icouldntthinkofabetternamesook

[icouldntthinkofabetternamesook]

So to me, an understated aspect of Watchmen is that it deconstructs supervillainy. Without the need for a rotating rogues gallery in the name of endless serialization, wannabe supervillains end up dead, imprisoned, sticking to common profitable crimes, or going straight like Moloch. I think this a missing aspect of other attempts to deconstruct the genre like Marshall Law or the Boys, because if there isn't a threat on the level of the Legion of Doom or Darkseid, then superheroes are just a solution in search of a problem, and if there are supervillains, then the superheroes need to get their shit together. This was also a problem with the League of Extraordinary Gentleman, were told about much of a threat superheroes are, but all they do is lounge around to be marketed, while the League goes out and tackles issues that a superhero could actually help with, such as the aliens from War of the Worlds, actual authoritarians like Big Brother, or even the antichrist.

Hard agree with at least the parts pertaining to Watchmen. Moloch's quivering little "Oh God, I spent the 70s in jail." is such an effective refutation of such a huge number of tropes at once, and hits above its weight in contributing to the sense that Watchmen proper is set well after the party has wound down, so to speak. I really wish that it had made it into any of the adaptations.

My endorsement as this pertains to Marshall Law and The Boys is much more tentative. Marshall Law is simply on my to-read list. The Boys is almost entirely about the idea that superheroes are just a solution in search of a problem, but also doesn't commit to an actual in-universe angle on what supervillains are, or whether they exist at all, in a way that severely limits it's ability to say anything about anything at all; they go from a real issue to which superheroes are framed as a bad solution, to controlled opposition stage-managed by Vought, and it's not a clean transition; as a comic it's concerned with getting in a lot of (decently funny) shots at the meta-editorial level at the expense of being a well-realized world. The show is meaningfully better about this, because the for-profit cultural elevation of "heroes" without a clear-cut exigence is both analogous to several dynamics in contemporary American culture and reflects the cultural idea of the superhero as shaped by the MCU.

As far as League of Extraordinary Gentlemen goes- I only ever got around to the first two volumes. But the entire point of those first two volumes is that the conflicts between heroes and villains are in fact just different groups of monstrous shitheads working at cross-purposes- as is the nature of Victorian great-game politics. The twist at the end of the first volume is that Fu Manchu, while evil, isn't actually meaningfully worse than the people who sic the quote-unquote "heroes" on him- but he is foreign, and thus easier to paint as a legitimate target.

Then, in volume two, individual heroism very pointedly plays a very limited role in the defeat of the Martians. They're driven off Mars to earth in the first place after years of warfare with a guerilla coalition of several other fictional Martian species of note- led but not defined by the efforts of John Carter and Gullivar, and it's ultimately a lukewarm, unsatisfying victory. The League's involvement in the Martian situation actively causes setbacks at first because it puts The Invisible Man in a position to sell out the entire defensive strategy to save his own hide. Nemo is only able to provide an effective stalling action because he's assisted by his sizable crew. Hyde is the only one of the group who gets to do a traditional singular superhero moment, and he's motivated to do it entirely by his overwhelming desire to kill stuff over anything intrinsically heroic, and he dies doing it. And the tide is ultimately turned by black-ops germ warfare perpetuated by the English government, ultimately bringing the entire conflict down to the level of two packs of imperialists taking swings at each other with countless innocents caught in the crossfire.

(Man, I forgot how much I liked Nemo in these, by the way. Had to quickly reread both volumes in order to make sure I wasn't going to be talking out my ass, so thank you for motivating that. What a cool guy.)

[icouldntthinkofabetternamesook]

charles xavier autism. but. abnormal. to me. charles xavier does not understand love on the same spectrum. there is a sense of detachment and. something far too logical. robotic almost. hes felt everything. he knows everything. people are one very long line of switches and knobs. they arent hard to puzzle out. just fickle. charles understands everything so differently and it effects how he interacts with everything and EVERYONE. but his fascination with erik is. augh augh. he loves erik and he doesnt know how to deal with it i think. he knows everything he needs to do to succeed. but he doesnt necessarily want success. he wants erik. in a different way than ever before.

