Category: Inspiration/provocation

So I guess I need to address this thing before we start…

I really like most of what Warren Ellis has written. I din’t think this post is the time/place to talk about all aspects of cancel culture, but since he’s currently sleeping on the couch I think some things need to be said.
Has he done some things he isn’t proud of, that hurt some people? Yes.
Does that mean we all have to stop reading all his stuff? No.
The things he did aren’t encouraged or defended in his works, so in that way they are separate things. He also doesn’t defend them as a person but has stated that he’s working to change (unlike some others who have been uncancelled faster).
But even if that wasn’t the case, you could still read and enjoy his works with a good conscience. It is possible to read things where you don’t wholeheartedly agree with every detail. You just need to sort things out for yourself, accept that there are things you don’t agree with and if the work is otherwise good enough to keep reading/watching etc or not. That’s how we had to consume more or less EVERYTHING back in the days (and still). You can still enjoy Harry Potter even if you’re not a TERF (I mean if you for some reason like it, you don’t have to if it’s not your thing, I’m completely uninterested in Harry Potter myself). You can still enjoy Lovecraft even if you aren’t extremely xenophobic (in his case the fear of most things/people is even probably the basis for what makes his cosmic horror so interesting, but you can still enjoy it without agreeing with him).
All that said, here are some really good comics by Warren Ellis:

So one of the things he was involved with was The Wild Storm, a reboot of Jim Lee‘s Wildstorm part of the original setup of Image Comics in the early 1990s, with titles like WildC.A.T.S, Stormwatch etc. In the mid-late -90s, Ellis wrote Stormwatch and built it up to transform it into The Authority which was a big part of taking the superhero genre to the next level. With The Wild Storm, his job was to update those characters, tone down the superhero stuff a bit while still preserving a lot of the more original concepts that have been developing in various Wildstorm titles over the years. One of those concepts is what he did with another of his titles on the imprint, Planetary, where the main characters met and fought paraphrased characters from other parts of various genres, from superheroes to secret agents to pulp-style adventurers etc. With The Wild Storm: Michael Cray, written by Bryan Hill (based on a basic concept and plot structure by Ellis), they’re doing something similar again, pitting the main character against alternate, eviller versions of classic DC superheroes like Wonder Woman, Green Arrow and others. It’s all fun and enjoyable, especially Ellis’ run on The Wild Storm. Sadly, it looks like that whole reboot project may be hibernating for now and I don’t know if, or in what form, it will wake up again.

I’ve also read some other Ellis things, like Trees, The Batman’s Grave, Dark Blue and a re-read of his main 90s work: Transmetropolitan, which still holds up, maybe even more relevantly than when it first came out, with its dystopian cyberpunk setting and its murderous cops and corrupt politicians… Ok, maybe some things are just more or less constant?
Anyway, I also read one of his very early comics, Hellstorm, which was much more interesting than the ettmpted TV version that came and went without much notice. Hellstorm has that 90s gritty cynicism that can still be refreshing sometimes, and also features art by a Leonardo Manco that is much less refined than his later works, but still expressive and full of dirty lines.

Speaking of The Authority, I have to mention something that has disturbed me. When Northstar got married in Marjorie Liu‘s Astonishing X-men, it was hyped in some places as the first gay superhero marriage. I don’t know what was actually the first one, but there’s AT LEAST the marriage of Apollo and Midnighter (who are pastisches of Superman and Batman, created by Ellis, married during Mark Millar‘s run). And that was in 2002, a bunch of years earlier than the X-men one.
Both comics are great, by the way. My only problem with the whole thing is the ignorance in news media and the view that nothing is important enough to be newsworthy unless it’s the first time it happens.

Guess this is as good a time as any to talk about the current X-men era, beginning with House of X/Powers of X written by Jonathan Hickman. Hickman has previously tackled both Fantastic Four and Avengers in longer runs that redefined both titles, at least for a while after. Now Marvel gave him the X-men to do the same thing but on an even bigger scale.
So he took some elements that have been recurring for a long time and saw what he could do with them, such as:
-Resurrections. Since Jean Grey/Phoenix died in the early 1980s and then returned a while later, first as what turned out to be a clone, then as herself, there have been multiple instances of X-men dying and returning with different explanations.
-Mutants as an allegorical tool for talking about racism. Even if it’s kind of a retcon that Professor X and Magneto were originally meant to represent Martin Luther King and Malcolm X respectively, there have been instances where they have been used that way, and different takes on racism have been the theme of most of the best X-men stories, from the future concentration camps in Days of Future Past to the mutant slaves in the fictional nation Genosha’s first appearance to what’s currently going on.
-Sci fi. When Chris Claremont took over as writer in the mid-70s, the sales numbers were really low, which meant that he and his artists had free reign to do basically whatever they wanted. So one of the things they did just because it might be fun was taking the mutants to space. Mutation in itself is a sci fi theme and they’ve been fighting mutant-killing robots since forever. There are also alternate timelines, time travel, freaky technology etc. The comic has been around for a long time and they’ve had time to do a lot with it. Slight spoilers ahead.

