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.

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?

An Indian comic building on imagery from a film

The Times of India announced the production of a concept art comic based on a film titled Ramayana:

Team 'Ramayana' has fans counting down the days to their big trailer launch this week. While kicking off the countdown to July 24 when the official trailer will debut online, fans have been busy turning the film's concept art into impressive first looks.

Following the grand event in New Delhi on Saturday, the makers unveiled a special comic book that offers an in-depth look at the mythology-inspired world of the film. The illustrated book showcases detailed concept art for key characters, kingdoms and locations, giving fans a closer look at the ambitious adaptation. Soon after images from the comic surfaced online, social media users began transforming the illustrations into real-life depictions using AI image-generation tools. [...]

The comic, unveiled during the film's promotional event also offers readers a detailed introduction to the kingdoms of Ayodhya, Mithila and Lanka, while also revealing character illustrations accompanied by brief biographies and mythological backgrounds.

If you think there's a good side to AI, then moviegoers having fun producing AI-generated imagery based on the comic panels that could resemble real life is indeed a better example of how to make use of the concept that's been gaining traction in the past 5 years or so. And a comic emphasizing concept art for the movie is certainly a great idea too.

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.

Canadian filmmaker produces a comic

The Wellington Advertiser wrote about a filmmaker, David Antoniuk, who's now produced a comic book of his own:

Award-winning film director David Antoniuk has always considered himself a writer, and the Guelph/Eramosa resident has now published his first comic book.

“If I could do anything I would sit around campfires telling stories,” Antoniuk told the Advertiser. “In my bones, it’s who I am.”

Shortly after moving to Toronto from Winnipeg to go to film school in 1989, Antoniuk wrote a short story that was published in Ice magazine.

Antoniuk was a young man grappling with age-old questions: “Why are we here? And what happens to us when we die?”

The story explores the question with both comedic and serious tones.

“I never want to preach to people,” Antoniuk said. “I want them to have an enjoyable experience” that gently leads to self reflection.

[...] Nearly four decades later, that story – Time Spent – has taken on a new life in the form of a comic book.

I certainly hope he means it when he says he doesn't want to "preach" to anybody, or lecture them, because there's been too much of that in the past quarter century or more, and it's hurt the entertainment scene very badly. But there's some dismaying news in this item as well:

People can expect to see more from Antoniuk in the near future. He’s working on turning short horror stories by his wife, author Vanessa Ireson, into comic book form and is also co-writing a young adult graphic novel about a group of kids fighting monsters.

After that, he’s set to write another comic book he said will have more in common with Time Spent.

I've said before that the overabundance of horror stories has had a ruinous effect on entertainment, and this is doing nothing to prove contributors to any entertainment medium are trying to move away from that. Even the premise of fighting monsters is enough to wonder if the guy's that obsessed with horror themes. So while I wish I could appreciate a filmmaker trying comics for a change, the part about writing horror stories only dampens the impact.

National library of Florence to host Italy's biggest comics archives

The Florentine announced the national library of Florence will be host to Italy's hugest comics archives:

Florence has taken a major step towards becoming Italy’s leading centre for the study and preservation of comic books following the donation of the private archive of Gianni Bono to the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze.

The deed of donation, signed on June 9, transfers one of the most comprehensive and significant collections of Italian comics ever assembled into public ownership. Amassed over decades by Giovanni Attilio Bono, known as Gianni Bono, the publisher, historian, scholar and one of Italy’s foremost experts on comics, the archive is unrivalled for its size, breadth and rarity.

Known as the Fondo Bono, the collection comprises more than 800,000 items, including comic books, magazines, book series, scholarly publications, and Italian and international editions. It also contains original editorial material such as manuscripts, scripts, story outlines, sketches, archival documents, original artwork, posters, promotional material, fanzines and other rare documents charting the history of Italy’s most important comic book creators, characters and publishers. Much of the collection has already been documented in the Guida al fumetto italiano database. [...]

Through the acquisition, the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze is laying the foundations for what it hopes will become the Italian Library of Comics, a national centre dedicated to the preservation, study and promotion of comic art and publishing.

That's great. I'm sure Italy's got plenty of their own comics and even animation samples that could use a good archive where everybody could take a look to see what they're like. Congratulations to the library in Florence for this achievement.

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.

Las Vegas specialty store closes

The Las Vegas Review-Journal says a comics store run by a musician has closed after nearly a decade, though its owner will continue running a sales website:

Torpedo Comics, founded by System of a Down sticksman John Dolymayan, has ended its run of nearly a decade in a shopping center near Rainbow Avenue and Warm Springs Road.

[...] “I started selling in the early ’90s, because at 18 years old, it’s tough to go to your parents and say, ‘Can I have some money for comic books?’” Dolmayan told the Review-Journal before the store’s opening in May 2017. “Initially, I started off by losing a lot of money trying to sell books at conventions and stuff like that until I figured out how to do it. By the time System got signed (in the late ’90s), I was making $55,000-$60,000 a year. I took a huge pay cut to join System.”

While the Torpedo store has closed, the brand will continue to live online at torpedocomics.com.

Too bad, but what could've been made much clearer is that if merit's plummeted, you can't be surprised when store units lose money this way. Yet nobody in the liberal press wants to ask if poor quality has long been an issue, and probably never will.

And again, I really wish specialty retailers would make the switch from pamphlets to paperbacks.

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.