A convention built on GI Joe in Augusta, Georgia

Fox54-WFXG gives a report about a comics convention in Augusta, Georgia built primarily on GI Joe fandom:

One of the biggest comic book conventions in the country came to Augusta this past weekend.

Joefest came back to Augusta for the ninth consecutive year. The convention is one of the biggest G.I. Joe conventions in the world and included a number of collector’s items, celebrity voice actors and comic book artists.

“This is my second year here, and we're having a blast with it,” vendor Jeff Mercado said. “I’m a big G.I. Joe fan anyway, so it made it easy to come. I have my own collection, so finding rare pieces that I want for my own collection, selling off some of my older stuff that I had from when I was a child, and then, I started getting into a lot of the other things. I try to just hit all the markets, you know, what everybody's into collecting, so I have a wide variety of stuff that we like to sell.”

Having a convention built on the Joes is great. But the trouble is, this is the kind of convention where collectibles are sold at huge prices:

The event included over 200 vendors serving over 15,000 people over three days. Vendor Jeff Mercado says that the collector’s items at the convention are worth thousands of dollars.

“I mean, we've got stuff here that's five bucks, 10 bucks, all the way up to a couple $1000 for a piece,” Mercado said. “I got some airplanes that go for 2,000 bucks. We got some tanks in here that range in the 100s, 200s. We cover a broad spectrum. There's all different kinds of collectors, so we try to have everything for every price point.”

Oh good grief. This sounds like another convention focused on selling to speculators, and that could even include those who buy toys for archiving in the vault. Indeed, what's the use of having old toys around if they're not going to be donated to museums anny more than old pamphlets are?

I think it's wonderful to establish a convention built around GI Joe as much as various other entertainment franchises. But that doesn't mean the speculator market should be mixed in with it, based on how high some of this stuff can sell, yet it's entirely possible it won't be played with or read, and end up locked in vaults till sold again at auctions. Indeed, toys can wind up being sold on auctions as much as Superman's most expensive back issues. And that makes the whole purpose of the toy industry look like a joke too.

An op-ed about the Andrew Farago scandal, and a bit more research

Lavender Hotels has an op-ed about the invasion-of-privacy scandal caused by ousted SF Cartoon Art Museum curator Andrew Farago, and makes some important points about what's happened, though unsurprisingly, they won't allude to any of his online antics, and there are some leftist biases here too:

The downfall of Andrew Farago happened inside a space meant to be entirely safe. For over two decades, Farago was the public face and institutional backbone of San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum, a beloved cultural fixture celebrating comic strip history, graphic novels, and animation. He was a respected historian, an author, and an award-winning pillar of the tight-knit independent comic community.

"Beloved" and "respected"? If these writers would pay more attention to what Farago was writing on his social media pages, which was pretty cavalier, such descriptions could be considered disputable. A vital query to be made is: does being rude and calling everybody you disagree with "nazis" make you a better person? No, it does not. Unfortunately, Farago seemed to think otherwise.

For decades, the alternative comic and animation industries have marketed themselves as progressive, inclusive safe havens for outsiders. This case exposes the structural vulnerability inherent in organizations built entirely around tight social bonds and informal networking.

When an institution relies on a single individual to act as its gatekeeper, historical curator, and community liaison, professional boundaries inevitably blur. Farago began his tenure at the museum as a volunteer in 2000, rising to a paid role in 2001, and taking the mantle of official curator by 2005. Over 21 years, he curated more than 100 exhibitions. He was embedded in the personal lives of the artists he championed.

This level of integration creates a dangerous shield. Power in small cultural non-profits rarely looks like a corporate hierarchy; instead, it manifests as social capital. When an influential figure hosts a party, the attendees are not just friends—they are peers, subordinates, creators, and families whose professional fortunes are intertwined with the host’s goodwill.

As the former curator of the museum, I assume he was in charge of selecting the projects for exhibition. Something tells me that, if a right-winger wanted to develop an exhibition there under his management, Farago would've vehemently refused and shunned the conservative figure on the spot. For all we know, he probably didn't even include Chuck Dixon among the interviewees for his Batman history, and recalling Ethan van Sciver was blacklisted from DC as a result of Farago's machinations, it wouldn't be shocking if the latter had no role in Farago's book writings either. Also, what's this about "social capital"? Is the columnist implying capitalism is to blame here? If so, that's distasteful and making it sound like "progressive" and "inclusive" are inherently positive notions also obscures more serious issues to consider here.

The defense strategy in digital voyeurism cases frequently relies on the destruction of immediate evidence. Farago’s defense will likely lean heavily on his prompt deletion of the recordings and his self-issued written apology, attempting to frame the event as an isolated, impulsive lapse in judgment rather than a systemic pattern.

Digital forensics tells a much harsher story. Deleting a file from a commercial smartphone filesystem rarely removes the underlying data blocks immediately. Modern law enforcement extraction tools can routinely recover deleted media caches, unallocated space fragments, and temporary database thumbnails. The seizure of twelve separate electronic devices indicates that investigators are looking far beyond a single afternoon's recording.

The true legal exposure for Farago rests on what those remaining eleven devices contain. If forensic analysts uncover evidence of historical recording, distribution, or the involvement of minors across older datasets, the current requested 20 misdemeanor or low-level felony counts of invasion of privacy could escalate into severe structural charges carrying mandatory prison sentences.

The Cartoon Art Museum faces its own reckoning. The institution must now audit decades of internal operations, off-site workshops, and youth education programs managed under Farago’s direct supervision. The immediate termination was a necessary public relations maneuver, but it does not absolve the broader cultural ecosystem from ignoring the risks of concentrated, unchecked social authority.

Trust inside small arts organizations cannot be managed by a handshake agreement or shared progressive ideals. It requires strict operational protocols, background evaluations, and independent oversight structures that treat cultural icons with the exact same skepticism as any corporate executive.

