The Four Color Media Monitor

Publishing Perspectives wrote about Italy's growing industry for comicdom:

Ivano Bariani sees the pandemic experience as having provided a serious inflection point in the progress of comics in Italy’s market. And while there has been much talk about brisk sales in recent years on the Italian market in comics, Bariani maintains that illustrated literature “has always struggled to gain the industrial and literary recognition it deserves, something familiar from other parts of the world, too.”

Bariani’s PromoComix is an agenzia di promozione, a marketing agency for publishers, and his company is specialized in comics, manga, and other graphic narratives. Formerly a bookseller, and one who had a small chain of stores at one point, he likes his role today in which, “We promote upcoming books, collect orders, work with buyers in every retail chain or independent bookstore. We also help publishers build a calendar and a strategy for their new releases.”

This also means that Bariani has a strong sense for the shape of the comics sector, using data, he says, from GfK, NielsenIQ, and from his clients to build his own picture of the very quick rise of comics and a sometimes confused view of where they are now.

“Until 2019,” he says, “the Italian comic book market was really behind its potential. In 2020-2021, with the pandemic, we saw an unnatural level of growth. Now, we’re on a plateau: huge numbers compared to just five years ago, and the quickness of high-intensity media phenomena, which can spike those numbers. I think the real challenge for retailers and publishers in this scenario, is not the dimension or growth of the market, but the speed of those phenomena.”

The kind of phenomena that Bariani is pointing to includes the prominance of the Tuscan-born artist Michele Rech, who works under the name Zerocalcare. His work in comics and graphic novels has led to a number of film successes, establishing a presence on Netflix. Bariani also points to the success of Pera Toons for children and of Lyon Gamer’s work, an outgrowth of social gaming.

Graphic novels, Bariani says, in the Italian market are “an underworld of undervalued authors” dominated by Zerocalcare. “But other sub-catetories of the comics market,” prior to the pandemic, “weren’t doing much better. In 2018, manga represented just over 1 percent of the market,” he says, “and that was only in terms of copies. In euros, it was around 0.5 percent. The leadership of a few popular artists and publishers seems central to the quickening movements of the sector in this decade. Jump to 2022, and comic book titles in Italy’s Top 100 included a Zerocalcare release ranked at No. 33, four Pera Toons works for kids, and two manga titles. And by 2024, Bariani says, he has seen a Zerocalcare release go to No. 8 and seven Pera Toons titles in the first eight months of this year. Bariani dates the frequently mentioned “explosion” of comics in Italy at 2021: “Comic book sales nearly reached 100 million,” he says, “with manga doubling the sales of graphic fiction, reaching almost 57 million. Eighty percent of the comics sold that year were manga. Considering sales of all books, one in every 11 books sold in Italy that year was manga.

I sure hope whatever's on Italy's own market today has stuff worth reading, because when Netflix comes up, that decidedly doesn't inspire confidence. For anything representing good taste, good luck to its creators in Italy. But anybody who believes Netflix is a great place more than anything else to air adaptations - or that adaptations is such a big deal compared to the source material - is kidding themselves. That's not a mindset comicdom can go by anymore.

Labels: animation, Europe and Asia, history, manga and anime, msm propaganda, sales, technology

The VT Digger gave a report about the comics collection of Christine Farrell, a late store manager who owned quite a collection of all sorts of comics dating back many decades. One that's now unfortunately being sold off to speculators:

What many visitors to Earth Prime Comics, one of Vermont’s first comic book stores, may not realize is that the shop’s late co-founder, Christine Farrell, wasn’t just another comic book fan. Farrell built one of the largest collections of DC Comics — the home of “the world’s greatest superheroes,” such as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern — in existence, becoming a quiet legend in the world of comic art.

Farrell died in April, leaving behind a trove of treasures and memories for those in the comics industry, as reported by Seven Days.

In her Burlington home, comic books filled every corner, packed in boxes, wrapped in mylar sleeves or stacked high in piles. Farrell had tens of thousands of books, among them every DC Comics ever published, starting with 1935’s “New Fun Comics” No. 1. While some of her collection has already hit the market, the full DC Comics collection is set to be auctioned off later this month, with sales continuing in the months to come.

“It’s definitely unique. Only one other person in history had a complete collection,” said Lon Allen, vice president and comic art expert of Heritage Auctions based in Texas, the auction house handling the sale of Farrell’s comics. Another auction house has been selling the other full collection for the past few years, but those copies were of much lower quality, according to Allen.

