Joe Simon's pro-Israel publication in the 1960s

The Canadian Jewish News wrote about the history of a comics-style project the late artist Joe Simon of Capt. America fame worked on following the 6-Day War in 1967 that was favorable to Israel:

After the 1967 Six Day War, the originator of the comic book hero Captain America produced a spoof on the war and its political aftermath. A Funny Thing Happened to Me on the Way to Tel Aviv was a 66-page satirical magazine created and edited by Joe Simon that sold for 50 cents.

Its pages contain photographs of Egyptian and Jordanian leaders with comic-style word balloons and corny jokes. For example: “The height of Israeli gall: while waiting for negotiations at the UN to begin, one of them opened a kosher restaurant in Damascus.” The magazine reflected the swagger across the Jewish world following Israel’s miraculous military victory.

Simon was no stranger to controversial humour. He edited Sick magazine throughout the 1960s which in its first issue described itself as “a grim collection of revolting humour.” It contained tasteless, politically incorrect humour much like the standup routines of controversial comics such as Lenny Bruce, who apparently purchased 100 copies of each issue that included excerpts from his routines. [...]

Simon used his pen and his sense of humour to stand up for the Jewish people. In his Funny Thing magazine, he includes this legal disclaimer:

“The captions in this publication are entirely fictitious. As for the characters, they should live and be well. Except, maybe, for one or two…”

Now that's amazing. The application of word balloons to live action photography is something the satirists at MAD magazine did too at times. Let's also recall Simon was a conservative in his time, and after September 11, 2001, he'd drawn an illustration similar to the cover of the premiere issue of Captain America Comics where, much like Simon and Kirby drew Steve Rogers punching Hitler, Simon drew Cap punching Osama bin Laden. The question now is whether that illustration was ever made public, or if we'll ever see it on display today? If his estate or anybody else responsible for retaining his artwork is withholding that Simon item, that's wrong.

For now, this is a pretty interesting bit of history of what Cap's co-creator did in the years afterwards, and from what I know, Simon did work in comics and other similar forms of entertainment at least until the mid-70s. His support for Israel, along with supporting the USA, is something important to appreciate.

For every person and generation?

El Pais recently wrote about Spider-Man history, claiming there's one for every person and generation, and predictably, they sugarcoat even the wokest, DEI-pandering products that have only stripped Spidey of any genuine meaning, and have nothing critical or objective to say about the resumes of some of the worst writers to have worked on what has surely become the most editorially mandated franchise, for all the wrong reasons, coming out of Marvel in the modern age:

Spider-Man is always present. The philosopher Grafton Tanner coined the term “foreverism” to refer to phenomena like the Star Wars saga (which never ceases to explore its own intricacies), or those veteran rock bands that never stop reuniting and never quite break up.

These are cultural expressions that have transcended their era. They remain relevant, generation after generation, making nostalgia impossible (and business always possible). Such is the case with Spider-Man: the industry surrounding this character continually offers products for people of all ages and backgrounds. He’s still, quite literally, a kid at heart. And to demonstrate his enduring appeal, the latest installment in the franchise, Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026), is premiering between July 29 and July 31 around the world.

Yes, and how they remain relevant and enduring, with endless publicity stunts and other alienating tactics that divide the audience, like the time when Joe Quesada forcibly undid the Spider-marriage through contrived circumstances, having Peter Parker make a deal with Mephisto and then in the following years, Mary Jane Watson was repeatedly insulted, and they even tried to "placate" audiences by putting her in solo books that ultimately didn't work out. Unfortunately, Spidey's appeal has not been able to endure increasingly leftist ideologies forced into the books, and they also ignore that Star Wars has succumbed to the same, one of the reasons why it's largely collapsed as a franchise today.

“What’s interesting is that he’s a character who feels timeless,” says Julián M. Clemente, author of the seminal book Untold Tales Of Spider-Man (2015), published in Spanish by Panini Comics. “If you’re a kid from the 1970s or 1980s, if you grew up with the cartoons from the 1960s, you’ll see him as someone who’s always been around. But a kid carrying a Spider-Man backpack today sees him as something very current. He’s managed to metamorphose; he doesn’t seem outdated to the new generations.”

No, but the modern stories are. One More/Brand New Day was insulting to the intellect, and again, the forced erasure of the Spider-marriage, which they don't have the courage to discuss here, has only led to a situation where Spidey has become pretty dated in terms of storytelling, because the stories are increasingly stilted and contrived. What's so current about even a story where Mary Jane becomes a female Venom?

The Spider-Man franchise just kept getting bigger and bigger. The 1980s and 1990s saw numerous milestones, including the black suit, the appearance of Venom, as well as the 1994 animated series. And, in the 21st century, he would be embodied by another character who wasn’t Peter Parker (something previously unthinkable): in 2011, after Peter Parker’s death in a branch of the Marvel Universe, writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Sara Pichelli created Miles Morales, a young man of color. Half African-American and half Puerto Rican, he resonated with the era’s focus on diversity.