So Hickman took these things and some other concepts and did something new with it. So the current state of affairs is that mutants are basically immortal since they can all be easily resurrected if they die.
They live in the only timeline they found where they have a chance to survive as a species, IF they can beat the competing AI/robotic strain of evolution. Kind of like the two strands of posthumanism in Bruce Sterling‘s classic cyberpunk novel Schismatrix.
And they dropped the old dream of living togehter with humans and instead started their own nation, on the living island Krakoa, for mutants only.

All very interesting and I’m sure most of it will turn out to be something different from what it looks like. But they’re also doing something kind of new with the publishing. House of X and Powers of X were two mini-series running parallel to each other, with one story running through both titles. After that, they rebooted all the X-men-related titles (usually somewhere between 5-10 titles/month) and started collecting them all in monthly trades. Of course it’s a profit-driven move to make it easier to follow ALL the titles instead of having to choose some, but it’s also kind of weird that it hasn’t been done this way before. Ok, I guess it has been done, but seldom exactly like this. So there are various titles driving the overarching story forward by concentrating on different characters or aspects of this new mutant society. Different writer/artist constellations on each title makes the quality fluctuate a bit and some of it isn’t as good as the rest while some are better than most. The overall story could’ve been done more interestingly and some characters could have been written better and so on, but as I said earlier, you can’t expect a work of fiction like this to be perfect. It’s still interesting enough to keep me hooked. The first 16 collections after HoX/PoX were called Dawn of X, then there was a crossover event called X of Swords and now they’re calling it Reign of X until the next crossover event that will bring the whole thing to its third phase. Hickman is now rumored to be leaving the whole thing before it’s finished, due to the rest of the writers wanting to drag it out longer before things change too much. It seems they have more stories to tell in the current setting. I hope Hickman will stay involved somehow since it’s his vision that started the whole thing, but either way I look forward to seeing where they’re going with it.

What else do I have to talk about from the world of superheroes? Oh, right. Remember the outrage when Captain America came out as a member of Hydra and there was this whole thing about it, mostly based on ignorance? Since Hydra are bascially nazis, I guess the anti-SJW croud thought it was a statement from woke Marvel about the US being racist or something, so they were up in arms (because the US can never be racist enough for them and everyone who says so is a liar). Not sure if anyone else really made a big thing out of it? Most people who are the least bit comics literate would understand that when a comic has been around that long (since the 1940s when he was created by two jews wanting the US to take a stand against the nazis), you have to do something with it to keep it interesting. So why not make it seem like the main character has been on the side of his enemies all along? Everyone knows that it’s going to be a temporary thing, just like the time when Thor was a frog, Spider-man was a clone or the Hulk was gray. It’ll pass, don’t worry about it. But while it lasts there might be a good story. So I read the Secret Empire story by to see what it was really about (wanna bet that most of the internet storms took place before it was even published?). It was ok.

Speaking of internet outrage… I wanted to read Divided States of Hysteria by Howard Chaykin based on a few reviews by internet idiots. They said this comic was 1: offensive to SJWs because they couldn’t see that depictions of racism and transphobia are not the same as actual racism or transphobia, and 2: depicting the USA in a bad light.
So I thought: I like dystopic stories that are critical towards the US, so maybe I should finally check out this Howard Chaykin guy? I’d read just a little of him and I liked the art but hadn’t read any of his writing. And you know that people who use the term SJW to describe people who don’t agree with them are idiots, so I thought those reviews were a good sign.
However, I didn’t like this story at all. It might have been interesting, but the storytelling was stiff and stale, and its depiction of racism was too exaggerated, like everyone in the near future US is super racist AND they have good grounds for being racist because everyone in the comic more or less live up to their stereotypes. More or less.
And let me be clear: I’m not offended by depictions or racism/transphobia. Those things are real and we need to talk about them, BUT I want my stories well-written. And this one is filled with boring stereotypes and also in the end with boring patriotism as well, so it’s just boring.
I’m also aware that you shouldn’t judge a comics writer by just one of their works. I think sometimes: what if people judge me by THIS story that I’m not particularly proud of and it prevents them from reading THAT one that I do feel is some of my best work? If it’d be unfair to me, it’d be unfair to anyone else too. On the other hand, I’m not made of money. So maybe I’ll give Chaykin another try in the future if I find some of his stuff from the 80s that’s supposed to be better. If it’s cheap. But I’m not actively going to look for it, as I would have if this one had been more what I hoped it would be…

By the way, the whole thing about “woke Marvel” is kind of pathetic, actually. There are some right-leaning people who complain that (especially Marvel) superheroes are too political now, too woke etc. And then there’s the other side with liberals who say that these comics have always been politically correct and even left-leaning. And they’re both wrong, basically because they both think that liberalism is a left-wing ideology. Of course you can find examples, both now and back when, of comics taking left-leaning stances. As I said, Captain America was created as an antifascist statement, BUT it was also created in a context that was very nationalist and very very capitalist, which limited what it could express and how far it could go. Marvel is now owned by Disney, and is anyone for real thinking that they are progressive for any reason other than making a profit? Yes, there is some space for messages that are at least humanist and sometimes even socialist or socialist-adjacent, but that stuff is still far from taking over the whole genre and whoever thinks otherwise is probably willfully ignorant or just stupid.