No doubt, the museum will suffer from a drop in attendance as a result of this scandal, and of course, Farago's history books are bound to lose audience too. But hey, as mentioned before, they probably aren't the most dedicated, let alone accurate, since he may have forcibly omitted anybody he despised from his narratives. The article's right though, that educational programs the museum may have run will have to be investigated to figure out whether Farago abused any of its students over the years. For all we know, there could turn out to be more witnesses than previously thought. And what if Farago has more than one single online cloud storage where he kept disturbing materials? The market for online storages is very competitive, and it's always possible to register multiple accounts on different servers. The police will need to investigate that too, and it wouldn't be surprising if plenty had their own tools for data recovery to help police with investigations when needed.

In addition to the above op-ed, if there's more to say about the now disgraced Farago, well first, I discovered that, if there's any social media pages he didn't get rid of so far, it's his Threads page (although that could change soon enough), and if there's something I noticed here worth commenting on, it's the following:

Geez...was Farago giving a hint what he really thinks of invasions of privacy/sexual abuse, and even Identity Crisis from 2004? I get the strange feeling he simultaneously doesn't like Terry Long, and from what I know of him so far, it doesn't sound like he ever spoke out against DC's worst directions since the turn of the century. If not, that too speaks volumes about his MO. And then, there's this:

When I noticed this post about GI Joe, I couldn't help wonder if he was imitating video filmer Richard Meyer, since I recall the latter once did a video about a GI Joe annual (yearbook) nearly a decade ago, and what Farago says sounds oddly similar to what Meyer said. Was this Farago's way of expressing spite for somebody he doesn't agree with, and likely never met? All that aside, seriously, I doubt Mr. Farago is a GI Joe fan.

I also thought to try and do some research on past writings of his, and found that in 2008, the Los Angeles Times quoted him on the late artist Michael Turner:

“He was definitely one of the most popular and influential comic-book artists working right now,” said Andrew Farago, curator of San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum. “He was very, very much in demand as a cover artist on high-profile projects.”

If Farago's a woke male feminist these days with a sex-negative viewpoint, then depending how you view this, he had a pretty different position back at the time. What are the chances he'd come within even miles of saying anything positive about Turner today? Perhaps next to none. He's surely the kind of leftist who simply "goes with the flow" and accepts what they consider acceptable positions, and in Farago's case, it was quite possibly because he thought it would make a great shield from scrutiny.

Here's also an older interview he gave to the Comics Reporter and the late Tom Spurgeon in 2011, where he tells that:

I'm very fortunate in that I often find myself in situations where I can't believe that I'm getting paid for this. Joining the National Cartoonists Society and meeting about 90 percent of the strip cartoonists I grew up reading in a social context has been incredibly cool. It changes your perspective when you flip through the comics section and realize that you've got good drinking stories about half the artists on the page. I've had dinner with Gahan Wilson, walked around Rockefeller Center with Larry Hama (which would have made 12-year-old me's head explode), toured the offices of Mad Magazine, Marvel Comics and DC Comics, shingled a roof with Jeff Keane, given museum tours to Art Spiegelman and Mo Willems, had tea with Hayao Miyazaki, and went to a Simpsons script read-through in Los Angeles earlier this month thanks to Tom Gammill, whom I met through the NCS. I've honestly given up on ever making a wish list of comic/cartoon things I'd like to do, because I've gotten to do so many amazing things as a result of this job. If I'm hanging out in a pub with Alan Moore and Scooby-Doo next year, I don't think I'll be all that surprised.

On the downside, when you're working for a non-profit that you really believe in, it's easy to find yourself working 50 or more hours a week, tackling extra projects on weekends, and never quite being off-duty. And there's a lot of paperwork, fundraising and grant writing, which balances out the more exciting aspects of the job. My family are the only non-cartoonists in my address book, so I feel like I'm on the clock even when I'm hanging out with friends.

I wonder what any and all of these figures he speaks of think, now that the mask is off, and Farago turned out to be so repulsive? Some of the professionals he spent time with are leftists, of course, so what they think is quite possibly the most interesting part of all. Presumably, if they've heard the news about Farago's crimes, they're shutting the door on him now. But did they ever notice anything fishy about him years ago? And if so, why'd they want anything to do with him then? That aside, a terrible shame he was paid for anything. IIRC, Hama was blacklisted by Dan DiDio years ago, and Farago did nothing to help him. And why does a leftist like Spiegelman matter so much?

I then found a post on Peter Laird's blog from 2014, of the history book Farago wrote about Ninja Turtles (Ultimate Visual History), and Laird hints he's dissatisfied, if anything, with how it's put together, in a way that's very sloppy:

However, I was disappointed that it also contains a number of mistakes, inaccuracies, and some weirdly inconsistent editorial decisions with regard to art credits (sometimes there are, sometimes there aren't, with no discernible rhyme or reason). I used up about half a package of Post-It notes while carefully going through the book so I could put together this list of comments.

Here goes…

End pages in the front of the book: I was sort of baffled by the odd choice of art for this, out of all of the TMNT artwork available -- a drawing of a Turtle in boxer shorts? With this image begins a strangely inconsistent treatment of crediting and/or describing the illustrations -- in this case, no artist is cited as having drawn that image, either on these pages, or -- as would be more likely in a book like this -- on one of the pages to follow. It kind of looks like a Mike Dooney drawing, though I cannot say for certain.

First glossy page, right hand side: This reproduction of the very first group shot of the TMNT, penciled by Kevin Eastman and inked by me back in 1983, with a slab of mottled green superimposed for some reason, is not credited anywhere that I could find. It's also an odd place to put this uncredited drawing, in my opinion, when a far better location would be on page 20, where it is described in the section about the creation of the TMNT.

Following page, left hand side: This full-color piece by Kevin is also uncredited, as least as far as I could tell.

Second page following, left hand side: Another full-color piece, this one of a leaping Leonardo, again by Kevin, is uncredited.

Two page spread following the "Contents" page: This unusual full-color piece by me is also uncredited, and no information about it is given at all, which to my mind is extremely weird, given the curious nature of it, with the Turtles wearing costumes that are very different from the norm. [...]

Page 28: Four of my black and white TMNT pin-up sketches are printed on this page with no artist's credit or description.

Page 31: There are no artist's credits listed for the insert. This, as I recall, was penciled by Kevin and inked and toned by me.

