Archive for Race Issues

Fear of a Black Planet

SuperBlack

Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes by Adilifu Nama

Hey, it’s nonfiction time! I picked this one up a few weeks back and thought it was pretty fun — or as close as academic pop culture analysis gets to fun.

In case y’all haven’t noticed before, comic book superheroes tend to be an awfully pink bunch of people. Plenty of people wish that were different, and that comics more closely resembled our multicultural society… and unfortunately, a lot of other people seem to wish that comics were even more white than they are now. So it’s nice to see that someone has put together a history of black superheroes and how they’ve affected our culture.

The book starts out focusing on comics’ earliest attempts to address racial injustice, particularly in Dennis O’Neil’s and Neal Adams’ “Green Lantern/Green Arrow” series. From there, it’s on to the first important black superheroes — Luke Cage, the Black Panther, John Stewart, Black Lightning, and the Falcon. And Nama is very careful to note how they fit in with the comic companies and within pop culture — John Stewart as an outgrowth of O’Neil’s political-themed comics and Black Lightning as the first African-American hero at DC to get his own title; Luke Cage and Black Panther as reactions to blaxploitation films, and the Falcon as possibly the most important black hero — he shared co-billing with Captain America, got serious stories about race relations into the comics, and was the first black superhero to be able to fly.

There are, of course, plenty of other characters discussed and analyzed, as well as how they influenced and were influenced by pop culture, politics, and current events. There’s a whole chapter on black superheroes on film — but far more interesting is the lengthy discussion of the 1970s blaxploitation flicks — and how they often made the most sense when you thought of them, not as private eye or crime films, but as early superhero movies.

Verdict: Thumbs up. It’s a solid and deeply interesting piece of analysis. This is the kind of material that gets short shrift in a lot of comics histories — usually confined to a few pages of the single “Oh yeah, here are the prominent black, Hispanic, and female characters of the ’60s and ’70s” chapter.

This is all really pretty entertaining stuff — the first chapter or two are very heavy on the academic language, and I was initially worried it’d be pretty dry and inaccessible. But once the book hits its rhythm, it really pulls you along. It’s a good, fast read, and it’s hard to put down.

If I’ve got a complaint about this book, it’d be that there are some really great characters who get very little to no attention. Milestone’s comics in the ’90s are discussed in only a couple of paragraphs — and dismissed as unimportant. Now I know — anecdotes aren’t data, but I’m a member of a Milestone Media fan page on Facebook, and everyone there sees Milestone as not just important historically, but inspirational as well — there are members there who loved Milestone’s books so much, they decided to create their own comics. That’s not an unimportant comics publisher — that’s a publisher that changed things.

Still, you got any interest in comics, history, diversity, and racial politics? You’re going to want to pick this one up.

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Alex Summers: Self-Hating Mutant

I reviewed the latest issue of “Uncanny Avengers” on Friday. And not too long after I posted it, there was this little controversy that hit the ‘net:

Havok-Mutant1

Havok-Mutant2

I barely noticed this when I read the issue. I remember at the time thinking, “Hmm, that’s kind of a strange attitude for someone in Havok’s position to have.” But I didn’t think of it much beyond that.

If you’ve read the link above, you’ll see some detail on why it’s such an odd thing for Havok to say. Alex Summers is a member of a minority group — namely, mutants — which in the Marvel Universe, definitely qualifies as oppressed. The government periodically tries to outlaw and imprison them and people sometimes kill mutants, all on the basis of their genetics. Sure, on the one hand, Alex just wants to be treated like any other human, which is something that every civil rights activist would agree with. But not wanting to be identified in any way as a mutant, and even considering the word “mutant” to be a slur, makes Havok look like a self-loathing mutant.

It’s been said that, as far as their political awareness goes, Charles Xavier was the equivalent of Martin Luther King, Jr., working to improve mutant rights through (mostly) peaceful means, while Magneto (and the current version of Alex’s brother, Cyclops) would be the equivalent of Malcolm X, working to advance mutantkind “by any means necessary.”

