and Dead Tree Comics

[Büge]

The Money and the Power? What even is money except a means of exerting power? At least, at the "clandestine cabal controlling world events" level. The Money isn't some guy who's just trying to pay his rent on time. So why is there a Money and a Power? In fact, don't all of them represent some form of power? They're a cabal controlling the world. All five of them represent Power. What makes the Power distinct from the other four?

[Thad]

Titties?

I would have thought those would fall under the Love.

[KingRoyal]

While she's pointing at her tits, her name is Power

[Mongrel]

I'll leave it to Thad to reply with the Simpsons version. :V

[Thad]

I also like the touch that both issues concern weird little towns with mysteries and secrets, and in each case the heroes have an opportunity to leave but decide to stay and fix things, and the solution ultimately turns out to be something small and human. I assume he'll keep the formula for Johnny's story.

Nope! Johnny saves a small town from a tornado in the first few pages, but after that his story's delightfully mundane and working-class -- he's working a blue-collar job (cleverly disguised in his new secret identity, Johnny Fairweather) and discovers the boss is a crook who's underpaying the employees and forcing them to work under unsafe conditions, threatening to fire them or have them deported if they make a fuss.

The whole plot's got a very '30s Superman vibe, and I love that kind of story.

Also, Johnny's a perfect Ryan North hero, in that he confidently says goofy shit.

And that's it for the introductory issues with the team separated -- appropriately enough, #4 will be the issue where they're all reunited. Looking forward to it.

[Thad]

I enjoyed the first issue of Pink Lemonade by Nick Cagnetti. I wasn't previously aware of his work, but I happened to stop by my LCS while he was signing books (turns out he's a local) and so I picked a copy up.

It's definitely got a more-than-passing resemblance to Madman. It's most immediately obvious in the bright, Laura Allred-esque colors (also by Cagnetti), but the Madman vibe extends beyond that -- it's got a strong Silver Age influence, it's an offbeat story about an upbeat, amnesiac hero, and it uses that backdrop to poke at grim-'n'-gritty comics of the '80s and '90s.

Issue #4 does some cool mixed-media stuff. The hook is that there's this character, OJ-Bot, who's been something of a mass-media mascot in the past and been adapted into various media. So this issue goes through a series of different styles representing those past adventures -- '90s CG, '60s anime, '70s Hanna Barbera, a pixel art section that looks like a cutscene in a Genesis game, clay figurines, paintings, and a Steamboat Willie pastiche at the end. Impressive work all around.

[Thad]

I also agree that North doesn't have Reed's voice right yet -- the "sloppy Joseph" line on page 1 is one example, and another is later in the issue when he can't think of the word "nasty". It could maybe work for me if they're intended as jokes, if Reed's making fun of himself a little, but there's no indication in the text that that's the intent.

It was a long walk, but yup, confirmed in #4.

[Crick]

Confirmed he's just making fun of himself? I stopped picking them up after 3, it just wasn't hitting for me.

[Thad]

Confirmed he's just making fun of himself?

He says another improbably awkward thing and then Johnny says "Oh come on, you're doing that on purpose." I guess it's technically not confirmation because Reed doesn't respond, but that's my read; Johnny isn't joking, he's figured it out.

That also dovetails with the emotional climax of the issue, where Ben and Alicia realize there's a lot more going on beneath Reed's cold exterior than he lets on.

I stopped picking them up after 3, it just wasn't hitting for me.

I don't know that #4 will change your mind, but I liked it. I think it did a good job of tying off the first arc, getting the band back together, and explaining just what the hell Reed did that left a giant crater in midtown.

#1 is still the best issue of the run up to this point.

[Crick]

That makes sense. I'd be interested in learning what the hell's up with that crater.

I think what I want out of FF is more toward Hickman's run and this was striking me more on Slott's end of the spectrum.

[Thad]

I don't always like Tom King's endings, but I think he pulled it off in Human Target.

Great series all around.

[Thad]

Ended up mostly liking the final issue of Superman: Space Age, too. There are some plot contrivances in there that annoyed me, but on the whole I think it ends up being a solid ending that shows how Superman, Batman, and the rest of the Justice League deal with a no-win situation.

And fantastic work by the Allreds as always.

[Thad]

I have mixed feelings about Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty, and, as suits my taste in superhero comics, I'm happy with the mundane stuff and vexed by the superheroics.

I like all the stuff that's just Steve living his life -- he moves back into the apartment he grew up in, makes friends around the neighborhood, takes a pottery class, has radio meetups with his old WWII superhero buddies. All that stuff's great.

I'm a couple issues behind but #8 is great. It gives Steve's normie supporting cast time to shine (and one of them refers to him as "White Captain America", which is perfect), the Captain America of the Rails returns to lend a hand, and when Sharon says they need help from a telepath Steve sheepishly explains that he hooked up with a telepath at a party and can get in touch with her by thinking a certain word really hard.

