I’ve launched a Patreon today, supporting a lot of writing about comics history and also .... Jeremy! Read more about it here. Membership starts at a dollar for all benefits!
Thank you for reading.
I did this comic for my Patreon supporters back in the day, but their dollars have withered and faded from memory. Time to share with the world!
calamityjonsaveus reblogged
My publisher, Quirk Books, has teamed up with Humble Bundle for a sale to benefit First Books, which provides educational resources for underserved communities. You can find my books, The League of Regrettable Superheroes and The Legion of Regrettable Supervillains up in the $15 dollar tier, with an IKEA-based horror novel I’ve been wanting to read, a great-looking Fred Van Lente book, the highly-recommended Princesses Behaving Badly and more than $230 worth of ebooks there and in lower tiers. You can grab a bunch books for a measly buck, even! Go Check it out!
I’ve just listed a baker’s dozen of original art pieces over at my Etsy store, including the one-and-done comic page above and some of that Metamorpho you kids like so much these days ...
I’m generally not a fan of the most recent spate of superhero movies (which tend to be merely middling action movies skinned with comic book cosmetics), but I was surprised that I enjoyed Logan -- not just as a movie about Wolverine, but an actual movie. Just as a film, it was impressive in that it gave a shit about character, dialogue, and pacing, was willing to wait for story elements to unfold at a natural pace, wasn’t shoving easter eggs and in-jokes down our throats, and embraced ambiguity.
I remember how the franchise began with a gag about the perceived silliness of the source material -- “yellow spandex” and all that -- and yet Logan introduces a nod to the source material as an actual component of the plot, to introduce doubt and frustration to the characters instead of a smarmy wink. It used it to ask a question about the aspirational quality of superhero comics, and in the end that contrived fiction was more powerful than the brutality and endless fighting in which these films trade.
Its use of violence was its major strength, tho. Violence, in the world of Logan, isn’t empowering, redemptive or cathartic -- frequently, it’s not even necessary or useful. Instead, it’s dehumanizing and shameful, and it weakens the characters’ resolve and ability to relate to each other. Laura, in particular, ran the risk of becoming another post-Buffy asskicker, but was instead a victim of her own violence as much as her targets.
Really, there’s so much more; that it wasn’t violence that redeemed Wolverine but that he killed his worst self (which I thought was a weakness in the film, writing the metaphor that blatantly) and allowed his faltering self to die, so as to save what is effectively his younger self and prevent her from going down his dangerous, pointless, suffering road. Jackman had the room to actually act for the first time in all of these films, and he and Stewart were a remarkable pair. And placing the movie seven years ahead let them do something that so few of these movies think to do -- to create a familiar world with slightly unfamiliar rules, which suit the necessary excesses of the genre. “Robocop Rules,” as it were.
Really a beautiful film. The Paris, Texas of X-Men movies. Paris, TeXas.
I checked. It works out.
Some time back, I asked some folks to recount the best advice they’d ever received from their fathers. Here’s the results...
I’m organizing some old files and wasn’t sure if I’d ever shared this piece before...