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Efficacy aside, I'm part of a whole bunch of demographics that are routinely targeted by alt-right and nazi dweebs, so seeing high-profile creators come out in my tacit defense is much more heartening to see than just thumb-twiddling. Nazis already have enough exposure-- the net good of artists telling them to buzz off outweighs, I think, is worth the hypothetical risk of giving them more of a platform. Nobody's going to be like, "an ALT-right? Gee, I never would have heard of this if James Tynion hadn't told them off online," whereas knowing that people you admire and respect have your back makes life more livable in tangible, immediate ways. Zoro posted:I know you're being sarcastic, but I'm really not surprised at all that, once they started talking, they weren't able to keep steam. People who aren't being personally targeted for harrashment tend to, when they try to confront the harrasher, see that "he's really a fun guy when you get to know him This is also sadly true, and I've seen it so many times in academic and artistic communities, where people will hand-wave the bad actions of racists, transphobes, even out and out actual rapists and sexual abusers just because they're "fun to hang out with" or professionally useful to be on the good side of, or just because it's easier to avoid direct conflict than barrel right into it.
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Sep 22, 2017 19:04
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" since they have no skin in the game.
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Gaz-L posted:Fun little opinion question: What change have you seen a creative team make to a property that feels like it should stick or is an all-around improvement, that hasn't really? It can be a retcon that was dropped after the run, a reinterpretation from an Elseworlds/What If or similar or anything really. I liked the idea of Superman being a vegetarian, and I loved the era where most of the X-Men were actively teachers.
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Sep 24, 2017 18:27
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Rhyno posted:Peter growing the gently caress up and becoming a HS teacher was probably the best thing they could have ever done with him. As much as I liked the unmasking it totally cocked up that plot and they had to bail on it pretty quick. I really disliked him as a teacher because it felt simultaneously like a) JMS giving himself a platform to moralize about how smart and nice Peter Parker is without understanding teaching as a profession beyond "nice people do it" and "smartish people do it" b) mega irresponsible of Peter Parker, since teaching chews up a ton of time and not much of it as flexibly as freelance photographer or wunderkind entrepeneur or even TA or whatever other jobs he's had. In a hypothetical What If? where he retires I think college professor would be a really ideal job for him but as it was written it felt facile. I realize that just a bit further up on this page I said I missed the X-Men being teachers but I guess I feel like teaching mutants how to mutant has always been part of that team's prerogative and like-- ideally, the X-Men, or at least that team of X-Men don't go out of their way to fight random crimes. What's PP going to do if the Rhino's on a rampage while he's teaching Environmental Science? Just dip out? Uh-oh, Doc Ock's got him trapped in an underwater labyrinth on a Friday night and he doesn't have a lesson plan for covering balancing molecular equations on Monday-- guess he'll just do a lovely job and let a bunch of children down. I hate that I'm about to say this but I actually preferred him at Horizon and Parker Industries. At least there he was shown as surrounded by other eccentrics who, more importantly, were also shown as having agency in losing patience with what surely must have seemed like irresponsible nonsense from their positions.
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Sep 26, 2017 04:13
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Rhyno posted:Wasn't Peter a TA back in the 80's? Yeah but the books were pretty inconsistent in establishing what exactly he did and for whom. He had the Foolkiller as a student though, and made a good enough impression that he was deemed categorically Not A Fool, which is IIRC about as far as establishing him as a teacher went. I might be forgetting stuff though, most of my recollections of that stretch center around resenting Deb Whitman's raw deal.
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Sep 26, 2017 07:02
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Cyclops' red and black costume was great and it was a promising and organic direction for his character to go in. I don't know if the stories lived up to that promise-- frankly that period sort of blends together and I definitely felt like it was one of those gigs where Bendis was enamored with the hook but unsure of how to tell a story with it. I had high hopes because I think Scarlet was a good example of him trying to tell a story about characters with a vested narrative interest in systemic change, but I suppose I shouldn't have gotten my hopes up? I wish Kieron Gillen had stuck around. I loved his take on Cyclops and that last page in the aftermath of AvX, where Cyclops raises his shackles up, is an iconic mutant moment for me and he usually handles characters with vocal political agendas well.
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Sep 26, 2017 19:58
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Edge & Christian posted:
The first time I read through that era of Marvel I always sort of wondered how he wound up on Scourge's radar considering he'd only existed for a brief little span of time. It seemed a little bit afield of his normal procedure. Ditto the issue where he goes to kill Flash Thompson in jail and just happens to bump into the Wraith as he's leaving.
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Sep 27, 2017 04:18
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 17:33 |
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Yeah, there's a political undercurrent from even his salad days in the 80s that evinces, at best, a clumsiness about race. There's a beautiful character beat in the middle of Born Again where Karen Page is at her lowest and Foggy comes to her and offers her safety and comfort because, he says, she, him, and Matt are all family. It's a really sweet and effective moment and it's illustrated in a big wide bottom panel of these two characters embracing in full color against a backdrop of shadowy looming figures. The thing is, the faces of those figures, or at least the faces that can be made out, are distinctly black-- broad noses, big lips, eyes covered in shadow. Miller isn't trying to tell a racist story about how Foggy rescued Karen Page from black people, but the iconography that Miller uses is the iconography that the 70s handed to him-- the outside, the other, is black. This isn't to throw Frank Miller under the bus or to single him out per se-- if you look at other comics from around the same time there is some truly embarrassing representation. David Michelenie and Roger Stern, among others, shoot for a broad "jive talk" dialect for black characters that is truly, truly awful, and again, it isn't like they're setting out to write "Birth of a Nation 2: Armor Wars" but it's there. See too Christopher Priest's blog posts about working at Marvel in the 80s and the constant low-level field of ambient racism he had to work against. I don't love Frank Miller and haven't liked a single thing he's made in ages but I wouldn't look you in the eye and say that Born Again isn't a masterpiece of its genre. But it does have deep issues with the semiotics of race, and those issues work backwards not only into the rest of his Daredevil work (is there a major black character in his run besides, uh, Turk?) and the field he chose to make his career in. Frank Miller has hosed up ideas about race, and hosed up ideas about politics, and his writing can get way too horny about certain things, I don't think any of that is up for debate. I think what's more interesting is tracking the extent to which his base-level ideology at the start of his career is not THAT different from that of his peers, and how it veered in one direction in the intervening decades whereas, like, Roger Stern's did not (to my knowledge?). I've also sort of suspected that Miller's fundamental deal is more like Claremont's-- the comic page is therapeutic to him so you're getting all of his baggage, all of what makes him mad, all of what turns him on, and that degree of nakedness is often unsettling.
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Oct 1, 2017 19:33
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