“She went out of her way to buy higher grade copies,” Allen said, explaining that books are inspected for factors such as the condition of the cover, spine, pages and corners. The book is then given a grade, usually on a scale of 0.5 to 10, with 10 representing a perfect condition.

I certainly think it's amazing she owned only so many old back issues that're now close to a century old, but what we have here is again a situation where classic content is being commoditized on the auction circuit, instead of being donated to museums. And on that note:

“They were discussing what era some of the comics were from. ‘Is this 80s Marvel? Is this DC from the 60s?” Van Dyke said. “So it was very cool to have them be like, ‘Hey, check this out!’”

Although some Vermont comic artists are disappointed that Farrell’s collection will be dispersed instead of preserved in a museum for people to read, Van Dyke said everything is happening in accordance with her will.

“This is the course of action that she set up, that the estate was essentially gonna be liquidated,” Van Dyke said.

See, this is what's regrettable about the situation here. She may not have bought the classic issues so they could be added to museum projects, but rather, for speculators to have a field day with. How is that helping, when these back issues are bound to vanish into vaults in the basement? Why can't the issues retain visibility? Surprisingly enough, however:

Farrell did not own a single graded or certified book, Allen said, suggesting she read the comics she collected. When a book is certified or “slabbed,” it refers to the process of encasing it in a hard, tamper-proof plastic case to protect it from further wear or damage.

The formal certification and slabbing of comic books started in 2000 with the creation of the Certified Guaranty Company (CGC), which is also grading Farrell’s comics collection for Heritage Auctions. It is an expensive process that comes out of the pocket of the person selling the comic.

“It makes me happy to hear that Chris’ collection is not in that state of existence,” Bissette said. “But it will also diminish the market value, in that people will bid on those comics and they will bid on them hoping on getting a copy of a given comic in good enough condition so they can slab and resell it at a higher price, so this is gonna be a highly speculative-driven auction process.”

Greg Gordiano, a Burlington comic artist and illustrator, describes the certification of comic books as a profit-driven scheme that has cast a cynical shadow over the entire collecting industry.

“Slabbing is so non-empathetic towards enjoying the books because once it’s in that plastic case, you can’t enjoy it,” said Gordiano. “You can’t even look at it. Zero pleasure.”

For Rick Veitch, a comics artist and writer mostly known for his work for DC’s “Swamp Thing,” the comics industry has become a collector’s market rather than a reader’s market.

“As an author of comics, I want readers, not hoarders,” he said.

Well I'm glad some sense is being brought in here, and pretty surprising to learn Mrs. Farrell may have actually read a lot of her collection. But that's why more needs to be done to voice objections to anybody doing business with profiteers, and encourage more business be done with museums and other archives instead.

But there’s hope. At the Center for Cartoon Studies in Hartford, an institution focusing on comics and graphic novels, young cartoonists are setting up small marketplaces where they are outside of the collectors’ market.

“They’re highly creative and following their individual visions and creating these sometimes handcrafted comics,” Veitch said. “You go to one of the marketplaces and the customers coming in aren’t comic nerds, they’re just regular civilians off the street who’re looking for something interesting and beautiful to read.”

But are the above cartoonists making use of the paperback/hardcover format? That's how you really get the message across these days convincingly, and it's regrettable there's still a considerable number of artists and writers out there who vehemently refuse to make the shift to the book market with products consisting of higher page counts than the 20-30 pages a pamphlet could contain, to say nothing of advertisements. If today's graphic novelists do make use of paperback, that's a step in the right direction. But the point must be made more widely, and there's only so many specialty news sites who won't make the case for paperbacking and hardcovering for comicdom, and seem very disinterested in actually doing so.

For now, those who care about the medium need to make it clear that auctioneering is only hurting the industry and making it a joke, and actually preventing the art form from maintaining visibility, if "collector's items" only get stored away in vaults. And future generations of specialty store owners should consider trying to make a serious shift to just selling paperback/hardcover products, if they really want to prove they're serious about promoting the art form for reading, for all ages.

Labels: dc comics, exhibitions, history, marvel comics, msm propaganda, museums, sales

Superhero Hype announced Marvel's doing a number of single-issue tales, some of which are penned by none other than the insufferably overrated Straczynski. For example:

The team-up is one of the oldest traditions of superhero comics. An uncountable number of stories are based around heroes and villains joining forces against a common enemy. The most memorable of these stories involve unlikely, if not unthinkable team-ups. To that end, a series of one-shots by writer J. Michael Straczynski will tell tales of Marvel Comics‘ most unlikely duos, starting with Doctor Doom and Rocket Raccoon.

