 2021, following the retired superhero’s journey as he returned to action to protect his family.

For Isabella, the television adaptation was a delight to both witness and be a part of.

But was that because there's any far-left components to it, like hostility to law enforcement? Well that's why the TV show was nothing to celebrate, and another example of how Hollywood's going down the political drain.

Receiving multiple awards over the course of her career, Isabella recently became a 2026 recipient of the prestigious Bill Finger Award, named after the co-creator of Batman, Milton “Bill” Finger, given to those who have exemplified excellence in comic book writing.

And the saddest part is that they very likely complied with his wish for female pronoun references. On which note, if I notice correctly in one of his recent photos, he's wearing a wig? What are the odds he takes it off when he's at home? That would only make clear he's doing this whole act for show and virtue-signaling. And that's what makes this whole embarrassment additionally sad. I don't know if he ever worked on women's panels at conventions, but based on where he's been going, that's why he's unsuited for it, if he's going to take up a lifestyle/ideology that does more harm than good for women. It's devastating to think of how even the kind of punk subculture that was common in the 1980s has also been validated by today's woke belief systems. Based on some of his recent behavior on social media, that's why Isabella doesn't deserve the award he got. Besides, did he ever do any favors for Finger's memory in past decades? Chances are Isabella never did, which only makes this whole affair that much sadder.

San Francisco Cartoon Art Museum closing, and who knows for how long?

The institution where the disgraced ex-curator Andrew Farago worked has announced on their site that they're closing down, and it looks like it's got something to do with rental issues:

The Cartoon Art Museum will not be renewing its lease at 781 Beach Street when it expires at the end of August. As a result, our current location will close on Sunday, August 2, 2026. [...]

Ten years ago, the cartoon community came together to begin a new chapter for the museum. Scores of funders supported our move to Beach Street in Fisherman’s Wharf. Since then, we have faced significant challenges, including the pandemic and the slow recovery that followed. But we have also enjoyed many successes and countless opportunities to celebrate cartoon art and the people who create it.

Not mentioned, rather predictably, is the aforementioned disgrace who undoubtably embarrassed their reputation, and led to many donors withdrawing their support, to the point they now have difficulty affording rental fees. Farago sure knew how to bring a whole institution to its knees.

I took a look at some of the museum's past exhibitions, and noticed they had at least a few that could be considered "woke", or politically motivated. We can probably guess who had a prominent role in greenlighting exhibitions like those. And if that's how it's going to be, perhaps we're not missing much.

The Daily Cartoonist notes that:

The Cartoon Art Museum first opened in 1984. In 1987 Charles M. Schulz funded the museum’s endowment allowing it to open it’s first venue in downtown San Francisco. It moved three times since landing on Beach Street in 2017. The space offered visitors 8,000 square feet gallery space, a screening area, education space, store, library and collections facility. Cartoon Art Museum reports they have over 9,000 original pieces in their collection.

They might have to sell some of those items to different institutions if they need to pay off any debts that came as a result of Farago's serious lawbreaking. I once noticed artist Ethan Van Sciver telling Farago did not do a good job on his part to ensure they'd be able to retain a steady location, and for all we know, he could've been partly the reason they had to move at least 3 times to different buildings. Depending how you view this, it's obviously a shame a museum whose donors included a famous cartoonist wound up being floored by the offensive behavior of a man who first worked with them at least a year after Schultz's passing. Others could say Schultz made a huge mistake wasting any money on their business. And now, there's no telling if they'll be able to recover from such a scandal as Farago's caused them, so what may have been the only museum of its sort on the west coast could now be history of a different kind. What a shame.

Eisner awards nominated pretentious scribes

Perhaps I was being too optimistic when I hoped earlier that the Eisner awards was coming off their biases of the mid-2000s. Oregon Public Broadcasting says 3 local scribes, one who's definitely overrated, were nominated:

Three of Portland’s prominent comic book creators, Rupert Kinnard, Kelly Sue DeConnick, and Sarah Shay Mirk, are nominated for Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards — the Oscars of the comic industry, named for one of the first comic artists in American history. This week, they’re traveling to San Diego Comic Con to speak on panels, sign books, and attend the awards ceremony on Friday night. [...]

While DeConnick’s book FML is up for Best Continuing Series, both Mirk and Kinnard are nominated for Best Comics-Related Book, which Mirk described as “the nerdiest, wonkiest category.” For DeConnick, this nomination is one of many throughout her career after winning the award for Best Single Issue in 2022. For Mirk, this marks nomination number four.

DeConnick's one of the scribes who ruined Carol Danvers as a superheroine in the past decade, all for the sake of "feminist" agendas, and wokeism. And what's this Kinnard known for?

Kinnard created the first Black queer comic strip characters, although he didn’t know he was first at the time. Born in Chicago in 1954, Kinnard moved to Portland in 1979 and helped start the queer newspaper Just Out.

He created The Brown Bomber, a nineteen-year-old superhero sporting basketball shorts and a home-made cape, and Diva Touché Flambé, a mystical grade school teacher who knocks sense into closed-minded streetgoers with her power of slapthology.

Together, the duo form Cathartic Comics, a strip that ran in newspapers in Portland and San Francisco, calling out injustice with wit, wisdom, and pride through an intersectional Black queer lens.

What's so special about that in the view of the leftists now running the Eisners? This is all woke cliche by today's standards. And then, here's what Mirk's known for:

Sarah Shay Mirk is a nonfiction comics journalist, publisher, and teacher at Crucial Comix living in Portland since 2008.