Yes, gay marriage sometimes occurs in superhero comics. Yes, stories can be made that deal with the complexities around mutants as allegory for racism and some comics are more progressive than others. And yes, even women and Black people can be superheroes now, as has been the case for a long time. But do you really feel that you have to look too hard to find an apolitical (as in: defending the status quo which is liberal capitalism) white cis straight male superhero?

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I think there’s going to be two more posts about comics and other reading material, so stay tuned for those. After that I’ll be going into movies and tv…
All these posts will be linked from the one about my own comics and illustrations.

So as part of my new year’s ritual, let’s talk about some of the things I read in the last two years, beginning with The New Gods by Jack Kirby. I never got the thing with Kirby.

I knew of him, I’d read a couple of his comics, I knew the huge influence he’s been on Marvel in particular, superhero comics in general, now also movies, and lots of artists (even working in other genres). I also knew how he got fucked over by the publishers he worked on. But I never got the thing. Until now. Still not sure I can put it in words, but reading one of the comics he made after rage-quitting Marvel and getting the freedom to do whatever he wanted at DC was kind of an eye-opener. The storytelling was solid, if not amazing, at least from a this-was-made-in-the-early-70s perspective, and I suddenly saw some line work that reminded me of other artists who must have been inspired by him. There’s also a general feel to his drawings that I’ve been aware of but I can now appreciate much more.

A few years ago I started re-reading the Dune series. I’ve now gone through Children of Dune and God Emperor of Dune. I’m guessing a lot more people have been reading the first book now since the movie was such a success, but I hope they don’t stop after the first book. I remember thinking back when that it was with God Emperor of Dune that it got really interesting, and I tend to agree, still, 20-something years later. Not going to go into more details than that to avoid spoilers. But I also got it into my mind that I should try some other books by Frank Herbert, which I did:

Whipping Star is linguistic sci fi at its finest, in my mind. Second in Frank Herbert’s sabotage series of one short story and two novels (The Tactful Saboteur, Whipping Star and The Dosadi Experiment), written parallel to the first couple of Dune books in the 1960s and -70s. I see echoes of this one in many other works of mostly sci fi/speculative fiction, but I had never heard of it before I stumbled upon it now. I’m very glad I did, because this should be seen as much as a classic as Dune is. The Arrival (which I’ve only seen as a movie, not read the book) comes to mind as a comparatively dumbed-down exploration of some of the same concepts. Language, how different species might experience time differently, how we might approach understanding each other. Don’t get me wrong, I liked The Arrival (even though as a comics creator I can’t see whay they wouldn’t try to communicate with images), but Whipping Star is so much more of a mindfuck. In the good way. You need a bit of patience, because everything isn’t clear from the beginning (same goes for the short story, The Tactful Saboteur, which I found in Eye, a collection of short stories by Herbert). But the main characters understand even less, and it clears up during the course of the book.
The first main conversation lasts for about 50 pages, and if you like the way Herbert writes dialogue in Dune, for example, then you need this. It is such a treat!
The Dosadi Experiment, the third and final part, brings more alien culture clash, also handled interestingly.

Destination: Void is a story about the first steps in the journey of a generational spaceship. You know the kind where the journey takes longer than one lifespan, so the passengers need to either be frozen or prepared to let the trip last for several generations. I’ll be talking more about the genre in a future post about movies/TV, specifically Aniara, Human, Space, Time and Human and Avenue 5. Destination Void differs in that it’s about a planned trip, not an accidental one. It’s also written by Frank herbert, so expect some interesting concepts in the relations between the small crew and the ship’s brain-based computer. There are three more books in the series, so at some point I will go on with those.