Fun was the watchword for Straczynski in crafting this particular collection of comics. “I like to go where the fun is, and the idea of putting together Marvel characters who had either never been paired before, or only minimally, seemed like it would be a ton of fun.”

What's so "fun" about Straczynski's writing? It goes without saying that a writer who forced some of the earliest of bad metaphors for real life leftist politics into comicdom post-2000 cannot be trusted to deliver a tasteful story teaming an anthropomorphic galactic raccoon with a nasty autocratic tyrant from a fictional Balkan country, one who's been written with a disturbingly high count of murdering people, and if the most recent examples in particular are canonized, that's exactly what makes this pointless exercise in futility repellent. Let's also not forget Straczynski was the writer who depicted Doom sobbing under his armor mask over 2 decades ago at the site of World Trade Center's destruction in the pages of Spider-Man.

The stories will be set at various points in Marvel continuity. Comparable stories include Jonathan Hickman and Sanford Greene’s Doom and Chip Zdarsky and Daniel Acuña’s Avengers: Twilight. This will offer both new fans and established readers a chance to enjoy these one-shots.

“The more unlikely the pairing, the more eccentric the combo, the more fun it was to see it come to life,” proclaims Straczynski. “For the first time we could see the original Nick Fury in China along with the Flying Tigers taking on a newly awakened Fin Fang Foom. See the Ghost Rider slugging it out with none other than Galactus. Aunt May caught in the midst of a supernatural battle alongside Agatha Harkness.”

Hickman and Zdarsky are just as overrated as Straczynski, and with Marvel's better days far behind it now, what's to celebrate? These writers simply do not have what it takes to deliver the goods, and the modern editorial mandates and status quos make things worse. It's just no use.

Labels: Avengers, dreadful writers, Fantastic Four, golden calf of villainy, marvel comics, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, politics, Spider-Man, women of marvel

Movieweb wrote about the box office failure of Joker: Folie a Deux, and they argue superhero films with female leads are held to higher standards. And they also reveal a certain director, most unfortunately, defended the sequel, and making matters worse, they pulled the woke card act on racial issues:

On October 6, the Sunday after Joker: Folie à Deux opened in theaters, the movie was looking at a terrible box office weekend and an even worse audience reaction. The Hollywood Reporter posted a story about how director Francis Ford Coppola liked the Joker sequel. The caption on The Hollywood Reporter's X account said, "Hang in there, Todd Phillips." Many called out The Hollywood Reporter for the framing of this story, particularly in response to how they covered the box office fallout to The Marvels in 2023, particularly with the headline "Why ‘Marvels’ Director Nia DaCosta Bailed on the Cast-and-Crew Screening." The article seemed to put all of the blame for The Marvels flopping on DaCosta and was accused of misrepresenting the situation. This certainly highlighted how white male directors are treated kinder than women of color.

Oh for heaven's sake. Do we really need to hear this nonsense again about how white men have it better, sans all discussion of artistic quality? There's tons of male directors who haven't fared well, and Steven Spielberg's recent remake of West Side Story was catastrophous. Must I also note how disappointed I am with Coppola for lending support to the Joker sequel? And here I thought he was among all those famous filmmakers put off by the overabundance of superhero fare! Supervillain fare is much worse though, and that goes without saying. If we're supposed to be rooting for criminals, that's awful.

Still, it also spoke to another case of how female-centric superhero movies are treated far more harshly than male-led ones. While The Marvels was a box office disappointment, it performed better on its opening weekend than Joker: Folie à Deux; headlines about The Marvels were much more doom-and-gloom. Everything was put on the shoulders of The Marvels, where Joker 2 was treated as a one-off. The release and fallout of Joker 2 highlights a sexist double standard in how people talk about female-led superhero movies, one that is sadly as old as the genre itself. Long story short, when a male-led superhero movie like Morbius, Shazam! Fury of the Gods, or Joker: Folie à Deux flops, is because of several factors. When female-led ones like The Marvels, Birds of Prey, or Madame Web flop, the blame is solely on whom the lead is.