With that speech, Alex has been cast as, basically, many of the characters from TVTropes’ “Boomerang Bigot” page. If his fellow mutants don’t bust his chops over this in future issues, they’re not doing their jobs.

It probably doesn’t help that “Uncanny Avengers” has previously been criticized for being a team of white characters — and in this issue, they added a Japanese character and two more white ones. And it also doesn’t help that writer Rick Remender is reacting to criticism by unleashing his inner douchebag.

For all the complaints, however, it must be said that Marvel could’ve handled the whole thing much, much worse. DC Comics, for instance, can barely go a month without some horrific controversy where they kill off another non-white character or ladle on the embarrassing sexism when writing about their female characters. Marvel may not be perfect, but they’re closer to where they should be.

Anyway, it bugged me that this didn’t bug me more when I read the comic, but like straight white male Alex Summers, I’ve got more than my share of privilege issues that make it easy for me to overlook these things. I try to train myself not to let these things slide by me, but the big problem with privilege is that you often have no clue you’ve got it until it’s pointed out to you after the fact. The best any of us can do is try to be better people…

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Poison in the Well

Obviously, I never read the “Weird Tales” pulp magazine back in its glory days — or really, any other time, since it mostly hasn’t been published while I’ve been alive. But any fan of horror or weird fiction reveres it because it was one of the first magazines to publish authors like H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, Clark Ashton Smith, Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Manly Wade Wellman, Theodore Sturgeon, C.L. Moore, and many others. It’s been revived periodically, mostly because the “Weird Tales” name and logo still carry a lot of weight for fantasy and horror fans, but the revivals have only rarely been successful or long-lasting.

The latest incarnation of the magazine seems to have screwed things up badly. It seems that the current publisher decided that the magazine’s connection to the past would be to the poisonous racism held by the pulp writers in the ’20s and ’30s…

Victoria Foyt’s self-published novel Revealing Eden: Save the Pearls Part One is set in a dystopian future where solar radiation means the Coals (with dark skin) can survive better than the fair-skinned Pearls. Pearls cover their white skin with dark make-up, and the black love interest of the 17-year-old white heroine Eden – shown in blackface make-up on the front cover and in promotional videos – is described as a “powerful, beastly man”. At one point, Foyt writes: “Eden flinched. One of them was touching her. White-hot light exploded in her head. Before she knew it, she blurted out an incendiary racial slur. ‘Get your hands off of me, you damn Coal!’”

The novel has been the subject of widespread attacks across the internet, with readers criticising it as “incredibly racist to pretty much every reader. Especially readers of colour”, and as a “white supremacist fantasy”. “The coals/pearls contrast is itself offensive: after all, coal is dirty and cheap, whereas pearls are beautiful and valuable,” wrote one blogger. Some readers have said they are considering boycotting the magazine.

Foyt, who self-published Revealing Eden but has previously been published by HarperCollins, has defended herself on Facebook and in blog posts, saying that she “abhor[s] racism”, that the book has received many positive reviews, and “if you ask if all these reviewers are white then consider that you have a racist point of view”.

Here’s some more info from the previous publisher and from an author whose first story was published in “Weird Tales.”

Obviously, it’s really sad to see a magazine with the pedigree of “Weird Tales” lower itself to publishing white-supremacist screeds, and to support them by publishing editorials claiming it isn’t racist, especially when it’s clear to everyone that the editor wrote it strictly as a cynical Cover-Your-Ass maneuver.

But it’s also part of an ongoing problem we’ve seen in the geek community — particularly in comics and gaming. Most of the recent controversies have been tied to the sexism and homophobia in the comics and gaming worlds, but the only reason that racism isn’t more noticeable is because the racism hasn’t been nearly as blatant as the sexism or homophobia.

