Category Archives: Uncategorized

Since watching Life of Python a couple of months back, I’ve been meaning to rewatch MONTY PYTHON’S LIFE OF BRIAN (wisely retitled from Eric Idle’s suggestion of Jesus Christ’s Lust for Glory!), which the group considers its last great work and the most fun to work on of any of their movies.

This starts out with the Three Wise Men arriving in a stable for the birth of the Messiah — then realizing this Brian brat isn’t him (Jesus is the next stable over). The child then grows up into Graham Chapman; despite not being the Messiah he winds up sparking devoted worship (“Gather round me, Gourdites!”), political unrest (a lot of satire on the radical left — though I wonder if it isn’t also riffing on the idea of Jesus as a revolutionary against Roman rule) before becoming crucified by error and dying as a neighbor sings “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” (perhaps their most memorable song, even making it into the musical Spamalot). I wouldn’t rank it above Holy Grail but no question it is very good. “It wasn’t meant to be taken literally — obviously it refers to any manufacturer of dairy products.”

LOST HEROES (2014) is a documentary on Canadian superheroes, starting with kids of the late 1930s embracing American comic books and American superheroes as much as children south of the border. When WW II economics forced Canada to stop importing them, enterprising publishers unleashed their own to fill the gap, including Cosmo, Freelance, and the best-remembered, Nelvana of the Northern Lights. While the war ending killed most of them off, there were multiple later attempts such as Captain Canuck, a Silver Age character whose been rebooted multiple times since (I have an issue from the 1980s attempt).

While Canadian publishers have launched other superheroes, none of them have had the success of Marvel’s Wolverine, debuting here on Herb Trimpe’s cover; that Alpha Flight, Marvel’s Canadian super-team, has never been as successful leads to the various talking heads interviewed here to conclude being Canadian is more a hindrance than a help (American superheroes are universal, Canada’s are just … Canadian). Interesting. “The secret of Wolverine’s popularity is that he doesn’t have to put up with you.”

All rights to images remain with current holders.

First, Kelly Freas

Next Ed Emshwiller.

Freas again.

And back to Emshwiller.

All rights to images remain with current holder.

I don’t have any jokes or pranks, but in the spirit of the day, here are some clown images. First, clowns from another world!

A piece of a Jim Aparo cover.

Then Neal Adams

I don’t know what this clown photo relates to but here it is anyway.

And a Steve Ditko cover. The Clown gets his name in the title but he’s not as prominent on the cover.

And I’ll close with one of my favorite films.

All rights to image remain with current holders.

The paradox of tolerance, for anyone who doesn’t know is “how do we tolerate the intolerant?” If we believe in free speech, what do we do with people who use free speech to demand others lose their right of free speech.

This is particularly pertinent in a United States where The Felon Administration is denying entry to legal visitors who have the wrong political views (i.e., they don’t approve of The Felon). President Snowflake has made it very clear that for the media to say critical things about him is the worst possible crime a human being can commit. Nobody must hurt his snowflake fee-fees! Pathetic though he is, that attitude in the Oval Office is a serious threat.

And it’s not unique. Florida Republican Randy Fine wants his opponent arrested for (non-existent) voter intimidation. Miami’s mayor wants to shut down a theater screening an anti-Gaza War documentary. Some senators get death threats warning them not to vote against The Felon (and none of them have gone public to push back against it). Even before the current administration we saw Republicans around the country pushing to ban drag shows and restrict schools from saying anything too supportive of gays, trans people, POC, etc.

The right, of course, has been weaponizing tolerance for years — you criticized my homophobia, therefore you’re intolerant! If someone’s uncomfortable airing their opinions for fear of blowback, they’ve been oppressed! Vaccine denialist RFK Jr. says Democrats are more intolerant, no matter what the facts say. If you won’t allow psychiatrists to impose conversion therapy on gays, you’re repressing the doctors’ free speech!

Then there’s the supposedly more neutral argument that if people aren’t actively harmful, judging them for their sincere personal beliefs is wrong. Conservative Christians feel hurt because their views — fascism is tolerable, LGBTQ rights are not — are getting criticized! A perspective that ignores the possibility their views are horrible and they are not, in fact, our moral superiors. This is not some radical insight — religious conservatives have been whining about this for years.

The image below (sorry to the creator — I don’t know the source) attempts to reframe the discussion (I think it’s primarily talking about how we should respond on a personal level rather than a legal/government framework)

For anyone who can’t see it, it’s an argument that tolerance isn’t a moral principle but a contract: if you won’t abide by the rules of mutual tolerance, you’ve broken the contract and aren’t entitled to tolerance yourself.