Page 33: The image of April on the right hand side of the page is described as "April O' Neil as she appeared in Eastman and Laird's original comics." I don't understand why there is no mention of which issue and what page this panel is from.

Page 34: There is no information describing what the insert card in the lower left hand corner is.

Page 35: This image is described as "The Turtles preparing to engage in combat with the deadly Triceratons." Why not say which issue it was from? (I think it was TMNT Volume One, #6.) [...]

Page 40: In the second paragraph on this page, it is said that "… Eastman and Laird knew that the time was right to take the Turtles to the next level." The obvious implication here is that we were actively looking around for ways to grow the TMNT business in the direction of licensing and merchandising, and that's simply not true. It's not that we were averse to it -- we'd already proved that by striking deals with Dark Horse and Palladium Books and a few others -- but these are things that came to us, not deals that we went out looking for. We were focused on trying to get the TMNT comics out on time and with a decent level of quality.

Also, Kevin is quoted as saying that we'd been approached by other licensing agents wanting to rep the TMNT before Mark Freedman showed up. I have no memory of any agents other than Mark Freedman ever approaching us.

On the bottom right of the page is a reproduction of a large TMNT group shot that I penciled and inked; again, no artist credit.

One of the commentors also said:

One thing I was extremely disappointed with the book is the coverage on the 2003 cartoon, since it is my personal favorite incarnation of these characters. Or seemingly lack thereof...A very limited amount of text for 7 seasons of my personal favorite (if added, maybe a 1 1/2 pages at most)...and even the pictures/art used were disappointing. One pic of Mikey from the very last season for 1 whole page? And then one pic of Shredder from the very last season for 1 whole page? No pics of the 4 of them in action, or the 4 of them together, or even villains like Agent Bishop, or artwork/pictures to show people the darker tone/aspects of the cartoon & how it pushed the show as far as it could go for a cartoon, which I very much appreciated (whether it be samples from episodes like Same As It Never Was or Bad Day, or the hallucination/nightmare of Leonardo stabbing through Splinter, Baxter Stockman's body falling apart, etc.), no comments from any of the voice actors of the show...the 2003 cartoon portion of the book I was honestly very disheartened about. But hey, what can I say. I'm just a guy named Matt from Iowa who just loves the 4kids show to death, lol. It's very partial to me and it's what got me back into the characters.

Well, this is telling something. It sounds like this history book isn't the well-researched, accurate overview the establishment would have us believe it was. And now that Farago was arrested, it'll all be seen as moot and badly aged. If there's not enough history books about TMNT on the market to date, let's hope somebody with a better moral backbone will take the time to do the research, and not rely upon anything Farago may have written in his now worthless book in order to try and develop an improved history of how the Ninja Turtles came to be. If anyone's considering buying the Farago book, please, look for another one, or try to develop a research book of your own. Farago doesn't need our money, and besides, what if he uses any dough he gets to pay his legal bills? Let's not finance that.

And then, let's not forget the horrid political side of Farago, which Fandom Pulse reminds everyone about:

Alongside that professional record, Farago maintained an active social media presence that was consistently and combatively left-wing in its orientation toward comics industry controversies. He was a vocal opponent of the Comicsgate movement, describing its participants as bigots and comparing them to racist fictional villains. In February 2024, Bleeding Fool documented a series of his posts, including one stating: “Never forget that everyone in ComicsGate took personal offense when Superman took a stand against the Klan,” and another drawing a comparison between Comicsgate creators and the X-Men villain Graydon Creed, writing: “Watching the X-Men cartoon again. Graydon Creed, the shrill, screaming bigot seemed so over the top and ridiculous back then, but today he’d be running the Mutants of TikTok social media account and would be cranking out a dozen YouTube videos a day about the Woke menace.”

Farago took to The Daily Beast where he was quoted by the media at length in his attacks on ComicsGate: “[Comicsgate] is made up of people who were into the Gamergate thing and when that ran out of steam they noticed that they hadn’t made comics miserable for enough people yet.”

Look who was talking - somebody who doubtless turned a deaf ear and blind eye when DC and Marvel under Dan DiDio and Joe Quesada turned the comics miserable and worse, and because Mr. Farago didn't want to alienate them, he likely said nothing in history books, and didn't take any objective view of the issues involved. Utterly shameful indeed.

Also, the Comics Journal themselves posted some news about this, which is likely an indication he's no longer employed by them as a contributing writer. Again, whatever he wrote for them now stands as meaningless, and from what I've read from his resume, I don't think he could write his way out of the proverbial wet paper bag.

Anyway, these are the clues I could find from his resume so far that he's not the genius he'd surely want everyone else to think he is. Some could argue Farago's favoratism for Batman could hint at what's wrong with how folks like him approach the whole medium, and I'm sure some will continue to look for whether his leftist MO turns up in any of his writings. And whether Farago serves a prison sentence for his lawbreaking, it's possible he'll find himself a very lonely man, with reason, and his fortunes will hopefully be diminished by the legal bills he's surely paying now.

Biased interview with Supergirl screenwriter

Variety interviewed Ana Nogueira, the screenwriter of what now looks like a total botch job for a new take on Supergirl in movies. It may have been written prior to the official release of the film, but does have what to ponder, and shake heads at in disbelief and sadness. First:

Nogueira, an actor and playwright-turned-screenwriter, was originally tapped to pen a “Supergirl” script when Warner Bros. was developing the movie as a spinoff of “The Flash.” But when James Gunn and Peter Safran were named co-CEOs of DC Studios in 2022, they decided to take the DCU in a different direction — and brought Nogueira along for the ride. In fact, they were so enamored with her take on the Supergirl story — both in its original iteration and her revised pitch, based on Tom King’s “Woman of Tomorrow,” which follows Kara and a young alien girl named Ruthye (Eve Ridley) on a quest for vengeance — that Nogueira will also pen DC’s upcoming live-action “Teen Titans” movie, as well as a “Wonder Woman” film.

