On Friday I was back behind the Golden EIB Microphone on America's Number One radio show. (You can find a few moments from my guest-hosting stint here.) We were preoccupied, as apparently we will be well past Thanksgiving, by the third Broward County hand count of the fifth Palm Beach machine count, or whatever rubbish we're up to now. But I also mentioned, towards the end of the show, my ambivalent feelings about Stan Lee, the phenomenally successful Marvel Comics impresario who died a few days ago at the age of 95. Meeting him was one of the great moments of my life. He looked dapper and tanned, fabulous and ageless, as he always did, and it was a delightful and unexpected encounter ...save that I was wandering through the 2000 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles.
"You're a Democrat!" I said, aghast.
"Are you kidding?" he beamed.
I should have known. Stan's comic books (The Avengers, The Amazing Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, The Mighty Thor) were "inclusive" and "diverse" and "multicultural" long before the terms ever occurred to any politicians. The X-Men were especially ahead of the game: they were mutants, evolutionary quirks who found themselves persecuted because they were "different". Stan had been working at what became Marvel Comics since 1939 but it wasn't till the Sixties that he started creating superheroes tailored for the sensibility of the age.
It took Hollywood awhile to catch up. Comic books are, as Jules Feiffer once said, "movies on paper": both forms are "motion pictures", defining character and telling stories through movement. And yet there were virtually no really good comic-book movies until film technology advanced to the point where it could capture the muscle-rippling, frame-bursting vitality of the form - "Ka-Pow!!!!"
And so Stan Lee's stable of mid-twentieth-century superheroes became the multi-billion-dollar franchises of the twenty-first century, making a fortune for Lee and his new Hollywood associates and rather less for the talented fellows who'd cranked them out every month way back when. With the exception of Spider-Man, almost all of Lee's household-name heroes were drawn by a fellow called Jack Kirby, who never enjoyed the star cameos Stan did in the Marvel movies. Kirby lived modestly in Irvine, California, and spent his days sat on "an old, straightback kitchen chair parked in front of the crummiest old drawing table you ever saw". He ought to have died the wealthiest guy in Irvine. Instead, his widow had to beseech Marvel for a modest pension sufficient to cover her mortgage, groceries and medical bills.
That's just the way it was in the comic business. The superheroes had superpowers, super costumes, super cars, super spaceships, super secret headquarters, super biceps, super chest muscles, super thighs and super calves, but they were created by guys on highly non-super pay scales - and that was true even for the fellow who was the signature look of the entire form. Until the movies CGI-ed these guys, when you pictured Captain America pounding through the streets in red-white-and-blue long underwear, or Ice Man riding a roller coaster of ice through the skies, or the guy in the pork-pie hat pointing upwards at the unseen monster about to start rampaging down Main Street, or the coed in the romance comic sitting alone in the booth when the big man on campus wanders in with the new blonde, or the Two-Gun Kid or Sgt Fury and his Howlin' Commandos, when you pictured superheroes or sci-fi, creatures or cuties, war or westerns in comic-book form, you were picturing Jack Kirby. He's the look of an entire industry. At Marvel Comics in the sixties, they gave Spider-Man to Steve Ditko, who, in contrast to Kirby's bodice-busting heroes, drew Peter Parker as an undernourished nebbish and gave the series its distinctive character. But the house rule was simple: Stan Lee wanted Kirby to draw like Kirby, Ditko to draw like Ditko, and everybody else to draw like Kirby. For a good couple of decades, everybody else did. He's what Roy Liechtenstein was appropriating when he took Kirby's style and turned it into "pop art," though Liechtenstein made more dough out of "WHAAM!" (now on display at the Tate in London) than Kirby ever made out of "WOW!" (now in a crate of junk under an antimacassar in your mom's attic).