Oh for heaven's sake. Since when weren't the male leads of various live action adaptations accountable for failure? Far as I'm concerned, a non-actor like Dwayne Johnson has some responsibility to shoulder for the Black Adam movie's failure, and the scriptwriters do too, based on all the wokeness they shoehorned in. Of course, if that's how they feel, why doesn't Movieweb's writers do a whole essay on how quite a few pretentious male performers are to blame for a superhero film's failure? And overrated as the Wonder Woman movies were, I don't recall anybody massively blaming Gal Gadot for the 2nd film's failure, awful as it was. On which note, Movieweb does get around to that film, in any event:

In 2017, after 76 years in comics, Wonder Woman finally got her solo feature film with Patty Jenkins's feature film, Wonder Woman. Despite being part of DC's Trinity alongside Superman and Batman, she had struggled to make it to the big screen. Superman and Batman had multiple films by the time Wonder Woman got her solo movie. Wonder Woman remained stuck in development hell even though lesser-known heroes from DC's pages, like Swamp Thing, Constantine, and Green Lantern, got the big screen treatment. Meanwhile, the MCU wouldn't have a female hero in a film title until their 20th film, Ant-Man and the Wasp, with the following movie, Captain Marvel, being the first female-led solo project in the franchise after 11 years.

For years, the poor box office and critical performance of female-led superhero movies like Supergirl, Catwoman, and Elektra were used to justify not greenlighting a Wonder Woman or Black Widow film. The common idea was those movies did poorly because audiences didn't like female-led superheroes, and not that the actual quality of the films was bad. Bad movies based around male-led superhero movies never stopped the genre or were blamed for their box office disappointment. Films like Batman & Robin, The Spirit, and Jonah Hex never risked other male-led superhero movies like The Flash and Green Lantern getting made.

This is how it goes, as male-led superhero movies aren't forced to carry the weight of the genre on their shoulders as their female-led counterparts are. Three Punisher movies were made and bombed before Wonder Woman got her solo film. Madame Web was bad, but it is not like Morbius is any better. Moreover, individuals on the internet tried to blame Madame Web for being bad because it was about a group of women, but the same reasoning isn't used for box office and critical disappointments like Joker 2, 2019's Hellboy, or The Flash.

Strange, wasn't the 1st adaptation of Swamp Thing back in 1982? What's that got to with all this? As for the Flash film, I don't think star Ezra Miller's going to find many more roles after what he was accused of, and is tragically getting away with. Something they don't correctly acknowledge here is that Jonah Hex, Spirit and Green Lantern, at their time, remained with just one entry, little different from any failed film starring superheroines. Plus, they forget Hex can't be considered a superhero in the same way as the modern day counterparts, since it's a western. Though as I recall, the film absurdly gave Hex the ability to briefly revive the dead just so he could interrogate them or something?!? Gee, as if things couldn't have been more badly handled.

Furthermore, to say Madame Web's a flop because it was about women is monumentally stupid, and throughly ignores any and all lady-led films and even TV shows that were successful. What about Charlie's Angels and even Charmed? They may be TV-based (the former did have a film adaptation in 2000), but don't they count? The reason was simply because the studio wasn't building on merit and talent. From what Movieweb's telling here, you'd think these were gay men blabbering the nonsense; why would a heterosexual man have an issue with a movie starring a girl, especially if she's hot? That's something Movieweb's propagandist doesn't answer. It just doesn't make any sense. After all, considering films starring women continue getting made all the time, doesn't that contradict their claim?

How much longer do these ideologues intend to keep pushing this silly clickbait cliche that nobody wants movies starring superheroines? None of this is helping, and again, throughly ignores the lack of talent and merit in today's Hollywood. Maybe the best question of all is, what's the use of making these movies at all, regardless of whether a man or woman is the star? It's all just a whole waste of billions of dollars on so much sound and fury that signifies nothing in the end.

Labels: Batman, dc comics, Flash, golden calf of villainy, Green Lantern, marvel comics, misogyny and racism, msm propaganda, Punisher, Spider-Man, Supergirl, women of dc, women of marvel, Wonder Woman

The New York Times did a gushy interview with a homosexual artist from Spain, who did early comics focused on transsexuality:

A case in point is the work of the author, painter and cartoonist Nazario Luque Vera, 80, whose work on Anarcoma, a homoerotic comic that he drew and wrote from 1978 to 1986, will be featured in a solo booth presented by the Barcelona-based gallery Bombon Projects at Art Basel Paris. Anarcoma is about a transgender detective trying to find a machine that can control sexual desire. Its drawings are explicit and feature L.G.B.T.Q. characters and themes that were not normally seen in comics, let alone in Spain, which had just emerged from dictatorial rule. Spotlighting Vera’s work, Delépine said, was a chance to recontextualize comics as a true form of art.

Anarcoma first appeared in Rampa, a Spanish magazine dedicated to erotica. In 1979, after three issues, it became a regular feature in El Víbora, a popular counterculture magazine. Making the comic for a general, not specifically homosexual audience — even one with an underground vibe — was a point of pride for Vera, who said he wanted to help “normalize homosexuality.”