Their book Guantanamo Voices: True Accounts from the World’s Most Infamous Prison chronicles the experiences of former Guantanamo Bay prisoners and staff in the form of a graphic novel.

There's something mighty fishy about this book. What if it's apologia for terrorism, since many Islamic terrorists were incarcerated at Guantanamo, to keep them away from the USA's borders?

Kelly Sue DeConnick is a New York Times Bestselling comics author, known for her reimagining of the character Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel.

Her 2026 nomination for Best Continuing Series is shared with David López, the co-writer of FML, a graphic series from Portland-based publisher Dark Horse Comics.

"Reimagining" is precisely the problem, since, not only was Danvers made to look alienatingly masculine in the past decade, her background was forcibly changed as well. And forced, abrupt retcons were becoming pretty common beginning in the early 2000s, with some of J. Michael Straczysnki's machinations in Spider-Man just the beginning. Also notice how they don't refer to Danvers as Ms. Marvel, which is what she was originally titled in the late 70s when the late Gerry Conway first launched the original series at the time. What's so special about scribes who don't care about the source material? This only clarifies the Eisners continue to remain corrupted in whatever values they once had, and serve leftist causes more than anything else. That's why they're not worth paying attention to, any more than the Oscars in Hollywood.

A superficial article about Doonesbury history, and a sloppy one

Earlier this year in May, The Forward wrote about how cartoonist Garry Trudeau dealt with Jewish-related issues in Doonesbury, mainly spotlighting Mark Slackmeyer, possibly the 3rd regular cast member who debuted shortly after Mike and B.D in 1970:

Trudeau’s “Megaphone Mark” — who sported long hair and a bushy beard —was modeled on Mark Zanger, the leader of the Yale chapter of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). Mark’s first act in the strip is to take over the office of President King, the WASPy president of Walden College, who was based on the actual Yale president, Kingman Brewster. Over the next few months, Trudeau increasingly used Mark’s clashes with his father Phil, a New Jersey stockbroker desperate for his son to “succeed,” to dramatize tensions within postwar Jewish life.

Phil represents a generation of upwardly mobile Jews who believed acceptance in corporate and suburban America required conformity, restraint and the concealing of ethnicity. Mark, by contrast, is openly confrontational, culturally self-aware, and seems uninterested in assimilationist respectability.

Mark’s Jewish identity was not made explicit until the middle of 1971, when he and his college buddy Mike Doonesbury attend a talk by a famous religious crusader. Asked why he has not yet chosen to join the fold and lead a proper Christian life, Mark deadpans, “I’m Jewish.”

At Yale, Trudeau hardly knew Zanger and had much less in common with him than he had with Kingman Brewster, whose ancestors sailed to America on the Mayflower. Trudeau was descended from three generations of Ivy-League-educated physicians. Like his father, the hardworking family doctor Frank Trudeau, the cartoonist attended St. Paul’s — one of the most blueblood of all New England prep schools. And though the young Yalie, like the genteel Brewster, opposed the war in Vietnam, he wanted nothing to do with radical politics.

But Trudeau identified closely with some of the personal struggles of Megaphone Mark. After all, he was also bucking family tradition by becoming an artist rather than a doctor. As Trudeau told me, some of Mark’s quarrels with his father hit close to home. Consider the line that Phil tells Mark in the fall of 1973: “Life is not to be enjoyed, it’s to be gotten on with!” Those words came verbatim from the mouth of Frank Trudeau, though, the younger Trudeau said, “my father and I ended up getting along pretty well and later came to laugh about such harsh comments.”

A key reason why Trudeau saw a part of himself in his Jewish cartoon character is that this ultimate insider also knew what it felt like to be an outsider. For many American Jews of the postwar era, especially those attending elite institutions historically dominated by WASP norms and values, Jewishness came with a sense of conditional acceptance, of not fully belonging. Trudeau had an emotionally similar experience at St. Paul’s, where he felt deeply estranged from the school’s rigid social hierarchy and its obsessive emphasis on athletic status. As the cartoonist later stressed, his four years there were “a tortured time for me.” He hated the school’s culture and never felt fully at home within it.

While this is interesting history, Trudeau diminished whatever impact it had when in the mid-90s, around January 18, 1994, he wrote Mark telling he was homosexual (with Zonker Harris providing a narrative), which is odd, since, while there was a strip around February 10, 1976 where Joanie Caucus was talking to Andy Lippincott, who told her he was homosexual (Trudeau later wrote him passing away from AIDS in 1990), Mark may not have been established as such at the time. What that would suggest is that Trudeau basically retconned one of his strip's established cast members for the sake of an oh-so vital agenda. It adds nothing to the character, and only makes previously established points moot.

Interestingly, if it matters, I'm not sure there were ever any notable lesbian characters highlighted in the strip, unless we consider a cameo by the real life Rachel Maddow, though that's hardly an achievement if it's not a fictional character who could make a more plausible regular. And if there weren't any recurring lesbian cast members in Doonesbury, it beggars the query - why do only homosexual men matter here? And why, if gay men did matter, Trudeau had to turn an established regular cast member into such, but couldn't create a new one like he did with Lippincott back in 1976? Sometimes, I wonder if comics writers like William Messner-Loebs have to shoulder some blame, since he turned the Pied Piper in Flash gay around 1990, rather than introduce a new character who could fill that role. Arguably, Messner-Loebs was one of the earlier examples of a writer who went "woke" in his approach, and it's certainly led to a lot of damage by this point, with Obsidian from Infinity Inc. being one of the biggest victims, since Gerard Jones, who retconned Todd Rice in 1995, turned out to be a criminal, and a lot of the stories Jones wrote were very bad.