For every superhero, there's a supervillain, and the best ones are usually the loyal ally who turns out to be playing a double-game. To Kirby's fans, the bad guy is a kid who showed up in the office of Timely Comics in the late thirties, the nephew of the company's business manager. He was a gofer and they let him do some copywriting, and, if Kirby was Captain America, the kid was kind of a Bucky, the boy sidekick. By the time Kirby returned to the company in the fifties, the kid was editor-in-chief: Stan Lee. They were a team: as the Marvel credits put it, "Smilin' Stan Lee and Jolly Jack Kirby." But Jack wasn't that jolly by the late sixties, and Stan was smilin' to the end, on all those gazillion-dollar-a-year retainers for "consulting" and cameos. As Kirby's wife Roz put it, "Tell Jack that after he finishes saving the universe again, he has to take out the trash in the kitchen."
Before Stan Lee mastered the transfer of the big WHAM! to CGI, superheroes were a specialty genre. When I was a lad, boys who were into war stories valued verisimilitude, which made it hard to get past the capes and tights on Green Arrow or Ant-Man. So, even among the male youth demographic, the superhero catered to a niche market—and a parochial one at that. One can certainly detect, as scholars do, a long cultural inheritance of Übermensch mythology underpinning the Marvel and DC universes, but putting the Übermensch in Sharpie-colored fully accessorized costumes is very American. Wolverine may have been born in northern Alberta and may have spent many years struggling, somewhat improbably, to escape the sinister clutches of his masters at the Canadian Defence Ministry, but, to the best of my knowledge, he has never been spotted flying down Yonge Street fighting for truth, justice and the Canadian way as he battles Islamophoboman, the deranged right-wing columnist whose evil powers grow stronger with every human rights complaint against him. Canada is just a place Wolverine happens to come from, not something he embodies. Back in the Seventies, Marvel introduced Captain Britain, with, first, a Britannic lion on his chest and, later, a modified Union Jack, a conscious hommage to Captain America's star-spangled pectorals. It never really worked, in part because it seems an alien cultural vernacular: the Union Jack is fine on Austin Powers' Y-fronts or Ginger Spice's knickers, but looks very foreign on the rippling chest of a superhero.
So the conventions of the genre seemed quintessentially American in their expansive confidence. Or so I thought. Now, as last summer's superheroics are succeeded by this summer's, I'm not so sure. A couple of years back, in Reason magazine, Jesse Walker mocked me for claiming to have detected Bush Doctrine subtexts in the first Spider-Man movie while entirely missing the masturbatory metaphor. Well, I saw Spidey in 2002, the day after visiting the World Trade Center site on what was the last chance to see it "as is," before the authorities closed it for redevelopment (if that's the right word for a decade of bureaucratic sclerosis). So perhaps my emotional compass was pointing elsewhere. I thought Spidey's big-screen debut made a case for Bush-style pre-emption in that "the men who killed his Uncle Ben were small-time crooks Peter could have stopped earlier but chose not to." On the other hand, apropos his uncle's famous advice to Peter Parker—"With great power comes great responsibility"—I seem to recall my National Post colleague Paul Wells defending then Prime Minister Jean Chrétien's 9/11 anniversary plea for the Americans to "be nice" to foreigners as simply a Shawinigan variation on Uncle Ben: "Wid da great power come da great responsibility."
Who's right? Me? Wells? Both? Neither? Well, it's sixteen years on, and I can't remember a thing about the movie except Kirsten Dunst's clinging shirt in one rain-sodden scene. Mr Walker is right that too many of us went looking for messages in the superheroics, and seized too eagerly on the slim pickings. As he says, the superhero genre has a "philosophical flexibility." Spider-Man himself compared biceps with Don Rumsfeld on stage as part of some Pentagon war promotion. But by January 2009 he was trading fist bumps with Barack Obama in a presidential inaugural special. Boy sidekick to Rummy, arachnid ivory to Obamessiah ebony: which is the real Spider-Man?
Er, well, there isn't a real Spider-Man, is there? And indeed in the movies, with his endless "reboots", he seems even less real than in Stan Lee's speech balloons. As I mentioned on Rush yesterday, when the superheroes got super-budgets something got lost. I think the last summer blockbuster my kids dragged me to was Avengers 7 or possibly X-Men 12. Anyway, it felt kind of weird to be watching a movie where the good guys have to figure out how to save America from the most advanced, evolved, giant-sized, invincible supervillains ever devised, and then leave the theater and return to a world where, in Afghanistan, the good guys are losing to the least super villains ever concocted - goatherds with fertilizer.