Regrettably, there's every chance ideologues like him played an early part in normalizing poor examples, no matter the storytelling angle, whether "realistic" or surreal, and the paper's clearly using the era of Franco to justify this propaganda. Is this really "art"? Nope, just a lot of smut, as the part about explicit content makes clear.

Was your family supportive of your art?

My father was a field worker. I was a teacher. To leave my job, to leave Barcelona and to devote my life to drawing comics in a commune, he did not like it.

Was it in Barcelona where you first felt part of a gay community?

I have a book called “Sevilla and the Little House of the Piranhas” about the beginnings of my engagement with the gay community in Seville and Barcelona. The community in Barcelona was bigger because it is a bigger city. At the commune I lived in, I was the only one who was gay, but I was respected and we all lived together peacefully.

That's the problem with some communities - they're too left-liberal. Even in rural areas, they must've been too much so to convince the guy why it's beneficial to learn how to best relate to the opposite sex, and why he shouldn't otherize them.

What was the inspiration for Anarcoma?

I was educated in a school of priests. I had problems with religion and my first comics were a lot about denouncing religious education and the repression of homosexuals by society, by family and by religion. By the ’80s I decided I had to express my homosexuality in a more playful way, and that’s when I created Anarcoma.

How did you first perceive the character?

I had originally thought of a masculine detective, but there were already a lot of male detectives. And women had characters like Barbarella and Modesty Blaise. Then I thought a transvestite would be perfect in the role of the detective to explore the underground of Barcelona, a little like “The Thief’s Journal,” by Jean Genet. This was Barcelona before the city hosted the 1992 Summer Olympics, when a lot of the underground gay clubs and discos closed.

Sounds like somebody missed a big chance to seriously add more women to the world of comicdom. That aside, very sad we have somebody here who's hostile to religion, apparently because he doesn't want to lead relations with the opposite sex. As for LGBT clubs closing down, I wonder what Vera thinks about how, under London's first Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan, many of the gay nightclubs in the city closed down even before the Coronavirus pandemic? If Khan got them pushed out of business, does he get a free pass simply because he's a follower of the Religion of Peace? Why, what could Vera think of Islam's hostility towards LGBT? If the Mohammedans take over Europe and banish Vera's comics, will he suddenly be okay with that?

Were there ever any problems with the sex depicted in the comic?

In the United States, the English version was prohibited from being sold in regular bookstores. It had to be sold in sex shops and wrapped in plastic. There were also problems in Germany, where I was sued because of the explicit material. But in most other places, there were no problems.

I wouldn't be surprised if he resented any restrictions in the USA for selling material that could be very explicit and thus unsuited for children. Of course, that's mostly in the past, and under today's leftist positions, it's all changing for the worse.

Did your father ever realize how accomplished you became?

Underground comics were synonymous with counterculture. My father read in the press that they talked about me as “the great icon of the counterculture.” This bothered him because he said that he wasted a lot of his money to give me culture. The fact that I was considered an icon of the counterculture was really offensive to him. My mother was proud of me.

Assuming what he says is true, why does a woman see anything excellent about LGBT ideology that ultimately winds up being hurtful to women, lesbians included? Or why must his mom have defended his positions? It's a real shame. And then Mr. Vera goes and slights Judeo-Christianity in the process, and only makes things worse for society, implying we cannot have any standards for sanity, let alone logic. It's sad how ideologues like Vera have done considerable damage to social cohesion in the long run, out of the ludicrous notion that perversion and explicit content is really such a big deal. And who knows how many fools will go and see this stuff at the gallery the content is now on display at?

Labels: Europe and Asia, exhibitions, golden calf of LGBT, history, islam and jihad, moonbat artists, msm propaganda, politics

Twin Cities Geek interviewed veteran writer Claremont about his X-Men run, still one of the longest one could expect from a professional writer for monthly series, and along the way, he sadly indicates what kind of ideologies he apparently considers acceptable. First:

Comic books have always reflected the public affairs issues of the time, and arguably none more so than the X-Men, whose big themes have always included diversity and equity, “controversial” issues, and the impact those things have on the readers. You go back to the Golden Age of Comics, and Superman was introduced as a ray of hope following the Great Depression. Batman was introduced when organized crime was at a high point. Captain America and Wonder Woman both served as World War II propaganda and fought Nazis. The X-Men were a metaphor for the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and over time they also became a metaphor for LGBTQ+ rights, among other things.