The good news is, I think, that opposition to all the -isms in geek hobbies — sexism, racism, and homophobia in particular — is growing and becoming more vocal. It used to be that this kind of garbage was just accepted, but it isn’t anymore. Wanna publish a racist story in your magazine? Guess what — you’re going to get metric tons of angry letters about it. Wanna put rape fantasies in a Tomb Raider game? You’re going to get a ton of bad publicity about it. Wanna promote sexism in your comics? You’re going to be met at every convention by people who will call you out about it.

Doesn’t mean the struggle’s over — the struggle’s probably never over. It’s still important for people like us who hate getting our geekery mixed up with racism, sexism, homophobia, and other hatemongeries to keep speaking against hate. But from a business perspective, it’s becoming more clear all the time that the way to success means you have to avoid anything that’ll make you look like a hater. It’s a big, diverse marketplace out there, and you can’t make much money by excluding potential customers.

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Because You Can’t Spell “Douche” Without “DC”

So DC has solicits up for their September comics, including their new zero issues. And one of them is the Green Lantern comic pictured above, with the new, so-far unnamed Green Lantern.

And yes, that looks like a new African-American Green Lantern wearing a ski mask and waving a gun around. Oh, Geoff Johns, your casual racism is why everyone must love you so.

A few hours after that image was made public, DC said, whoa, wait a minute, he’s not black, he’s actually Muslim.

So he’s still a marginalized and often despised minority wearing a ski mask and waving a gun around. Also, observant Muslims don’t have tattoos, like this guy sports on his arm. And he still looks black. So no matter what, it’s still insulting and racist!

Some days, I don’t know whether the people running DC are just unusually oblivious racists (and sexists) or if they think trolling their readers and trying to get people to hate them is smart marketing. “Hey, everyone’s talking about us! Success!” Too bad your comics don’t sell so well, guys.

Now how long before DC renames their “Stormwatch” comic to “Stormfront”…?

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Superman Smashes the Klan!

Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan by Rick Bowers

I picked up this book a few weeks back, and I wasn’t expecting a lot — I know Scholastic Books publishes a lot of good stuff now, but when I grew up, it was strictly for kids’ books — and not particularly good kids’ books either. But I ended up liking what I read here.

This is basically a history book, with its initial focus on the history of Superman, from the early youths of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, through their initial failures in the comics biz, to the unstoppable success of the Man of Steel, and clear through the way Siegel and Shuster got screwed out of their rights to the character. There’s quite a lot of info about the years when “The Adventures of Superman” was one of the most successful programs on the radio, earning millions of dollars for his advertisers and enthralling legions of fans, both kids and adults.

The book’s other focus is a fairly detailed and warts-and-all history of the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi organizations, and hate groups in 19th and early 20th centuries. And a lot of this is stuff that was definitely never taught to me when I was in school, mainly because textbooks have always seemed to put more emphasis on teaching kids the national legends instead of the actual facts. There were times when the KKK and pro-Nazi groups had a lot of political power — and a lot of times when they were mostly devoted to fleecing their members of every dime they could get. And a lot of the time, there were a vast number of people, ranging from everyday citizens to federal officers to Southern newspaper editors, who hated the stuffing out of the Klan.

And it all comes together after World War II when the advertising execs for Kelloggs — who also managed the Superman radio show — decided they wanted to try pointing the power of Superman at the nation’s social ills, particularly racism and intolerance. And what was interesting to me was that the radio producers didn’t just bang out some scripts for Superman to fight some Nazis — they did intense research on how to educate children about racism, and they interviewed people about what the Klan was like behind the white hoods. One of their interviewees was a man named Stetson Kennedy, a publicity-hungry Southerner with a serious mad-on against the Klan — he heroically infiltrated the organization while simultaneously campaigning publicly against it.

And what they came up with were a couple of storyarcs that infuriated the KKK and the rest of the nation’s racists. And that by itself is a pretty awesome victory.

Verdict: Thumbs up. It’s well-written, it’s detailed, it’s entertaining, and it’s filled with really interesting characters, including Siegel, Shuster, Stetson Kennedy, radio producer Robert Maxwell, education consultant Josette Frank, and even several of the Klan’s leaders, who generally come across as either charismatic lunatics or craven greedheads.