This is a good way to look at it as far as our individual our group response is concerned. Refusing to associate with the speaker, criticizing them, firing them or not dating conservatives (one of the things RFK thinks is sooooo unfair) is all legit. Ditto saying MAGA attire is not welcome in your business. “Sending them to Coventry” (the old British term for cutting someone out socially) is legit.

It reminds me of an old computer experiment showing that while cheaters win in every transaction with an honest individual, if the honest individual stops dealing with the cheater, honesty wins out in the long run. The cheater will succeed in every transaction but as fewer and fewer people deal with them, they wind up without any contacts and the honest folk win. Similarly, intolerant individuals can keep winning as long as everyone else tolerates them … not so much if that stops.

Prompted by some of Alan Stewart’s reviews, I began reading Marvel’s Bronze Age Frankenstein series on the Marvel app. It opens with a descendant of the sea captain who met Frankenstein in the original novel finding the Creature, then hearing his history from his own lips over the course of several issues (courtesy of Gary Friedrich and artist Mike Ploog). The Creature then sets out to destroy the last of Frankenstein’s descendants, leading to adventures in the 1800s, then a jump forward to the present.

This starts well but as it changes creative hands and becomes more conventional for a Marvel monster magazine (moving to the present, for example) it ran out of steam, then picked up energy again (a plotline involving a meeting with Frankenstein’s descendant Veronica) then in the last issue (written by Bill Mantlo) fell on its face, so I don’t think cancellation was any great loss (though the Monster would return in various later superhero books).

As a fan of both the Shadow and the Twilight Zone, THE TWILIGHT ZONE: The Shadow by David Avallone and Dave Acosta was irresistible, though the idea of the Shadow wandering through various settings from the series (“While I’m battling the Howling Man, I can’t stop the immortal conspiracy of Walter Jameson and the Queen of the Nile!”) struck me as difficult to pull off. Unfortunately the miniseries goes for a much duller angle, remaking the episode A World of Difference in which a man discovers his life is nothing but a TV show.

As Margo and Lamont bicker about whether he’s getting too ruthless, the Shadow finds himself suddenly an actor playing the Shadow in a radio show (the jokes about what the series gets wrong are the best part), then a pulp writer creating the Shadow … “All your adventures are imaginary!” is a twist that’s been done a lot (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, St. Elsewhere) and I didn’t find this take fresh or clever at all.

GIRL GENIUS: Sparks and Monsters by Phil and Kaja Foglio improves on the previous volume in that all the disparate plot threads seem to come together as everyone begins working on ways to stop Agatha Heterodyne’s monstrous mom Lucrezia from taking her over and wreaking havoc (though there’s a lot more going on too). As always, the series is goofy, charming and entertaining; annoyingly the next volume seems to be hard to find and correspondingly pricey, but I’ll get it eventually.

LAGUARDIA by Nnedi Okorafor and Tana Ford is a good, whimsical drama about a serious subject, immigration. In the near future, alien refugees are arriving on Earth and we’re not handling it entirely well. Freedom, the protagonist, returns from Nigeria with an intelligent plant she smuggles into New York but settling into a new life will be more complicated than she’d like … Immigrant = Alien is a touchy analogy but I think it works here. In a minor note, as someone old enough to remember when Biafra’s secession attempt from Nigeria was front-page news, it’s interesting to see the regional dispute hasn’t completely died down.

All rights to images remain with current holders. Covers top to bottom by Ploog, Acosta and Foglio.

“What the proponents of the Great Resegregation seek is a counterrevolution not merely in law, but also in culture. The civil-rights revolution of the 1960s changed hearts and minds as well as laws, and one of those changes was that racially exclusive institutions became morally suspect. Notably, Trump officials are not willing to state their aims explicitly; they feel obligated to pay lip service to ideals of color-blind meritocracy and mislead about their intentions.” — Adam Serwer. I recommend the whole piece which gets at what I was talking about here, that for many people white male achievement is never to be questioned while anyone else is suspect. (hat tip to Slacktivist for the link). In the same vein:

“That, really, has been the crux of everything for several years now. They feel as though they have been denied the social power and cultural influence to which they are entitled, and even though literally nothing has changed beyond a president who didn’t even win the popular vote by a whole percentage point running roughshod over the entire federal government, they are frantically declaring a vibe shift.” And they believe they’ve achieved it which is why DOD press official Kingsley Wilson feels free to tweet raving anti-Semitism.