[icouldntthinkofabetternamesook]

I feel like it's probably reflective of.... something that The Boys (Amazon) couldn't really come up with anything more interesting to do in their Spider-Man parody than just having him be some random junkie. The comic notably didn't even really try anything of substance at all, and in the context of the show's nothingburger take on the archetype that feels like a very deliberate exclusion

[icouldntthinkofabetternamesook]

[icouldntthinkofabetternamesook]

Laurie's role in Watchmen is interesting in how it's sort of leaning into the dynamics of child stardom- she got into the business as a teenager (one of the only heroes to do so!) and at the behest of her mother, with her attendance of the Crimebusters meeting explicitly being likened to an audition, and almost immediately upon being entered into that space she gets groomed by a man at least twice her age having a midlife crisis- and then kind of just gets quietly subordinated to him until her mid-30s, in a way that I think it's fair to say the text characterizes as extremely destructive to her ability to self-conceptualize. And, you know, despite Sally's obvious fear that something like this might happen- note the strength of her reaction to The Comedian looking in Laurie's general direction!- neither she nor anybody else was able or willing to put the brakes on any of this, because, to extend the showbusiness metaphor, Jon is the A-list talent. Jon is the name on the posters. Jon is the lynchpin of nuclear defense for the same government that keeps The Comedian on payroll. No one in a position of power is going to give a shit if a teenaged girl ends up as part of the cost of doing business.

[icouldntthinkofabetternamesook]

this comic was brought to you by Summer Sux Dot Org

[icouldntthinkofabetternamesook]

I was wondering if you have any recs for superman runs, I've finished reading all the available absolute superman and I'm really on the mood for more superman stuff, I've already read all star superman and loved it, btw

I myself have never really read prolonged Superman runs, although I've been meaning to look into Busiek's stuff from back when. As far as miniseries go I enjoyed (and continue to enjoy):

Superman: Birthright

Superman: American Alien

Superman: Secret Identity

Superman for all Seasons

Superman: Earth One

Alan Moore outings Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? and For the Man Who Has Everything

The Death of Superman and it's follow-ups, World without a Superman and Reign of the Supermen

The Trial of Superman (conditionally advanced; one of the first really involved superhero comics I ever read so I can't actually attest to it's quality removed from nostalgia.)

Assuming a certain tolerance for Grant Morrison Metanonsense, I really enjoyed Superman's parts in Final Crisis.

I've also heard good things about Superman Smashes the Klan by Gene Luen Yang and Mark Millar's run on the 90s tie-in comic for Superman: The Animated Series, although I've yet to read either of those.

[icouldntthinkofabetternamesook]

everyone on replies is terrified of this fact but i just think it's so sweet and heartwarming. she's holding our hand and leading us somewhere secret and we're both giggling like kids. i love her

[icouldntthinkofabetternamesook]

Basically I'm a Laurie Juspeczyk centrist in the sense that I believe every element of her character was a deliberate, considered inclusion and commentary on the role (or lack thereof) that female superheroes often played in cape spaces at the time of publication (I.E. sex objects, tokens, designated love interests, existing fundamentally in relation to male characters) but she then doesn't get enough focus and agency throughout the rest of the book to attain true escape velocity from that narrative role, and thus ends up inadvertently reproducing the dynamics under critique to some extent.

[icouldntthinkofabetternamesook]

"actually batman has PTSD"

"no, he has OCD"

"if you notice these panels he has autism"

"actually if you look here he clearly has narcissistic personality disorder"

all mental health labels were invented by an evil system of oppression designed to destroy the lives of the cognitively disabled. institutionalisation must be torn down, burned down, and destroyed by any means necessary

also he clearly has C-PTSD wym

[icouldntthinkofabetternamesook]

i think that the dudebro who reads Batman as a violent escapist fantasy without engaging with the themes of Bruce Wayne's mental illness is an egregore

where does it dwell

can it be killed

i think, rather, that the way in which the mental illness of white cishet men has historically been discussed is ever-changing, reflecting social fears and moral panics, evolving concepts of masculinity and the changing landscape of mental health narratives as created by the a culture that 1. products 90% of popular English language media, and 2. has so deregulated psychology that your "therapist" might actually be a practitioner of a legally dubious ghost religion.