The problem is that since the turn of the century, and maybe before that, there were LGBT ideologues who hijacked it far more for their own narrow agendas than anything else. Of course, if we take Grant Morrison's X-Men as an example, the franchise was also regrettably hijacked for Islamic propaganda, since the character Dust was depicted as an Islamist in a whitewashed manner. As a result, it's hard to say comicdom's always reflected certain issues, certainly not with objectivity. After 9-11, Captain America was made more into an apologist for Islamofascism than actually fighting against it, in the Marvel Knights line. A terrible waste of Simon/Kirby's classic creation.

In 2012, Astonishing X-Men #51 featured the first same-sex wedding in mainstream comics when Northstar married his boyfriend, Kyle. The issue had a foldout cover, and there was lots of hype around the story, which was written by Marjorie Liu. Claremont himself co-created Northstar with John Byrne in 1979, though it wasn’t until Alpha Flight #106 in 1992 (after Claremont’s run on the X-Men ended) that it was explicitly acknowledged the character was gay. In the years between, when the Comics Code Authority did not allow the open acknowledgement of homosexuality, everything was subtext.

Even without the code, Claremont doesn’t like grandiose gestures as a writer, what he likens to pointing a big arrow and saying, “Hey look, this character is gay.” Rather, he prefers to place his character in a life where are were already out—as he did in Uncanny X-Men #170, in which he had Destiny in her nightgown having coffee in the kitchen when Mystique walks in in her robe. It was clear they were together, and it was clear that that was their apartment, but it wasn’t stated outright. Claremont placed them in a normal, everyday situation that normal couples have, just living their lives.

In that case, does he also find the original "outing" of Northstar, written by Scott Lobdell, appalling? The biggest irony about a story that leftists were making such a big deal about at the time is that it wound up being more offensive to LGBT advocates than helpful. If Claremont had anything to say about Lobdell's rendition, they haven't included it.

But at the same time that some characters’ identities are being made more overt in recent comics and movies, there are other cases where identity seems to get lost. One of the things that struck Claremont about the 2020 New Mutants movie was the portrayal of Roberto Da Costa (Sunspot), another character he co-created. In the comics, Bobby is Afro-Brazilian—his father is Black, and his mother is white. His father is also a billionaire and a power player in the Brazilian economy. But all the other wealthy people around him hate him, because they’re white and he’s Black. This dynamic of prejudice is paralleled in the treatment Bobby receives for being a mutant.

In the movie, Sunspot is Brazilian, played an actor who’s Brazilian, but not Black. For Claremont, this leaves out a fundamental part of his character. To focus on him being from Brazil but eliminating the racial dynamics from his comics origin story misses the point.

“I have nothing against the actor, I have nothing against the performance of the script that he had to work from,” he stressed. “But the essential key is the comic was going for one specific metaphor. And the movie blew it out the window.”

Whether it’s sexuality or race, Claremont’s approach is not to highlight the issue out and say, “This is where we should be as a society—let’s get there.” Rather, he places us already there and challenges the reader to think about it, to face their own preconceived notions and try to explain or rationalize why it shouldn’t be.

Wonder what he thinks of Brazil now being run by somebody as awful as Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva? That could make an interesting subject for focus in comicdom, but I guess Claremont's too woke at this point to admit it. In which case, is it any wonder his past writing may not hold up well? Especially considering what comes next:

One choice he struggled with was the comics outing all mutants and establishing a nation for them on Krakoa. “Once you cross that threshold,” he said, “you can’t bring it back: Everybody’s out, like it or not.” For him, that takes away the one thing that made the X-canon significantly different from superheroes like the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, and Spider-Man. If you expose a hero’s secret identity, by extension, you’re outing their parents, their relatives, their friends; you’re putting them all at a measure of risk. But in the X-Men universe, it’s not just the heroes who have secret identities—it’s all mutants.

That’s why so many are scared in the first place and why being a mutant can be terrifying. It parallels the fear of someone who’s Black, Muslim, or gay and living among people who are prejudiced against those identities. Claremont elaborated:

For me, the point of X-Men is that it gets to deal with racism front and center. What I find disturbing about the current books, the current era of books is the decision that that doesn’t seem to matter anymore. And I think for it not to matter anymore takes away a very strong analogy that is why the X-Canon has been followed … analogous to being Black, to being gay, to being Muslim, to being Hispanic, whatever, for me, as it should be.

For Claremont, that connection between mutant identity and real-life identities and the need to take a stand is baked into the DNA of the X-Men. And the definition of who that stand is for is fluid: “You can’t put it in a single box and say this is what it is. It’s a box that reaches out and embraces a lot of different aspects,” he said. And it allows the reader to connect to the characters and see their own struggle against racism and other forms of discrimination represented, acknowledged and championed. Claremont wrote as he did because he felt that that metaphorical perspective was an important one, a needed one. “Maybe now, that’s 30 years after when I started, things have changed,” he said.

