It's not about race

Glenn Beck, late of TV fame, is upset by the fact that Marvel comics has killed off Peter Parker and replaced him with a new Spider-Man: Miles Morales, a half black half Hispanic teenager. Apparently Beck feels that whatever made America great is being trashed. He blames all this on the obvious culprit:

On his radio show today, after repeatedly telling listeners that “I don’t care” about the new Spider-Man and that it is just a “stupid comic book”, Beck got his real opinion out. He explained why the new bi-racial Spider-Man can be attributed to Michelle Obama.

“I think a lot of this stuff is being done intentionally. What was it that Mrs. Obama said before the campaign? Because its strange how so much of this seems to all be happening,” he said. Beck then played an audio file of Michelle Obama saying that “we’re gonna have to change our traditions.”

Makes you want to go out and "take back America" doesn't it?
From the Frum Forum, btw.

I mean, messing with Spider-Man!?

A Dream of a Thousand Cats

Juxtaposition is everything.




First, watch this little video. (Carmen made me watch it, much as I dislike animals).

Then, read this little comic book story. Or should I call it a graphic novel? Or, "Sequential Art" (apparently the newest academic term for comic books). It is Neil Gaiman's now classic tale "A Dream of a Thousand Cats" from The Sandman series. Peculiarly addictive, by the way.

Adds a little something to the appreciation of "she's" motivation, don't you think?

Favorite quote:

Little one, I would like to see anyone -- prophet, king or god -- persuade a thousand cats to do anything at the same time.

I think I'll go play with Mosby Cat now. Ta.

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Golden Age of Comics

Once upon a time, long long ago, I wanted to be a comic book artist. Something in me still does, but it usually keeps pretty quiet, except when I come across blogs like this one.

I am sticking it here so I can go back and wander through it whenever I want.

I think our little friend Mr Miggs would love some of these old illustrations.

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Neil Gaiman

The New Yorker has a profile of Neil Gaiman, one of Carmen's favorite authors. I've liked everything of his I've read (or seen), but don't want to have favorite authors. The profile is fascinating if you are familiar with him, and odd enough to make you read something of his if you aren't. Here's my favorite quote, combining several authors who would be my favorite authors if I had any.

The writer Gene Wolfe says that “Sunbird,” Gaiman’s story about an epicurean club that eats the mythical phoenix, “is so much in the style of R. A. Lafferty it’s almost as if Lafferty were dictating it from Heaven.”

He was a kid I can relate to:

As a child, he was bookish and broody; for his tenth birthday, he asked for a shed and got a kit of pine boards, which his parents assembled at the bottom of the garden. It was where he read: the Narnia books; Roger Lancelyn Green; a neighbor’s father’s “Dracula”; Chesterton, borrowed from the library. Instead of studying for his bar mitzvah, he persuaded his instructor to teach him Bible stories—the Behemoth, the Leviathan—and the secret teachings, about Lilith and the Lilim, which he used in “The Sandman.” To his father’s dismay, he spent his bar-mitzvah money on American comics—a good investment, as he sees it now.

He started out writing the comic book "Sandman" ... and has an arresting way to describe its success:

“Sandman,” Gaiman says, is sexually transmitted. “Guys who wanted their girlfriends to read comics would give them ‘Sandman.’ They’d break up, and the girl would take the ‘Sandman’s and infect the next guy. It grew on a vector.”

A strange fellow. Maybe I should read more of him.


he could become my favorite author with an English accent who wears black.

R. Crumb, r.i.p... ooops

Honest, I thought he was dead. R. Crumb. How many of you remember him? He was an underground comic artist of the late 60s-70s and a very strange man. (See this bio-pic if you have any doubts about that!). His artwork was splendid - he only drew in sharp black and white using India ink in a Rapidograph pen (my hero!).

While I have to admit to a certain influence on the budding Clemens' barely post adolescent mind, many critics have "denounced Crumb's work as socially degrading and emotionally immature misogynistic pornography!" (from a web page devoted to his work)

So imagine my surprise when I see in today's Washington Post that the man has illustrated a complete, unexpurgated, literal, word for word version of the book of Genesis. Complete unto every last 'begot'! Don't know if it is a work of reverence, love, or irony, but there is no doubt that it will be regarded as a work of art.

If you go into that sort of thing.

and I certainly do. Keep on truckin'.

Faces in time

This morning when I came into the office I picked up a copy of Watchmen by Alan Moore, loaned to me, no, forced upon me, by the department lunatic with whom I have altogether too much in common. One of which is a love of comics, and Watchmen is one of the best, illustrated by Dave Gibbons. Not quite ready to get back to the Order of the Templars article I am finishing up ONE MORE TIME* I opened it and my eyes fell upon a paragraph that struck a chord.

Moe Vernon was a man around fifty-five or so, and he had one of those old New York faces that you don't see anymore. It's funny, but certain faces seem to go in and out of style. You look at old photographs and everybody has a certain look to them, almost as if they're related. Look at the pictures from ten years later and you can see that there's a new kind of face starting to predominate, and that the old faces are fading away and vanishing, never to be seen again.

True, with one exception: every time I look at old photos of Civil War soldiers I see relatives of mine. Perhaps we got stuck in the 1860s somehow.

It would explain a lot.



*it came back to me a few months ago for some updates on bibliography. Me being me, I did some more research and started rewriting one important part.

Ode to comics

Yet another of the guest writers (aka unpaid subsitutes) on Andrew Sullivan has published an ode to comic books.

As someone whose entire early knowledge of history and virtually everything else came from comic books, especially things like Classics Illustrated, comics based on movies like "The Conqueror," and "El Cid," and, of course, every issue of every war comic I could find, not to mention the original "Thor," I have to agree.

Once I even wanted to be a comic book illustrator, like Russ Heath, Joe Kubert, Russ Manning, or Sam Glanzman.

Instead I became a medieval historian. What a come down.