“The attack on DEI shows why liberals should stop arguing about “strategic” use of language forever. DEI stands for three uncontroversial virtues that most every American accepts, and the right still turned it into a vile slur. It doesn’t matter what you say – they will poison it because YOU said it.” — Adam Conover

“It was five words that sealed the deal. ” And they just let you .” That was key. If he had said that he grabbed women by the pussy and they told him to fuck off and then sued him for sexual harassment, it would have been something different altogether. He might not have won, and not because people sided with the women, but because he would have been perceived as weak. When he said, ” And they just let you, ” it gave these people a glimmer of hope for a power they felt they once had and have since lost. That’s what “putting someone in their place” means. It means that you have the power “and they just let you.”

“The irony, of course, is that Trump and his cabal insist that DEI puts unqualified people in positions and steals from competent white men, when his choice of cabinet picks and staffing shows nothing but the highest levels of grossly incompetent white men. White men who were angry that before the return of Trump, their whiteness was no longer cover for their mediocrity and that in a world with DEI, they were forced more often to actually be competent and well-qualified to get work. ” — Shay Stewart-Booley

From one of the links above, I think this is also worth quoting: “they think they are replicating what the Left did with regard to what they understand as “woke.” They think we just made up new rules for everyone to follow in order to trip them up and get them in trouble for no reason — sort of like how old money people made up weird new etiquette rules (like a raised pinky while drinking tea) in order to trip up the nouveau riche during the Gilded Age. They think we took things that weren’t real problems (specifically anti-Black racism) and made a big thing out of them in order to make them feel like bad people. They think we invented trans people just to personally annoy them.”

To which this quote from Audre Lorde seems relevant: “This hatred and our anger are very different. Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.”

Here we have a story of part-time call girls in Japan, who love As Only An Asian Woman Can. Art is uncredited.

Another exoticized Asian woman on this uncredited cover.

Here’s another bit of uncredited art, this time without an Asian woman. I do like the title.

All rights to images remain with current holders.

Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but it’s cool that my book Now and Then We Time Travel has been footnoted in an academic paper, Paradoxes of Time Travel in Juliusz Machulski’s Cinema. It’s not the first time I’ve been cited either.

I am not, however, the F. Sherman cited in Engineered Yeasts Simulating P450-DEPENDENT Metabolisms: Tricks, Myths and Reality (an academic website asked). While I have a biology background, I do not even know what that means.

This was a hectic week, though I knew some of that going in. Vet appointment Tuesday for the dogs, lunch with friends Wednesday, doctor’s appointment for myself Thursday. I’m always a little morbid about my checkups, thinking I’ll hear horrible news (“Your cholesterol number would look really good … if you were 100 pounds of yak butter.”). Nope, cholesterol is good, weight is better than I expected, other stuff looks good. Yay.

On top of all that, the dogs put us through the wringer. Trixie had several days of night squirtles; unlike her usual, which is going out every hour or so, it was one runny poop a night, one or two hours after midnight. That’s passed but Plushie had a midnight puke the past couple of nights. So not a lot of sleep — Thursday I just threw up my hands at writing anything requiring thought.

Still I got some movies watched for Jekyll and Hyde, worked on Savage Adventures and got some Local Reporter work in: a story on the new Carrboro librarian and a look at sidewalk and bike path funding in Carrboro. Over at Atomic Junk Shop I blog about comics’ boom in horror at the end of the 1960s, three different types of heroes and comics trying to deal with the youthquake of the era. Below we have the Teen Titans from one of those stories of youth, before they shucked their costumes for a string of politically relevant storylines.

I have no idea why Lilith, clearly not Asian in Nick Cardy’s art, is identified as “the enigma of the East.”

All rights to images remain with current holders.

TYG had an operation on her hand this week. It went fine but having her right hand out of commission proved a challenge. I had to handle all the doses for our dogs’ medical care for a couple of days, plus walking them both to minimize any risk to her hand — Plushie’s pulling can be hard enough even with two good hands to rein him in.

On top of that, the night before the surgery I slept poorly — and I didn’t have the same freedom to take naps during the day that I usually do. The end result was that I was exhausted, plus I had less time. So not a great week for productive work.

Plus I spent an hour trying to track down one Jekyll and Hyde movie online. The one site that had it requires a subscription and wanted me to pay for it by direct withdrawal from my bank. Um, no, I don’t trust them that much. I ordered it on DVD, finally.

So another largely unproductive week. I did get in two articles for The Local Reporter. One of them, on documentary producer Joedan Okun — he worked on the Grammy-winning American Symphony, available on Netflix — is way cooler than my usual subject. The other was an update on Carrboro’s newly opened library branch.