Look, I know several comrades of mine were very taken by Michael Caine's speech as Alfred the butler to Master Bruce a couple of movies back —"Some men just want to watch the world burn "—hailing it as an incisive analysis of al-Qaeda et al. But I don't think so. Marching town to town across Iraq decapitating their enemies as they go, Isis enjoyed the body count, yet, unlike the Joker, they do have an end rather than just means. The notion that they merely "want to watch the world burn" is more readily applied to your average Hollywood studio. For over a decade, the summer blockbusters have avoided saying anything about terrorism, Islam, 9/11, Bali, Beslan or Benghazi, but boy, do they like to "watch the world burn." And so they opt for explosions and fireballs and shattering glass and screaming civilians unmoored from any recognizable reality. Hence, the Age of the Superhero: the Sharpie-bright spandex boys helped the movies off an awkward hook.
Some studio vice-presidents just want to watch the world burn. So we have movies about nothing. You can discern subplot if you wish, but in the end what 99 per cent of moviegoers notice is the stuff that's not sub-: He has webbing shooting out of his fingers! He can shrink to the seize of an ant! Whoa, did you see the way he just ripped a hole in the space-time continuum? You can debate allegory and metaphor, but once upon a time you didn't have to—even with superheroes. The very first issue of Captain America showed our hero punching Hitler in the kisser right on the front cover—and look at the date: March 1941, months before the U.S. even entered the war.
As I mentioned in my introduction to The Prisoner of Zenda, my old New Criterion colleague James Bowman thinks the big-screen superheroes help to "isolate and quarantine heroism in fantasy-land." "Heroism" is what people who've been bitten by radioactive spiders do. Until that happens to you, best to steer clear. And so a world of superheroes leads remorselessly to a world without heroes. Gone now are the amateur adventurers of 19th- and 20th-century fiction, chaps who'd find themselves caught up in something, and decide to give it a go, initially because it's a ripping wheeze but also because, in some too-stiff-upper-lipped-to-say way, they understood honor required it. Now the conventional romantic hero is all but extinct, and as giants patrol the skies those of us on the ground are perforce smaller. In The Incredibles, there's a famous line aimed at the feel-good fatuities of contemporary education: when everyone's special, nobody is. The failure of storytelling in today's Hollywood teaches a different lesson: when everyone's super, no one's a hero.
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Jack made a bad move in the mid-1970's. He accepted an offer from DC to be head creative honcho and revitalize the brand. The project did not go well. He created "The New Gods" (Darkseid, Mr. Miracle and that crowd) which are still with us but most of his new characters didn't work out. He didn't have a feel for the DC universe as opposed to the Marvel mythos. Sales at DC confined to fall during his tenure and Kirby went back to Marvel. By this time it was all Stan Lee all the time. The difference nbetween the two seems to be that Lee was a hustler and promotee wko patronized comic book fans by selling a form of snobbery that theirs was a "real literary form." Kirby was primarily an artist with an artist's, as opposed to a businessman's, sensibility.
Anthony Watts needs help. Forgive highjacking (sort of) the thread, but a hero of the climate change wars needs a little backup to clear away the kryptonite. "Wattsupwiththat" website has been pushing uphill for years a dedication to the exchange of scientific ideas. Very much connected to Mark's heroic defense of free speech.
There is a surely a crossover with patrons here but if not yet aware, some of his employees were Paradise, CA residents and have been left homeless when the Camp Fire incinerated the town last week.
Consider reading his sobering posts on the situation.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/11/11/my-status-and-the-status-of-wuwt/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/11/13/update-2-wuwt-camp-fire-relief-fund/
When I was a child in 1960's Australia there were high quality comic book versions of many of the famous Occidental classical novels. It was a brilliant idea and they were excellent. There were comic book versions of many Shakespeare plays such as Hamlet; Macbeth; The Tempest; Romeo and Juliet; Twelfth Night; Much Ado About Nothing, et cetera. Also, there were many classics such as The Prisoner of Zenda; The Scarlet Pimpernel; Green Mansions, et cetera. Green Mansions stuck with me the most because it is such an unusual, fascinating but bittersweet novel.
