This Means War, out now from 20th Century Home Entertainment, had all the makings of a unique and fun romcom that instead turned out to be a dreadfully dull and predictable film that fell flat for audiences, critics and did dismally at the box office. The basic premise has Captain Kirk A and Shinzon as buddy spies vying to win the heart of Elle Woods, which meant they took the eye off their mission with horrible results.
McG is clearly a visually director who cares little about characterization or story structure which is a shame because with some effort, this could have risen above the obvious and been a modern day action romance along the lines of True Lies. In Los Angeles, CIA field operatives played by Chris Pine and Tom Hardy are the best of friends and have been for some time. But we’re shown how lonely they are and both coincidentally use the same online dating service at the same time.
Meantime, Product focus group facilitator Reese Witherspoon has also been out of the dating game for too long and is urged by her best friend Chelsea Handler to try online and guess which site she uses? Sure enough, she and Hardy, who is unhappily divorced from Abigail Spencer, agree to meet and find a spark. By sheer coincidence, she then meets Pine at the video store and there’s another unexpected connection. (more…)
My weekly rants here do not seem to be attracting the same numbers as my colleagues. This hurts my feelings. I suppose I could pick a fight with Michael Davis, but I’m not very good at feuds. I could start some kind of poll of web comics, but you don’t read columns to find out what you already think. You read columns to get a specific perspective on something. Just, apparently, not my opinion on the stuff in pop culture that has attracted my attention lately.
So let’s talk about sex.
Specifically, sex in comics. Alien sex.
Perhaps I don’t read as widely as I should, but very few stories about aliens and sex show much imagination. Most of the time, only two beings are involved. Sex organs and other pleasure centers seem to be located at the same places they are in humans. The exchange of bodily fluids is necessary for reproduction, unless the species is advanced enough to use science instead.
Biology, it seems, is destiny.
As I wrote here, there seems to be a need to put breasts on any females, whether they are mammals or not.
Even worse, rotting female zombies are often nothing more than flesh, bone, and gigantic mammary glands. If you don’t believe me, look at any random issue of DC’s Blackest Night. I suppose that it’s possible that every woman in the DC Universe had silicone breast implants which wouldn’t decompose at the same rate as their human parts, but if that were true, wouldn’t there have been a story somewhere in The Daily Planet? Wouldn’t Dr. Midnider have mentioned it?
Comics are graphic stories. That means they have art. It wouldn’t be too difficult to create characters who aren’t human, who require three or more individuals to reproduce, and whose reproductive organs are in places other than their crotches. Maybe they have to sit in a circle and hold hands, so the story could include graphic sex scenes that are G-rated.
Or there could be a society where sex is an involuntary (and not entirely pleasurable) physical reaction, like sneezing. Kleenex would be as provocative (and necessary) as condoms, and sold behind the check-out at drugstores.
Or maybe they could sneeze out of their gigantic breasts, which would sell a zillion copies of that particular comic. And also, drive up my screen views.
(Editor’s Note: Kleenex is a registered trademark of Kimberly-Clark.)
SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman and Why Most DC Movies Suck
It’s spring, that magical time of year when the flowers bloom, birds sing, and school libraries publish the list of books most frequently banned or attempted to be banned.
This year’s list is a mixture of new best sellers and timeless classics. You’ve got your Hunger Games, your To Kill a Mockingbird, your Brave New World and your Gossip Girl. There is a guide that explains to kids about what happens to mom when she is pregnant, and the reason it’s listed is because it is “sexually explicit.”
Look, I understand that most school libraries have limited budgets and limited shelf space. They can’t stock every book in the world. Someone has to make decisions about what gets purchased and where it gets shelved.
The problem is who gets to decide.
I’ve been the mother of a first-grader, and if there arose a ridiculously hypothetical situation wherein my six-year old came home with Brave New World, I probably would have a talk with his teacher. I think it is inappropriate (my kid would have just learned his ABCs, so I think Alpha and Beta might be a stretch), but rather than try to get it banned, I would hope to understand what the teacher was thinking. Maybe there is a new pedagogical theory that I don’t understand.
But no one is complaining about Aldous Huxley being taught to first graders.
The idea that someone is objecting to To Kill a Mockingbird because of “racism” is ludicrous. It’s a story about racism, how it affects people of all races in a community. It’s great novel, beautifully written and evocative. It’s also a great opportunity to start a conversation with students – most likely middle school or older – about how our country evolved and is still evolving.