that is to say, Batman has been in conversation with male mental illness since 1937, he has been more overtly in conversation with the subject since the mid-1970s, frank miller aligned the conversation with discourses created and perpetuated by bands like suicidal tendencies, pantera, and other hyper-masculine expressions of being unwell in the mid-1980s, and the subject has been pretty much impossible to ignore in the text ever since.

rather, it's an unhealthy engagement with the theme that we're really responding to. my drama is that we're responding to it in this strawman adjacent, unconstructive way, by misunderstanding the broader issue that the discourse resembles, imo.

consider:

men are told our mental illness is the consequence of a materialist circumstance. there is no complex inner world, only factual things, because we're so fucking rational, emotions are for women and faggots in that order. batman's parents are dead: this is a material circumstance that has affected him, a thing we can point to in his world and say "ah ha! you see, his trauma is real, not ephemeral."

men are told that because oru mental illness is the consequence of a materialist circumstance, a materialist answer is necessary. grind your way out of poverty. grind your way to that promotion. find wife. put baby in wife. wife raises baby and so long as baby lives you will never die. acquire car. own more than neighbour. not owning these things, or inability to do these things, is the reason for your discontent, for you are a man and exist only in material. batman tries to fight crime by punching it (material action) with his batmobile (material object).

we see batman's social connections as both an alleviation of mental illness to some extent (tim drake's introduction) and more often, as a flaw or weakness (1980s conflict with dick grayson, azrael, batman's sense of responsibility for barbara, "batman creates his own villains.") this reflects masculine mental health narratives about it being our harmful or predatory connections to others that in fact perpetuate our misery, oh everyone wants to be my enemy (my enemy).

in good batman texts, we see that batman's materialist, social isolationist, very smelly man response to his mental illness is unhealthy, unproductive, hurts himself and others, yadda yadda. in bad batman texts, batman's isolation is represented as a virtue, lionized in the way pantera's "walk" lionizes themes of suicidal tendencies' "institutionalised" i'm sorry i'm sorry i promise i'm normal

my point is, the dudebro demiurge might not know that batman is a text that deals with mental illness, but the real annoying reddit dickhead you're actually thinking about definitely does, he's just not someone who processes mental illness well, due to pervasive narratives in culture that teach men wretchedly harmful shit lol.

[icouldntthinkofabetternamesook]

Batman is actually kind of interesting when considering the weird trend of pro-natalist techbro white people using IVF and similar procedures to create weird little armies, the relationship that has to Great Replacement Theory style racism, the eugenics of it all, blah blah blah. Because we live in a time when rich people do in fact have a dozen or more kids, brought on by some insane belief systems I feel most people don't actually understand, but which stem from very liberal eugenicist concepts lol.

And then we have Bruce Wayne, who adopts all of his kids and is so much more normal about them than any author could possibly have intended, because again, normal people don't know about the rich white pro-natalist movement.

[icouldntthinkofabetternamesook]

I think ultimately my beef with Chris Claremont is that he will discuss bigotry at length but seems not to understand how many forms of bigotry are manufactured on a societal level.

Take "God Loves Man Kills," which is kind of the thesis work for the concept of "X-Men as minorities" under Claremont imo. I think it's fine to point at fiends like Pat Robinson and so on as a vector for increasing bigoted beliefs in society, sure. That's very accurate.

I uh, have never met a bigoted Christian who functions in precisely the same way as William Stryker, and bud believe me I have met bigoted Christians, but fine. As a broad "fuck this kind of dude" thing I think it works and starts conversations for a lot of young boys reading these comics at the time, mission accomplished.

My issue is, the same text presents the cops as ranging from indifferent and "just doing their job" to heroic because one of them shoots Pat Robinson. There's a rejection of the concept that the cops are themselves agents of bigotry in society, or even susceptible to bigotry. All of the cops we see talk shit about Pat Robinson. Why? I believe it's because Claremont genuinely believes in liberal societal myths that if all is functioning smoothly, then we are in fact equal. In Claremont's X-Men, racism is an aberration from the norm brought out by individual bad actors and their stupid sheeple followers. It's like how you see liberals attempt to understand the Daily Wire or Tucker Carlson or whatever by insisting it's just grifters and nameless faceless stupes who don't exist in the way you or I do, and sans Tucker would perhaps not be racist. They understand racists as amorphous masses, and not people created by complex systemic and cultural realities that can be addressed, is my point.