My siblings and I loved reading them far more than the usual super hero comics because they nourished and challenged our intellect and conveyed excellent moral lessons in life.
What I liked most about them was that they gave a condensed overview of the story in visual form, that children could understand, that then piqued our curiosity to read those books. This was especially helpful with understanding the Shakespeare plays.
I do not remember who was the publisher of these comics and have not seen them since and, unfortunately, I did not keep any from my childhood which I really regret.
Now I know why the owner of a used bookstore and comic shop I regularly frequent (more for the books than comics) dismissed Stan Lee and said "Jack Kirby made Marvel Comics".
I'm always amused every summer when lazy political columnists do the obligatory finding of political subtexts and themes in the latest blockbuster movie. (Not you, Mr. Steyn. You write about movies a lot and old ones at that.)
The ideological confusion of political commentators about comic book movies amuses me. Leftists, alleged egalitarians, celebrate an aristocracy of demigods whose powers derive from accident -- mutation, inheritance, radioactivity.
Conservatives celebrated The Incredibles which, while it may have acknowledged the folly of egalitarianism, also had as its villain a character who really did bootstrap himself into competence through hard work. The heroes were the lucky freaks of nature. (There are a few mainstream comic book characters who did that -- the vigilante Punisher comes to mind -- but in my limited knowledge, it's rare.)
Amusingly, authorial intent sometimes gets subverted by popular reaction. British comics publisher 2000AD's Judge Dredd started out as a Dirty-Harryish figure acting as judge, jury, and executioner with an unflinching regard for the letter of the law in a future America. The creators thought him a comment on American fascism. The audience loved him and those qualities.
"Hero" seems an overused word these days. The last movies I can recall see with what I regard as heroes would be Blackhawk Down and Flight 93 -- ordinary men not impulsively putting themselves in danger but risking their lives with deliberation in an effort they knew was likely to fail.
I feel like an alien from another planet reading Marks article. I could not comprehend what is he talking about. The term superheroes are completely strange to me. Maybe it is because I was born just before the inception of WW2 in Europe and I have lived to witness both heroism and cowardice, good and evil of real humans and not of imaginary characters. I lived in the time when movie industry was producing best-selling movies describing actions and events of humans and not of make believe superhumans. Those were times before the invention of political correctness, when science fiction was not presented as science, before politicians started masquerading as scientists, when documentary movies were presenting the truth and not used as a tool to promote fraudulent theories.
I wonder if the alternate universe that the super heroes and science fiction movies depict have not raised generations of people in the "Democratic" West that cannot adapt to the real world and need to be sheltered in safe spaces or need drugs to escape reality. They also need to be warned that what is presented might be too graphic to their sensitivities or are prevented from seeing it by having it blanked out on TV or even blocked completely in the social media by algorithms. To bring it to the extreme anyone that tries to bring to light what is happening in the real world by circumventing the methods that are in place to block it is being prosecuted as Marie LaPen in France that posted a picture of ISIS atrocities to counter accusation that her party is same as ISIS. That is also the reason that anyone that tries to bring the real world to the attention of the people is labeled as Hitler, racist, Nazi, etc. and is blacklisted, muzzled, forced into silence for the inexcusable sin of trying to bring light to a population that is forced to live in the darkness of alternate reality. The only problem with this is that the "Democratic" West faces powerful opponents that want none of the nonsense of alternate reality and are not scared by the real world, that encounter will not end well for the "Democratic" West.
Not a fan of the superhero genre, but I do notice that many "non-supernatural" movies seem to be copying the superhero films. I'm thinking of the "Taken" and "Equalizer" series. These are essentially superhero comics on film.
As a lifelong fan of the superhero genre in basically every medium, I have never agreed with Mark about the merits of the genre. I've enjoyed a great deal of the superhero fiction of the last ten years, and been thrilled that those whiz-bang stories could finally get the budget to fit the visuals they'd always had in my imagination. And no matter what Mark or James Bowman say, to me, the whole appeal of superheroes as a child was in the inspiration they gave, to be smarter, or more fit, or more morally centered than I was. Sure, I wasn't going to be running faster than a speeding bullet...but if Superman could do that, then surely I could at least run a mile without stopping. And for that matter, I liked the unpowered heroes just as much as the powered ones; the scale of the fight wasn't really the determining factor in the scale of the inspiration.