There were a couple of things that I knew already, being a longtime comic fan — but it was still nice to see them pointed out in a book designed for younger readers who probably aren’t as familiar with the history of Superman. The first was that in Superman’s earliest appearances, he was a very, very political guy — and he definitely came across as a liberal, since most of his opponents were greedy politicians, crooks, and factory owners who were making things hard for the common man. The second reminder — there were a huge number of Jewish people who had a hand in Superman’s success, including Siegel, Shuster, their publishers, and even their radio producer — no wonder they were so interested in putting the smackdown on the nation’s hatemongers!

I was pretty impressed that this book didn’t sugar-coat very much. These days, you read the newspapers and watch the news shows, and they’re absolutely devoted to never saying whether any group is right or wrong. If they mention the Klan these days, they definitely never say that they’re evil racist scumbags — that wouldn’t be properly Broderian or moderate — and they might offend some lunatic on hate radio. Rick Bowers really doesn’t do things that way — Superman’s the good guy, the Klan are the bad guys, and that’s really all there is to it. He also doesn’t mince many words about how Siegel and Shuster got mistreated after DC got its claws on Superman, and that’s pretty refreshing, too.

So there’s Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan by Rick Bowers. I liked it — go pick it up.

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Torching the Protocols

The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion

I found this a couple weeks ago and was actually really excited to get it. I’d heard that Will Eisner was working on this a few years before he died in 2005, but I’d never managed to find this in stores and assumed it was out of print by now — I was glad to see I was mistaken.

Basically, Eisner — one of the most important creators in the history of comics, creator of “The Spirit,” creator of what’s considered the first graphic novel — decided a few decades back that he wanted to research and write a history of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” If you’re fortunate enough not to be aware of that, it’s a very old anti-semitic hoax claiming to represent a ploy by Jews to take over the world.

Eisner starts his story all the way back in 1848, with a French writer named Maurice Joly, a critic of Napoleon III. Joly wrote a book called “The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu,” a coded, over-the-top denunciation of Napoleon III as a diabolical dictator who intended all manner of cartoonish evil for France and the rest of the world. Joly’s book was mostly forgotten until 1894, when members of the Russian secret police resurrected it in a bid to influence Tsar Nicholas II. Some creative rewriting of Joly’s book, and the focus was changed from Napoleon III to the ever-popular scapegoats in the Jewish population.

And a couple decades later, Hitler got his rotten hands on it. And from there, it was off to the races.

Artistically, I think this has Eisner near the top of his game, which is pretty awesome, considering that he finished it only a few months before his death. Lots of wonderfully expressive faces and postures — most of the work here looks just as fantastic as anything he ever did on “The Spirit.” It’s a bit of a shock at times to see how much Eisner uses really insulting caricature — one of the characters is depicted as a dead ringer for Rasputin — but on the other hand, a lot of the characters depicted were responsible for the most disgustingly hate-filled rhetoric on the planet, and it’s a bit hard to work up much sympathy for them. So they’re depicted as ugly, barely human cartoons? Well, turn-about is fair play.

On the other hand, there’s a lot less art than you’d probably expect. The entire book is very text-heavy. Page and pages are devoted to side-by-side comparisons of Joly’s “Dialogue in Hell” and the Protocols, along with vast amounts of background and analysis. Eisner was clearly thinking of this less as a comic book and more as a simple history book with some illustrations. But if you’re expecting a fast, cartoon-filled read, you’re not going to get it — reading the whole thing is a bit of a slog.

One of the interesting — and I suppose, depressing — elements of the tale is how frequently the Protocols get debunked, always in high profile exposes in prominent publications and by powerful organizations — and every time, the debunkers allow themselves their moment of triumph and think, “Surely, this is the end of the Protocols. No one will ever believe it now.” And every time, the damned Protocols just keep on going and going. Eisner was at least under no illusions about what effect his graphic novel would have on the people who wanted to believe lies. In other words, don’t get this expecting a happy, uplifting ending — hate always finds a way forward, unfortunately.