Notice how this sham of a trade journal's perpetuating the use of a masculine term, "actor", instead of "actress"? Well that's another problem with this day and age of Orwellian vocabulary, and it's very insulting to the intellect as much as it is to women. That aside, what was so awesome about a tale originally penned by a writer as awful as King, they just had to adapt that? And if the screenplay for Supergirl is that bad, I hesitate to think what a TT and WW movie will be like under her scripting. Now, here's what they say about the addition of Lobo to the story:

Lobo, the cigar-smoking alien bounty hunter played by Jason Momoa, was originally in the “Woman of Tomorrow” comic, but got cut from the story. Take me through the decision to add him back for the movie?

So that was brought to me. [Gunn and Safran] were like, “We want to do ‘Woman of Tomorrow,’ and we want you to find a way to put Lobo in. We think Lobo has a place in this.” I think their thinking was we know Jason Momoa is interested in this, and how can you turn that down? He’s so excellent in it, and you have to find a place when somebody is willing to go there. But at the same time, it also makes sense, because it’s intergalactic. It’s hard to bring Lobo to Earth — he’s always taken place in outer space — so they’re like, “This is an opportunity to bring in this character that would be hard to bring in.”

I knew Tom King had based the comic on “True Grit,” but originally, Lobo was the bounty hunter and Kara was the girl. Then he was like, “That doesn’t quite work.” He flipped it, and he brought in Ruthye. But when I was trying to bring in Lobo, I was like, “There is a third character in ‘True Grit’: Matt Damon’s character,” so if we follow that structure, there’s still room for this guy who is like a frenemy to the two of them. And Lobo is the ultimate frenemy.

From the panning reviews I've read so far, it looks like Lobo's only in the film to look "cool", and little else. Also, there were times in the comics of the past 4 decades where Lobo traveled to Earth, so I don't understand what's the point of this tommyrot. Besides, if they want to take creative liberties to depict Lobo journeying to Earth, they could've if they'd wanted to. That said, what's appalling in the comics is how Lobo was characterized post-Crisis, as some kind of leftover from the Soviet Union who led to the deaths of his fellow citizens on his home planet. This is why it would've been far better to leave him characterized as the Velorpian adversary he began as in the 3rd issue of Omega Men in 1983, pre-Crisis. Because how does his post-Crisis characterization truly count as a "hero"?

The film is about two young women learning to save themselves — and each other. But they also save all these other girls who’ve been kidnapped by the Brigands. How did that come to be?

So, that is not in the comic. I put it in for very boring writer reasons: in the comic, there’s this central planet where there’s been this horrific act in the past — essentially a genocide, an ethnic cleansing — and you find out that Krem was in some way involved. What’s really important about this is them coming and seeing loss that is not perfectly reflective of theirs, but just that deep pain that these girls have been through. And we also had to see that Krem is just like a total POS; that this guy is somebody that we are going to want to see meet a certain end. But I needed it to be something that was happening in the present and not the past, because in the comic, you can jump around to the past, but you can’t do that here. I needed something to feel really immediate, like there was saving to be done now.

I also wanted it to be something that specifically put our girls in jeopardy, so that they would be a target. Because otherwise, I don’t know why the Brigands would come after them. So, it’s those silly, boring writerly things that then end up leading to a larger plot. And it just tracked for me that the Brigands are an all-male race: What do they need?

Better scripting to portray them as convincing villains, and how interesting she admits, in a way, that the end result is boring. That aside, what are the chances the premise she wrote involving the "central planet" is another negative allusion to Israel and the USA, just like in the previous Superman film?

Also, if history items matter, prior to the official opening, Inverse wrote about how the Girl of Steel came to be in the Silver Age, and it also says:

It’s ironic that, despite the impetus of his origin story being his existence as the “Sole Survivor of Krypton,” Superman hasn’t been that in quite some time. Over the years DC Comics has slowly increased the number of Kryptonians who survived the destruction of their planet: General Zod was one of the first, debuting in Adventure Comics #283 in 1961, and since then they’ve added the entire city of Kandor (a population of thousands that accidentally avoided the destruction of Krypton when they were shrunken down and put in a glass enclosure by Braniac), H’el (a Kryptonian clone created by Superman’s father), and even Jor-El himself, transported through time by the machinations of Watchmen’s Dr. Manhattan (a creative decision that surely sent psychic shockwaves down Alan Moore’s spine).

Interesting there's no objective description given of what was also a recent take in the past decade on characters from the Watchmen, one that was quite pointless.

In her earliest stories, Supergirl resides at Midvale Orphanage under the secret identity of Linda Lee, only using her powers to aid Kal-El sparingly because he didn’t want her revealed to the world until she’d mastered them. Eventually she’s adopted by Fred and Edna Danvers, makes her debut as Supergirl to the world in 1962’s Action Comics #285, and graduates from high school as Linda Lee Danvers; after her college years, Linda relocated to San Francisco and took up a variety of different jobs in her off-time from superheroics, including serving as a TV news camera operator, student counseling, and even acting. The 1970s was arguably the biggest period for defining Kara as a character – along with her relocation, she also received her first major villain: Nasthalthia “Nasty” Luthor, the stubbornly loyal niece of Lex Luthor who made it her mission to discover the secret identity of her hated enemy, Supergirl.

Kara’s popularity made her a mainstay in Superman lore, earning her two solo comics as well as appearances in other Superman books, but 1985’s Crisis on Infinite Earths brought her character to a shocking and tragic end. Years earlier, in an attempt to reconcile the canon inconsistencies that naturally arose from decades of different writers, Kara Zor-El and the Superman of the 50s through the 80s were retroactively labeled heroes of the reality Earth-One, while the original Golden Age Superman of the 1930s and his cousin (more on her later) hailed from Earth-Two – Crisis on Infinite Earths was an attempt made by DC editorial to totally erase the Multiverse, having felt the concept ultimately created more problems than it fixed. The reality-destroying villain of Crisis, a being known as the Anti-Monitor, posed so great a threat that heroes were recruited from multiple alternate Earths to stop him; in the battle, Kara Zor-El was fatally wounded while trying to save her Superman, and when the story concluded with the establishment of a new, singular DC Comics timeline, Kara’s existence and sacrifice were erased for decades.