Next up, in the past month, the Los Angeles Review of Books discussed the new history book about the now 56-years-old comic strip, and there's at least a few errors here, such as:

Doonesbury’s Slackmeyer came out as gay in 1976. It seems almost quaint now (and then again, not) that Slackmeyer paralleled rock stars like Lou Reed and Elton John, who felt comfortable enough in their own professional spaces to proclaim their queerness with pride. But this was the very first gay character in comics, and dozens of newspapers simply dropped the strip. Their editorial boards deemed it inappropriate for family reading, as if sexual orientation were inherently salacious. Trudeau refused to apologize or put his character back in the closet. He accepted the economic cost of moral clarity. Not content to be absorbed into the system, Trudeau gladly risked loss of distribution for the sake of truth-telling.

Oops, that's incorrect. It was Lippincott, not Slackmeyer, who was the first gay male character in the strip, perhaps also in all comic strips of the times. Most mystifying, I couldn't find any mention of Lippincott in the article. What gives on that? The glaring historical error aside, where do they get off lecturing everybody homosexuality's literally appropriate for children? Have they by any chance noticed what turned up in school libraries in past years? Do tell us about it. And then, there's another potential error here:

In Peanuts, the adult world feels incomprehensible, their speech reduced to onomatopoeia. In Doonesbury, the adult world tilts hypocritical and borderline psychotic, the source of colossal betrayal and moral rot. When Trudeau deployed abstract visual cues to depict presidents—Reagan as an empty brain, Bush Sr. as a “point of light,” Trump as a sentient toupee—he pointed Schulz’s abstractions at a new target: that power is often visually represented by its absence, by the void where thought should live.

I know Trudeau developed a gimmick where he'd depict some politicians as "invisible men", with certain symbols to replace them (Dan Quayle was depicted as a feather, meant to allude to what Trudeau thought of his personality), but I don't think it included Trump, and certainly not of recent, if the panel from last month says anything. But how disturbing that Trudeau's depicting Trump conversing chummily with a character named Trff Bmzklfrpz, a dictator from a fictional country called Berzerkistan, who's supposed to be murderous and antisemitic. Would he have written a leftist politician maintaining such friendships? Something tells me that, despite this, Trudeau doesn't have anything concrete to say about Trump's administration making a deal with Syria's current dictator, Ahmed al-Sharaa, who was a terrorist before, and there's bleak signs he hasn't changed. All that aside, the "joke" Trudeau made about Trump believing something's been named in his honor is one of the cheapest I've ever seen in the newspaper strip to date. What's that about "incomprehensible" again?

If Mike represented the political sell-out, Mark Slackmeyer represented something more urgent: the moral witness to governmental impunity. Originally a campus radical and DJ at Walden College’s radio station, Mark came out in 1976, a move that became a watershed moment for the funny pages. But the 1980s deepened the crisis. As the Reagan administration ignored the burgeoning threat of AIDS—the president refused to even speak the word in public, and homophobic legislatures debated whether infected people deserved treatment—Trudeau used Mark to bear witness. While Bible-thumpers attacked the “morality” of the afflicted, treating AIDS patients as deserving of their fate, Trudeau faced the grim realities of suffering and death. One 1985 panel still grates: Mark stands at a closed-casket funeral for a lover, his face a hollow, blank mask of exhaustion. The caption: “I’m just so tired of being brave.”

When they repeat the error with Mark's history twice, it starts becoming funny enough to fall off the couch laughing. Why wasn't the establishment of Lippincott as gay considered a "watershed moment", according to their poorly researched effort? That aside, what proof do they have that "bible-thumpers" took such a denigrating position? According to Religion Dispatches, that was far from the case. And why no provision of the 1985 strip in question, so we can ascertain the given year is accurate? The following isn't very accurate either:

When B. D.—the strip’s resident conservative and permanent helmet-wearer—lost his leg in Iraq, 35 years of character history freighted the injury. This wasn’t a policy abstraction; it was a friend’s tragedy. Trudeau became a fixture on Ward 57 of Walter Reed hospital, interviewing veterans and their families, detailing their trials and the government’s responses. Following B. D.’s journey through PTSD, Trudeau earned the title “archangel of Walter Reed” from the military establishment itself.

But here’s the paradox Kendall fails to articulate: Trudeau opposed the Iraq War vehemently, yet his humane treatment of its victims earned him establishment gratitude. When you become a “humanist,” you often lose your “teeth.” The military appreciated Trudeau’s compassion for wounded soldiers even as they pursued policies that kept wounding them. They could separate the caricaturist of their commanders from the chronicler of their suffering. They used his moral clarity about individual pain as cover for endless wars.

Regarding B.D, we once again have an error at hand, or at least a lack of historical clarity: in April 21, 2004, after 34 years, Trudeau drew the guy's helmet being removed after he lost a leg in the Iraq war. On the other hand, I don't think Duke and Ching Huan have been seen without their glasses in all the time they've been recurring cast members. Whatever, it's disturbing how the reviewer turns to claiming wars are "endless" because of the USA's conduct, not because of the foreign autocrat tyrants and ideologies that begin them. Such propaganda only lets savages off the hook, and proves the journal's not altruistic. Also, was Trudeau's reason for opposing the war in Iraq because he didn't think they were as dangerous as Iran's turned out to be? If so, I have yet to find him actually saying so. His turn to victim-blaming in the past decade after the Charlie Hebdo massacre certainly didn't help matters.