Later, in 2014, writer Dan Slott came up with a wild idea: the Spider-Verse comic book series, which also focused on diversity. Spider-Men of all kinds emerged, from a Spider-Punk to the futuristic Spider-Man 2099. One version was inspired by cowboys of the Wild West, while another was inspired by 1930s film noir. There was even a Spider-Ham (Peter Porker)!

“These [were] fresh ideas that worked out really well; they led to a series of highly-original animated films. [The many versions] demonstrated the character’s resilience, allowing him to reach another generation,” Clemente explains.

When they turn to this kind of stupidity that doesn't even emphasize merit in writing and art, it just explains all the more why the franchise has been as dulled as it's been dated. Why is it such a big deal virtually every "generation" have a Spidey, but not create new characters, and not have the guarantee of story merit? Do they even pay any attention to what sales figures are, or try to find out just how much any particular comic sells in copy units? All that aside, they predictably sugarcoated some of the era's worst writers like Bendis and Slott, right down to how the former mistreated Scarlet Witch horribly in Avengers: Disassembled. And what good was the original Ultimate line, which lasted about a decade, but whose ongoing series were largely cancelled, the Ultimate Spidey version included? They don't get into any of that either.

While there’s a wide variety of Spider-Man stories aimed at younger audiences, there are also options for those in middle age: Dan Slott’s Renew Your Vows series focuses on a 40-something-year-old Peter Parker’s married life with Mary Jane Watson. In that parallel universe, they have two children together, a situation also found in Jonathan Hickman’s recent Ultimate Spider-Man comic book series. “[This scenario] really connects with the audience that came to Spider-Man in the ’80s and ’90s,” Clemente points out. Going even further, Spider-Man: Reign shows an older, gray-haired Peter Parker, who’s around the age of 70. His eternal love, Mary Jane, has already died. He now lives under the rule of an authoritarian regime, in an atmosphere of darkness that seems inspired by Frank Miller’s aged Batman in The Dark Knight Returns.

I think this is equally telling of where this puff piece is going, when they go so far as to sugarcoat DKR's dark influence, and act like alternate dimension versions of Spidey's world are a literal substitute for the 616 universe. And they don't even question whether it was in good taste to write Mary Jane out of the picture and into the grave. Does that connect with the audience? It should be noted that although MJ gets mention here, it's superficial, and doesn't offer any serious focus on her as a character as opposed to Peter, and again, the writer and interviewee don't have anything objective to say about what happened with the Spider-marriage in 2007. So what's their point about Spidey becoming timeless?

The truth is that Spider-Man is, by a long shot, the superhero who has best conquered cinema. While Superman certainly paved the way for major adaptations — and even though Batman influenced several generations — the wall-crawler is the character who has been consistently successful for more than two decades.

Well isn't that because the filmmakers managed to convey some entertainment value? Although if Zendaya's of mixed descent, a case can be made that the Spidey films where she co-stars are a product of the DEI propaganda era. Was that really necessary? And even before that, what about the 2011 reboot? I'd argued before that the problem there was that I already knew the story as it originally began in 1962, so it didn't have the impact it could've.

...we can add the animated saga that began with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), considered by many to be one of the best superhero movies ever made, with its revolutionary visual style and a story that turned Miles Morales into yet another icon of the franchise.

The truth is that Spider-Man’s dominance in film goes far beyond the character’s movies. For years now, Sony, which owns the film rights to the character, has tried to build a parallel universe, starring some of the villains and supporting characters (without including the hero himself). The result has been mixed: productions like Morbius (2022), Madame Web (2024) and Kraven the Hunter (2024) have received a lukewarm reception from critics and audiences alike. However, there is one major exception: Venom, the oil-like symbiote that bonds with people and grants them powers similar to Spiderman’s. The version starring Tom Hardy resonated with audiences, thanks to its more irreverent tone. It was so popular that it became a highly-successful trilogy.

Gee, I wonder why we're supposed to care about the villains, if anybody, being pushed to prominence? Sorry, but that was in poor taste, and another example in motion of too much emphasis on villainy and even glamorizing it. IIRC, the sequel, "Let There be Carnage", wasn't as successful, but in any event, it's a shame whenever audiences buy into that kind of embarrassment.

“Spiderman triumphs because the true protagonist isn’t the superhero: [in fact], it’s Peter Parker. There [have been] many superheroes, but people became fans of the person beneath the mask,” Jorge Iván concludes. “He’s a profoundly human character: he’s constantly worried that his Aunt May will discover his identity, he has precarious jobs and he barely makes ends meet. Unlike other heroes, his everyday problems are just as important as the villains [he faces]: if he gets fired, he doesn’t have money for food.”