A lot of the books on the list made their places because, according to their critics, they contain “sex,” “violence” or both. Some contain “nudity.” Some have “language.” I have trouble imagining books that don’t have at least a few of those elements. How can you describe human interactions without at least one? How can they teach the Bible (any version) or Shakespeare without them?
Some parents say things like, “I don’t want the schools teaching my child about sex/racism/war. I want to do it myself.” And that’s all well and good. However, one doesn’t teach a child by restricting information. If the school teaches something with which one doesn’t agree, one should use that as an opportunity to demonstrate one’s own position. As a Jewish parent in a predominantly Christian society, this was something I did regularly.
Some parents don’t want their children exposed to any ideas that might influence their kids to think independently. I have to wonder why these people had children. They would be happier with dogs.
Why does this matter to comics fans? Because the people who decide to ban books from school libraries are the same people who think comics are just for kids, and therefore should face the same restrictions they think are appropriate for school libraries. These people are why the American Civil Liberties Union has always included comics as part of their mission, because they remember that the attacks against comics in the 1940s and 1950s were attacks on all of us.
Our democracy can only succeed when all members have access to the marketplace of ideas. That includes Mein Kampf and Heather Has Two Mommies, Twilight and The Catcher in the Rye, Harry Potter and Captain Underpants. It also includes Superman and Spider-Man, Hellboy and Preacher, Fun Home and The Playboy.
Whenever my old employer, DC Comics, reprints some of my ancient work, it’s gratifying, particularly if what’s reprinted is one of the “socially relevant” stories Neal Adams and I did in the early 70s, but it can be a little disheartening, too.
The problem is, the stories are for the most part still relevant, and what does that say about the state of the nation? Environmental upset? Yep, still got it. Racism? The folks down in Florida could tell you about that. Addiction? That lovely singer is no longer with us. Overpopulation? Hasn’t improved. American Indians? Some of the nation’s worst poverty is found on reservations that don’t house casinos.
As one of Bill Maher’s guests said on his show last week, it seems unbelievable that birth control could be a factor in presidential politics in the in the twenty first century. I mean…birth control?
But occasionally a glimmer of light shows through the gloom. So let us smile and extend a salute to Batwoman.
Digression: Batwoman and I go way, way back. Fact is, I killed her 40-something years ago. Why? Don’t remember, exactly. Her demise was almost certainly a plot point in the days when comics stories were largely plot-driven, and she must have seemed to be good cannon fodder: a character who, although she was in the continuity, hadn’t done much in a long time and if we needed a snuffee, and I guess we did, she was a good candidate. I do regret ending her offstage; she probably deserved a death scene at the very least.
End of digression: Batwoman is back. Wait – make that a Batwoman, who has the same name(s) as the original, but a different lifestyle. She’s a redhead and…oh yeah, a lesbian. Big deal? In our world, it kind of is since, from the beginning of mass-marketed comics, redheads were forbidden.
Just kidding: it’s gay people who could not grace our little sagas and in this we were one with most other media. In television and most movies, sex of any kind was antiseptic – all those cardboard kisses! – and gay sex was way outside the limits. And if gayness was an element in a story, as in some of Tennessee Williams’ film material, it was no more than hinted at and its practitioners were going to suffer plenty before the last reel.
In comics? Well, one of the characters John Byrne created for his series Alpha Flight was gay, but not too obviously; John’s editor knew of Northstar’s orientation, but I’m not sure anyone else in the editorial department did, not at first. (I’m informed that later creative teams pulled Northstar further out of the closet.) And a couple of years back, Marvel let us know that the ol’ rannie from the western titles, the Rawhide Kid, was gay, news that managed not to shake any foundations. But on the whole, the Kid and Northstar and a few others, including the revamped Question, in private did icky stuff that wasn’t mentioned, except, maybe, in he gutters.
Now, Batwoman. Last week she received a media award from the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and nobody’s making any secret of the recognition.
Call it one of those glimmers I mentioned earlier. And be grateful for it.
Like most Americans, I learned about Alexander Dumas’ Three Musketeers from their countless adaptations on screen and in print. For me, it was probably Sheldon Mayer’s Three Mouseketeers reprints along with the rallying cry of “One for all, and all for one” shouted by just about every cartoon, sitcom and prime time drama at one point or another. Sure, there was the delightful two film adaptation made by Ilya Salkind that was instrumental in their approach to Superman the Movie and my kids grew up adoring the somewhat boiled down, tongue-slightly-in-cheek version from Disney with a great cast (Oliver Platt, Kiefer Sutherland, Tim Curry, etc.). It wasn’t until last year that I actually read the book in its entirety and it was a revelation.