It's Emma Frost and the word is "Mommy."

(Also I don't know why this didn't occur to me until now but Lena Headey would be perfect casting for Emma. Get on that, Feige.)

[Thad]

Disney ousts Marvel chair Isaac Perlmutter after he clashed with CEO Bob Iger

That's good!

Move is part of efforts to eliminate 7,000 roles, according to people briefed on the matter

That's bad.

[Thad]

Steve Lieber:

It's wonderful that they laid #IkePerlmutter off, but they missed a important opportunity by not wrapping him up in web fluid and leaving him suspended from a midtown lamppost for pedestrians to gawk at.

[Thad]

Heidi MacDonald: Ike is gone; what’s next for Marvel Comics

Okay, now the most important question that I know you are all asking: is Marvel Comics in trouble? Details amount to a single sentence in the NY Times story, but it seems that Marvel Entertainment is no more, absorbed into the larger Disney operations. And that sounds very not good, an echo of DC’s own whittling down just last week.

Surprisingly, all of the insiders I talked to yesterday were pretty upbeat about this. It may have just been enjoying a day of glee at Ike’s removal, but as one former top level comics industry exec told me, “This is the best move for Marvel Comics.”

The almost universal speculation is that in order to get rid of Perlmutter, Iger had to get rid of Marvel Entertainment. Although Perlmutter no longer held the title of president, he remained chairman of Marvel Entertainment – but with no Marvel Entertainment, he had nothing to chair, and got…laid off.

[...]

It’s worth noting that for now, Marvel Comics remains untouched. President Dan Buckley, a very capable executive who has been handling Ike for years, remains in place, reporting to Kevin Feige, and the two have a good working relationship, I’m told by multiple sources. Marvel Comics remains profitable, and as the plucky, colorful House of Ideas behind the MCU, it still has some marketing value.

My own opinion is that Disney loves to look like it values creative people with things like their “Legends” program, honoring animators, Imagineers and songwriters. The Marvel Bullpen (which doesn’t exist any more) still has some symbolic value as part of Disney’s Happiest Place on Earth, and Feige seems to have gone along with this idea until now.

(links and formatting not included in copy-paste)

[Thad]

IDW “goes dark” on the NYSE, lays off 39% of their staff

[Thad]

Kevin Smith has recently spoken candidly about his struggles with mental health and how, among other things, the more popular and successful he's become, the more pressure he's felt to put on a public persona and to present himself as the performer his fans expect him to be instead of the man he really is, to the point where it's led to dissociation and crisis.

I respect the hell out of Smith speaking about these experiences honestly and publicly; that takes courage, and it legitimately helps people.

But I'm here to complain about a comic book.

I think you can really see the impact Smith's struggles have had on his art. And from that perspective, there's a fundamental irony in that his fixation on trying to give the fans what they want is exactly the thing that's made his art worse.

As something of a lapsed Kevin Smith fan, I think his greatest appeal was always in his authenticity. Trying to please guys like me is exactly what I don't want him to do. But his work's become progressively more self-referential and pandering, and that's exactly how he lost me. It's all frosting, no cake.

He's still capable of telling good, character-driven stories -- I actually really liked all the bits of Jay and Silent Bob Reboot that were about Jay's relationship with his daughter, and found all the cameos and 37 references tedious. Though, okay, I laughed at the gag where Ben Affleck can't remember the name of Bruce Wayne's mother.

Which brings us to the comic book tie-in, Quick Stops. Which is, near as I can tell from the first two issues, made up entirely of those kinds of continuity jokes and references. The first issue takes place immediately before the aforementioned Ben Affleck scene in J&SB Reboot, where Holden's doing a panel at Comic-Con and explaining how he met Jay and Silent Bob.

And then there's issue #2.

The premise of issue #2 is "Remember how Mallrats begins with Brodie saying 'This one time, my cousin Walter got this cat stuck up his ass', and how you the Clerks fan realized that's the same Cousin Walter who Randal said broke his neck trying to suck his own dick?" And that's it. For 22 pages, or however long the thing runs. It's just a lengthy digression on that one brief continuity gag from a film from 1995. Randal and Brodie meet up at Walter's funeral and nothing much of anything happens; there are a bunch more continuity references and pop culture jokes.

Sloppy pop culture jokes. Randal makes a Matrix reference, in a story that takes place in 1994 at the latest.

The frustrating thing is that there could have been an actual story here. Randal and Brodie, a couple of weirdo cousins, and Walter, their even bigger weirdo cousin. There's a potential for genuine character-driven comedy and pathos there, and the closest thing we get to that is a flashback where Randal and Brodie see Batman (the 1989 movie) and decide to become superheroes and Walter spraypaints a giant dick on Randal's car and declares that he is their nemesis, Count Cockula.

It's a waste, man.