Verdict: Thumbs up. But with some reservations. When I said it was a slog to get through, I mean, seriously, it was a major slog to get through. The side-by-side comparison, for example, while certainly informative, ran the narrative straight into a brick wall. This is less a graphic novel and more a graphic historical narrative.

Nevertheless, it’s still worth reading. It may be a slog to read as a comic book, but it’s much quicker to read than a full-length history of the Protocols would be — and it’s clear that Eisner meant it to be that way. He didn’t mean this to be the be-all-and-end-all of Protocol histories — he knew that more complete books had already been published and more would eventually follow. So this was, I think, always meant to be more of a fast summary of events — enough to quickly refute the Protocols and get other readers interested in more of the history (the book includes a nice bibliography).

And again, you get some really outstanding Will Eisner artwork. So you get to enjoy awesome comic art and strike a blow against haters and Nazis at the same time. Sounds like more than enough reason to pick it up…

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The Wrong Stuff

The New Avengers #6

Well, I didn’t like this one at all.

Wolverine has been mystically granted the full power of all the Avengers so he can fight Agamotto, which he does, for page after page after page. Agamotto is a shapshifter, so he never looks the same twice, which was probably the only way to make Glowing-Wolverine-fighting-magician-on-pages-with-no-backgrounds at all interesting. The rest of the Avengers mostly sit around in a magic circle and chit-chat about what’s going on. Dr. Voodoo’s long-deceased brother Daniel is in Agamotto’s realm and tries to help out, and Voodoo freaks out, goes charging into the fight, and sacrifices himself to destroy Agamotto.

Ladies and gentlemen, Brian Michael Bendis, writer of “The New Avengers” and way, way too many of Marvel’s books, just killed the black guy so he could move Dr. Strange back into the Sorcerer Supreme slot. And that’s about 18 months after Bendis himself moved Dr. Voodoo into that same position. What was the point? Bendis hadn’t gotten to kill a random character in too long? Bendis decided he’d be more edgy and exxxxtreme if he killed a black character for no reason?


(Pictured: Brian Michael Bendis, unretouched photo)

On top of that, on the last page, Daimon Hellstrom goes out and scolds a bunch of random New Yorkers because they weren’t genuflecting low enough to the Avengers.Who didn’t really do much beyond sitting on their butts while a non-member, Dr. Voodoo, saved everyone. Why? I dunno, maybe because Brian Michael Bendis is a colossal douchecanoe.

So to sum up: Wolverine does stuff. Dr. Voodoo does stuff. Dr. Strange cries. The rest of the Avengers sit on their butts. Bendis collects a fat paycheck for writing yet another rotten comic book.

Brian Michael Bendis is an extremely lazy and vastly over-rated writer.

Verdict: Thumbs down. And you can add Bendis to the list of writers whose comics I won’t read any more.

Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #6

Finally, and only a few weeks late, Grant Morrison drops this bucket of insanity on us. Bruce Wayne appears at the very end of time, dying of an infection by Apokolyptian monster. The mostly-robotic keepers of the end of time can keep him from dying, at least temporarily, and they disguise him as one of their own number. He returns to the present and fights off the current version of the Justice League while Superman, Green Lantern, Booster Gold, and Rip Hunter try to figure out a way to follow him when they don’t even have a time machine anymore. Wonder Woman hits Batman with her Lasso of Truth and learns that his armor is now possessed by Darkseid’s last doomsday weapon while deadly Omega Radiation burns him from the inside out. Is there any way to save Batman and save the world?

Verdict: I think I’m gonna thumbs it down. There was a lot of good stuff here, but it was all just a bit too frantic. And coming after Bruce Wayne made his return last week in “Batman and Robin,” it takes a lot of the oomph and thrill out of this one. Maybe it’ll all look better in the trade paperback…

Batgirl #15

After a great opening where Stephanie tries to explain the ins-and-outs of the Bat Family to Wendy using funny cartoons, we jump to Batgirl beating on a bunch of robed bad guys when she’s interrupted by a guy calling himself the Grey Ghost — actually an obsessive train bomber who Steph corralled a few issues back. Unfortunately, the Grey Ghost’s inept intervention allows the robed guys to kill a university student — and who’s gonna get the blame for that one, huh?