In 2014, Trudeau stepped away from his daily grind to work on HBO’s Alpha House, and most papers carried reruns of his greatest hits. He still writes a Sunday strip. Mike’s daughter Alex entered the cast, while the Duke (a play on gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson) lived long past his writerly role model to serve as as the proconsul of an Iraqi city. Like Donald Trump, the Duke acts like a monument to the Great American Grift. By the time Trudeau reached the Trump era, satire entered a predicament that made exaggeration almost impotent. Even late-night comics weary of ridiculing Trump, and logic simply vaporizes in the face of his daily harangues. Trudeau’s solution treated Trump as monstrous subtext—an unstable virus distorting his characters’ daily lives rather than a target for direct parody. It was a graceful retreat, but it also admitted defeat.

Sounds like somebody wishes the strip continued daily for longer, if that's what it took to ram Trump for ambiguous reasons. I sometimes wonder if Trudeau stopped drawing daily strips because he had little else to tell in this day and age, and his resort to cheap jokes at this point with Trump certainly proves he's way past his prime.

Doonesbury may have run for a longer time than strips like Peanuts, but has since proven overrated and pretentious, as the swipe at Trump makes clear. Even long before that, from what I could tell, it had long hit bottom. So what good does it do to write up a history book about it when the chances are it won't take an objective viewpoint?

What the film director of the Dark Knight's doing now with the Odyssey makes clear he wouldn't be a good choice for it anymore

Christopher Nolan, the filmmaker known for his Batman trilogy, Dark Knight, nearly 2 decades ago, is soon going to be releasing a movie based on The Odyssey, and it looks like he's decided to join the woke bandwagon, based on the casting choices, as the following report from Breitbart makes clear. This may not be comics-related per se, but since Batman and a few other comics characters do come up in discussion (along with the actors playing them), that's why it could be a good idea to take a look:

In an interview with the Telegraph, Nolan insists that he is not at all worried over the criticism. When asked about the hubbub, he casually replies, “Comes with the territory.”

“But look,” Nolan continued, “these conversations that happen before people see the film – they’re always irrelevant, because no one having them knows what the film actually is yet.” And he added that he felt The Odyssey was going to stir controversy regardless.

“But remember,” Nolan said, “I spent 10 years of my life dealing with Batman.”

“When I came on to Batman Begins, writers and artists had been working on this beloved character for almost 65 years, and a lot of freighted thoughts were out there about what he represents. And what I learnt over my time on that trilogy is you can’t worry about any of that at all,” the Oscar-winning director explained.

“What you have to do is honor the original text by interpreting it in the strongest way you personally can,” he exclaimed.

“In the end, fans of the property – even when we were doing something that was not what they would have done – enjoyed the sincerity of the attempt to put as good a version of it on screen as we could,” Nolan said.

“All I can do is make the best film I possibly can in the most sincere way. It’s very different from how anyone else would do it, but that’s what adaptation is,” he concluded.

Critics have pointed out several red flags in the upcoming film’s promotional materials: indications that the script leans heavily on a revisionist Odyssey translation by left-wing, feminist writer Emily Wilson; his casting of African actress Lupita Nyong’o to play the Greek character Helen of Troy, who is described as having pale skin and light blonde or reddish hair; and the casting 5-foot-one, 105-pound transvestite actor Elliot Page as Sinon, a Greek warrior who does not even appear in The Odyssey or in Homer’s other epic The Illiad. The character was created much later by Roman poet Virgil in his Trojan War epic The Aeneid.

When Nolan originally worked on the Dark Knight trilogy, I don't think he ever went out of his way to do DEI casting. So to say you "can't worry about it" doesn't work well when he's going out of his way to be so noticeable in his choices, right down to the casting of a woman who desecrated herself so badly. And if Nolan's not going to consider what Homer's Odyssey represents, then Nolan's only letting know that his leftism's come to the fore in the worst ways possible.

This subject was already brought up nearly 2 months ago by the Federalist as well, and at the time, they told that:

...the only relatively recent, large-scale adaptation for the screen was a made-for-TV film in 1997 with cheap production (just a small step above a typical episode of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys with Kevin Sorbo). Despite its shortcomings, the movie at least stayed faithful to the source material and maintained a brisk pace as well as a spirit of fun.

Nevertheless, in an era of reboots, it only made sense for Hollywood to give the Odyssey the epic treatment it deserved under the direction of a guy like Christopher Nolan. He could enlist the necessary talent and apply the necessary cinematic techniques to do to Odysseus what he did for Batman.

But every piece of news, particularly the new lengthy (4000+ words) puff piece from Time magazine, has quickly eroded any hope this movie is worth seeing. With his horrible casting, drab cinematography, and intent to explore Odysseus’ inner demons, Nolan seems committed to ruining his most ambitious film yet. Rather than save American cinema from its current death spiral, he has somehow brought all of its worst qualities together in this new project.

DEI Casting

The most obvious offense has been his choice of actors. Outside of Matt Damon playing Odysseus, nearly every other person in this movie has little reason to be there. Starting from the top, Anne Hathaway is a mediocre actress with too little depth, range, or charisma to play Odysseus’ wife Penelope. The same should be said for Tom Holland, playing Odysseus’ son Telemachus. Although both of them have risen to fame playing likable young adults, they will be difficult to believe as a grief-stricken queen desperately waiting for her husband and an adult son growing up in his father’s shadow.