(Some great art, though, by Phil Hester and Ande Parks, the same team Smith worked with on Green Arrow back around the turn of the century.)

The thing about Kevin Smith, that irony I was talking about earlier, is that his greatest appeal has always been in his authenticity, and the more he's obsessed over trying to be the person his fans want him to be, the farther he's gotten from that honesty that made them fans in the first place.

"Cousin meets a cousin he hasn't seen in awhile at a funeral for another cousin who died in a profoundly embarrassing way" is a great story prompt. There's so much you can do with that premise. Laughter, tears, a whole range of emotions. Quick Stops #2 does none of that. It's just a bunch of reference humor.

And not even good reference humor. Like, when Randal says "Remember that time we saw Batman and then decided to become superheroes?" obviously the flashback should be this:



Anyway. I don't think I'll be picking up the rest of the miniseries.

Smith can do better than this. And I hope his efforts to be his own authentic self help him produce better art -- but he also shouldn't care so much about what guys like me think. Mainly I just hope he can be happy and healthy from here on in.

[Büge]

MONGRle

YOU KNEW HERGé WORKED FOR THE NAZIS ALL THIS TIME AND YOU SAID NOTHING???

(I knew there was some problematic shit in the Tintin stories but still)

[Mongrel]

It's a very clickbaity title and presentation. Overall he's actually giving a fair assessment and Hergé was unambiguously a collaborator, but the quick presentation oversimplifies what's a fairly complex muddle and the fact that there were and are many degrees of collaboration.

So the short version is, yes. The longer version is also yes, but not really more so than the average person.

As the video states kind of offhandedly, ultimately Hergé was someone who just wanted to make people happy; easily influenced, maybe a bit servile. This eagerness to please, this malleability did come out alright in the longest run I would say, as he spent a life constantly making mistakes but also learning from them and trying to correct them, which the video correctly presents without calling it revisionism (even though it is, but the positive, corrective sort).

You see it as a repeated pattern in both his personal history and his published work, which begins by mindlessly copying the worst racist and conservative tropes of colonial Belgium (!!!), before gradually opening to a much broader and more global understanding.

Getting into the WWII-era run specifically, Hergé actually did draw a few anti-nazi cartoons, though they were very modest. The last pre-WWII book, King Ottokar's Sceptre literally has "Musstler" as the central villain leading a balkan fascist party. On the other hand, the next book, The Shooting Star has a not-even-veiled Jewish banker caricature as the main villain, as well as opening with a horrible anti-semitic joke, though the joke was removed before its initial publication as a book even back in 1941 (presumably after someone swatted him with a rolled up newspaper or something). After the war, the recurring Dr. Mueller villain was obviously coded as a former Nazi.

It's important to remember the broader context here, as collaboration in occupied countries, especially France and Belgium was enormously widespread most of it, similarly spineless-yet-ordinary people who turned a blind eye to what was going on around them. This is pretty normal; after all if everyone always resisted occupations the heroes who did would not be remarkable as such. The biggest fact left out of the video is that any non-collaborationist Belgians who didn't cooperate were banned from publishing, so going neutral was an entirely self-serving decision to allowing him to keep publishing. Which is still something morally reprehensible! But not quite the same as directly working for fascists.

As the video itself states Hergé never joined any fascist parties or groups, write polemics, or did any actual propaganda work (in fact it fails to mention that pre-war, Hergé was in a legal and personal dispute with that Leon Degrelle, the leader of the Belgian Rex fascist party after Degrelle had used a bunch of Hergé cartoon images in actual fascist publications without permission). Most critically, there's obviously nothing in the WWII-era stories which mentions Nazis or supports them in any way; they are mere distraction, which is why this probably comes as a surprise in the first place! So it goes; the stories survived and the newspaper didn't.

Now of course he could have had the courage of conviction and simply refused to publish, and other creators were right to be mad at Hergé for not having had those, but basically the failure was not having ANY courage or convictions, rather than being an actual fascist.

I guess would say he always managed to be of his times, without ever having the vision or wisdom to be ahead of his times. He was simply a disappointingly ordinary man with a particular talent for drawing and telling stories. While he did have a modest redemptive arc, it was no more or no less than any other ordinary low-grade collaborator.

---------------------------

The funny part is there's a bunch of even more clickbaity stuff the video author didn't use at all which longtime Tintin readers are well aware of. The first is a quote from Hergé's somewhat meek apology after the war where he fully admits that there was a time when he mistakenly thought Fascism was just the way the world was going to go, that he took it it, as others had, as the inevitable response to the political chaos in Europe in the 30's. The second is any of the notorious images of Tintin in a Nazi uniform, which are actually from a postwar childrens' collectible card series of planes and other vehicles from all the wartime nations, with each image featuring a drawing of Tintin in a matching uniform (so there are of course British, American, etc. Tintin images as well), which has provided our latter-day internet with a font of meme images of Evil Tintin.