And that's just not my worldview man. So reading a text about racism that fully embraces this concept of racism feels naive and, if I'm being really honest, a little embarrassing.

I think that it's also impossible to really ignore that this text does contain an ambiguously brown rape gang. The only character with a voice uses Spanish phrases, and his mate is wearing a Sikh dastar (it was also a time when "Sikh" and "Muslim" were, hilariously, not distinct in the minds of most white Brits and Americans lol). These characters attempt to rape Kitty Pryde, and are then all killed by the child-murdering anti-mutant extremist who wants to kill Kitty Pryde. What is going on here, and what is Chris Claremont unintentionally - or perhaps intentionally - saying about the actual nature of bigotry? That sure, some people in society are A Problem, but it's not these nice mutants who all live in a mansion under the watchful eye of a benevolent white billionaire? That racists feel justified because hey, they're not sending their best, they're not sending people like you and me, they're sending rapists?

I don't know.

The thing is, in my opinion, Claremont seems unaware or uninterested in many flavours of history. He is, obviously, very aware of and responds often to Nazi antisemitism, using Nazism as some a kind of warning as to where society might be headed if we're not careful with the slurs. Fine.

He also has a range of Native American characters lol. Oop! The thing is, Native American history consistently debunks the entire concept of normative peace and tolerance vs. individual bad actors and mass hysteria. In fact, the concept of tribalism, that is the idea that people innately react with hate and hostility to folks what look and live different, is consistently used to deny the extreme intentional nature of colonialist genocides.

Frustratingly, Claremont doesn't engage with Native American or colonialist history beyond this football teams concept. In fact, Claremont solves this issue by just... not talking about it much at all.

Now, perhaps something is eventually said with Dani Moonstar or someone, sure, but I simply did not read enough to reach that point. Which is a problem, because I read 16/18 volumes of the Masterworks Uncanny re-issues (meeting Mickey Twoyoungmen and my favourite, Forge), and 4/8 of the New Mutants. So, regardless of whether Claremont chooses to get around to it sooner or later, it's certainly not frontloaded like the presence of the characters is.

Frankly, at one point, Claremont puts pro-colonialist words in Dani Moonstar's mouth, as if she simply would not have a more complex inner world or reaction to seeing colonialist violence.

Claremont will have his Indigenous characters yell "hoka hey" in direct reference not to Chief Crazy Horse, but to cowboy movies about Chief Crazy Horse. He will not sit with the concept of colonialism as a manufacturer of racism in a way that distinguishes that racism from, say, a Klansman lighting a cross. Dani just hates white people, 'cause teams. They play for the Bulls and she's a Celtic.

To demonstrate what I mean by not giving equal weight to history:

In her introduction, Dani Moonstar is told she's going to be relocated to live with Charles Xavier, a white billionaire. She screams no, fuck that, white people are "the enemy" and I'm not going to live with one.

Claremont does not couch this in a discussion of how for generations the United States has weaponized child protective services and similar state entities against Cheyenne and other Indigenous people. Relocating Native American children into residential schools and white households is not a neutral subject, or something one can explore with a "two football teams" idea of racism. There's history of this as a tool of colonialist violence and Dani, often politically aware of colonialist violence (see: her grandpa's death) is not written to articulate this sentiment in a way the reader can access.

Thus, Dani's resistance to being forced to live in a rich white man's home is couched in some kind of strange "racist black guy" concept. She never deconstructs this further, and is characterized as a bit paranoid and traumatized, sure, but not correct.

A more informed audience may fill in that blank if they want to. Will an ignorant reader be able to do the same?

Racism has complex roots.

When black historians discuss redlining as "going all the way back to the plantation," that's what they're getting at. White supremacist cultural practices exist in layers of beliefs built upon colonialist attitudes that began on day one and persist, mutating through generations to fit new realities and circumstances, but never deconstructing the core.

When Columbus met the Taino, the Arawak and the Carib people, and he infantilised (and enslaved) the Taino, but used the Arawak as a scapegoat to claim a "caniba" nature of the Carib people. He was not responding honestly to observation, and this was not a "egad! brown skin? verily these fiends play for Detroit Pistons and I, the noble Denver Nuggets!" situation.