Billed as a modern retelling, The Three Musketeers from Summit Entertainment, was therefore eagerly awaited. It had been over a decade since the Disney film so the time must have felt right and director Paul W.S. Anderson, certainly knew how to make commercial fare to appeal to today’s younger audiences. Screenwriter Alex Litvak certainly knows how to handle action given his work on Predators and the casting sounded right: Athos (Matthew Macfadyen), Aramis (Luke Evans), Porthos (Ray Stevenson) and D’Artagnan (Logan Lerman) versus Cardinal Richelieu (Christoph Waltz) and Rochefort (Mads Mikkelsen). There was the sex appeal of Milady (Milla Jovovich) and her would-be lover Duke of Buckingham (Orlando Bloom). (more…)
As we gird our collective loins for another presidential election season, we become accustomed to another iteration of praise for “family values.” It is a phrase that has different meanings to people of different political persuasions. To Democrats, it means a living wage and a financial safety net for the poor, the old and the infirm. To Republicans, it means no gay marriage, no sex outside marriage, and no abortion.
For me, neither viewpoint is adequate. I strive for Superman Family values.
As a woman of a certain age, I remember a comic book series dedicated solely to the Superman family. It had stories about Superman, of course, but also Supergirl, my favorite character, and Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane and Krypto. At 60¢ (not the standard 15¢ or 20¢), this was a big, fat comic book, good for a whole afternoon.
I learned a lot about family from those books, and not just how to get some extra change from my parents.
Superman grew up with loving, principled parents in the Kents. He lived on a farm where everyone had chores that contributed to the family fortunes. He knew he was adopted, so he knew his parents really wanted him. However, since he was Kryptonian, he had powers and abilities far beyond those of his friends and classmates. His parents taught him to value his differences, but not use them to draw attention to himself for personal gain. His gifts were best appreciated when he used then to help his community.
Years later, Superman discovered he had a teenage cousin, Supergirl. He didn’t know anything about her, yet he immediately accepted her and loved her.
When he grew up and moved on to his adult life, Superman, like the rest of us, assembled a family of sorts, of people he chose. Most of this family came from the people with whom he worked, Perry White a surrogate father, Jimmy Olsen like a little brother. Bruce Wayne was his best friend, a peer who understood what it meant to live life with secrets.
I have to believe that Superman would favor the rights of immigrants, since he is one. I have to believe that a man who has roamed the various universes and seen thousands of different societies would develop respect for people with different beliefs than his, and different ways of defining family.
As a member of the Legion of Super-Heroes, Superman had good friends who were in romantic relationships that were not only not conventionally heterosexual, but often between two different species. If this bothered him, we never saw his discomfort in the comics. He accepted his friends as they presented themselves.
Is Superman political? I have always imagined him to be a New Deal Democrat, or what the GOP today calls a “socialist.” At the same time, I don’t see him as an activist, nor even all that partisan. As Clark Kent, he votes, he serves jury duty when summoned, and he pays his taxes.
To him, family is a joy and a refuge. It isn’t something for politicians to use to bludgeon each other and score points.
In fact, I’m so far away from being a prude the next level in my open mindedness would be to become a prude.
I’ve met a lot of prudes in my life and nothing makes a prude more prudish than their views on sex.
Me? As long as it does not include kids or animals I say what ever floats your boat sexually, have at it. You would have to be into some sick shit (kids, animals, Republicans) to disgust me.
I’m not quite at the point that I’m disgusted by the depiction of some women in superhero comics but I’m far from all right with it and have not been all right with it for a while now. It’s just a real turn off to me and it’s also one of the reasons a lot of people still think comics are juvenile fare at best.
The depiction of super titty women is not something I consider as important to be concerned about like some sicko who’s into gerbil love or some other crazy action. I guess for the most part absolutely unrealizable depictions of women with breasts as big as a weather balloons is harmless, except for giving young men a bullshit unrealistic view of women and demeaning women in all sorts of ways. But other than that, it’s harmless.
But-that does seem to be what the audience wants, though it seems to me the 38 double-D tits, tiny waist and banging booty that appear to be the preeminent portrayal of women in comics is just silly in this day and age. Yeah, I can hear the decades old ridiculous argument “they are drawn that way for the 15-year-old boy audience.”
Really? So those 15-year old boys are not into the guys in tights that beat up on other guys in tights, which is the reason most superhero comics exist? So doing away with the big titty women would result in those 15-year old boys no longer reading about the men in tights who like to pound other men in tights?