It sounds like some propagandist doesn't want him to have any. In any case, even the part about lack of food is exaggerated, and this all ignores that the writers are responsible for the storylines turned out, which in recent times have become utterly pointless and dated the series all the more. This kind of stupid lecture is exactly what led to Mary Jane getting kicked to the curb, because some selfish, entitled propagandists want Peter to remain something close to a pauper in the stories till the end of time, who's not allowed, in their mindsets, to find a successful career in photography or university teaching, and his being married to a girl who became a model/actress is somehow implausible and the worst thing that could happen. If they say they respect Stan Lee, they lie.

Ultimately, deep down, he’s not a hero. He is, as the wall-crawler reminds us, just “your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.”

Well neither are the real life J. Jonah Jamesons who reduce this all to a form of PC propaganda that throughly fails to distinguish between the good and bad stories over the years, and won't ask whether the real descent into tailspin began around the turn of the century, when J. Michael Straczynski became writer. What they don't get into is how Peter and MJ's status has become horrendous over the years, with Marvel's upper echelons subjecting them to some of the worst editorial mandates possible, and despite what they say, when they start sugarcoating the DEI pandering, it's clear that despite any claims to the contrary, we are supposed to care more about the costume than the character. Peter and MJ have been done such injustice, as have even other recurring veteran cast members in Spidey's world, since the turn of the century, and these propagandists don't care a bit. Nor do they admit that all the DEI/SJW pandering they're gushing over is exactly what's made a joke out of Spidey as a creation, because they actually reduce the original's significance without offering anything solid for storytelling.

And if the day comes when Marvel goes out of business as a publisher, they're bound to act like nothing happened, and won't ask whether the degradation that began at the turn of the century had any part in bringing down Spidey. If there's anything that isn't for every person and generation, it's the sad lack of merit, which they unsurprisingly obscured.

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.

Artist who worked on TMNT charged with assault on reporter in Maine

Maine Wire reported that one of their staff was assaulted at an anti-ICE protest by somebody who turned out to be an artist who worked on recent Ninja Turtles comics, an artist by the name of Bob Tkacik:

A Maine comic book artist is facing a criminal assault charge stemming from the alleged attack on a Maine Wire reporter covering an anti-ICE protest in Biddeford earlier this month.

Bob Tkacik, a freelance comic book artist known for his work on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise, has been charged with assault in connection with the July 13 incident involving Maine Wire reporter Jon Fetherston. The case is expected to be heard in Biddeford District Court unless it is resolved beforehand through the York County District Attorney’s Office.

According to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, Fetherston was covering an anti-ICE demonstration in downtown Biddeford when he was allegedly struck with a skateboard, shoved, spat on, and repeatedly harassed while livestreaming from the scene. The attack reportedly knocked his cellphone to the ground and interrupted his live coverage. The incident has since been cataloged by the Tracker as an assault on a journalist and damage to journalistic equipment.

The alleged assault quickly drew national and international attention. The incident was covered by Fox News and Newsmax, while Britain’s Daily Express also reported on the attack during Fetherston’s live television coverage, bringing broader attention to concerns over the safety of journalists covering politically charged demonstrations.

The Maine Press Association also condemned the violence, issuing a public statement denouncing attacks on working journalists and reaffirming that reporters must be able to cover news events without fear of intimidation or physical assault. The organization called violence against members of the press unacceptable and urged respect for the First Amendment and the role of journalists in a free society.

It was bad enough when a would-be historian who'd written about the Ninja Turtles committed a criminal offense several weeks ago. Now, an artist who worked on the comics themselves has also tarnished its legacy with an offense of his own. What makes this additionally disturbing is that the same victim had also been threatened by a mosque attendee in the state, and other attendees were also hostile to him. I don't know if he's a right-leaning journalist, but his chilling experiences certainly make clear something's horribly wrong over there. Including how Tkacik's given clues as to what he thinks of law enforcement. Based on which, you could wonder why he even drew Ninja Turtles to begin with.

I looked around to see if there were any past articles about Tkacik, and found this interview on Capes and Tights from 2023, where it says that:

While you have other professional work, some people know you for your ability to draw turtles. Is this something that your enjoy being connected to and what is the best part of being so connected to the turtles community?

To be perfectly honest, it is an honor to be known for this. I think the TMNT community is full of incredible storytellers, artists and enthusiasts, and I can genuinely say, for everyone I’ve met through this connection, I am immensely grateful. I’ve made a lot of very good friends through this work, and I couldn’t be happier.