This bitch wanted fuckin money and was enacting older, Crusades-era concepts of Christian dominionism (see how history cycles work?) So, he was marketing this new uncolonized land to his investors as having slaves, and dangerous locals who he characterized as so savage they could not be Christianized and thus had to be killed, justifying further investment of resources.

It wasn't

ah! different people! my urge to kill... EXPLODING!! NNNGHGN

Listen, I like the X-Men fans that I've met. It's one of the nicest fandoms on tumblr and the people in it are broadly cool, educated and hot with excellent pecs.

However, and I do mean this with love, I bet not a single fuckin fan from when Claremont's books were on the shelves found it odd that Storm XMen, a Kenyan living in Kenya in the 1970s, was somehow untouched by colonialism or decolonialist concepts, during Kenya's decolonisation era.

The region was forcibly Christianized by the British starting in the 1890s, or debatably earlier if we count missionary efforts, and yet Storm XMen lives in this weird little untouched pristine village where they worship her as a goddess.

The 1970s audience probably just accepted this because 1. she controls the weather, so obviously right, and 2. they're like dumb black African villagers or something so they probably worship all kinds of shit.

An opportunity for education was, in my honest opinion, wasted.

And it fucks me into a coma leaving my asshole wet and gaping because I see older fans insisting that it's just "of its time." man! man!!

the time of Black Panthers, feminists, queer and disabled liberation marches, all of these anti-bigotry activist causes out in the street causing a ruckus!!

Roy Thomas' ASS, I mean Roy Thomas' All Star Squadron, contained a clumsy but somewhat informed expression of the systemic causes of American anti-Japanese racism during WWII. It was bad, yes, but at least Thomas was able to explore the concept that most white Americans didn't even know where Japan was beforehand.

Bro! He explores how American culture created arbitrary and fucked distinctions of "good Japanese" vs. "bad Japanese" based primarily on immigration status and other mechanisms weaponized against this marginalized demographic. He was out there dropping terms like issei and nisei, which sure yes whatever that's diet shit for historians, but I have simply never seen other American media care enough to acknowledge how white supremacy genuinely did create complex wedges in Japanese-American society in the 1940s.

There's even a moment early in the run where a white bloke articulates that China and Japan are like even forces and thus removes the Sino-Japanese War from its colonialist character lol. Although I believe this is unintentional on Thomas' part, veeery funny and apt considering the overall vibe and the era Thomas is discussing. That kind of thing coupled with anti-Asian racism is why the west never intervened before the creation of Manchukuo.

It's bad! It's ahistorical and frustrating! It contains a "Heroic Jap" narrative meant to debunk the concept of absolutist racism!

But it demonstrates an adjacent of-era comic series that is able to engage with racism as a systemic and manufactured concept at a level that Claremont can't or won't or whatever.

And another thing, Claremont's use of schizophrenia -

[icouldntthinkofabetternamesook]

So since Watchmen solely focuses on the superhero genre in America, how do you think the superhero genre fairs in the rest of the world? I know there will probably never be a Power Rangers, but do you think other nations would still have superhero franchise such as Super Sentai, or Miraculous Ladybug? Particularly in the wake of Dr. Manhattan.

This is actually something that the supplementary materials for the TV show threw around some ideas about- specifically, the existence of a genre of Afro-Vietnamese blaxploitation-styled superhero films following the annexation, borne out of critique of the role that the actually-extant superheroes of that world played in the political status quo. I think it's safe to say that nothing you've mentioned would exist in a recognizable form, all of that having been downhill of cross-pollination with a robust American superhero space that explicitly doesn't exist- but it's fun to extrapolate this logic and imagine a world in which fictional superheroes almost universally fill this kind of subaltern foreign film niche rather than being the Biggest Thing Ever as they are in our current context.

[icouldntthinkofabetternamesook]

X-Men

[icouldntthinkofabetternamesook]

damn that time stream entanglement cause wyd if you see your ex from a timeline where he doesn't die in some horrible way 😂😂😂🤣🤣😂🤣😂🤣🤣😂😂😂

[icouldntthinkofabetternamesook]

Absolutely 0 platonic explanation for imagining your enemy dressed in a fully white suit days prior to your students wedding while blatantly telling yourself you wish you were in that exact situation

Good morning Cherik nation