You can reasonably wonder why they didn't draw ideas from the Silver/Bronze Age history for Kara instead of a shoddy miniseries by an overrated writer who spends too much time writing up contrived takes on trauma. Interesting they admit it was tragic that editorial had to mandate Kara's demise in COIE, and took such a casual approach to the whole notion any character who's supposedly a burden should go nowhere but into the grave. But seriously, it's disputable the Multiverse literally made things confusing when it's 2 or more dimensions involved, and even Marvel's had their share of parallel worlds. The article also brings up Earth-2 counterpart Power Girl's history:

After CoIE, Power Girl was folded into DC’s new Prime Earth, with a fresh backstory that presented her as the long-lived descendant of an Atlantean sorcerer. Naturally, this was a disappointment to fans, so when 2005’s Infinite Crisis (a direct sequel to the original) resurrected the concept of the Multiverse, Power Girl’s origin was again retconned to reveal that she had actually always been the Supergirl of Earth-Two, and had somehow survived the destruction of her original reality; this has remained her consistent backstory to this day, a tragic recontextualization that makes her a refugee of both Krypton and Earth-Two. Adopting the name Power Girl to differentiate herself from Superman (and stand on her own with the appearance of yet another Supergirl), Kara Zor-L’s presence in pop culture has largely been relegated to countless jokes about the overtly sensual nature of her costume, but on the page she’s an incredibly intelligent and authoritative character in her own right, with years of experience as a superhero that make her a stark, mature contrast to the frequent depiction of other Supergirls as impulsive teenagers.

And here, I'm not sure fandom was ever "disappointed" with the retcon for PG, so much as with how Infinite Crisis was such a repellent tale begun with a prelude story that forcibly killed Blue Beetle Ted Kord. IIRC, Arion, Lord of Atlantis, the character created by Paul Kupperberg and Jan Duursema in 1982, was the father figure in the retcon, and funny the writer didn't take the time to make that clear. The post-Crisis retcon to PG was tame compared to what came about when Identity Crisis did in 2004. As for PG being intelligent, isn't that thanks to the best writers? Another example of how they don't have what it takes to credit whomever they thought did the best jobs in characterization when given a writing assignment. Who knows, the Inverse writers probably wouldn't even credit themselves if they got the job!

It wasn’t until 2004 that the grandmother of Supergirls finally returned, receiving a rebooted origin in the pages of Jeph Loeb’s Superman/Batman series. Her initial post-Crisis origin involved Kara (chronologically older than Kal) being sent away from Krypton at the same time as her cousin, with space shenanigans delaying her arrival for decades and causing her to meet her younger cousin in adulthood while she has the appearance of a 16 year-old girl; later comics revised this by once again having her home of Argo City survive Krypton’s original destruction, only for her parents to send her to Earth before Argo City is forcibly integrated into the Bottle City of Kandor by Braniac. Her first appearance on Earth sees Kara train with Wonder Woman and the Amazons before she’s kidnapped by Darkseid who plans on making her one of his Female Furies — after being saved by the combined might of the Trinity, the new Supergirl goes on an odyssey of self-discovery around the world, encountering Power Girl, the Teen Titans, and the Justice League before she’s transported to the 31st Century where she temporarily joins the Legion of Super-Heroes.

Since her post-Crisis debut in the early 2000s, Supergirl has gone through a few more reboots and reimaginings, but most of them use her 2004 origin as a launchpad to integrate her into whatever new confusing company-wide reboot DC Comics is going through at the time. Across 70 years and multiple different characters holding the mantle, Kara Zor-El has remained one of the most popular characters in the Superman mythos, growing far beyond her initial conception as a “female Superman” to become a character with a vast library of stories in her own right, including her brief time as a Red Lantern as well as the recent Woman of Tomorrow arc the movie is based on.

Gee, doesn't this prove how unsuccessful DiDio's supposed caring about the character was in the long run? The company wide crossovers, which they didn't bother to clearly mention, were another problem that sunk the return of Kara Zor-El, not to mention the disgraced Eddie Berganza. Some could reasonably say the heavy-handed allusions to sexuality in the 2005-11 series could reflect how corrupt Berganza was, and he definitely helped bring comicdom down the horrid levels it's at now. And here we also have an example of no objective view taken on what stories were written up in the past 2 decades, not even the Red Lantern tale that spun out of the awful Geoff Johns' run on Green Lantern. At least they admit what came since was confusing, though they don't mention it was just plain uninspired as a result of DiDio's forced darkening of the DCU.

Now onto a few more reviews of this sad catastrophe. Here's what a Forbes writer says about the film, and this one is absurd in its own bias regarding the source material:

I have not read the Tom King source material that inspired this story, Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, but I know it’s considered quite good and brilliantly drawn and inked. Supergirl is neither of those things. A dull blend of Guardians and an attempt to be Mad Max, but shot with increasingly ugly special effects that have been plaguing many blockbusters and layered on top of a script doing the original source material, and its actors, no favors.

Oh god, is this such a groaner. I've seen some of the art from the original GN, and it's some of the most dreadful, uninspired to come down the pike in the past decade, making Kara look very unappealing and sexless. Let's also not forget how King makes too much of a habit in his writing of relying on trauma themes, and coupled with that, it's exactly why the story makes for a most awful wellspring. Something tells me that, even if the reviewer did read the GN, he'd still be "diplomatic", which is pretty odd for somebody working as a professional reviewer to begin with. And yet, something also tells me that, if the screenplay were based on the writings of 20th century scribes like Otto Binder and his successors at the time, the reviewer would've been far less kind, as though relying upon a more optimistic vision in itself was a crime. And if so, that's very appalling, because it would compound the perception modern reviewers have a grudge against optimism.

There's also another review worth pondering, on 411 Mania, reminding everybody of one of the most decidedly rotten details about the previous Superman movie that's followed up on in Supergirl:

Unfortunately, Supergirl continues an ill-advised plot thread, first introduced in Superman, involving Superman’s parents. The last movie shockingly revealed that Superman’s parents sent him to Earth to conquer it and subjugate the human race.

The revelation is certainly a unique narrative choice, differing from past, more traditional interpretations of Jor-El. However, Superman failed to meaningfully flesh out that detail. Supergirl continues that plot thread to some extent, but it still doesn’t work. Basically, the new DC Universe opened a huge can of worms and has no idea how to deal with it.