Of course, what has elicited more outcry has been Nolan’s brazenly woke casting for the other characters. To play Athena, he cast Zendaya, an actress who suffers from incurable “resting bitch face,” can’t act, and is too young and unserious for the part. For Helen of Troy, the princess whose superlative beauty “launched a thousand ships,” he cast Lupita Nyong’o, a mostly forgettable actress who is known more for appearing in the Black Panther movies than being a paragon of female perfection. If one had to guess why exactly Nolan picked these actresses, it seems that being a woman of color had something to do with it.

On the subject of the BP movie, I recall some people said it had a questionable approach hinting at social justice propaganda, and now, several years later, one can ask whether it had any impact in the long run, after its contrived sequel collapsed.

As for men of color, Nolan has this covered by casting the rapper Travis Scott as a bard in order to communicate “the idea that this story has been handed down as oral poetry, which is analogous to rap.” Considering that the epic poem is an art form that celebrates the ideals of an ancient culture with larger-than-life characters in a larger-than-life setting while rap is a contemporary art form that glamorizes urban decay, vice, and criminality, this connection is a bit of a stretch.

Nolan also made sure to represent the elderly with the inclusion of Charlize Theron as the ageless nymph Calypso and John Leguizamo as Odysseus’ lieutenant Eumaeus. At 50 years old, Theron evidently clings to her glory days of being a bombshell/action star. Meanwhile, John Leguizamo is an unfunny 65-year-old comedian best known for spouting leftist propaganda and whining about racism.

But the most controversial decision (to put it mildly) for casting has been that of Elliot Page, formerly known as Ellen Page. Setting aside the rumor that she might play Greece’s mightiest warrior Achilles, simply looking at Page after her transgender surgeries is highly distracting, if not outright disturbing. Here was a young attractive actress starring in big movies like Juno, X-Men: Days of Future Past, and Inception now reappearing as a scrawny pubescent boy. With the transgender insanity behind us, most people would probably agree Page needs mental and emotional help more than a prominent role in a big-budget movie.

I think Nolan has a lot of explaining to do why, back in the day, he didn't go out of his way to do such forced, politicized casting, and now all of a sudden, he believes it's that big a deal, taking full precedence over merit. I guess it's because Matt Reeves and Robert Pattinson's film went that route just a few years ago, so now, Nolan's decided to follow suit. Some moviegoers argued the Caped Crusader doesn't do much of anything in Reeves' film, and what Nolan's doing to the Odyssey now in his adaptation decidedly makes clear he's abandoned all qualifications for ever producing/directing films based on Batman again, ditto other comics characters. You could also ask what the whole point was of even bothering to adapt Batman back in the day if this is what Nolan thinks now. For all we know, his new path could have people one day look upon the Dark Knight film trilogy quite differently. It's pretty surprising there could be quite a few performers here whose names I recall from the live action comics films they appeared in, right down to Holland who played Spider-Man. But, they too seem to be following the woke narrative, and if that's how it's going to be, that's why, compared to actors and actresses of the past, they won't rate high in cinematic history in the future.

What John Byrne has to say about his new X-Men: Elsewhen story

Before I begin, while I've made clear in the past that the Phoenix Saga is not one of my favorite storylines - not on its own anyway - I am aware that terrible SJW Heather Antos actually attacked Byrne over bizarre accusations that he's supposedly homophobic/transphobic, even though he was the creator of Alpha Flight's Northstar, and it was originally his intention to emphasize that Jean-Paul Beubier was homosexual. From what I can tell, Antos must've attacked Byrne more out of bizarre jealousy along with virtue-signaling, and she does seem to have embarrassed herself with her employers over that.

But with all that said, does that mean I have to like the Phoenix Saga, or even the premise of Byrne's new alternate continuity story? Of course not, and seriously, what he's written up today is, IMO, distasteful, based in part on my being a fan of Jean Grey, and would I be taking this position if I weren't a fan? Anyway, Byrne was interviewed by the NY Times (archive link), and here's what's brought up in discussion:

Now 76, Byrne has re-emerged with what he’s calling his swan song: “X-Men: Elsewhen,” an alternate reality hardcover which revisits the X-Men at the point where he left, without his former collaborators but with a big plot twist: Phoenix was not killed.

Viewed within the specific context, if Jean was rescued from the Shiar and brought back to Earth as though nothing happened, after she allegedly wiped out billions, is that in good taste? Hardly. That told, what comes up next in the main interview is eyebrow raising:

For readers who may not be well-versed in the long history of the X-Men, can you briefly talk about the controversy around the Phoenix character?

There had never been a case where a superhero created by Stan and Jack had been turned into a villain. And we did that. We had her go out and blow up a whole planet and destroy an entire alien race. [Then editor in chief] Jim Shooter knew this was coming, but for some reason he said, “She must be punished” — that Phoenix had to be taken to a “prison asteroid,” and horribly tortured for all eternity. I said, “I’d rather kill her.” So that’s what we ended up doing.

What?!? Shooter thought Jean should be tortured?!? As though it weren't bad enough he wouldn't lift a finger in defense of her dignity as a character based on how she was being forced into the role of a criminal/murderess, he thought it okay to put her in a position where she'd end up being tortured to the end of time? Well, I knew there were sadly some very serious downsides to Shooter's MO, and Secret Wars was surely just the icing on the cake. What I did know years ago was that one of the story proposals was to have Jean put in a position similar to an actual Phoenix, where she'd revive but then be destroyed again repeatedly. I'm not sure if that's what Byrne's alluding to, but let's be clear: I just didn't find the whole premise appealing, and when the lead up to where Jean would be obliterated told that she'd wiped out 2 billion residents of an alien solar system...that made me sick. What's more, this whole storyline itself kept getting dredged up again and again, with Chris Claremont writing something vaguely similar when he got a job writing Justice League in the 2000s. What's so special about a story where a decent woman's turned into a monstress, but not one where she spends time with a loving family or something like that? And then, look what bizarre, questionable comment Byrne makes next:

But later, after you stopped working on X-Men books, Jean was brought back. So is anything ever really at stake in mainstream comics?

