On HU
This week was devoted to our (still ongoing) roundtable on copyright.
Utilitarians Everywhere
At Comixology I talked about Steven Grant’s Punisher series, Circle of Blood and the connection between super-heroes and noir.
From the neck up, though, the Punisher isn’t hyper-competent at all. Instead, he’s more like the classic noir dupe. Though he has a certain tactical animal cunning, his inner monologue is obsessively repetitive in a way that suggests borderline idiocy — where Batman’s traumatic backstory has, supposedly, made him smarter, the Punisher’s has left him, in Grant’s writing, a monomaniacal mental and emotional basket-case. The Punisher is, like most noir men, childishly easy to fool. He stumbles into traps, is bamboozled by a shady conglomerate called the Trust, and, inevitably, betrayed by a woman. His solve-it-by-shooting-it approach to every problem results in heaps of dead bodies, including that of one child. Said child’s death sends our hero into a self-pitying funk, complete with flashbacks and profound utterances (“It’s got to stop. The poor children.”) which, at least from my perspective, makes him appear more damaged, dangerous, unsympathetic, and unheroic than ever.
On tcj.com I reviewed Fumi Yoshinaga’s All My Darling Daughters.
At Madeloud I interviewed Best Music Writing series editor Daphne Carr: Part 1; Part 2.
Also at Madeloud I reviewed Priestess’ prog metal opus, Prior to the Fire.
Other Links
Dirk kicks ass.
Jason Thompson on incest in manga.
Tucker argues that illegal downloading is bad because it betrays the can-do rapacious imperialism of our forefathers.
And Tucker also pointed me to this article about why contemporary poets should just go ahead and die already.
And here’s a long, academic, and pretty fascinating article about yaoi and homophobia.
Noah–
Thanks for the link to Jim Behrle’s piece on the life of contemporary poets. In my experience, what he writes is also applicable to contemporary fiction writers. And if the titans of publishing get past the dabble stage with graphic novels and make the things mainstays of their output, you’ll see it become applicable to literary cartoonists as well. (Where the New York publishing world goes, academia follows.)
Remember: this is from someone who, unlike you, actually likes the stuff.
I think poetry is especially hopeless since literally nobody but other poets reads it. Literary fiction isn’t quite as utterly hopeless — though obviously the situation is similar.