It reminds me that 2 decades ago, when Dan DiDio, Eddie Berganza and Jeph Loeb launched the post-2004 take on Kara Zor-El in a new solo book, there was a storyline in issue 16 co-written by Mark Sable where it looked like Kara's father was doing terrible wrongs, which, if the following synopsis at Grand Comics Database is correct, was disgusting, because it claims Kara was forced to kill her mother and her father sent her to kill Superman?!? Well that was abominable, and so too was the premise for Jor-El in Gunn's Superman film. As a result, that's why, if Kara kills Krem in the new Supergirl followup, it not only reeks of moral hypocrisy, it perpetuates some of the most embarrassingly bad storylines to emerge when DiDio was still holding DC hostage to his whims. Also, note the continued use of "revealed", instead of "established", and that illogic is very grating.

Anyway, John Nolte at Breitbart's announced that this new take on the Maid of Might has become a global fiasco:

Supergirl didn’t just flop at the box office this weekend; it is a flop of epic proportions, an abysmal failure that will be remembered only as a failure.

With a disastrous $38 million domestic opening and an even more humiliating overseas take of $30 million, Supergirl is a bigger domestic flop than The Marvels ($46 million), The Flash ($55 million), Black Adam ($67 million), and Morbius ($39 million).

Supergirl’s global opening gross is just $68 million, which means it’s worse than notorious flops such as The Marvels (110 million), Morbius ($84 million), Birds of Prey ($81 million), and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom ($80 million).

Get this: Supergirl’s global is not much better than Madam Web ($50 million) and Blue Beetle ($43 million).

The production and promotion budget for Supergirl is right around $250 million. That makes the break-even number at $450 to $500 million. Supergirl will be lucky to hit $200 million worldwide. Warner Bros. is looking at massive losses. [...]

Well, it certainly didn’t help as the hype machine kicked in that Supergirl star Milly Alcock — who has all the charisma of a sidewalk and the body of a 14-year-old boy — started opening her mouth about how she’s a victim of sexism and Supergirl is queer.

From what I've read of the movie to date, it doesn't sound like there's any love interest or romance in it, quite a contrast to how Kara hoped to find love with a boyfriend in the Silver Age stories. And that's another of the biggest problems with modern movies - PC mandates shun any chance of romance.

In the end, of course it's very sad the result is a movie that adds insult to injury 42 years after the failed Supergirl film of 1984 starring Helen Slater. Now, for all we know, it could take decades until they try again, and for all we know, even then it'll probably wind up being a case of "3 strikes and you're out". Sometimes, ever since the failed adaptation of Sara Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski in 1991, I've wondered if filmmakers and studios are deliberately making these lady-starring action epics bad in order to taint the source material. The new Supergirl movie could sadly be another hint at that.

Classic cars painted to resemble comic book sketches

Top Gear wrote about an exhibit of cars made to look like comics illustrations:

An artist called Joshua Vides is presenting his latest art highlighting automotive culture at LA’s Petersen Automotive Museum in a new exhibition entitled ‘Flat Out: The Art of Joshua Vides”. Tin, what it says, pretty much, on, etc.

Only this isn’t what it says on the tin, because Vides’ art isn't really going flat out. Instead, it's been made to look like a giant, real-life comic book sketch, and you’ll spend a considerable portion of your day just gawping trying to figure out how he’s done it.

According to the Petersen, Vides “painstakingly hand-paints crisp black lines onto all-white surfaces to create monochromatic graphic artwork that resembles flat comic book sketches”. So, that’ll do it.

Wow, that's pretty fancy alright. Congratulations to the guy for his marvelous nod to comicdom with this vehicular form of artwork.

The style of Barry Windsor-Smith

Cartoonist Jim Rugg wrote a review on Literary Hub of artist Barry Windsor-Smith's work on Wolverine's Weapon X story from the 1988-95 Marvel Comics Presents anthology:

Barry Windsor-Smith was one of the most popular creators at Marvel Comics. Part of his popularity was due to his style. His comics did not look like or read like other comic books. It is important to clarify that Windsor-Smith’s style was not defined exclusively by his artwork. Windsor-Smith approached storytelling very differently than the standard Marvel house style approach.

The average age of comic book readers in the 1960s was seven. The storytelling style of Marvel as well as many other comic book publishers was “show and tell.” Captions often described the drawing in the panel. This redundancy made sense for young, inexperienced readers. But by 1991, readers were older and hopefully better readers.

The 1980s saw the rise of creators who felt that comics were an art form and were not inherently limited to young readers. These creators challenged misconceptions about comics being for kids with complex, sophisticated works like Maus, Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, and Love and Rockets. The growth of storytelling in the art form meant that creators like Barry Windsor-Smith could use different techniques to engage and challenge their readers.

One of the more obvious storytelling choices in Weapon X is the lack of narrative captions. Without literal explanations, readers must pay close attention to Smith’s artwork in each panel to follow Weapon X’s story. This one choice dramatically changes the reading experience. It places much more value on the artwork. One cannot understand the story only by reading the words. The art in each panel provides critical information. In order to understand what is happening, the reader must interpret the images and the character’s dialogue. This was a radical departure from most Marvel comics of 1991. This kind of reading requires time, attention, and thought in order to process what we see and how it fits with other panels. It also creates an experience where the reader’s knowledge is similar to Logan’s—limited. We do not always know what is happening. We often piece together the story from a subjective, fragmented vantage point. At times, this effect makes Logan’s character more relatable.

Well that was then, and this is now, and while sophisticated writing/art may have been common at the time, it most unfortunately has turned into a lost art as of today, if we take Brian Bendis' writing as an example. And while Rugg may be right about how Windsor-Smith approached the writing/art in Weapon X, I'm going to have to disagree with Dark Knight Returns, if only because Frank Miller sowed the seeds that brought down the Masked Manhunter in the mainstream DCU proper over time though DKR.