But I have to admit that my defense of the genre has been less and less reflexive over the past two years. The Marvel films are still mostly good (Ant-Man and the Wasp, of all movies, was the best movie about fatherhood I've seen in a while), but DC's entire TV lineup went from solidly enjoyable to fully leftist and terrible in the course of about a season and a half, and their movies have gone way downhill, too. Marvel's shows on Netflix, likewise; Daredevil's first two seasons even portrayed Catholicism in a distinctly positive light, but the third season finally gave in to the urge to turn the previously-fantastic villain into an explicit parody of the president, and to have Daredevil decide to reject his faith. I wouldn't be surprised at all if there's a market collapse of the genre within the next five years, no matter how much I might wish otherwise.
But I'm glad we have at least one bit of common ground: we are both fans of the Scarlet Pimpernel, the first of the modern superheroes. I've been quite enjoying your reading of the novel thus far.
There's another reason for lack of non-super heroes. This isn't happening in a vacuum. The publishing industry actively discriminates. Shut out of big house publishing, lots of authors tried ebook publishing only to be labeled as 'conservative' which is a bucket of chum to the piranha mob to create bad reviews, install shadow banning and engineer outright theft. The big search engines easily shift book covers on searches from 'safe' to 'unsafe' on only one mischief down-check, with absolutely zero appeals process, less transparent then government, which is saying a lot. This means that a book written for a general audience is never found on a normal search, wrongly bumped to a category the target audience will never try, and thus never see.
Advice to any dreamy-eyed writer, do not take the house suggestion of free download promotions - people get the books for free then set up sites to hand them out like candy, destroying sales. The house companies (that big one) shrug and say they can't do anything. They managed to delete a kid's version of 1984, but can't find a person who's dumping the download off them with their name and publishing ID of an author's book - despite that on each unauthorized giveaway they also lose money? They won't change blatantly provable gratuitous bad rankings - unless one is a certain HR with a C and then they are quick to erase the down-grading one stars. They more than don't care, they enable the harassment. Many good authors have quit, given up.
So a lot of new fiction stories that could easily compete with all this have been deep-sixed by the system that invited them in - just to ruin potentially competing authors it seems. Outside the elite publishing clique that finances badly-written yet psychologically corrupting books of another teen vampire blood-drinking porn and supernatural drivel, the author more rooted in reality has to self-fund, pay upfront to print paper books and sell them while shut out of the mass market exposure. It's not just what they tell us, it's also what they actively hide from us.
I would rather watch Casablanca again for the 25th time than watch the latest Marvel CGI extravaganza for the first time. Neither Rick nor Louis are heroes much less super heroes. They are both flawed men who when faced with extraordinary circumstances decide to stand up and do what is right even though it could likely cost them their lives. They then walk off together in "the beginning of a beautiful friendship" determined to do their small part to save the world.
The point that was originally made by the EIB caller in Friday afternoon was that the "Individual Citizens" in the "SuperHeroes" movies are simply tiny insect-like creatures located far, far, far below The Real Action. What better definition of Marxism? They were "Dirty Little Nuthins", who had no voice in their own future.
In Fact, the "superhero" movies are targeted at children aged 8-12. Any adult who finds "deeper meaning" in this CGI-trash really MUST reign in their imagination.
[P.S. I have an MA in Radio-TV-Film from a Top-10 program.The last movie that I attended in a theater was "Schindler's List". There may have been other movies since then that were worth viewing, but the overall "Theater" and "Movie" experience were too disgusting to bother with yet another idiotic waste of my time. Just watch TCM...]
Concerning the use of the Union Jack in heroic contexts, I recall vividly its being referenced in a scene of the novel "Flash for Freedom!" Flashy's companion, a runaway slave in the US in 1849, is striving to reach Canada, where the Union Jack represents to her the freedom that is impossible in the country of her birth. Canada's government, of course, chose to rid itself of that symbol in 1965.