Verdict: Thumbs up. The opening cartoon is just plain wonderful, and the rest of it ain’t bad either. Excellent dialogue, action, humor, you name it. Have I told y’all before how great this comic book is?

Today’s Cool Links:

Oh, and while I got y’all here — don’t forget the meeting that’s being held TONIGHT about possible future comic conventions in Lubbock. Remember, it’ll happen at 8 p.m. this evening in the Metro Tower/NTS Building downtown, up on the 19th floor. If you’ve got any interest in comic-cons in Lubbock, don’t miss it…

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Oh Brudder, Where Art Thou?

Via Snell and Kevin Church and Benjamin Birdie: Okay, lemme set this up. The most recent issue of Brian Michael Bendis’ “New Avengers” comic reveals that Dr. Strange is no longer the Sorcerer Supreme — he’s been delving too much into black magic, and he’s fallen from his mystical perch. As the Avengers, Strange, and a bunch of supervillains try to track down Strange’s magical accoutrements, including the Eye of Agamotto, we discover that the new Sorcerer Supreme is very likely going to be Jericho Drum, a.k.a. Brother Voodoo.

Very cool, sez I — nice to see a little shakeup on the mystical front, and Brother Voodoo has been a fairly cool character who has mostly been neglected since he was created in the ’70s.

Brother Voodoo’s debut as the Sorcerer Supreme looks like this:

Oh, wow.

The guy was educated in the U.S., and spent quite a few years stateside working as a psychiatrist, fer gosh sakes. He’s been running around the superhero community for who knows how long. He’s the brand-spankin’-new Sorcerer Freakin’ Supreme, and Bendis sticks him with insulting and possibly racist pidgin dialogue.

Coming up next month in Marvel’s numerous Bendis-written comics, Cecilia Reyes will show up wearing a sombrero and taking a siesta under a cactus, Hulkling will develop a lisp, and Amadeus Cho will get coke-bottle glasses and gigantic buck teeth. Why Bendis has been doing such a good job with Luke Cage, I dunno, but maybe he’s gonna start back up with the “Sweet Christmas” stuff again…

Come on, Marvel, enroll Bendis in a sensitivity class before it’s too late…

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The Black Dossier

I know this has been out there forever, but I only managed to grab this one after Christmas, thanks to some handy and much appreciated gift certificates. So what the heck, let’s review it.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier

This picks up several decades after the last episode of the entirely classic “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. (And if you haven’t read that yet, you really, really should. If all you know of “LoEG” is that awful Sean Connery movie, then excise all memories of that pile of cinematic dreck and go read the comics, ’cause they’re really cool.)

Aaaanyway, it’s 1958, Big Brother’s dictatorship from George Orwell’s “1984” has just fallen, and Mina Murray and Allan Quatermain are still kicking around England. Thanks to an encounter with the “Fire of Youth,” both are now basically immortal. They’re after a book called the Black Dossier, that includes the complete, secret history of their League, as well as the Leagues that came before and after.

While most of the main story is told through traditional comic illustrations, the material from the Black Dossier is, for the most part, recounted in straightforward text. These include a lengthy comic strip focusing on the life of Orlando (the immortal gender-swapping swashbuckler from Virginia Woolf’s novel); a “Fanny Hill” sequel; a short story written in the style of the ’50s beat writers; a Tijuana Bible about life and sex in Big Brother’s England; and a comedy combining P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Bertie Wooster with H.P. Lovecraft’s cthulhoid horrors. There’s also an actual pair of 3-D glasses to go along with the extended 3-D sequence at the end of the story.