And if Rugg believes what came about in the early 90s makes good art, what does he think of modern "art"? Seriously, I think anybody who can't apply an objective view to modern storytelling as much as older stuff is not providing enough to challenge the readers either. Rugg's review of Windsor-Smith's Wolverine tale from MCP is impressive, but it still doesn't substitute for explaining why modern mainstream comics aren't delivering. In fact, there's a valid argument to make that if narrative captions were thrown away by later writers, that's honestly not good, because they do still have use even in modern times, though what's really bad is when thought balloons suffer the same fate. Without those, how can you know what's on the superhero's mind? If Superman and Spider-Man were written without thought balloons, they'd be getting nowhere in past decades as a storytelling vehicle. That's why, while I don't doubt Windsor-Smith's talent in the past, narrative captions and thought balloons still shouldn't be thrown away as storytelling tools.

John Byrne pens yet another Phoenix-related story

Popverse tells the veteran artist Byrne has put together yet another story building off the Phoenix saga from X-Men, a story that was regurgitated far too many times:

It is a story that has been in the making for over 40 years. After very publicly walking away from Marvel Comics 25 years ago, John Byrne is returning to publish his own version of what happened after his iconic Dark Phoenix Saga. In his version, Jean Grey doesn’t die, and X-Men history takes a very different turn.

X-Men Elsewhen started as a webcomic that John Byrne published on his website starting in 2018, but it is set to get a physical release later this month. That release is remarkable not just because it is John Byrne returning to one of the most iconic storylines in comic book history, but also because Marvel Comics is putting its official stamp on it. They are involved as licensors while Abrams ComicArts is publishing.

The problem is that it's also one of the most way overused story premises and plotlines in publishing history, and I think Claremont himself once recycled elements from it in a Justice League tale he wrote in the 2000s for DC. Why is this such a big deal, and is fandom actually looking forward to this? There's only so many other story ideas from past history that would make great setups for a science-fantasy tale today, and this is what we keep hearing about? Sorry, but this is just insulting to the intellect when they keep regurgitating a storyline that wound up emphasizing mass death and destruction, and while the late editor Jim Shooter may have decided it better to have Jean put to death than be let off the hook for wiping out a whole alien space colony (Jean's fate was retconned 5 years later with an alien lifeform becoming the actual culprit), it doesn't explain why he approved of making Jean the scapegoat who's destined to be turned evil in the first place.

If there's any storyline the medium has to stop relying upon so heavily for a setup, it's the Phoenix Saga. It did no good in the long run for comicdom, and was the kind of tale that should've been left in the past long ago. Why Byrne himself sees this as great is beyond me.

Former director at San Francisco's Cartoon Art Museum arrested for filming people in bathroom

Some people may be familiar with Andrew Farago, who until some time ago was a curator at the San Francisco Cartoon Art Museum, and a contributing writer to the Comics Journal, who was also the kind of leftist who attacked easy targets like right-wingers and Comicsgate. Now, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, he was arrested by police for secretly filming people in his home bathroom:

Andrew Farago, an author, historian and former curator of San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum, was arrested on June 3 on suspicion of recording 20 people in the bathroom at the party, which had attendees including at least six children ages 3 years old or older, Berkeley Police Department spokesperson Byron White told SFGATE in an email Wednesday. According to court documents viewed by the Berkeley Scanner, Farago co-hosted the party on May 23 at his Berkeley home.

A woman at the party found Farago’s phone wrapped in a towel and aimed in a direction that would “record people’s genitalia as they used the restroom,” and video footage on the phone showed Farago setting it up, the Berkeley Police Department wrote in the documents, according to the Berkeley Scanner. [...]

White said police launched an investigation and obtained a search warrant and an arrest warrant for Farago on May 27. Officers conducted a search at his house on June 20 and seized his electronic devices, White said.

Farago’s arrest warrant included 20 counts of secretly recording someone who is undressed or in their undergarments without their consent, White said. Farago’s name does not appear in the Alameda County inmate records as of Thursday afternoon.

The 50-year-old is a notable figure in San Francisco art and pop culture, including writing comics and co-authoring a history of Batman. Farago also helped advocate for the museum to acquire a new location in 2016 after its former Mission Street location doubled in rent. The museum is now at 781 Beach St., a block from Ghirardelli Square.

Although Farago is still listed as the curator for the San Francisco Cartoon Art Museum in several places online, his name has been removed from the museum’s official site and his LinkedIn profile has been deleted.

This is very, very disgusting, and that goes without saying. I expect his book writings will be going out of print soon, and he has truly tarnished a number of projects, not the least being the very museum where he reportedly once worked, but has now hopefully been ousted after committing repugnant acts that could've endangered children. One of the worst things about this is that it may not be the first time Farago pulled such crap, and what if it turns out he did similar acts at the museum he worked for? It's enough to shudder.

I noted how he's also been a contributing writer to the Comics Journal, and 6 months ago, he wrote the following item about the late cartoonist Scott Adams of Dilbert fame, and at the time, Farago said that:

Adams spoke candidly about expected topics like cartooning, office culture, and popular entertainment, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, revealed his self-described “Libertarian leanings” as he ventured into discussions of current events and politics. Controversial and outright hateful comments were framed as “thought experiments,” such as a 2006 Dilbert Blog post that questioned historical accounts of the Holocaust or a 2011 post in which he compared adult women to “children and the mentally handicapped.” Adams offered dating advice that included “pickup artist” techniques and emotional manipulation, but the Dilbert comic strip plugged along as usual, just with more dot-com jokes and cynical takes on the economy in the wake of the 2008 crash. Most daily newspaper readers and feature editors were oblivious or indifferent to Adams and his online activity, and friends chalked up the occasional offensive newsletter or blog post to the cartoonist’s sense of humor or desire to provoke a reaction. He had been happily married since 2006, after all, and was a devoted stepfather to two children, so how much of a jerk could he really be?

Readers, especially in hindsight, felt that Dilbert’s tone shifted during the 2010s, punching down at targets, mocking and belittling societal shifts and perceived “political correctness,” with more cynical, even bitter humor than the bemused, gentle office hijinks of the strip’s first two decades. “Dilbert went from challenging the absurdities of workplace management and the abuses of late-stage capitalism to a broader distrust of all expertise, media, and institutions,” observed Rob Salkowitz in his Adams obituary for Forbes.com. “The tone became combative, the humor more hectoring. Dogbert, Dilbert’s anarchic pet who always managed to come out on top, began delivering preachy monologues more suited to the op-ed page.”