But returning to your column's reference to Miss Halliwell's Union Jack-emblazoned underwear: I suspect you have confused her famous Union Jack dress with something more intimate.
"Strange, that you should be an Englishman ..... Dat's the flag o'freedom, chilluns, dat's de ole flag ..... Whoever stands on British soil shall be forever free."
Canada's a bit downplayed, somehow.
Remember that the ludicrous George Randolph turned up in Vermont ...
Sorry to disagree with some of the bashing of fantasy stories in comics, books and movies. I work as an environmental attorney, and my company dels with real radioactive spiders and bats as we clean up hundreds of square miles of look and contaminated during the production of plutonium for the Manhattan Project and the Cold War. Like many of my scientist and engineer colleagues, I read a lot of science books in my spare time, along with history, but we all grew up on stories by Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke and the visualization of space exploration and galactic empires and robots that came from Star Trek, Star Wars, and 2001. It did not distance us from reality, but prepared us for the modern world, with all the varieties of societies considered in those stories.
"It did not distance us from reality, but prepared us for the modern world, with all the varieties of societies considered in those stories."
I agree, and I'd argue that science fiction is an excellent way of training people to think like scientists. Not because they're going to work with faster-than-light travel, or force fields, or any of that - but because any decent sci-fi story has its own internal rules about the way the universe works that the reader is expected to piece together, and learning to piece together those rules from clues is what scientists do.
Mark, you are my superhero!
Just watched "12 Strong"... real men, real heroes.
WHAM!!!!
Agree. absolutement.
1) There are so many instances of one person becoming crazy rich while others who did the lion's share of the work got nothing. How hard was it to share with the team that built the foundation? As if talent is only to steal.
2) Also have been more and more convinced that these movies are a flattery (a form of hatred - a pretty lie) to the audience, a catharsis. At least the comic book visuals are obviously artwork - the CG versions create a deceiving allusion.
What good purpose does it serve to encourage young people to waste their hours dreaming of the impossible - being 'WHAM' hit by a subatomic particle to be transformed into a special creature instead of learning that a well-rounded, competent adult requires through childhood and youth all sorts of daily life experiences, physical stability from being active, solid skills training and practice through putting them to use in productive ventures? A couple of movies of this type is one thing, but this completely dominates cinema and TV now; a great audience soothed living vicariously through Impossible Man.
This was a good essay for me to read now just before Thanksgiving. My young brother was into drawing tiny soldiers in battle scenes, changing 45s, collecting baseball cards and many of Stan Lee's superhero comics turned up as they were traded around the neighborhood. I was into anything if it was happening and happening outdoors. Reading about Stan Lee brings to mind all the drastic changes since the fifties and sixties and all of the people behind the scenes who never get much recognition and of course those who gave something to the world and the country to remember them by and which we can still appreciate, today. They all contributed something to the enriched lives we enjoy now.
We're going through a pretty rough patch now in our countries and our societies seem to be losing their hold on what binds us as freedom lovers, but the heroes are still among us. We hear about their everyday acts of heroism. I'm going to try to stay positive by hanging onto the people who I perceive as the real heroes, both public and in my personal experiences and travels. There are good young people around who are still trying to shine brightly. I know they want a good world and a good life for their futures, too. How they carry that torch will ultimately be up to them.
Happy Thanksgiving to all here in the club and thinking to join the ranks of Mark Steyn membership. This has been a deeply edifying experience reading and learning about all that Mark and fellow members offer up on a near daily basis. I appreciate you each one.
"We hear about their everyday acts of heroism. I'm going to try to stay positive by hanging onto the people who I perceive as the real heroes, both public and in my personal experiences and travels. There are good young people around who are still trying to shine brightly. I know they want a good world and a good life for their futures, too. How they carry that torch will ultimately be up to them."
Wonderful, inspiring and obviously very heartfelt sentiments, Fran.
Heroism isn't necessarily bold and explicit, and it can be "everyday", as you point out. But the fake heroism of virtue-signalling is so prevalent now that we often don't notice (or can't identify) the honourable, decent, old-fashioned acts by individuals who don't advertise their conduct. Likewise, the admirable behaviour of individuals who stand up to enormous pressures and risk by speaking the truth and refusing to submit, even in relation to everyday matters; that's real courage.