Is it an honor for him to now be known for breaking the law, and assaulting a news reporter without provocation? The interview says Tkacik published an indie comic of his own, and it'd be strongly advised not to buy it now after what he did, delivering the industry another embarrassing moment. We must hope this terrible incident brings his career to an end, and that the Ninja Turtles franchise holders will no longer allow his employment after what he did. This is exactly why more serious demands must be made by businesses in comicdom for creators to uphold the law, and avoid politicized issues like these. Comic book publishing cannot afford this kind of negative publicity anymore. Would this have occurred if Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman were still in charge of their creations? I don't know, but perhaps this sad case could suggest why some franchise creators just shouldn't sell off the rights to their products.

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?

A review of Frank Miller's new biography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marvel moves from NY to CA, and replaces C.B. Cebulski with Stephen Wacker as EIC

The Hollywood Reporter's announced changes are being made at Marvel, none of them anything to be optimistic about, in both location and staffing:

After calling the Big Apple home for almost 90 years, Marvel Comics is moving out of New York City. And heading to Hollywood.

The relocation was revealed to staff at a town hall Thursday at Marvel’s New York office in Midtown, where employees were informed that its publishing division will be pulling up stakes and transferring operations to Burbank, California, the current headquarters of Marvel Studios and corporate parent, The Walt Disney Company.

Just like DC, right? Considering how artistically and politically bad their owner became over the past decade, this is nothing to take pleasure at learning, unfortunately. Nor is the news of who'll replace C.B. Cebulski as EIC, after he retained the role for nearly a decade:

The development is accompanied by a changing of the guard at the top. Stephen Wacker, a respected veteran comics editor who also earned an Emmy nomination for his work in the company’s forays in animation, has been named Marvel’s new editor-in-chief, replacing outgoing chief C.B. Cebulski, who had steered the division since 2017. Cebulski will still remain part of the family, however, as he will be moving to Japan to spearhead the company’s push into manga, among others things, as editor, Asia originals.

Both changes are meant to reinvigorate the comic book side of the company, which has been overshadowed in recent years by the success of Marvel’s movies, and by a creative slump that saw it lose its position as comics market share leader for the first time this century. Marvel chief Kevin Feige’s installing of the new leadership and the relocation of its comics side to Disney’s Burbank base represents a long-term investment in what he believes underpins the source of Marvel’s storytelling. [...]

Among those joining the Burbank headquarters will be Wacker, who is making his Marvel return after leaving the company in the early 2020s to lead Jonathan Hickman’s worldbuilding project 3W3M and then co-founding the entertainment studio Stone Kite.

A beloved editor with strong talent relationships, Wacker spent over fifteen years at Marvel, overseeing Spider-Man comic runs that included the best-selling “Brand New Day” and “Superior Spider-Man” eras. He was also editor on Daredevil and Hawkeye when those titles won Eisner Awards and was involved in the introduction of Kamala Khan, also known as Ms. Marvel.

"Respected and beloved"? Wacker's the same editor who was part and parcel of the effort to run the Spider-Man franchise into the ground, and they shamelessly gloss over one of the worst editorial mandates Joe Quesada forced upon Spidey when he was EIC. It's just like them to distort and obscure the worst of what was brought about. And all these years, they kept repeatedly dangling carrots as to whether Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson would be reunited as a married couple, which they never did, and Cebulski recently allowed things to become worse by approving a story where MJ's turned into another Venom host. These kind of shock value stories don't improve a dire situation, and that's going to be part of Cebulski's "legacy" going out.

Since Wacker, of course, was party to the degradation of Spidey, he's unlikely to reverse any of Quesada's worst steps of the past quarter century, and unlikely to restore the Spider-marriage. And even if he does, that alone won't make Spidey's adventures readable again. For all we know, Wacker could ramp up the wokeness by galaxies, as though it weren't bad enough already, and he was instrumental in shoehorning Islamic propaganda into the MCU with a character whose instant solo series wasn't marketed on merit, and at least 3 projects translating the Muslim Ms. Marvel into live action films, TV and video were flops, with the Marvels movie becoming a huge dud. Of course, the MSM will doubtless not have anything critical to say about his upcoming run as EIC, and chances are that, much like the now outgoing Cebulski, Wacker won't give many press interviews, if at all. At least that'd be a comfort in a sense, since Quesada gave only so many years ago where he was unendurable. Forbes also addressed the move, and said:

In one way, it is unsurprising that Disney is uniting Marvel’s publishing and film units in Burbank. Comic-based movies, media and games supplanted comics publishing as the economic driver of the business two decades ago. Longtime rival DC decamped from New York to Burbank in 2015, a move also accompanied by a change in company leadership. An internal Marvel company survey revealed that more Mavel creators now hail from the West Coast than from the region nearby New York, and in any case, geography has become largely irrelevant to the production of comics. [...]

Cebulski’s departure was also not a surprise. Though the Marvel editor could claim a range of creative and commercial successes in his decade-long leadership of the company, Marvel’s sales have slipped in recent years, falling behind DC for the first time in a long time according to industry sales data. With longtime Marvel President Dan Buckley stepping down in May, replaced by Brad Winderbaum (head of TV, animation, comics and franchise) and David Abdo (general manager, comics and franchise), it seemed likely that Marvel would get new editorial leadership sooner rather than later.