More sci fi, but much much older: The Book of Enoch is an approximately 2300(?) year old sci fi/horror(?)/fantasy story. Some would call it mythological or religious and they wouldn’t be wrong considering it’s one of the background works of Judaism/Christianity/Islam and even canon in some branches, like Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity.
To me, it was more interesting to read it as really old sci fi, and it might even have been written that way originally. In any case, it is one (of many) example of the apocalyptic genre that was a thing mostly for a few centuries around 2000 years ago. There’s some cynical politics in there, a bitterness over all the evil the writer/s saw around them, and a hope that the wrong-doers will be punished in a utopian final judgment. An event where all sins will be forgiven, but there’s simultaneously no salvation for the sinners. I guess the absolution is only available for the good guys who might also have sinned, while the bad guys are eternally fucked. A mix of wishful thinking and commentary on the times it was written.
Part of the book is the story of when a bunch of angels (100 of them, 10 main leaders who are named) decided to go down to Earth to marry human women. And of how they were punished for it. The most well-known thing about this (as mentioned in passing in Genesis) is that they had children with the human women. Children who grew to be massive giants. What’s less known is that not only did they have angel/human hybrid kids, they also taught their wives about medicine and other things. And they taught the human men how to make weapons and armor and work with metal, and astronomy, astrology and so on. Their punishment was for all this, not only the procreation. Granted, the greatest sin was that they had defiled themselves by being with human women. But the writer probably also didn’t like war. Or science. Or medicine. Or giants. Or especially women. I’m not sure if this should be read as conservative/nostalgic or as a cathartic curse on contemporary mainstream society, with their wars and all those other things.
Parts of the book can be read almost as a Lovecraft story, with dream sequences and these cosmic beings procreating with humans and names like Azazel, Araqiel, Zerachiel, Chazaqiel…
Another interesting thought: If you see this as sci fi, you might see religions as fandoms, sacred texts as shared universes. Think of the Bible as if it was the Marvel comics universe. Different writers contributing to stories about different characters and events, some dealing with supernatural powers, all set in the same universe/timeline (while for example the Olympian pantheon is an adjacent fandom within the same genre). There have been in-group discussions about what’s canon and not, how the fandom should be organised, what themes are important in the stories, who counts as a true fan etc.
When I thought of it this way, it made a bit more sense as a historical/social phenomenon within human culture. That was part of what made me interested in the Book of Enoch to begin with. I wanted to see how it would feel to read such a text if I saw it as a really old sci fi book. I must say it does work quite well.

Speaking of HP Lovecraft, I finally managed to get all of Alan Moore‘s Providence, so I re-read The Courtyard and Neonomicon, since they are all part of the same story.

Alan Moore is easily one of the best and most interesting contributors to the mythos based on Lovecraft’s stories. Providence is at the moment quite hard to find (or it was, until the compendium edition was released recently) but well worth the effort. It was frustrating but kind of fitting since much of the story is about the main character trying to find a book. Each issue of the series, at least the first ten, is part comic, part entries from a notebook/journal written by the main character. It fucks up the reading rhythm a bit, but gives some extra insight into the character when you read his after-the-fact interpretations of what you’ve just read in the comic, as well as some events that weren’t shown in the comic pages. It shows how oblivious he is to certain elements, but also gives some insight to some of the context.
For example, the main character is homosexual and has several sexual and/or flirtatious encounters during the course of the story, but even when he writes about them in a journal only meant for himself, he takes care to use neutral pronouns or insinuating that the person was female, probably because it’d be dangerous not to do so IF someone else would happen to read it, even though he comes from what seems to have been a pretty open gay culture in New York in the years around 1920.
As usual, Moore does his research and uses it in his worldbuilding, setting the story against the backdrop of a world war, prohibition, the fear of communists following the Russian revolution etc.

Also as usual, he uses the sequential nature of comics to enhance the storytelling, which I won’t go deeper into here. If you read it you’ll understand. He incorporates the prejudices of the zeitgeist and of Lovecraft himself and lets it enhance the horror. Lovecraft did this as well, but Moore flips the perspectives. Instead of the otherness of everyone except White men being one of the sources of horror, here it’s the process of othering that is part of an oppressive background to the more cosmic elements. Which is a simplification, but I believe that to be a basic intention in the way Moore deals with those topics while adapting someone like Lovecraft.
A friend of mine, French artist Alkbazz, posed the question at one point: what would the world be like without Lovecraft? It made me realize how far his influences reach. How many writers and artists haven’s been influenced by him? No, not by him but by his works. An important distinction considering how much he was a child of his times and how racist/sexist/homophobic those times were (think the 1980s but much worse, less insightful and closer in time to some massive examples of genocide. If you grew up in the late 1900s you’ll probably know what I mean). But the contributions Lovecraft made to the horror genre, in many ways grounded in the fundamental realization of how insignificant we are in the cosmic scheme of things. Insight that probably derived in part from the scientific discoveries of the time and how the public consciousness moved in a more secular direction. We had to come to terms with a world where we weren’t chosen by God, where we weren’t at the center of the universe and if Gods existed they either didn’t care or had no respect nor concern for us because we were like tiny faceless inhabitants of their fleeting dreams.

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I think that has to be enough for today. I have things to say about more things I’ve read, but I’ll let you rest a bit before continuing. So…

To be continued…

Enough about comics and movies, I’ve played games!