Oh, wait a sec.
Perhaps the reason for the big titty women is to insure that no conservative family value group complains that comics are nothing but guys in tights pounding each other.
That can’t happen. It would destroy the sanity of marriage.
So I guess we are stuck with the 15-year-old boy defense for the reason that big titty superhero women are on the rag…I mean all the rage!
Heh.
That defense is weaker than OJ’s but it’s working just as well I guess. It’s the cop out of all cop-outs and artists who spin that line are just wrong or really horny.
I mean really.
The only thing that’s possibly worst than comic’s big titty women are the big titty women in some video games. Have you seen Catwoman in Mortal Combat VS. The DC Universe? She looks like a porn star that has seen way too many one eyed monsters. I mean…damn.
I often wonder what the wives and girlfriends of the artists who draw big titty super women think. But then again, maybe that’s the problem. Maybe most of these guys have no wife or girlfriend. Maybe they just need to get laid.
Well if that’s the case I’m not here to judge, I’m here to help. Follow the steps below and your pent up frustrations will soon be a thing of the past.
Step 1. Go to a bar.
Step 2: Buy the ugliest or the fattest girl a drink or seven.
Step 3. Get real drunk yourself.
Step 4. Take her home.
Step 5. Tap that.
Note: for even faster action, buy a fat and ugly girl the drinks.
This works. Trust me. How do I know? It’s in the Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain handbook and just look how much tail those guys are getting.
On the very, very slim chance there is a woman artist out there drawing big titty women in comics the followings are steps that you can use to get laid.
Step 1. Go to a bar
Step 2. Look for the guy trying to get a fat or ugly woman (or both) drunk.
Step 3. Go up to him and just say “yes.”
Step 4. Let him take you home and “tap that.”
Step 5. In about two minutes after he is “tapped out,” leave and go home and work.
By the way, shame on you for being such a slut.
Look, kidding aside, I’m a big a fan of big titty women with tiny waist and banging booty as the next guy but I prefer real and not plastic.
That’s the problem with the way some artists depict woman. Their depictions just do not ring true.
Yes, I know that neither does a guy who comes from another planet and can bend steel in his bare hands and who, disguised as Clark Kent is tapping the ass of one of the few female characters who is not a big titty woman. I know that does not ring true either but that’s a non-truth I can live with.
The new guys would do well to take a page from some of the masters of comic book art. They took the time and effort to draw women with grace, style and attitude and those women were hot!
Gwen Stacy as drawn by John Romita Sr. is the hottest comic book woman character ever created bar none.
Who’s hotter? Nobody.
Gwen Stacy was not a superhero but she was still a piece of ass to beat any other piece of ass.
Female agents of SHIELD as drawn by Jim Steranko – hot!!! Nick Fury’s girlfriend Contessa Valentina Allegra de la Fontaine as drawn by Jim was sexy beyond words.
Jack Kirby’s Sue Storm was so fine that she was my second pretend girlfriend. The first was Gwen Stacy and the third was Laurie Partridge.
Yeah, I had a thing for white girls. I had to have a thing for white girls; there were no black women in comics or on TV for my 10-year-old self to develop a crush on.
I’m proud to say as a proud African American man, all my crushes now are of women of color…Asian.
What?
I don’t expect anything to change anytime soon with regards to super big titty woman but maybe some artist will read this and check out how the greats did women.
Give that a sec.
You know, if those comic book artists who draw those outlandish women would simply draw less big titty women the big titty women they did draw would become that much more of a sex symbol because she would be rare.
That would be sexy.
I miss you Gwen Stacy. I’m sad that the Green Goblin broke your neck.
If you, the entrepreneur, self-publish a book you will stand out, you will make more money, you will kick your competitors right in the XX, and you will look amazingly cool at cocktail parties. I know this because I am seldom cool but at cocktail parties, with my very own comic book, I can basically have sex with anyone in the room. But don’t believe me, it costs you nothing and almost no time to try it yourself.
I won’t even start with the “creating a comic costs you nothing and almost no time” supposition. But I will say this: if you are at a cocktail party where being a multimillionaire entrepreneur does not get you access to your object d’amor d’moment, but being a comic book creator does–
–dude, I want to go to your parties, because I don’t remember anything like this at TechCrunch events.