At Atomic Junk Shop I wrote about comics’ first resurrection and the first death of a Marvel hero’s love interest. I also looked at how Captain America was becoming out of place by the end of the 1960s, as Cap reflects in the scene below. It would be a couple of years before Marvel found the solution.

On the plus side, I sold another digital copy of 19-Infinity. Whoever you are, thanks for spending your hard-earned money on me.

All rights to images remain with current holders. Art top to bottom by Curt Swan, Sheldon Moldoff, Nick Cardy and Gene Colan.

As I mentioned Monday, state department official Darren Beattie thinks white men should run everything. Giving women and POC a role in leadership is just coddling them — presumably because Beattie considers them de facto unqualified whereas white men automatically earn their positions by merit (at the link it says he’s also behind the claims there were federal agents in the J6 crowd. And I’ve read elsewhere he advocates giving Taiwan to China). Never mind how many of Trump’s crew are WEI (white, entitled, incompetent) hires.

As Karen Attiah says, this isn’t about meritocracy, it’s about segregation: “I don’t mean resegregation in the sense of separate water fountains. I mean it in the sense that a Black woman would never even be considered for a federal job or a management position at a big company — the way it was in, say, the 1960s. It is not “inclusion” the Republicans want to get rid of, it’s integration.”

Wake County School Board member Sam Hershey makes the same point: “For 250 years I think it’s really important to talk about people being hired based on their skin color and for 250 years it has been mediocre white men who have been hired based on their skin color, and those are facts.”

That is, of course, the Republican idea of equality. It’s typical of how many of the religious right think we should solve problems: by turning back the clock. Never mind the utopian past they dream of didn’t exist, at least white men will be on top again!

And never mind the New York Times paints such criticisms as a matter of opinion, that “some see” racism. It’s racism. Likewise, when Charlie Kirk says his first thought on seeing a black pilot is to question their qualifications, that’s not because of affirmative action or DEI, it’s because he assumes black people are unqualified (or he’s lying).

Costco has rejected calls to drop its diversity, equity and inclusion programs so multiple Republican AGs are suing them. Pam Bondi, Trump’s new lapdog attorney general (DOJ attorneys are his attorneys, not the government’s) has announced she’s investigating private companies’ DEI programs.

I find myself wondering if these suits will continue even if there were no diversity programs to scream about. As I wrote in Undead Sexist Cliches —

— our society still has a default assumption that white male achievements are earned — if the leadership of anything is all male, that just shows they’re superior beings. If it’s even moderately female, it’s suspect. This attitude didn’t start with Trump. The late columnist John Leo was adamant in the last century that having low numbers of women doesn’t prove discrimination; if there was a male minority, that was prima facie proof of reverse discrimination!

Before DEI the complaint was “affirmative action,” or it was “they’re just a token” or for women, “who’d she blow to get that job?” Or simply “what’s that bitch doing taking a man’s job?” Because women simply can’t be better than men … can they? (Spoiler: yes, easily). Affirmative action isn’t why Kirk (or anyone) assumes a black man or a woman of any color can’t do the job.

Consider FOTUS and JD Vance shrieking that “diversity” means lots of highly qualified manly white men were denied jobs as air-traffic controllers and it’s the unqualified POC and disabled people and women who caused that crash. Never mind that we’ve had diversity programs in the FAA for years without massive crashes. Obviously if we’d had more white men with the sterling qualifications of a Vance, it wouldn’t have happened (sarcasm font).

Or as HL Mencken once put it, “”The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true desserts. He ascribes all his failure to get on in the world, all of his congenital incapacity and damfoolishness, to the machinations of…some…den of infamy.” In too many cases the den of infamy is a secret man-hating feminist cabal.

To end on an up note, people are pushing back against the Trump white male supremacist leadership. Senator Brian Schatz. Multiple protests. Trump backed off his tariff plan for Mexico and Canada when they pushed back. Wall Street Journal reporter Katherine Long “linked DOGE staffer Marko Elez to a deleted X account that advocated repealing the Civil Rights Act, backed a “eugenic immigration policy,” and wrote, “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.” Dude resigned, though Musk and JD Vance got pissed — and got him reinstated. Some state AGs are pushing back against DOGE accessing citizens’ data, including my NC AG, Jeff Jackson. American kids in Germany booed Pete Hegseth.

We can’t save everything but we can save some things. Decide what you want to save and look for ways to help do that.

For more of me venting about misogyny, check out Undead Sexist Cliches in paperback or ebook. You can also order it straight from me from the Behold the Book page.