METAL GEAR SOLID V & 4
This year, I’ve finished Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain and Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, in that order because I guessed (correctly, imo) that MGS4 was more of an ending to the whole series. While The Phantom Pain was technically the better game and I was enjoying it a lot, I think story-wise I liked MGS4: Guns of the Patriots better. The themes of PTSD and peace vs war and governments vs nation-free armies have been present through all of the Metal Gear series, but in this one they were taken to the next level. Not to mention the question of nuclear weapons that’s always been part of these games. Something I can relate to, having grown up in the 80s. I was never really into most of the specifically 80s culture, but the threat of mass extinction in a nuclear war was kind of looming a lot in the background.
Are there still un-unravelled (ravelled?) conspiracy threads left over after all these games? Probably, but I feel satisfied. Are there still game functions I haven’t explored, and reasons to go back and play them some more? Definitely.

DEATH STRANDING
Death Stranding – best walking simulator/multiplayer/building sim I’ve played. Yet also none of the above and also foremost a massive fetch-quest with an increasingly engaging story. If that’s what you need in your life, this may be your thing. If that sounds horrible, this still might be your thing. Or not. In any case, it’s the best short description of the game I can come up with.
The way I played it, I spent maybe 10% of the time on the story and the rest on travelling around, delivering orders and building structures, which I have a feeling is a good way of doing it, because it gives you more of a connection to the game world which makes the story more engaging. But how you play it is pretty optional.
It’s also a deconstruction of videogame concepts that we’ve taken for granted for the last 30+ years, like carrying stuff, or killing/dying/getting extra lives. Also how you watch the final credits. Since inventing stealth mechanics in the first Metal Gear game, Hideo Kojima has always been innovative in his games, and he doesn’t disappoint in that area.

SEKIRO: SHADOWS DIE TWICE
I died more than twice, I can tell you that. But yes, this is another game that came out this year which deals with dying and being resurrected within the game’s internal logic. Being a sucker for meta stuff, this of course appealed to me. It’s also visually beautiful and the fighting mechanics are perfect and traversal feels really great and it has that typical From Software worldbuilding and I already look forward to a replay after I’ve finished it.
I’ve worked my way up to the final boss (in one of several possible storylines), and I still have a bunch of minibosses to deal with, so I will probably finish it next year.

MAD MAX
After finishing Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, I got into this game which I had tried a bit earlier but kind of underestimated. I more or less wrote it off as one of those cash-grabs relying too much on a brand name instead of delivering something original. But it was much better than expected and I spent quite some time thoroughly exploring its postapocalyptic world.

CATHERINE
How do I enjoy this game? The whole premise is based on gender stereotypes in a story of moral dilemmas I’m having a hard time identifyig with, but still! It’s a game about relationships, where you go through characterization episodes and puzzle episodes which all take you through a drama and I just find it interesting even though I probably wouldn’t recommend it to anyone other than for curiosity reasons.
Another point is that it’s a game from Studio 4°C who also gave the Tekkonkinkreet anime (based on Taiyo Matsumoto‘s excellent manga Black and White) and a bunch of other stuff, so there’s that…

WOLFENSTEIN II
Probably half-way through this nazi-killing, alternate-timeline, political comment/gore-fest. I think that sums it up. Light-hearted entertainment.

CONTROL
This was a great surprise. At first glance it seemed vaguely interesting but I decided to skip it. Then I got it as a birthday present and it turned out to be amazing! I know it’s been divisive and for some reason some people don’t seem to like it, but I couldn’t say why. The controls are well-balanced (not sure what I exactly mean by that but sure, why not?), the setting and mood are intriguing, the story is cool and there is this Finnish(/Scandinavian?) humor here and there which is hilarious and probably the thing that sold me. And you get superpowers and, maybe the most important part, you get Threshold Kids, the children’s TV show to end all children’s TV shows!

At some point I’ll have to finish Dark Souls III and Bloodborne. Even though I like From Software’s game design and Lovecraftian themes and world-building, I still haven’t finished any of them…

Speaking of interesting game development studios, I replayed Ninja Theory‘s Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice recently in order to get the platinum, and I have to mention it again because you should really play it. It’s great, and has psychological depth, and looks really great, and the fighting is occsionally epic, and the sound design is amazing!

Some movies/TV shows I’ve watched this year… These are the ones I have something to say about, if only sometimes short comments.

Killing (Zan)
This one is easily up there with my favourite samurai movies, like Seppuku, Samurai Rebellion and Twilight Samurai… The thing they have in common is probably that they don’t glorify Japan’s past feudal society but rather are critical towards them, or at least come at them from a different angle. This one is no exception, and does it brilliantly. I’ve followed Shinya Tsukamoto as a director since I saw Tetsuo: The Iron Man and I would say that this gave me just what I was hoping for when I heard he was going to do something in this genre. This one is closer to some of his later works, though, probably closest to Fires on the Plain if I’m to compare it to another one of his.