A while back I read a book called THRESHOLD that impressed me greatly.It was modern day, grunge thriller written by a truly fearless writer.Kozek’s prose, like her protagonist, Honey McGuiness, is not for the faint of heart.Honey is a broken soul, abused constantly by her father as a child, tossed from one foster home to another; her life has been nothing but a constant swim through the sewers of society.In that first outing, Honey, with the help of a selfless, naïve police officer, helped topple a corrupt administration and almost got both of them killed in the process.By the book’s end, she was packing it up for parts unknown.
Which, as it turned out, became an out of the way burg called Pie Town.As this sequel opens, Honey is working in a restaurant/bar in the small hamlet and slowly getting accustomed to the eccentricities of the colorful locals.Still there is a recurring oddity about Pie Town, all its young people run off the second they finish high school, leaving the town to children and seniors.But Honey isn’t a private eye and solving mysteries really isn’t her thing.Getting by is and as a expert survivor who has taken the worst this world can dish out, she’s lulled herself into thinking Pie Town is a safe, boring corner into which she can crawl and disappear.
Sadly that assumption is the furthest from the truth.Pie Town harbors a dark and unholy secret and when Honey is kidnapped by a psycho killer operating a sex cult in the nearby woods, she begins a descent into a drug induced hell that is both horrifying and mind-numbing.Kozek doesn’t spare any of the details of Honey’s sexual degradation and continues to explore her twisted, wounded psyche every painful step of the way.This book is one woman’s personal journey to that hell and the writing is as sharp and brutal as a razor blade.It cuts…often.Still, it is never sensationalized and believe me, that is incredible.Oh, I am positive there will be readers and critics who will decry it as such, calling the shock-value a gimmick.They’re wrong.Like any exploration of the human condition, one has to peel away the layers to find then gristle and bone beneath.That process is never pretty.It is real.
And despite its in-your-face portrayal of abject cruelty, JUST BEFORE THE DAWN manages to find a glimmer of hope and salvation at its conclusion.It may be fragile at best, but then again, in the real world, there are no guarantees.Each of us gets by, if we’re lucky, with a little help from our friends.Honey McGuinness is one of the most memorable characters you will ever encounter, if you’ve got the fortitude to take the trip.
It’s that time of year when my comics threaten to take over the apartment. As someone with a serious weekly habit (and no basement), there inevitably comes that moment when there is no more available shelf space. Or table space. Or floor space.
Back in the olden days, I didn’t want to get rid of my comics. Well, at least not all of them. When the stacks got high, I’d go through them, taking out the issues I thought I’d want to read again. I put those issues into long boxes (although not with bags and boards), and sent them away to storage. Then I would donate the remaining comics to the block association sidewalk sale. I felt great watching neighborhood kids ravage the boxes, looking for a something that was clutter to me but a treasure to them.
Once the trade paperback made its entry into the marketplace, I no longer felt it necessary to save my back issues. Almost everything I’d want to re-read would be collected at some point. This saved me a lot of time when it the sidewalk sale rolled around.
And then they changed the calendar, and the block association is much less convenient. I had to find another way to get rid of my stacks.
Luckily (<-sarcasm), we’re in the middle of a horrible recession. In my part of the country, there are all sorts of people selling stuff on the sidewalk. This being New York City, the center (but not the entirety) of the publishing industry, a lot of people sell books. Not only is there a market for books, but selling them on the street is protected by the First Amendment.
So, just as primitive man did before the invention of Ebay, there are tribes of people who look for reading material to sell. I found a lovely man, less than half a mile away, who has a table set up just outside Urban Outfitters (a chain I boycott because the founder donates to Rick Santorum), and he agreed to take my year’s worth of back issues.
I suppose I could just take my old comics down to the trash and let them be part of recycling. However, since I know most of my neighbors, and their kids, I worry that a child might get hold of a comic that is less than appropriate. I’m not a prude about sex, or language, or even necessarily violence, but I don’t want that sweet eight-year old in 5-C to be traumatized by an issue of Animal Man.
It might turn her off comics forever.
Instead, this is a win/win situation. I have a cleaner apartment, and the nice man in front of Urban Outfitters gets fresh merchandise. I feel like one of those job creators that the GOP are always praising.
I wonder what’s actually in my storage boxes. Perhaps, someday, I’ll have the space to unpack them.
This Means War, out now from 20th Century Home Entertainment, had all the makings of a unique and fun romcom that instead turned out to be a dreadfully dull and predictable film that fell flat for audiences, critics and did dismally at the box office. The basic premise has Captain Kirk A and Shinzon as buddy spies vying to win the heart of Elle Woods, which meant they took the eye off their mission with horrible results.