Wacker will step into the role once held by industry legends Stan Lee, Roy Thomas and Jim Shooter among others. Wacker has been behind some of Marvel’s most interesting and popular comics of the past few decades, including Brand New Day and Superior Spider-Man. He is well-liked within the industry and well-regarded by creative colleagues both at Marvel and on other stops in his professional career including at DC and Jonathan Hickman’s 3W3M.

As surely expected, they too sugarcoat the worst atrocities to come out of the Quesada era at Marvel, and it wouldn't be the least bit shocking if they're fully in the boat for the worst of the overabundant company wide crossovers that're doubtless coming up in Marvel's schedule now. I'm sure there's something to the claim Wacker's "well-liked" inside the industry, since he's bound to be a knee-jerk leftist who could do everything they consider acceptable. But after the Spider-marriage was thrown out so blatantly, do they really think he's popular and well-liked within Spider-fandom? Naturally, the real-life J. Jonah Jamesons at Forbes won't acknowledge that issue.

Anyway, hiring a new EIC doesn't guarantee fortures will improve, if no merit or respect for fandom and past creators isn't emphasized. Sales of mainstream comics have been declining for years, to the point where it's bewildering Marvel and DC are even still in business as publishers. I'd noticed rumors Disney might shut down Marvel as a publisher, but for all we know, they're bound to continue pointlessly for still another decade or so. And within that time, sales, along with "merit", are bound to fall ever further.

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 the Comics Journal says about Gerry Conway

The Comics Journal wrote about the history of the late Gerry Conway's career, and among the subjects in focus, it includes the death of Gwen Stacy in Spider-Man during 1973, and a most interesting part that came afterwards, which hasn't always been noted clearly in history items coming in later decades:

A year into Conway’s run, that push toward adulthood took its most celebrated and controversial form with “The Night Gwen Stacy Died,” in which Conway and co-conspirator John Romita killed both Peter Parker’s long-running love interest Gwen Stacy and longtime arch-nemesis Norman Osborne. The book became an immediate sensation: so shocked and distressed was the fan response that Stan Lee would briefly demand Conway bring back the character from death immediately (he did, kind of, in the form of a clone), and decades later it was still being used as a kind of critical shorthand for the moment Silver Age innocence in comics gave way to 1970s angst. But the scene that has always haunted me from that story isn’t about Gwen Stacy or the Green Goblin at all: it’s of Peter’s roommate Harry Osborne, delirious and desperate as he recovers from a drug overdose, begging his best friend not to walk away.

While TCJ may be one of the most left-wing periodicals around, it's amazing the writer would point out something most mainstream newspapers didn't: while Gwen wasn't resurrected, they did compromise with a clone. Strange why some MSM sources don't clearly acknowledge that. But the article fails to be clear about something else:

His output at DC was vast, peppered with an endless supply of new characters, from the successful (Firestorm, of TV’s Super Friends fame) to the less so (the streetwise era of the Justice League Detroit). “He was just always creative,” Harris said. “I remember in our plotting sessions, he would say, ‘Well, we could introduce a new character at this point.’ And he always had something in mind. I don't know if he had a backlog of them in his head, or if he created them on the spot. But it was fun to watch him come up with something.”

Wonder why they didn't discuss how Vibe and the Steel character created at the time were thrown under the bus by 1987 because George Perez didn't like the absurd accent applied to the former, in effect punishing the character instead of the writer? That was a very sad example of placing blame squarely on a fictional character, and it's one of the leading ways and reasons the industry's been brought down. And then, here's where, sadly enough, political bias shows up when the Punisher comes into focus:

Oddly enough, the Hollywood caste system being what it is, Conway was seldom involved with movie and TV projects based on his own comic book creations — one of whom in particular had been growing up without him. In 1974, Conway, along with artist John Romita, had created the Punisher as a vigilante antihero in the model of Don Pendleton’s Executioner novels. The Punisher appeared initially as a recurring foil for Spider-Man, and in later years Conway would maintain that the character was imagined as a one-off villain, and certainly not a hero in his own right.

To be sure, this wasn’t entirely ingenuous. The Punisher as originally conceived wasn’t a moral paragon, but he wasn’t a villain either, and when the character showed enough success to warrant a spinoff stories in Marvel’s black-and-white magazines, Conway obliged by writing him with the kind of hard-bitten grittiness that had made Dirty Harry a hit at the box office.

But during the early 2000s, the Punisher took on a second life of his own, becoming a kind of mascot for the American far right: “American Sniper” Chris Kyle boasted of putting the Punisher’s skull logo on his unit’s gear during the Iraq War, and by the time Donald Trump was in office, the image and character had become a meme on military and police-centric kitsch. By 2025, Kash Patel was putting the logo on challenge coins handed out to agents at the FBI.

