An eye-witness report by yours truly on last weekend's New York Anime Festival is up on the Friends of Lulu blog. Complete with hot pics of intense fellows in black shirts playing Magic The Gathering!
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"Comics: The Ron Paul Effect"
Presidential candidate Ron Paul tells Comic Mix who his favorite superhero is...the answer might surprise you!
Paul's choice leads one poster on the John Byrne message boards to comment,
"That's an obscure choice, even for comic book fans. Ron Paul really is trying to cater to the internet geek vote."
I dunno, if he was catering for the internet geek vote, he might have more luck with "Naruto."
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"Custom Sexy Bra And Panty Padme"
...for the Star Wars collector who has everything, brought to you from the makers of "Custom Sexy Leather Bondage Padme"
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"Knock Up Backtrack"
Was filming "Knocked Up" a sexist experience or the best experience of Katherine Heigl's career?
Her first quote on the subject:
"a little sexist”
second, later quote:
"it was the best filming experience of my career."
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"Kitty's Delivery Service"
So after all my bitching about mainstream comics publishers failing to catch the manga wave, I find out that Marvel has made a deal with Del Ray to produce X-Men manga:
It’s the X-Men as you’ve never seen them before, with the storyline fashioned as a private school shôjo comedy. (Shôjo manga is aimed at girls and often covers popular subjects such as comedy, romance, and drama.) As the only girl in the all-boys School for Gifted Youngsters, Kitty Pryde, a mutant with phasing abilities, is torn between the popular Hellfire Club, led by flame-throwing mutant Pyro–and the school misfits, whom she eventually bands together as the X-Men.
Marvel, I have just one word for you: Yaoi. Pronounced, "YOW-we," as in "Wowee!"
Wolverine/Gambit. Logan's the old pro, Gambit's the young newbie trying to make it in Xavier's school. That's all I'm saying. I'm done now.
(tip of the hat to The Beat for the article)
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"So Wertham Wasn't Completely Full of S**t"
Scanned excerpts from Fredric Wertham's classic anti-comic screed "Seduction of the Innocent" reveal that the doctor was also against racism in the funny books:
"White men in jungle books are blond, Nordic he-men, athletic and shapely, while the colored natives are characterized as subhuman. The superman type of comic book also needs an endless stream of criminal "foreign-looking" people to justify the constant use of force and superforce. These are always Negroes, Jews, Slavs, and Orientals, characterized by irregular features, swarthy skins, physical deformities. While the United States spends millions of dollars to persuade the world that hatred is not an integral part of American life, millions of U.S. comics exported all over the world show an endless stream of prejudice-producing images."
This of course started a bit of a discussion on the comments section of the blog where the pages were reproduced. One commenter said that Wertham's anti-racism stance might have just been a "cover" for his nefarious anti-comics agenda. Another defended Wertham, pointing out that he did work for civil rights. But as always, it is the gut-response from a comic book lover on the blog that rather stops the conversation cold:
"This (Wertham's) article was the direct cause of the burning of my entire E.C. collection."
See? Pin-drop.
For the record, my mom thought those Marvel Handbook "Books of the Dead"
were pretty goddamn morbid. But didn't burn them. She just laughed at them. I think it would have been cooler if she burned them. 'Cause then I woulda felt more like a rebel and less like a total geek. (article found at Journalista)************************************************************************************
Video: Pop-Culture Reality Check
When many of your parents were young, this was considered "edgy" sexualized entertainment that all the cool kids were into:
In other news, a woman with Annette's posterior would have been ambushed by today's media as being "too fat." I think Amy Winehouse is our generation's Annette.
Can't we have a better choice for today's Annette than that nutty coke head? Lily Allen, maybe? I'd say more pure, but that's not "in" these days.
ReplyDeleteAt least Annette is missing teefs!
ReplyDeleteSee!
Oh sweet! You're standing in front of my friends' booth, Morlock Enterprises, in that photo with the hat. They make awesome anime props! Sugoi!!!!
ReplyDeleteevery wednesday is my pajama party night: a little vino, a little top model, a little pushing daisies...
ReplyDeleteMy mother is a HUGE Annette Funicello fan - so far that a picture of Annette and my sister is placed in with the collages of family photos on her hallway in her house.
ReplyDeleteHowever. . .Annette Funicello, a sweet, nice gal, who in her biography said she wanted to do something out of character and naughty and went to see an X-rated movie once. . .
Or Amy Winehouse, a complete mess of a crackhead who has yet to discover shampoo and gets into domestic spats with her husband in public, walks around with the wounds, and now tries to go see him while he's in prison.
I pity Annette to be compared with that trash. :)
sorry, I posted this in the wrong message the first time.
ReplyDeleteyou know i've long thought that many of werthams charges are indistuinguishable form modern femminist complaints. Might be a column in it for you.
rmm--didn't val...didn't she...didn't she just post about it?