When Mark Gruenwald, my friend and editor, died unexpectedly, I mentioned it on my website and the first response was, “Oh, that’s terrible. I hope he recovers.” I thought: Oh my God, we’ve trained fans to expect that no death is actually permanent, even in the real world!

But this wasn't the real world they were dealing with! This was science-fiction/fantasy! And the later 1988-98 Excalibur was one of the most surreal series of all in Marvel's output. Resurrection is part and parcel of science-fantasy whether Byrne likes it or not, and he acts like it's some kind of calamity if handled otherwise? I'm sorry, but no. Resurrection in science-fantasy is not the worst thing that could happen, and to restrict it even in the Marvel/DC universes, or single them out as though they alone aren't allowed to employ the concept is insulting to the intellect, and offensive. Why, if you know where to look, there's undoubtably stories about resurrection of fictional characters in science-fiction/fantasy that are very enjoyable, in otherwise good taste, and we're being lectured that it's somehow a crime? Good grief. And then, look who he says he enjoyed writing most:

Which of the characters is the most fun to write?

Cyclops was always my favorite X-Man, from when I first started reading the book. Wolverine, of course. I often say Wolverine is my fault because [when I came on] Chris told me that he intended to write him out of the book. I was Canadian at that time and said, “No way are you getting rid of the only Canadian!”

But Jean wasn't fun at all? Perhaps not even Storm, Kitty Pryde, Scarlet Witch, Lois Lane and Lana Lang when he later wrote and drew Superman, or even Wonder Girl and Big Barda? Byrne unfortunately had a questionable approach to women at the time, and that he had 3 or 4 of the leading ladies drawn with short hair in his stories was probably the beginning. I recall a Superman story where an alien from Apocalips named Sleez mind-controlled Barda and Superman, and put them in a bizarre fanfiction situation where a snuff filmmaker would record them in something like a porno flick. I once read that Jack Kirby disliked that story because he considered it an insult to his wife, whom Barda was meant as a tribute to (and IIRC, there was a scene where Superman implied she looked like glop?!?). Superman may not have fared much better in that tale, and it was decidedly a low point in Byrne's run. And again, it doesn't always seem like he had much affection for some of the women in his stories, not even Aurora in Alpha Flight. Honestly, in hindsight, some of that stuff comes across as quite ludicrous, and has to be taken with a grain of salt.

Is Byrne correct though, that Claremont wanted to jettison Wolvie? I don't know, but some history items tell that Claremont wanted to put Wolvie in the grave and revive him as a villain. You could reasonably ask there if Claremont really loved Logan as a character, and of course, whether he actually loved Jean too, considering where he took her in the late 70s as the X-Men writer.

When people talk about giants of the era you came up in, you and Frank Miller are often on similar footing. Thoughts about his treatment of Wolverine?

This will get me in trouble, but I didn’t care much for Frank’s Wolverine. In terms of creating a hugely popular character, he did the right thing. My gut reaction was: beautiful artwork, but I don’t know this guy.

Well, based on Miller's appalling leftism, that's why I don't think I know him either, and he sure didn't give much reason to have faith in his ability to stand by his stories.

There’s a page in Elsewhen where you depict Wolverine brutally attacking Magneto. The backgrounds are bright red, his eyes are bright red, he’s in a murderous rage. Is this a new kind of ferocity for this character?

Well, it was always what we had in mind. There’s a scene, that I would never, in a million years, do. It’s Wolverine sitting at the breakfast table and Kitty Pryde [the youngest of the X-Men] comes in and says, “Hey,” in just the wrong tone of voice. And he guts her without a second thought and then goes on eating his Cheerios. Because he is quite literally a homicidal maniac.

Seriously, that's what he believes Logan should be?!? Strange. From what I'd read years ago, he wanted Wolvie to have a more likable persona, and this certainly is enough to wonder if Byrne's taking a contradictory position. He also makes it sound like he's taking the fictional-characters-are-real-life-people approach, which again, is utterly grating, illogical and brought down comicdom practically years ago.

And then, wouldn't you know it, an allusion to Byrne's leftism turns up:

It almost feels like we’re living in a comic book world today.

It feels like evil has won. I look at Washington and go, oh my God, this is the [guy] who I modeled my Lex Luthor in part on, back when he was just a big noise in business in New York.

Sigh. So he considers Trump a baddie and nothing else. A real shame. As though there weren't any better examples of bad billionaires out there at the time. On which note, as this Popverse article tells, if Byrne's take on Luthor was based on Trump, it was only partially, since there were other examples of billionaires at the time he'd drawn ideas from, including Ted Turner and Thomas Edison. But now, despite a suggestion to the contrary, Byrne sounds like he wants to claim Trump's literally the problem, and not the others. How odd. As a result, he's not all that different from Miller, so what's his point? At the end of the interview:

What do you consider your legacy?

When I look at my work, all I can see is the influences. There’s Neal Adams, there’s Joe Kubert, there’s Bernie Wrightson, there’s Jack Kirby, there’s Gil Kane. When people tell me they’re huge John Byrne fans, I go, “What are they seeing?”

I would like to think that when people see my work, it’s believable. If it’s two guys sitting at a bar, or if it’s two planets crashing into each other, I like to think that people will believe what they’re looking at. Just verisimilitude. There’s the word.