Those on the left (and fellow travellers) have succeeded in obscuring the truth, and even the very concept of "doing the right thing" as it was universally understood. Approved victims and virtue-signallers are now touted as "heroes".
In his obituary for Karol Wojtyla (2005), Mark wrote: "It requires tremendous will to cling to the splendour of truth when the default mode of the era is to blur and evade."
How fortunate we are to have the self-described "effete foreigner" to remind us of rare but very real modern-day heroism; he's a shining example of it. And it's a great privilege to be a member his Club.
The "effete foreigner"! How we love the way he shows us the way, day after day, Kate. I listened to the show Friday and thought how that takes courage to do three hours live on The Rush Limbaugh Show, guest hosting for the most highly trained broadcaster in the country. Some caller even said he waited thirty years to get on and Mark replied about what a let down it must be to wait all those years and finally get through, and what a clunker, you get a foreigner. The caller said it was okay because (something, hmm) about wanting to get a foreigner's opinion. It was all good-natured but genuinely and spontaneously fresh. It's all about throwing away the script. That's what I love about talk radio, completely non-scripted, loose and free flowing. Well, that's if one knows what one is doing.
"It's all about throwing away the script." Indeed! The poetry recitations are sublime, but his banter is the best! Love the Rush-guest-host anecdote.
Happy Thanksgiving, Fran.
Hollywood has deputized itself as superhero, saving the planet from nonexistent threats like, as Mark said yesterday on Rush, the civilization that built the modern world. Spidey-studio is using its powers of storytelling to create a webbing of an artificial world like The Truman Show. Based on fear and lies, like Truman, people are afraid to leave it.
It's the reverse of a superhero universe. Instead of being able to put a fist to the sky and circle the earth, the sky is oppressively falling toward the audience. The horizons of the audience have shrunk. Sitting still and being something like Climate Changeman has been redefined as hero.
Spielberg's recent Ready Player One is a visual metaphor for virtual reality, trumping reality. The cities and living conditions are trashed, but unnoticed; eclipsed through virtual reality goggles. Ersatz reality is now reality for many who have grown up on the carefully cultivated web of lies. A former Muslim, who is now a Christian apologist, called Abdu Murray talks to college students, some of whom, he says, have gone beyond postmodernism and live in "post-truth". There the postmodernist argument about truth being absolute or relative is moot. They know something is untrue, but don't care.
Orwell said the first duty of intelligent men was to state the obvious. Decades later, Os Guinness titled his book against postmodernism Time for Truth. The same, simple remedy is needed in super-quantities today: truth.
In the old days, the TV and movies were filled with ordinaryish heroes. Now if a chap rushes into a burning house to rescue a neighbour, the first thing the interviewer draws out is the expression, "I'm no hero," which is a noble sentiment, but in fact it's an admission that only approved persons are allowed to wear the hero mantle.
After 911, all first responders were automatically deemed to be heroes in perpetuity. Veterans of the wars seem to have lost ground in that exchange. And don't forget the entertainers, those freakish folk who can't get by on one award ceremony per year, who require multiple awards shows and fawning acknowledge their self-anointed super-star (or is it really super hero?) status in society.
I'll take Islamophoboman fighting his archrival Hockey-Stick Mann any day.
I never read superhero comics and have not seen any of the superhero movies so I slogged through this because I was looking for something non-newsy to read for a few minutes. Fair enough piece with some interesting history, between the rants, but artists don't draw and color with Sharpies. Nitpicking, perhaps, but Sharpies were mentioned more than once. Copic, Ohuhu or even Primsacolor, but no serious artist is using a Sharpie, because they are the lowest-end as far as quality. Maybe Kirby did use Sharpies, how would I know? But for myself as an amateur artist, newly-aspiring cartoonist and part-time art student, no way would I use Sharpies for anything other than marking the contents and date on food items destined for the freezer.
Just saying.