Verdict: Well, I’ll give this a thumbs up, partly because I’m not sure I’ve got it in me to thumbs-down an Alan Moore story, and partly because I thought “What Ho, Gods of the Abyss?”, the Jeeves and Wooster story, was extremely funny. But yeah, this story has some severe problems. There’s vastly too many folks running around without their clothes on — sure, there’s an awful lot of classic literature that’s pretty wildly bawdy (like, fer instance, almost all of Shakespeare’s plays), but “The Black Dossier” really does desensitize you to sex and nudity after just a little while. (“Oh, look, it’s Mina without any clothes on. Oh, look, it’s Fanny Hill without any clothes on. Oh, look, it’s Orlando without any clothes on. Oh, look, it’s a Tijuana Bible. Oh, look…”)

In addition, several of the text pieces were really difficult to read, partly because of formatting issues (Paragraph indents, Mr. Moore! And less single-spaced stuff, please!) and partly because they’re not all that well-written — “The Crazy Wide Forever,” written in the style of Jack Kerouac, was almost unreadably awful.

All the stuff drawn from “1984” was a bit of a setting breaker, too, frankly. I just can’t buy into the idea that England would transition so quickly from a fairly normal society, to a crushingly autocratic dictatorship, and then back to a normal society in such a short space of time. The Ingsoc from “1984” wasn’t a government that was going away any time soon, and the concept of doublespeak wasn’t something that would allow a normal, well-adjusted society to occur, in any case.

And finally, one of the characters who shows up at the end is a giant Golliwogg doll. If you’re not familiar with those, they were blackface minstrel ragdolls. Why is there a racist doll running around England with an airship? I got no idea. And it really pulls you straight out of the story. You’re reading along, you’re in an exciting chase sequence, and then, hello, racist stereotype doll! What the frackin’ frack?! Weren’t there any other popular children’s toys in England in the late 1950s? Winnie the Pooh, maybe? Peter Cottontail? Betsy-Wetsie? Madame Freakin’ Alexander dolls?

I really do think this is my least favorite of all of Moore comics, and I’ve read a ton of ’em. But even with that caveat, I still think it’s probably worth reading.

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Wholly Spirit

Wow, two comics came out this week about “The Spirit”! Sure, that means DC and Warner Brothers are trying to drum up some interest in the Spirit movie that’s coming out in December — might I add, the Spirit movie that’s coming out in December and looks like unmitigated garbage.

Ahh, but on to the comics for now…

The Spirit #23

Ooh, lookit! A cover by Joe Kubert! BONUS!

Anyway, in this story, the Spirit travels, with Commissioner Dolan and his daughter Ellen, to a dude ranch for a little Wild West R&R. Along for the ride: a wealthy industrialist, his unfaithful trophy wife, and his scheming assistant. When the industrialist is murdered, will the Spirit be able to pin down the murderer, even with the “assistance” of a dimwitted sheriff and a mysterious Indian?

Verdict: Thumbs up. Sergio Aragones and Mark Evanier’s version of the Spirit is often too silly and not rooted deeply enough in the grime and grit of the city, but this is excellent storytelling, along with an enjoyable (if a little obvious) mystery.

The Spirit Special #1

This is the real deal — four classic stories from Will Eisner himself, creator of the Spirit and one of comics’ greatest storytellers. The stories range from 1947 to 1950 and are perfect examples of Eisner’s pulpish, gritty film-noir style. We get one story featuring the villainy of the Octopus, a story about an assassin gunning for the Spirit, and a two-parter telling the story of Sand Saref.

Verdict: Thumbs up. This is beautiful, vital stuff. The most uncomfortable part of the entire thing is the story that includes the Spirit’s sidekick, Ebony White. While the modern incarnation of the character is a perfectly normal kid, the version from the ’40s was a crude minstrel stereotype. Modern opinions on the character consider him an unfortunate element of the story who still managed to transcend the era’s racism, to some degree. But it may still make you really uncomfortable reading him.

Aside from that, again, it’s an amazingly beautiful comic, and I recommend it highly. Get it and see how a true master put his comics together.

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