While there are several examples in his portfolio that're great, including his overall run on Fantastic Four, Byrne later stumbled by the turn of the century (his Spider-Man: Chapter One miniseries didn't get a good reception, IIRC), and I can't say he'll ever have as big a legacy as Kirby, Kane and Wrightson. Interesting that somebody who alluded to Kirby would've risked alienating him with a take on the aforementioned Barda from New Gods that was questionable at best, and ludicrous at worst. And Byrne's inability to avoid leftist political allusions will certainly for now make it difficult to decide how well his legacy can be admired overall.

Now again on the subject of Antos' recent attack on Byrne, what's really appalling is that she may have boosted sales for a story that I don't think should be considered a big deal, and alternate reality or not, it strikes me as tasteless. Interesting that she didn't attack Byrne because she cares about Jean, but rather, because she perceives his politics as incompatible with hers. That's got to be saying something. I don't like her MO, but even so, I'm not going to buy what Byrne's promoting as possibly his last writing and art project, because the whole premise was in questionable taste to start with, and became such an irritating cliche over the following decades. Even Colossus, if memory serves, was turned crooked in the early 90s, but he was never burdened with the kind of indignity Jean was when she was originally written obliterating citizens of an alien solar system, incurring the wrath of the Shiar. So why must Jean have suffered something that could make it difficult to use her as a character in later years? I know the setup was retconned with an alien lifeform disguising itself as Jean in 1985, but even so, that doesn't mean Claremont, Shooter, Byrne and company couldn't have created a new character in the mid-70s to take the role of the Phoenix instead of Jean being shoved into it. Now, we've since wound up with an embarrassing situation where the premise was repeatedly dredged up by bankrupt creators who can only think of emphasizing the darkness in the worst ways possible, and it's hurt comicdom very badly.

Veteran actor from X-Men films made offensive comments about Donald Trump and his residence

Warner Todd Huston at Breitbart says veteran actor Ian McKellan, who played Magneto in the live action X-Men films in the past quarter century, is the latest performer with comics-to-movie connections who's made offensive comments about the USA president:

Disney’s Marvel film star Sir Ian McKellen is boasting about fantasizing about destroying President Donald Trump’s home at his Mar-a-Lago resort during his scenes in the upcoming superhero blockbuster, Avengers: Doomsday.

McKellen will reprise his X-Men role as Magneto, the mutant with the power over metals, in the film set to be released in December. And in comments made in Rome, the 87-year-old actor said that directors Anthony and Joe Russo told him to envision something personal when he was wreaking havoc as Magneto, according to The Guardian.

McKellen told his audience that “they got me at one point to destroy New Jersey.”

The actor then rose from his chair onstage to give a dramatic recreation of his thoughts during the scene, and said that the Russos “told me to look more furious: make it look as if you hate what you’re destroying. So, I stood there and I shouted: ‘Mar-a-Lago!'”

And the filmmakers had no complaints? Well, they have indicated they're leftists, so I guess that explains something. This does not make me look forward to watching whatever new films they're producing any more than anything else, and it says quite a bit more about the actors who were part of the X-Men movies as well. The Marvel movieverse has been on the decline for the past several years, and this kind of PR is not going to improve fortunes by much either.

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.

Masters of the Universe movie goes into box office freefall

So the latest live action adaptation of what began as a toy line that later morphed into comics and cartoons appears to be another financial dud, as Variety states:

“Scary Movie” easily secured the No. 1 spot over this weekend’s other major new release, Amazon MGM’s sword-and-planet adventure “Masters of the Universe,” which debuted at No. 2 with a soft $29.3 million in North America. The film also earned just $25 million from 86 overseas markets for a global start of $54 million. It’s an underwhelming start for a movie that cost nearly $200 million to produce, not including the marketing budget. It’ll require substantial staying power to justify its price tag, considering that theater owners get to keep roughly 50% of ticket sales.

”This is a soft opening for an action adventure with franchise and series potential,” Gross says, adding that “right now, the only fantasy heroes doing strong business are the biggest and most established superheroes, like Spider-Man, Deadpool, Wolverine, and Superman.”

“Masters of the Universe” is based on the Mattel action figure known as He-Man and marks the toy company’s second theatrical film after “Barbie.” Inaugural crowds were 66% male and nearly 40% were above the age of 45 — meaning that mostly fans of the ’80s toy and cartoon showed up. So “Masters of the Universe” will need to cater to broader audiences in the coming weeks in order to become profitable in its theatrical run.

Not so simple if it didn't make a big splash in its first week. The results so far are certainly telling.

Anyway, there are questionable elements in this new film, which is not bound to be a surprise for anybody who's paid attention to the woke trajectory Hollywood sadly took in the past decade. Let's begin with the following review - or what I can glean from something where the majority of the text is largely restricted by pay options - from the Wall Street Journal, which says:

As imagined by director Travis Knight—best known for another toys-to-screen saga, 2018’s “Transformers” sequel “Bumblebee”—and a battalion of screenwriters, the new He-Man, lost prince from the planet Eternia, is a meek cubicle dweller named Adam. He lives in Oklahoma City. He works in H.R., wears a pink shirt, and drives a yellow Subaru. The last gets better mileage than the running gag about his ordinariness, which is still being used in the closing minutes of the film. Adam, played by England’s Nicholas Galitzine (“The Sheep Detectives”) with Schwarzeneggerian bulk, never stops babbling about conflict resolution and creating space for meaningful dialogue. His office-dweeb jabber would be the most overdone gag in the movie were it not for the many references to the kinds of actions a fellow called “Fisto” might undertake.

