On HU
Featured Archive Post: our Octavia Butler roundtable
Me on Nicki Minaj’s crappy first album.
Nishizaka Hiromi with a manga version of red riding hood, translated by Matt Thorn for the gay utopia.
Kim O’Connor on Tom Spurgeon, tcj.com, and barriers to women in comics crit.
Chris Gavaler with an introduction to the French superhero Atomas.
Alex Buchet with the first ever translation of Pellos’ French superhero comic, Atomas.
Brian Cremins with his first post as a regular for PPP — on Charles Johnson’s single panel cartoons and Thiery Groensteen’s theories of narrative.
Me on Christopher Priest’s Black Panther being trapped by superhero tropes.
Utilitarians Everywhere
At the Atlantic:
—I interviewed Feminista Jones about street harassment of Black women.
— I reviewed Above the Dreamless Dead, a collection of comics adaptations of World War I Poetry, and talked about the possibility of anti-war art.
At the Awl I interviewed Otrebor aka Botanist about black metal and eco-apocalypse.
At Salon I did a list of the most covered songs. This is my last list for Salon, alas.
At Splice Today I speculate about the next Supreme Court nomination battle and the broken Republican party.
Other Links
David Brothers on Marvel’s diversity marketing.
At the Village Voice, Stephanie Zacharek said the Guardians of the Galaxy was mediocre. Marvel true believers spewed sexist bile, because that is what they do.
Andrew O’Hehir thinks about violence and Guardians of the Galaxy.
Margaret Corvid on the pernicious myth of sex trafficking.
Russ Smith on still liking Bob Dylan, albeit not live.
Interesting to read the David Brothers piece together with the Village Voice piece. Is the Voice kind of doing what Brothers accuses Marvel of doing?
Possibly a little tricky, isn’t it? The Voice is trying to defend one of their writers and deal with what I think is a pervasive problem in comics; it’s hard for me not to see that as worthwhile.
David’s written before about the problems with a focus on racism (I think he talked about it in regard to articles focusing on racist folks tweeting about the Miss America winner.) I see where he’s coming from, and it’s good to keep in mind — though at the same time, I feel like calling out racism or sexism is worthwhile and necessary, at least in some situations.
I’d say it’s apples and oranges. The Voice article is on gendered harassment, and it’s addressed to a specific case. The Brothers article is about Marvel’s decision to co-opt legitimate concerns about race and gender to promote product and deflect criticism.
My own favorite “Louie Louie” is by the Sonics, from 1966:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhM5k_EGzaQ
Brothers’ piece is really great, but not just for calling out Marvel on how it highjacks (or maybe rotten-cherry-picks) negative reaction to frame itself and its marketing decisions as honorable and part of the grand arc of justice. (“Buy Marvel! You can stand with the good guys!”) His piece also calls out critics and commenters who too easily piggyback on this narrative, gleefully showing how much better “we” are than those troglodytes. And thus potentially questionable motives can turn into truly slanted history (like, “remember how Marvel said the Falcon was going to be Thor and everyone lost their shit?”).
p.s. the error above was inadvertent, but seemed like a great opportunity for cross title synergy