Gemini Man
Ang Lee making a Will Smith action movie with sci fi elements. While the action is very well executed, the focus is more on the emotional aspects of the situation.

Joker
Best DC movie so far. The only good one since the DCEU started and it completely exceeded my expectations. Between this and the Doom Patrol TV series, it looks like some gold can be found after all in that pile of mud.

John Wick 1-3
I liked the first one when it came as a competent action movie, but didn’t think much of it. Kind of disappointed with the second one so when I saw the third I didn’t expect much more than a nice-looking action film. It didn’t catch my attention at first, I thought some details were a bit dumb, some fights were well-made but kind of boring, but then something happened and I started to re-evaluate the whole series. Not sure if this is intentional, but when I started to watch them as some variation of angel movies (God’s Army is probably the best example for comparison), they suddenly worked much better. It suddenly made sense that they could kill people in a crowded station and no one would really notice, because these assassins aren’t operating quite on the same level of existence as the rest of us. And then, somewhere in the middle, there’s this fight that is a total homage to John Woo when he was at his peak (The Killer, Hardboiled) and I was all in.

Parasite
The latest one from Bong Joon-Ho. It seems to have been hyped quite a lot lately, which it deserves. Kind of in the same genre as Borgman, Kynodontas, and Funny Games, except they’re not really in the same genre and they doesn’t even have the same feel to them. Anyway, nice one about class and class consciousness.

Midsommar
Pretty much a Swedish version of The Wicker Man (the original one, that is), but not actually Swedish. Not sure what else to say about it, it’s probably best to go into it with no preconceptions. I’ve already said too much already.

Ad Astra
Heart of Darkness in space, but without the colonialism. I’ve seen some criticism of this movie. Sometimes from people whuo had seen the trailer and were disappointed because they got something more slow-paced. Some (a lot) of the sciemce is also wrong, but it doesn’t bother me this time, and most of it can be explained away by pointing out that they’re using future tech that is obviously way more advanced than what we have now, amd their in-movie explanations of things are nvague enough that you can claim that when they call something “laser”, that’s obviously just what they call something that is completely different from a laser. And anyway, the point is the trip into the dark loneliness, not the scientific accuracy. It’s not Gravity, where what they get wrong is the point, and even the title, of the movie. Or Passengers, where the entire plot hinges on science and logic that doesn’t work.
Does it miss some point by not including the colonialism of the original? Maybe. Apocalypse Now used the Vietnam war as a stand-in for the Belgian Congo of the original book that both movies are new takes on, while Ad Astra seems to skip out on that aspect. On the other hand, you should be able to see Ad Astra as its own thing and then it should also be judged on its own terms. Would I still think like this if I’d read the original? I’m not sure. I did read Catherine Anyango Grünewald‘s/David Zane Mairowitz‘s comic adaptation, but that also has its own take on the story. So maybe I just don’t know enough to make this call.
In any case, I really liked this one.

Antiporno
Sion Sono is doing some interesting movies in general. This is probably the most interesting one I’ve seen since Strange Circus. Meta film about a woman in a yellow room with lots of sexual and violent tension? That doesn’t cover it but I don’t think I should say anything else. If you like Sono, this is probably for you.

MCU and other superhero movies…
Captain Marvel managed to do feminist superhero much better than Wonder Woman was even close to doing, while Avengers: Endgame completely failed on that front, in ways that could maybe have been justified by internal logic, but weren’t. I don’t even need to consider gender to be disappointed. Sure, I liked some things they did, but why the focus on the original Avengers team when there are so many other characters that could have had bigger roles? We know the Russos could have handled it. And after all that build-up…
Glass was ok, but had some weird comments that make me think that Shyamalan tries to seem like someone who knows and cares about comics and wants to do something original with the genre. But he only almost succeeds because he doesn’t really know what he’s doing with it. Other than that, if we disregard comics and see it as part of a movie genre, it manages to be a bit different and unexpected and a quite ok movie.
Brightburn had some potential that it didn’t deliver on, but if you want to watch Superman told as a horror story, this is just what you want to see.

Some more movies I don’t have a lot to say about but that I watched and found worthy of mentioning here:
Velvet Buzzsaw, Sorry to Bother You, Us, BlacKkKlansman.
Just watch them and see what you think, I’d say…
I mean, I could also probably go on and have some thoughts about TV series like Russian Doll, Killjoys, Futureman, all of them great sci fi series with different approaches, but I’m sure others have already said stuff on the internets and I’m tired at the moment and need to make some food before finishing Death Stranding, so…

How to use this lists (and the other entertainment culture as escape culture posts):
If you see me liking some things you also like, and if I seem to like them for similar reasons, then see the rest as recommendations. If you hate all the things I like, then maybe see the rest as warnings. It’s not a fool-proof method, but it’s a good start. There are always intersections between what we like or hate and what other people like or hate, you just need to learn to navigate the cultural landscapes in order to find the stuff that speak to you.