Conway, whose own politics by then skewed toward the left, wanted none of it. “It’s as offensive as putting a Confederate flag on a government building,” he said. In 2020, amid the wave of protests following the murder of George Floyd, he decided, vigilante-style, to take matters into his own hands, selling a line of shirts bearing the logo with all proceeds donated to Black Lives Matter. A few decades earlier, it might have been different. Roy Thomas recalled that in the early ‘80s, Conway was something of a “definite Reaganite, not unlike myself.” In a field not always known for the capacity of its creators to grow and change with the times, Conway was a model of graceful evolution.

It is surprising if Conway supported Reagan back in the day, but sad then that he changed considerably, and sadder still that the writer's gushing over all that, and sugarcoating the whole Floyd affair. But of course, not surprising.

As for what's said about how Conway approached the use of the Punisher - both character and symbol - in later years, that's nothing new by now, but that the magazine would gush all over his pivot to the far-left is appalling. As I've said before, there were positive and decent moments in Conway's writings up to the early 90s, prior to the time he shifted to TV scriptwriting, and that's why it's a shame he had to go out of his way to follow an increasingly far-left narrative that did more harm than good for comicdom, and also Hollywood. At least now that he's gone, it's easier to separate art from artist, and perhaps to attribute the Punisher's creation more to Romita than Conway. In any case, it's a shame that even years before Conway disowned Frank Castle, writers and artists like Frank Miller and Bill Mantlo weren't doing any favors with the questionable way they approached the character, no doubt with Conway's approval. Yet all the while, Wolverine gets a free pass on what the Punisher didn't. Come to think of it, even Jason Todd, the 2nd Robin in the Batman books, didn't get a free pass on supposedly killing a sexually violent criminal in 1988. Todd, IIRC, was also created by Conway, and his apparent acceptance of what DC and Jim Starlin did to that character could easily say something about whether he really cared about his creations too. Even if certain fictional characters are created for corporate ownership, does that mean a creator should remain quiet? Of course not.

So it's regrettable Conway had to follow a position even Stan Lee did, and not speak negatively about the places he worked for. Now, we're long seeing the terrible results of all that silence.

Frank Miller makes the mistake of defending Neil Gaiman

Veteran leftist artist Miller was interviewed by the UK Telegraph at the Fastnet Film Festival in Ireland, and he still can't keep himself from pushing all the wrong buttons. First:

It’s hard to overstate Frank Miller’s cultural impact over the past four decades. It was Miller, the artist and writer behind The Dark Knight Returns, 300 and Sin City, who redefined comics from kids’ stuff into something darker and more adult – noirish, dystopian and morally ambiguous. Without Miller, Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan’s Batman films wouldn’t exist; without Miller, the whole movie superhero phenomenon might never have happened at all.

And I guess Denny O'Neil, Steve Englehart and Chuck Dixon don't matter, huh? Only Miller; how nice to know only so many other decent Batman writers don't count the tiniest bit. Predictably, no objective view of "something darker" and "morally ambiguous", as though that's totally above criticism. As for Miller himself, what matters to him? Left-wing "causes":

Still, he’d take that New York, “for all its despair and menace and its degradation”, he tells me, over the one that exists now. The city “in those dark Seventies”, he says, had a spirit of defiance, “a sense of shared safety and, well, there’s no other word for it, love. I don’t believe it does now. We have a militarised police, those horrific ICE agents are nothing less than a Gestapo, and the city itself has been so mismanaged for so long. As scary and grim as things were in the Seventies, there was not the overall stink of totalitarianism that there is throughout America today.”

Is the incumbent president an archetypally corrupt, money-grabbing Frank Miller political villain? “He’s grotesque,” Miller spits, comparing Donald Trump to Darth Vader without his mask. He invokes the characters that the co-creator of Captain America, Jack Kirby, conjured when the Nazis were rampaging across Europe. “Kirby several times recreated Adolf Hitler as a comic-book character. One of them was named Hate-Monger, and that one certainly applies to Trump, because he spews hatred, and he calls on that part of the human spirit in his rhetoric, and you see it on the faces of his followers – the naked racism, the naked sexism, the belligerence.”