Well this is very sad he wants to put the Religion of Peace in the same boat as the other backgrounds mentioned, but not surprising, considering he did indicate as far back as the early 2000s after 9-11 in the pages of a 2nd Gen13 volume that he was willing to go woke and appease Islam, since he wrote up a Muslim character there depicted positively. It's just as well then that the whole run was ultimately written out of history by the end, since IIRC, the other team members besides Caitlin Fairchild herself turned up alive, and they went back in time to reverse their fate from the end of the previous volume. Claremont's practically even dampening whatever impact the story with Legion had in 1986. Then again, the prelude to Age of Apocalypse already did in 1995. That this interview took place after October 7, 2023 also speaks volumes of Claremont's potential failure to recognize that his messages of the past have spectacularly failed.

Besides Claremont, even the actress Leonore Zahn was also interviewed, and spoke about doing the voice acting for Rogue on the X-Men cartoon series on TV, and her leftist positions come about as well:

She said she looks to her own as inspiration for portraying the character. Like Rogue, she wears her heart on her sleeve, cares passionately about social justice, equality, and fairness, and will always stand up and fight for the underdog. In 2008, she took this to the next level: After living across Europe and North America, she returned to the town where she grew up—Truro, Nova Scotia—and went into politics. She explained:

I was asked to run for election for a state-run legislature in Canada, in Nova Scotia, which is where my parents moved to when I was a kid after we left Australia. … And so I was asked to run in the provincial election. And I won. And then I won three more elections after that. And the last one I went federal, so I ran for the Liberal Party of Canada, which is Prime Minister Trudeau’s party, and I won that one. So all together, I was in politics for 12 years.

Zann introduced a number of progressive bills to help bring the country forward in the areas of diversity and equality, women’s rights, and environmental issues. One that she is particularly proud of introducing involves a national strategy to address environmental racism and environmental justice. The bill was still before the House of Commons at the time of our conversation, but it passed on June 21, 2024.

I wonder if she also backed LGBT ideology that came at women and children's expense? What's told here is fishy enough, but in a country that's been tragically consumed by identity politics as much as antisemitism, it wouldn't be shocking. And what next, will it turn out Islamists are exempt from the demands of any LGBT bills developed? Who knows?

Anyway, this all explains why, whatever one thinks of these veterans, their modern leftist standings are very sad, and require separating the art from the artist. All Claremont for one is doing is suggesting he doesn't have what it takes to truly stand by certain messages, whether they apply to one and all, and whether say, the Religion Clause of the 1st Amendment is a good thing. Some veteran writers, if you know where to look, can turn out to be very disappointing people, because they don't understand even leftists can make mistakes. I own some of the X-Men today in Epic Collection format, and I don't regret it. But it's clear Claremont doesn't have what it takes to be a realist, and that's hugely regrettable.

Labels: animation, golden calf of LGBT, history, islam and jihad, marvel comics, misogyny and racism, msm propaganda, politics, women of marvel, X-Men

Entrevue recently announced the French comics writer Pierre Christin, who together with the recently deceased artist Jean-Claude Mezieres created Valerian and Laureline in 1967, has passed away at age 86:

Pierre Christin, a major figure in French comics, passed away this Thursday, October 3, 2024 at the age of 86. A renowned screenwriter, he is known for having co-created the cult series with the cartoonist Jean-Claude Mézières Valerian et Laureline, forever marking the world of science fiction comics.

Born on July 27, 1938 in Saint-Mandé, in the Paris region, Pierre Christin first studied at Sciences Po Paris before embarking on an academic career. Passionate about literature and history, he taught for a time in the United States, where he met up with his childhood friend Jean-Claude Mézières. Together, they imagined the spatiotemporal agent couple Valérian and Laureline, whose adventures began in 1967 in the pages of the newspaper [Pilote]. The series, which mixes science fiction and social criticism, quickly became a classic and influenced generations of readers.

Christin's narrative style, which integrates political, social and philosophical themes, has left a deep mark on the ninth art. The planets and civilizations he imagines with Mézières are all pretexts for exploring the human condition, which he approaches with intelligence and subtlety. Albums like The Empire of a Thousand Planets ou The Heroes of the Equinox are full of allusions to contemporary issues, whether colonization, ecology or totalitarianism.