Coming up next: games!

Entertainment culture is escape culture but do we break free?

I guess the answer is: “yes, temporarily”(?). It’s nice to have somewhere interesting to hide while the monsters of Fascism and Capitalism eat the world around us, and it’s a great privilege to have this escape hatch.

I learned in school that privileges are meant to be used. Whenever us kids didn’t like the school food, the grown-ups told us to “think of the children in Africa”. Because as we know, all the children in Africa are starving (this was the 1980s, but I guess this image more or less prevails). I did think about them, but I could never figure out how they would be helped by me forcing myself to eat food I didn’t like. It should be the other way around. I’d gladly share my food, which I figured would help more. Maybe they meant that our food would taste better if we were thinking about someone else suffering while we ate? That doesn’t seem right either.

What I think now is that they meant that growing up in a rich country made us privileged, and it was somehow our duty to enjoy those privileges (even if we didn’t find them that enjoyable). I’m still not sure what to take away from that experience, but there’s probably a lesson about subconscious(?) racism in there somewhere.

Anyway, I’ve read books!

Some of them (a few) were even without pictures…

Considering how long it takes me to read a book, maybe I shouldn’t re-read old stuff, but I figured it was time to see if Frank Herbert‘s Dune series was still as good as I thought half a life ago. Maybe treat it lika ritual ayahuasca trip that you should do once in your youth, once as an adult and once when you’re old? Anyway, I got through Dune and Dune Messiah, which was a good start. And they are still that good. I’m planning to also read some other stories by Herbert in the near future, so I started on Eye, a collection of some of his short stories.

I got hold of Jeff Noon‘s Pollen, the sequel to Vurt, but it wasn’t as good as the first part and now I’m not looking forward as much to when I find Automated Alice, even if I do like the concept of these books as sci-fi sequels to Alice in Wonderland and if I find it I’ll probably read it.

Also decided to give Stephenie Meyer a chance with The Host. It did have some nice concepts, but also some elements I wasn’t as fond of, or rather there was some untapped potential that I would have liked to see further explored. In any case, I’m glad Kinga got me to read it.

That’s it for the lesser kind (text only) of books. Here’s some comics:

I borrowed and tried out some of Jeff Lemire‘s books (Sweet Tooth, Underwater Welder, Royal City, etc), but the ones I like most are the ones with, in my opinion, the best art, like Black Hammer (Dean Ormston) and Gideon Falls (Andrea Sorrentino). Both of which actually turned out to tackle the same subject in a way, but from different angles.

Also borrowed and read some of the new Ms Marvel by G Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona, etc. Kind of feel-good fun superhero story. I can understand why it got all that attention when it came.

A Walk through Hell is one of the few horror comic that work quite well. Psychological, religion-inspired horror set in a socio-political context, by Garth Ennis. He treats identity politics quite interestingly here, kind of making fun of it while simultaneously validating it in the story.

Speaking of well-written stuff… I finished Paper Girls by Vaughan/Chiang and The Wicked + the Divine by Gillen/McKelvie. I recommend both of these books from Image Comics, especially… No, I’ll just recommend both. Paper Girls for the time travel, The Wicked + the Divine for the recurring gods (it’ll make sense if you read it).

I read the Secret Avengers run by Brubaker/Ellis/Remender. When it comes to Marvel, I was never as much into Avengers as I was into X-men. But I follow where the good writers take me, so now I ended up here. And with the exception of X-men Red, what recent X-comics I’ve read were really not that great. They finished the storyline with the young time-displaced X-men a few years late, because that story never made sense, and what they did with the Uncanny X-men: Wolverine & Cyclops (Matthew Rosenberg) was just stupid. Killing important and not-so-important characters off-panel just because they could, then pretending that it had any kind of emotional impact didn’t work for me at all. There were also all these references to previous events, but the characters seemed to be written as if there had been no character development at all since the early 80s. I’m well aware that I’m picky when it comes to this stuff.
On the other hand, I felt that X-men Red, written by Tom Taylor, tried to do something new. Updated conflict-resolution that was less about Heroes punching the Bad Guys and more about finding new ways to break that pattern and build a better world. Too bad they didn’t let that one go on for longer.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m too old for this shit, but I am part of a generation that never really grew up, after all. And I can also blame it on my line of work. Anyway, I’m looking forward to Jonathan Hickman‘s run on the X-titles, which I haven’t started reading yet.

Instead, I read Hickman’s run on Fantastic Four/FF and I’m thinking of returning to his Avengers/New Avengers/Secret Wars before I get to the Dawn of X stuff. See if there is a thread to follow through all of it, since he’s working himself through all the major Marvel group titles. Fantastic Four is another titles that I’ve hardly read. After John Byrne‘s run, I’ve basically only read the one by Millar/Hitch and a miniseries by Grant Morrison. Which was all good, I’m just not that interested in the characters themselves as much as I am in well-written stories.