It's so sad Miller continues to spew hatred at Trump for all the wrong reasons, and all without clearly backing up his complaints with concrete evidence. And all the while, Miller turns a deaf ear and blind eye to the Iranian ayatollahs, who preached what he speaks of, and Miller's ignorance only dampens whatever impact he must want his GNs to have. That Miller also attacks ICE and refuses, much like his other leftist colleagues he doesn't have the courage to distance himself from, to consider what heinous crimes any illegal immigrants have committed within the USA's borders. The really sad thing is that, if we take Mark Levin's criticisms as an example, there are valid issues one can make when it comes to Trump's managements, yet Miller acts oblivious to all of that. So again, if Miller believes Sin City's a masterpiece, why does he make it look like a joke as a result of his far-left stances? There's also quite a goof in this Telegraph article:

Those early days were exciting. New influences were flowing into Manhattan via the first Forbidden Planet comic-book store, where Miller mainlined the work of Japanese and European masters. His first creator-owned work, Ronin (1983-1984), was a sci-fi samurai mash-up set in contemporary New York that incorporated a wild mix of influences, with manga writ large. Some complain of cultural appropriation in borrowing from other traditions. Miller says, “I welcome any such activity. America is an amalgam of cultures… If we could, I’d love us to learn from Martians.”

Umm, doesn't contemporary mean "modern"? I read Ronin years ago, and putting aside for now that it was overrated, I seem to recall it was set in a future time. Maybe not that far into the future, but it was set years ahead all the same. Gee, what a stupid typo they put to use there. Surprising though, that Miller upheld drawing from foreign cultures, considering how limp his positions are on any subjects involving serious issues like what Sin City may be about. Unfortunately, that's about as far as he may go by now in defense of anything creative and challenging.

There’s a humorous, upbeat quality to Miller that belies the sometimes Stygian darkness of his work. His physical trials – his neck is bent by an undisclosed condition into a position that is visibly limiting – do not daunt him; he declares himself “reborn” as an artist, rather than compromised by his posture. He draws with dramatic vigour, using techniques that embrace the unpredictable. Blood spatters across his pages. Miller achieves the effect by dipping a toothbrush into ink and pulling back the bristles with his thumb to send droplets flying across his creations.

And we're supposed to be utterly impressed and thrilled by his use of bloodletting? What's so "unpredictable" about that? It's actually been quite a cliche for goodness knows how long. That aside, here's what they say about certain other parts of the content:

In Sin City (1991), the men are staggeringly brutal and the women are almost all sex workers. “As far as misogyny goes,” Miller says, “I laugh about it because all you have to do is just read my work. [The accusations] might be because I draw the women as attractive, but in Daredevil, for instance, who’s the most powerful character you remember? It’s Elektra… When it comes to Sin City, yes, I draw the women to be as sexy as possible, but they have their own neighbourhood that they police by themselves. They’re a pack of Amazons.” He is, he insists, not the least bit misogynistic himself.

He’s been accused of Islamophobia, too, after penning Holy Terror in 2011, a graphic novel that he writes “was created in a bloodthirsty rage” after the attacks on New York City on September 11. He had originally conceived it as a story in which Batman simply “kicks Al-Qaeda’s ass”, but instead it “sparked a fire of criticism, some of it warranted”. “It was a howl of pain and rage, and an inarticulate one. I’ll just leave it at that,” he tells me.

On the subject of how he draws women, yes, it's quite possible PC advocates over the years attacked him just for that, but apparently not for the violent content he's decidedly notorious for drawing in the Sin City series. As for the Holy Terror GN, again, it's regrettable he first decided to say 8 years ago that he regrets it, because for somebody who claims he's not a misogynist, he's letting a religious ideology wallowing in just that off the hook. It may have been "inarticulate", but that's surely because he never studied anything about Islam and didn't defend his work based on that. Making matters worse, the same guy who says he's not a misogynist then goes on to defend another writer who was accused of just that:

Generally, Miller is not interested in slanging matches. He says that it would please the media if “I spent half an interview” talking about the embattled writer Neil Gaiman – accused in 2024 of sexual assault by multiple women, which Gaiman denies – “saying, ‘He’s not just a terrible writer, he’s a bad person.’ You know, something crazy like that, when he’s a lovely person, he’s a terrific writer.”

Oh good grief, does he realize he's giving serious detractors a statement to use against him? The same artist and writer who said earlier he's not a misogynist destroys his defense by acting as an apologist for a man who turned out to be scummy. Is Miller doing this because he's worried his recent documentary, American Genius, will suffer in sales due to Gaiman's contributions to it? Well that's partly Miller's fault, as he probably didn't think to vet most of the people who chipped in while preparing the production.

Now the memoir is done, he’s writing a story for the 1,000th issue of Spider-Man in September. Does he still feel affection for those old characters? “Oh God, yes,” he says. “That’s the stuff I grew up on. I’m so fond of it.” And does he think the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been bad for print comics? “I don’t know how good it’s been for movies,” he says with a sly laugh.

What of the prospect of a real “superman” in the near future, as robots and AI continue to advance? “It’s not gonna be that,” he says. “AI is a false god… [and] it’s making for some bad writing.” Meanwhile, this thoroughly human creative engine is still thinking about what he wants to do next – Beowulf, perhaps. Or Der Ring des Nibelungen. “There are an awful lot of stories,” he says.