Comicon has more about Christin's portfolio. I just think it's a shame the 1967-2010 comic had to be made into an expensive live action movie that didn't live up to its potential back in 2017. One that, as I recall, made too much of an effort to stuff nearly everything overrated director Luc Besson thought was great about the comic into one single movie, even in cameo format. That kind of trick hardly works. The comics are decidedly better for consumption, and the funny thing is that they apparently inspired some of the designs used in Star Wars decades back. And neither creator got much credit for it, if at all.

So thanks to Christin, along with Mezeieres, for what they brought to the table in their time.

Labels: comic strips, Europe and Asia, good artists, good writers, history

Disney CEO Bob Iger isn't keeping his promises to move away from the woke propaganda, as John Nolte at Breitbart reveals:

A transgender woman (i.e., a man) named “Sister” who wears armor painted in the colors of the trans flag is the latest stormtrooper added to the increasingly insufferable and stupid Star Wars universe.

“Roughly two years after the character was introduced,” reports Bounding Into Comics, “a newly released Star Wars encyclopedia has provided audiences with their first official look at the franchise’s first-ever transgender Clone Trooper.”

So much for Bob Iger’s vow to “quiet the noise”...

“Sister” was first introduced in the Star Wars young adult novel Queen of Hope. What we know, according ot the report, is that he “served alongside Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker, and Commander Cody in the Clone Wars and … once held some reservations about whether the Jedi would accept [his] transgender status.

Well this certainly makes clear what a bad influence the "young adult" genre truly is. If this is all it's about, it's clearly not very creative, let alone informative. The Daily Wire says there are SW fans who've panned the book already:

Many fans pointed out how the introduction of “Sister” broke canon in many ways, noting that the clone troopers were vat-bred killing machines that typically weren’t even given names let alone so-called “gender identities.”

“Disgusting and lore-breaking,” one person wrote. “Disney should be ashamed of themselves.”

Another person added, “Are we really supposed to sit here and take this at face value for canon? C’mon this is some wacky nonsense.”

“She literally has the trans flag on her amor[.] The transgender flag… this is supposed to be a galaxy far away, not downtown California,” another person wrote. “These people just love to kill escapism and fantasy.”

One of the most regrettable things about how classic creations are managed today is that there's only so much face-value propaganda the modern ideologues in charge force in, and refuse to let go of. That's why anybody who really cares cannot sit around and continue to buy these products. It's bad enough already wondering if the comics adaptations of SW will be seeing this madness next. The Force is not with the franchise anymore.

Update: Shawn Fleetwood at the Federalist notes:

The incident represents yet another example of the dishonesty of Disney CEO Bob Iger, who, as I previously noted in these pages, “claimed during the company’s annual shareholder meeting [in April] that Disney’s gamble with political activism and injecting leftist ideology into its content was over.”

[...] Iger’s pledge was shown to be completely meaningless a month later when Disney released “Star Wars: Tales of the Empire,” an animated anthology series geared toward children that featured a Jedi using “they/them” pronouns.

And this is why, if Disney's fortunes have plummeted in the past 4 years, it's best to let them continue to go out of business.

Labels: golden calf of LGBT, moonbat writers, politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daniel Greenfield had more to say about him:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update: National Review says about Coates:

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

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

Correct. Here's more from Compact Mag:

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

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

Labels: Africa, bad editors, Black Panther, Captain America, dc comics, Europe and Asia, golden calf of death, golden calf of villainy, islam and jihad, marvel comics, misogyny and racism, moonbat writers, msm propaganda

I recently found, from a hospital library shelf, a copy of an early reprint edition of the late cartoonist Jeff MacNelly's famous newspaper comic strip, Shoe: This copy was printed in 1978, at least a year after MacNelly launched the strip, starring anthropomorphic birds like Martin P. Shoemaker, who runs the Treetop Tattler newspaper in a fictional region of east Virginia. I was fairly familiar with it in my youth, and it still holds up as a very amusing pastime.

And this also makes a point I may have once made about newspaper strips have utilized the power of reprints in paperback/hardcover much sooner than comic books actually did. Monthly pamphlets may have seen some form of reprint in such a format in the 1960s, but it took at least 2 decades until Marvel/DC became more serious about employment of paperback/hardcover format, and the most important point in all that particular issue is, again: why don't they abandon the monthly format altogether and take up something like paperback/hardcover for a change? Come to think of it, the same could probably go for newpspaper strips too.

Anyway, amazing to find something like Shoe after so many years in a reprint format, this one which reprints both the black-and-white dailies and the full-color Sundays. I guess it's a good question whether today's reprint societies should also offer colorized editions of the daily strips as well? That could be worth considering.

Labels: comic strips, good artists, history