ReplyDeletealso, eff the javitz center. i tried going to the first ny comic con there & my girlfriend & i hated the venue so much we just bailed instead of...waiting in line & other ridiculous shit. then again, i did go there for book expo & that was kind of okay.
ReplyDeleteshe kinda mentione that wetham was involved in the civil rights thing, and that he was apparently not a racist, but I was thinking soemthing more in depth mordecai.
ReplyDeleteYou know, I think every single person complaining about "feminist over-reaction" should just scroll up to the "custom Padme" figure, and then realize that not only is everything every feminist ever said about male comic book fans right, they were only scratching the bleeping surface. I mean seriously, what in the ever-loving blue-eyed f**k was that person thinking?
ReplyDeleteI'd comment more, but me, dozens of Star Wars fans, and Mister Baseball Bat are going to be taking a meeting. Hold all my calls.
Fred Wertham was in fact a commited socialist, and was very much a supporter of the civil rights movement.
ReplyDeleteHe also, in later life, expressed regret over the repurcussions from the publication of his book.
Werthem was far from the wtwo dimensional character often presented in comics histories... there is a brilliant (if somewhat flawed) book on the British fallout from Werthem's campaign, called "A Haunt Of Fears". I highly reccomend it.
I'm not sure anyone from that Book of the Dead cover is still dead.
ReplyDeleteWell, Bill Foster's dead again, but that was pretty recent.
Speaking of Kitty Pryde and slash-fiction, was I the only one that saw the logical endgame to Ultimate Spiderman having a female clone with all of his memories as...
ReplyDeleteAs Kitty ending up with girl-Pete so as to tie up the Pete-MJ-Kitty love triangle neatly?
Or am I nuts?
Wait. There was talk of Kitty Pryde slash fiction? Did I miss that? Damn it!
ReplyDelete"[E]verything every feminist ever said about male comic book fans [is] right"
ReplyDeleteSettle down there, hoss. Not only is that just plain wrong, it's quite possibly the kind of all-encompassing statement that, backed with a psychiatry degree and a book deal, could get people burning books again.
Why is there a straight razor included with each custom Padme figure? Is that so the buyer can slit his wrists when he realizes exactly what he's done?
ReplyDeleteSorry, was that mean?
And if Amy Winehouse is the new Annette Funicello, who's the new Frankie Avalon?
I think a movie could be "a little sexist" and also be the best experience of her career, cause she evaluates her experiences on other criteria besides how sexist they are. Also, she could maybe believe that gray's anatomy or the creepy movie with gerard depardieu and whatever else she has done in her career are more sexist. Maybe "a little sexist" is meant as (faint) praise.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I disagree with all the Winehouse hate. She is a goddamn mess it's true but her voice is an international treasure, the sort of thing that doesn't come around often. She's doing her best to sabotage her career and kill herself but that doesn't mean her gifts aren't real.
Talent doesn't always end up in the hands of those who deserve it and her voice might as well be a super power but it's done nothing but harm to her.
"who's the new Frankie Avalon?"
ReplyDeleteZac Efron. I thought that was obvious.
"Marvel, I have just one word for you: Yaoi. Pronounced, "YOW-we," as in "Wowee!""
ReplyDeletePreach it. I personally have always wanted to see a fluffy shonen-ai series about Wiccan and Hulking. And then maybe a shojo-ai series about the Karolina-Nico-Xavin triangle. That's how you get girls reading comics, dammit. Or have they not noticed how many girls read The Authority?
WRT the Heigel statement:
ReplyDeleteThe film is a little sexist. Nice article in Slate a couple of days ago
http://www.slate.com/id/2179621/nav/tap3/ saying that Knocked Up implies that men want to be irresponsible and creative, and women are the gender that cares about responsibility. Men are fun, women want to take care of families and make sure the dishes are done? A little bit sexist.
The best film-making experience of her career? Apatow uses the same actors over and over and he trusts them a lot. He encourages them to do a lot of improv. And actors LOVE improv. I read an interview with Heigel where she said she was nervous the first time they asked her to improvise lines during a scene in Knocked Up, but she felt she learned a lot from the experience. So . . . a film where the actress feels like she was a valuable part of the creative process rather than a particularly photogenic piece of meat who should just say the damn lines as they're written and keep her opinions to herself? Maybe it's a positive experience?
Here's my question: if the actors, women and men, are given the freedom to do a lot of improv in the film, whose fault is it that the film is sexist?
I thought that the premise seemed fairly fundamentally sexist, to be honest. I'll admit I didn't see the movie, so maybe it came off very differently in context, but I found it difficult to believe that in this day and age, a woman who has a one-night stand and gets pregnant decides that she has no choice but to wind up in a committed relationship with the near-total stranger, and raise the child with him. Especially when he's such a stereotypical loser that you wonder just how much alcohol it took to get her into bed with him in the first place. :)
ReplyDelete