No kidding. Well, it gets worse, as this review from Peter Travers points out:

Galitzine, a self-described “hetero” who won raves for playing a gay prince in “Red, White & Royal Blue” and a queer Duke in “Mary & George” with Julianne Moore, plays it straight here as hapless Adam, a clueless charm boy with an office nameplate that lists his preference for he/him pronouns. That one quickly went viral and not in a good way.

Gee, and it doesn't get any better with what's told in the following review from Region Free, about crude sex-related jokes involving genitals turning up, which I'm not going to highlight directly since what's described is so alarmingly vulgar. For something turned out in part by a toy company, how odd they want to inject crude lines into the mess, just because they want a PG-13 rating and believe that's the only way it'll sell. What that shows is just how lacking confidence many entertainment producers are, and it's doubtless been that way for a long time. And what makes it additionally insulting to the intellect is how, according to Screen Daily, the relationship between Adam and Teela is "chaste". How odd indeed. Yet that's been pretty much the norm for years now, to eschew romantic chemistry between the leads almost entirely, and points to either/both a lack of creative freedom for the writers/directors, or goes to show how creatively bankrupt they are at this point.

And then, from Vanyaland, we learn this film can't escape certain stereotypes that're apparently still acceptable among Hollywood leftists:

...Meanwhile, there are the scenes set on Earth, full of a simmering rage at the “feminizing” ways of corporate culture — “I have the power” reinterpreted as a seminar chant, conducted by Adam’s boss, a black woman with a shaved head and overly-cautious-yet-peppy HR demeanor — which is intended to provide a polar counter-balance to the hyper-masculine expectations of those on Eternia.

And I thought it was already bad enough the Golden Age of comics had some unfortunate stereotypes of black women with short hair, making them look far less attractive than their white counterparts. Obviously, the stereotype still exists, and, if the above description is any sign, has gotten considerably worse. What's so "feminine" about what they cite? It's nothing more than a slight to black women, and no doubt, a result of the woke notion that guys aren't allowed to admire even them. PC certainly leads to victimization.

Since we're on the subject of race-related issues, I also noticed the film's simultaneously got a case of race-swapping, with the mentor-like figure Man-At-Arms - who was white in original incarnations in toys and cartoons - changed to black with the actor Idris Elba in the role. It's rather ironic since Elba also claims to believe James Bond shouldn't be turned woke or its star have his race changed. But then, why didn't he make the same argument regarding the co-star he plays in MOTU? Is it because this is a minor character by contrast? Does that suddenly make it justified? Or was Elba too eager to receive a paycheck for a screenplay so laughable? They had a chance to introduce an original character who could fill the specific role here played by Elba, and instead, yet again, political correctness triumphed over organic writing. What a joke.

The studio's presumably planning a sequel spotlighting She-Ra, but I think it'd be better if it all stopped here, since PC is bound to influence such a project even worse than what this MOTU movie's already turning out to be. And if box office results say anything, it probably will grind to a halt anyway. Just another ridiculous merchandise-based movie starring actors and actresses I've never heard of, and the result of Hollywood's barrel scrapings in their desperation for what they can adapt to live action. Stuff like this is why it's better to stick with comics and other books instead, so long as they aren't woke.

Has a writer for neo-Valiant been un-cancelled?

About a year ago, an Argentinian writer working on Valiant's Bloodshot appeared to be blacklisted over alleged negativity to LGBT ideology. Now, according to Comic Book Club Live, he's been reinstated:

Nearly a year after Valiant — and publisher Alien Books — were hit with serious blowback online thanks to what was seen as anti-trans text in Bloodshot #1, writer Mauro Mantella is back on the book with the June release of Bloodshot #4 – Man Made Hell #1, a “new” three issue series with art by Kristian Rossi.

To briefly review what went down in August of 2025, the rebooted Bloodshot featured a storyline about vampires fighting the nano-tech powered warrior using his own nanites. While a lot of it skirted cultural commentary/satire, one bit in particular stuck in reader’s craws. Specifically, this line of text: “There are kids who want to be bitten to become vampires because their favorite influencer says they are one. And parents who force their children into that irreversible change… just to feel modern… and believing that they’ll be thankful for it when they grow up.”

As many readers pointed out, this bit seemed to be specifically mapping onto anti-trans messaging, and Argentinian writer Mantella came under fire for including it. For their part, Alien Books immediately offered a statement on the dialogue, and laid out several steps for addressing the issue including updating dialogue for the trade and undergoing “a more intense review by our proof readers as part of our editorial process.”

Unfortunately, immediately following that in came to light that Mantella had repeatedly retweeted anti-trans and anti-vaccine memes, multiple times in the past. And in response, Mantella deleted his Twitter account and posted a lengthy response/explanation about his reposts, as well as the offending line of dialogue in Bloodshot. [...]

Well, after that absence, Bloodshot is back — and so is Mantella, with the new issue hitting stores on June 24, 2026. While this is pure speculation, it seems likely this fourth issue is the first completely crafted since the fallout from everything detailed above. Whether it will be addressed in the issue, or referenced in any way? TBD.

Does this mean they came to realize how bad it looks when they cancel a writer over petty issues and politics, so they reversed their previous approach and reinstated Mantella at the helm? We can only hope so. But if Mantella and company actually address anything related to this, that's something they decidedly shouldn't do, unless they're willing to prove they can defend the dialogue as originally written last time. Something they probably won't do, unfortunately.