Well Miller's offering up some very bad commentary ensuring he won't be the most famous creator to come about in the late 20th/early 21st centuries. One of the worst things about modern comics movies is that they did come at the expense of the zygotes, and while Miller may claim to have affection for even Spidey, his failure to address the erasure of the Spider-marriage can speak volumes. It won't be shocking if the 1000th Spidey issue spoken of turns out to be heavily mandated, with C.B. Cebulski prohibiting a reinstatement of the marriage with Mary Jane Watson. So why tell us about the upcoming "anniversary" or even about his new memoir, Push the Wall? After this insult to the intellect from a guy who doesn't seem to understand the importance of consistency, I'd rather not waste my time on either. Miller's problem is that he simply won't keep his mouth shut, and recognize that obsessions like his with figures like Trump doesn't make him a realist. Miller's only proving he's one of the most disappointing artists in comicdom today, and then, if his recent projects were failures, we shouldn't be surprised why. With a few exceptions like Daredevil and maybe Batman: Year One, he is pretty overrated as an artist and writer. And his defense of Gaiman is very troubling.

Kingston's first game convention gives a role to Canadian comics creators

The Kingston Whig-Standard wrote about the first video game convention being held in the Ontario city, where even comics creators had a role:

Indie game developers, esports competitors, comic book creators, and pop-culture enthusiasts gathered at Slush Puppie Place this past weekend for the inaugural Eh! Game Expo.

The event was a three-day festival that organizers hope will become an annual event in Kingston. The expo featured esports competition, cosplay, trading card games, artists and exhibitors from across Ontario and Quebec.

The event also included the Fight for the Throne esports tournament, bringing competitive players together for games such as Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8 and other fighting titles.

Among those showcasing their creative work was Chris Cochrane, a longtime musician and teacher who moved to Kingston nearly a decade ago. That’s when he decided to revisit a dream he first pursued as a young artist: creating comic books.

For Cochrane, founder of Kingston-based Machete Comics, the expo was more than a business opportunity. He saw it as evidence that a community centred on comics, gaming and fan culture is continuing to grow in Kingston.

“I knew that I wanted to do comic books,” Cochrane said. “I figured this is a trilogy in life. This is the third chapter in a trilogy.”

Well good luck to him on his productions. But, the guy unfortunately couldn't resist bringing up a political complaint:

Cochrane cited recent trade tensions and the rising cost of selling books in the United States as key factors in swaying his interest more heavily toward Canadian stories and local creators.

“Because of the tariffs, one of my comic books costs about 40 bucks in the U.S. now,” he said.

Oh good grief, can it really cost that much, tariffs or none? I thought those applied more to distribution and delivery than the list prices on the books themselves. It would seem some Canadians just aren't willing to take issue with their local government and what it's doing wrong, and the aforementioned Tom Grummett was one such person.

I think more Canadian storytelling can be a great thing, but they should seriously leave grudges with the USA and Trump out of this. The same can be said for the video games industry.

Insufficient reactions from industry insiders to the Andrew Farago scandal

I looked to see if any comics writers and artists responded to the reports of the disgraced Andrew Farago being arrested for invasion of privacy felonies. So far, I couldn't find many at all. One who did respond was Gail Simone, of all people, on Facebook: So she's claiming she only spoke with Farago briefly through the mail. But what if there was more correspondence? In any case, somebody as leftist as Simone sadly is doesn't qualify as "moral authority" on the subject that turned up in the past few weeks. Some of the positions Simone took in the past decade only render her "arguments" moot, one more reason it's a shame anybody follows her on social media.

If we were to also quote somebody else who responded to the above post, it's the onetime comics editor Peter Sanderson:

It’s now happened to me three times that a comics pro whom I knew ended up in a sexual scandal. That’s disturbing. I suppose that many sexual predators function by seeming normal in public while having unpleasant secret lives. But I will continue to assume that people are what they seem to be until and unless unpleasant facts emerge about them. How can we function in society otherwise?

One way is to speak about these things more openly, and make clear that partisan politics can't get in the way of being vigilant and making clear sexually abusive behavior is unacceptable. And it's vital to ponder that many predators and perverts can have double or multiple personalities to disguise their actions. Perhaps if we quizzed some people on their overall personal character, we might be able to figure out whether certain individuals are worth supporting or not.

One more we could add is Tess Fowler Guittirez, who said:

It should be recalled, however, that Fowler may have once made unsubstantiated accusations against another writer/artist, and that doesn't help matters either. Those who seize upon scandals like these for the sake of opportunism are not improving the situation.

If there's more creators out there, old and new, I have yet to find them. 2 of those I've found commenting so far certainly don't have the best records to prove they're being altruistic. And when the vast majority of creators don't say a word, what was the point of that "pledge" they took years ago?