Wow, look how Farago moralizes ad nauseum, and blah, blah, blah. Now, after Farago was discovered to be as much a pervert as his fellow SF resident and leftist Gerard Jones, these kind of writings stand as meaningless. I remember when Farago signed onto a petition in favor of the Kfir Bibas family after October 7, 2023, and hoped he was at least improving over his previous attacks on petty issues like Comicsgate. But as this scandal makes clear, Farago apparently just found another cunning way to virtue signal, and seeing how he endangered children at his house party, that makes his petition signing look very hypocritical, seeing how he committed such an abomination. If that's how he's going to behave, how do we know he doesn't hold those kind of twisted visions for Jewish children too? Will he ever even apologize for his rude social media postings about Comicsgate and any other petty issue where he made denigrating comments about anybody whom he didn't agree with, conservative or otherwise? Probably not, and his fellow leftists are possibly not interested in raising such topics again.

Cosmic Book News also notes:

He received the Inkpot Award from San Diego Comic-Con in 2015 and wrote numerous books on comics and animation, including the Harvey Award-winning Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Ultimate Visual History, The Complete Peanuts Family Album, and The Art of Harley Quinn.

Will the SDCC demand he return the award? He's also humiliated a lot of notable comics franchises and kid friendly creations as a result of his actions, and what do his interviewees think now that this has been discovered? The above site also has a redacted picture indicating Farago once took a photo with a kid standing in front of him, and after this whole scandal, sane parents will hopefully keep him far away from theirs. Also, what does the Comics Journal's staff think, now that one of their writers turned out to be scummy?

Some ideologues like Farago who attacked targets like conservatives online in past years possibly did so in the hopes their leftist brethren would overlook any wrongdoings they committed like what Farago's now known to have done, and would serve as a cunning shield from scrutiny. But even that's beginning to prove ineffective, and it's to be hoped more leftists in the medium will learn some lessons from this, and stop villifying the outside while ignorning the inside. For now, it remains to be seen if Farago will go to trial and face any legal penalties for his criminal offenses. His reputation is certainly over, and it wouldn't be surprising if the books he wrote about comics history aren't the masterpieces some press sources likely want everybody to believe they are.

Comics and cartoon characters featured in illustrated history about the Declaration of Independence

The Orange County Register interviewed cartoonist R. Sikoryak about a new GN titled Declaration/Emancipation Illustrated, which builds specially on use of comics and cartoon characters for exploration of the famous moment in USA history when independence was set in motion in the 18th century:

As he worked on an adaptation of some of America’s essential documents over the past few years, cartoonist R. Sikoryak says one element of the ongoing American experiment became clear.

[...] His new book, “Declaration / Emancipation Illustrated,” combines the complete texts of the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Gettysburg Address and illustrates them with characters and scenes from comic books, comic strips and animated films and TV series, including The Simpsons, My Little Pony, Black Panther, Ziggy, the Powerpuff Girls and more.

“People identify with cartoon characters,” says Sikoryak, who skillfully takes on the styles of everything from The Family Circus to Family Guy. “I like that interplay of familiar characters with important texts.”

And sharp-eyed readers will recognize reworkings of iconic comic book panels, including “The New Teen Titans,” “The Invaders” and “The Savage Sword of Conan.”

“I was strictly using American characters, U.S. characters,” he says about some of the restrictions he gave himself for the artwork. “They’re all characters created by, or who represent America in some way. So that was the rule for the book.”

I would assume it's done under licensed permit, but this is a creative way to make use of other known creations for producing a GN about American history, and a lot more than what you see in the actual mainstream today.

Q. Your book is an illustrated version of the Declaration of Independence, Emancipation Proclamation, and Gettysburg Address. How do you describe this kind of hybrid?

I grew up making comics and reading lots of comics, and I’ve tried to find ways to take my skills and use them in an interesting way. I used to do strictly literary adaptations, where I would take novels, and I would retell them as comics in different styles, kind of like what I’m doing now,

You could call it a graphic novel, you could call it an illustrated book, but basically, I just like taking the history I love from comics and combining it with texts that I think are important or interesting for people to reevaluate in new ways.

It's certainly pleasant news in an era where patriotic values have been largely rejected by mainstream leftists who don't show any appreciation for themes like "truth, justice and the American way" in Superman, for example, and likely don't celebrate American patriotism in Captain America either.

Q. There can be a friction between people who believe that if you love something, you can also have fun with it, versus those who don’t. Is that challenging to navigate?

I have a certain earnest streak to me, and I think that comes through in the work. Certainly, I will throw in some jokes here and there, but for the most part — there’s some editorializing, I suppose, in some of the image choices — but I am really keeping the text there. I’m not commenting in the text. If you just read the text, there’s nothing in the book that isn’t in the original document.

I’m really trying to be faithful to all my sources, whether it’s what Thomas Jefferson wrote or if it’s what Seth MacFarlane drew for “Family Guy,” I’m trying to represent the perspective of both sides — or the many sides.

One of the reasons I wanted to use the different styles is because you can find a page that feels very patriotic, and it feels kind of solemn, and then there’ll be another page that’s maybe a little absurd, or a little funny, or a little ironic, but that’s the tapestry of America. I really wanted people to feel like something in this would represent them.

In the best sense of what I think the country is, it’s all these people coming together — I know some people don’t think that’s what it is — but in my estimation, it’s really about all these people coming together, that’s kind of what the book represents. You could find specific pages that are nothing but solemn, but there is a certain, I hope, thrill, or as you say, friction, in the combination of all these things next to each other.

The question is whether he ultimately respects what the Declaration of Independence was for, which is why we need to hope the part about "reevaluation" only means whether most believe it's acceptable to employ notable creations from past franchises for a new GN about an historical milestone. Same can be said about the view of "both sides" too.

If the finished product respects patriotic and civilized values, that's what'll make this an admirable project. So if Sikoryak is faithful to those beliefs, then he'll have produced something that can be a breath of fresh air in an era where patriotism's sadly been diminished by leftist ideologies, and this needs to be challenged by showing the courage to present patriotism as a positive value again.