Speaking of going back to well-written stories… I hadn’t realised how good some of the things were that I missed in the 00s/early 10s. I knew there was some potential in the Marvel Knights line, for example, but I had missed the whole Daredevil storyline by (mainly) Bendis/Brubaker/Diggle. It’s actually one long story that took them something like 10 years to get through to the end. Admittedly, the Bendis/Brubaker parts of it were better than the finish, but those were really good. Also of course the David Mack installments, but that was never a surprise.

Speaking of Brubaker and Marvel comics of that era, I’ve also started reading his Captain America, and am not disappointed. It’s kind of weird how it took me so long to discover Brubaker, but on the other hand I could never afford getting everything I wanted, so I had to ignore some stuff I would potentially have liked. It worries me a little that some of the titles I’d like to catch up on now are starting to be hard to find.

One of those hard-to-find comics seems to be Alan Moore‘s Providence, which disturbs me like an unnamable thing lurking in the doorway. Hopefully I’ll find them some day.
What I did recently read by Moore, however, is Whatever happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, his “final” Superman story from around the time of Crisis on Infinite Earths (mid-80s). This was also the first Superman story I ever read as a kid (first superhero story, even). It truly scared me as an 8(?)-year-old, though it didn’t scare me off from the whole genre, and I had these vivid recollections of it when I read it now. I even destroyed my copy back then, so this was the first time I re-read it since maybe 1987…

Did you know that DC started an imprint in the 1990s called Milestone, with Black superheroes, by Black creators (or at least non-White)? It’s another one of those things I was aware of and curious about, but couldn’t afford to explore back then. I recently found one of the miniseries from that era, Wise Son: the White Wolf, by Ho Che Anderson. It was obvious that I missed some context since it was about a character connected to the other Milestone titles that I hadn’t read, but you can’t really go wrong with HCA, and it still felt like he brought some of his own stuff to the story.

On the subject of CBA-connected creators… One of the artists of the upcoming CBA vol 47 is Francisco Sousa Lobo, whose The Care of Birds (published by Chili Com Carne) I got at CRACK! this summer. It’s about a bird-watcher who “is to paedophiles what bird-watchers are to hunters”. A slow-paced story that I’m not entirely sure how to describe, but that I enjoyed in all its mundanity.

Also at CRACK!, I got André Coelho‘s Acedia (also from CCC). We never published Coelho in CBA, but he did a piece of fan art for one of my Piracy is Liberation books, and we’ve collaborated on some projects without ever meeting (unless I’m forgetting something). Anyway, I’ve always liked his art, and this was no exception, in a darkly hallucinatory story of sex and mental states.

Speaking of CRACK! and Novo Doba and European underground comics… Penis Tutorial is a book made in silk screen in several colors by Bernharda Xilko, printed at Matrijaršija in Belgrade.
I got it at Novo Doba and it was probably what pushed us over the edge to make us actually do a book in silk screen (mine and Kinga’s Sleep Paralysis, which we admittedly haven’t printed yet, but we plan to, I promise!). Beautiful book, lots of over-sized dicks. Very colorful.

At some point I think I need to find a way to edit/publish an anthology of antifascist comics. But I want it to be fictional stories with antifa sensibilities rather than yet another “this is what Fascism is about”. So I went and got The Antifa Comic Book: 100 Years of Fascism and Antifa Movements by Gord Hill, which is a very informative book about what Fascism, and Anti-Fascism, is about. So exactly the thing I didn’t want for my planned anthology, but apart from that it was good. Really focusing on the antifascist movements in a way that you don’t see much of in the mainstream, where the only acceptable antifascism basically ended with Hitler in 1945 and everything since then has been too violent or deemed unnecessary. This book shows pretty clearly that it’s far from unnecessary, and it shows what happens when antifa movements (of any kind) fail.

By the way: Did you ever think about how lucky we are that Hitler invaded Poland and that the second world war happened? Because it wasn’t the Holocaust or persecution of Jews and others that made the Allies fight against Nazi Germany. The only problem they had with Hitler was his territorial aspirations, so if it wasn’t for that, the racism and the Holocaust wouldn’t have been seen as such a big problem. After all, that stuff was in part inspired by the segregation politics in the US, which we of course know is the Greatest Democracy ever. I think that’s an important thing to remember when trying to understand our current Liberal/Capitalist democracies and how they deal with (or don’t deal with) today’s Fascist (and related) movements.

See now what happened. Here I am, trying to speak about comics and it ends up on the subject of Fascists again. Fucking Hell, they’re everywhere these days.

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I know this is part 3/3, but there still are 2 more to come. Watching tomorrow and Playing after that. So stay tuned if you’re interested in what I have to say about some films/TV/games…