Mark replies:
Actually, comic-book illustrators don't do their own coloring, PK. That's a separate job - for "colorists", which these days is done on computers. The Sharpie reference is not meant to imply use of the actual tool, but to the look of the superheroes in cheap four-color printing - see Captain America or Captain Marvel circa 1943.
I get your point now, it was a shot at the comics being cheap from a color perspective and I totally missed that.
It's true Mark, professional comic illustrators have colorists. We amateurs don't as it is cost-prohibitive. Learning how to color the strips or single-panels is a skill to be acquired as part of the refining development of the characters and sets, both physical images and personas. I've read several books by professional cartoonists and I'm only on my second class at art school, so I am definitely a rank amateur but the authors and the instructors make it very clear that the color is a crucial part of the comic and characters and must be defined by the original artist, even if and when it is handed off. Definitely computers are used by the pros, but computers are not Sharpies either. ;^)
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I have also seen the group Superhero movies with my kids and asked them, as we were leaving the theater, to summarize the plot for me; they can't do it. They can recount individual scenes, but not the overall story. The most deplorable thing about these movies is that they are weak on writing because if you have super powers, there are no problems you can't fix by using them. Everything about them is weak; plot, dialogue, theme, dilemma, story arc, ending... And yet, they are successful. Fully grown adult men love these movies, which is incredible! Adults have withdrawn in to fantasy. Is there anything more pathetic than adult men at comic book conventions?
Tom, I like to ask people what book they are currently reading. 30% say "I hate to read", 65% some fantasy of fiction title. It seems from my informal survey that very few people are putting anything valuable in their heads.
I know, I get that all the time, too. "I hate to read" and "I'm not a math person." I struggle not to say "Jeez, then what are you good at other than eating?" But sometimes I'll mumble "People who don't read have no advantage over people who can't read," but that doesn't win many friends either, so I just shut up about it. If people want to relax their way to death on the skids greased by fantasy stories, who am I to object? It has come up with my kids that the biggest competitive weapon they have in life is other people's lameness. Not very inspiring, I know, but true. Lame-O Man rules in most place.
"Islamophoboman" had me cracking up, especially as I'm currently reading Lights Out. Keep up the good work Mark!
I concur. However, I worry some will find the term offensively hobophobic.
Continuing on. The closest thing to a "hero" that we used to watch like in campy movies like Rambo, Rocky, Delta Force, have been replaced with more super-spy flicks. Poor attempts to recreate the magic and genius of the iconic James Bond films. Imagine if James Bond never existed and it was sold as a concept in today's world. No chance a male chauvinistic imperialist who views women as pieces of meat would ever be accepted. I wonder if you'd ever read one of the Bond novels with you doing the music. I bet the price to do it would be high.
My spouse saw the spy movie Atomic Blonde with Charlize Theron on a plane a while ago. I heard the disgust in the recap of scenes but nothing of the overall plot. Most notable was one scene in which she took on some 30 Russian spies attacking her with various weapons and bested/killed/maimed them all, without any firearm in her possession. Laughable on several levels.
"A feminist movie then?" I asked. "Or perhaps a comic book movie?"
"At any rate, it was awful," was the reply.
In the PC world that we live in, we don't endorse heroes out of fear of offending certain groups. We used to have the hero be idolized in the early days of the silver screen. Now they have to be politically correct. If you make a pro-American movie involving the military, the enemy has to be Russia because Russia is the enemy. We can't make it against any Islamic terror group because it may provoke hostility and offend Muslims.
Stan Lee, among other comic writers in other companies, introduced polarizing issues that happen in real life, often causing fans to despise the creators for making the comics political, making their heroes unlikable, and dividing the fan base. It's things like this that have made comics or rather entertainment what it is today. No longer can you enjoy a good vs evil battle anymore. If it doesn't involve some sort of underlying message about the left's ideology, it's shunned and demonized as right wing propaganda.
Now it's close to the holidays. The days that even the left has made political. I loved Thanksgiving, Christmas, and even Easter as a kid. We used to celebrate these holidays with pride and joy, now they're insensitive to the feelings of Muslims and are endorsements to white supremacy. Do we even bother to celebrate anything anymore that isn't approved by the PC police?