#Approved by the Comic Code Authority

[browsethestacks]

Vintage Comic - Facts About Code-Approved Comics Magazines

Comics Magazine Association (1958)

[age-of-moonknight]

Variant cover for Vengeance of the Moon Knight (Vol. 2/2024), #4 by Elizabeth Torque.

[mrdogface]

it's weird to see "approved by the comics code authority" being used as some kind of cool badass reclaimed branding thing in modern superhero movies, especially the miles morales movies lol

gurl the CCA was why EC went out of business trying to put this on the shelves

idk about putting it at the start of a movie about one of the most recognisable black characters in comics but then, i don't think most people know that the CCA is the reason that comics sucked and featured almost exclusively straight white people for decades, it just seems like a cool badass "fuck yeah, comic books" thing to people who do not read comics.

[jhsharman]

Tingly

The funny question on why the change in color for tennis outfits. Clearly the thing everyone will take away from this editing job.

Also punctuation. Note that they added a comma in Betty's dialogue. Speak it aloud and you will see that there is indeed a natural pause there.

Whether or not you are also enunciating "tingly" as Betty does is, I guess, you.

Why did the towels turn green?

Curious. Betty's underwear turns into shorts and slide up. They shift time lapse so Veronica has on her bikini instead of her underwear in that second panel. Speaking of which -- a different panel shows a color change.

Now is a good time to remind kids out there, mindful of parental concerns, to properly arrange your comic books. Like, shove some of your old Archies behind Fabulous Furry Freak Bros. That way your parents will look, roll their eyes and say "oh, he's just reading stupid drug humor. Whatever." And be kept away from what Betty and Veronica are up to in the shower.

[hellishhotel]

Everytime you see these, you know it's a certified Approval of the Sinners Code and/or Authority of Spindle Comics!

[drkineildwicks]

In continuing to follow the WGA strike and learning that the WGA is functionally a monopoly, I'm wondering if this will end up going the way of the Comics Code Authority.

For context, the CCA was in response to the Wertham trials, where Fredric Wertham claimed that comics were detrimental to children and resulted in violent behavior. Wertham's research was later proven to have been falsified and basically violated every ethical rule for research in the book, but the damage was done and the CCA was made for the comics to self-police. No comic was to be published without the CCA stamp of approval.

And then the anti-drug Spider-Man run did publish without the stamp, and the world didn't end.

And I really am out here wondering if we're about to see the same thing with the WGA, considering people are indeed crossing picket lines and going back to work.

[angelbitezzz]

Some writing under the cut

Prev - Next - First

Plus: Bonus

It was quiet now. Just the sounds of her peaceful breathing and the ambient rustling of the wind through the pine trees outside. The TV was muted, only on to give some light if the human was to wake up. Not that she was likely to—healing was an exhausting process, and apparently even more so to beings made of physical matter.

Sans leaned against the wall next to the television, arms crossed over his chest. He hadn't moved in...oh, if he had to say, maybe 3 hours? He'd parked himself there once Asgore had deemed her no longer at risk of dusting—no, wait. Humans didn't do that, did they?

He was learning a lot about humans today.

For one—the blood.

Comics didn't do it justice. Most of what washed up down here was kid stuff, tagged with that old "Approved by the Comics Code Authority" nonsense that he was beginning to suspect was just straight up censorship. Of course on a factual level he'd known that humans had blood; he wasn't stupid, he'd skimmed waterlogged science textbooks with interest.

Did you know that humans have nearly five liters of blood in them? If they lose about 40% of that, they're dead. That's about 2 liters, give or take. It's so little blood. Just 3 liters makes a gallon. Humans were walking around with just above a gallon of blood inside them, sloshing all over the place.

It's heavy, too. Well—humans were heavy in a way that most monsters couldn't be. They were just stuff, collected together in a bag of skin and liquids. Angel weight approximately 150 pounds, if he had to guess. Limp, it felt like more.

His hands tightened on his arms, bones digging into soft fabric. Dried blood flaked off a dark stain along his chest and right arm, just where his left hand rested. It was uncomfortable. He didn't move his hand.

Could Sans even describe that unique, awful, stomach-churning feeling of sheer nausea at the memory of feeling it seep into his clothes? His mind went back to the first drop, that single, perfect, ruby red drop that'd plopped down onto his white glove and soaked into it. Like a blooming rose.

He felt a fullbody shiver pass through him, rattling in the air softly, too quiet to disturb her rest.

...Why couldn't he stop focusing on it?

His gloves were in the trash now. He couldn't bring himself to take off the jacket, though, regardless of the blood dried on the fabric.

Blood was dark when the cells within died. Brown didn't go well with blue. He really should go wash it. But then, the blood hadn't washed off the gloves. So where did that leave him?

Pupils tracked where the drop had fallen from, sliding up along a tree trunk until it landed on the dark figure overhead, hung over a particularly thick branch. A hand hung down, fresh red drip drip dripping. The faint purple glow of her headset was the only reason he even realized who it was, as hidden in the leaves as she was.

It was a blur. He reacted without even really thinking of it, reaching up and grabbing onto her soul with his magic, pulling her down almost too harshly. It prompted a breathless whine of pain from the nearly unconscious human, his brother gasping next to him as she slumped down into Sans's waiting arms.

"SHE'S...IS SHE...?"

Home again, no time to speculate. Her HP was low. It was dropping. He CHECKED and found it steadily beeping down, sending electric panic down his spine. More blurs. Pawing at purple clothes, assessing the damage, an awful wound that would've made him lose his lunch if he'd had the stomach to do so. The smell strong and iron, mixed with the fragrant perfume of the trees she'd been caught in. Bandaging her with Papyrus's help, watching in despair as she bled through and began steadily staining an old shirt of his, a bead of blood sliding down the side of her face from her nose and swiftly drying, sticky red on brown skin still dark from the sun. Fuck. Fuck.

Nauseated, he flicked his gaze back to her face on the couch. She was sleeping peacefully. Her features were soft and relaxed, open, no pain present. Not like earlier, when she'd been unconscious and clearly in so much pain that she couldn't help but react even while down for the count, crying and moaning while they'd tried to fix her up. The flickering TV cast ghoulish blue light on her face, an arm slipping out of the blankets and flopping limp downward.

He needed to know more. More about human bodies. He needed to make sure this couldn't happen again. He'd half a mind to wake her up and force her to quit their endeavor altogether, if not for Asgore's insistence that she gets rest.

Was her chest rising with her breath? Was it?

Struck with a sudden, uncharacteristic paranoia, he pushed off from the wall and approached on silent feet. He reached and pressed a hand to her chest over the blanket.

A steady rise and fall. The vibrations softly reverberated through his bones, easing the tension that had coiled in his shoulders. He felt stupid. He kneeled and gently took her fallen arm, raising it to tuck it into the blanket again only to stop, digits still pressed against her wrist.

"her heart," he thinks. "of course."

A soft flutter beat against his fingertips. Like he'd caught a butterfly in his hands. But this...was in her arm, or rather, her wrist. Small, insistent. Steady. Warm.

Sans really should tuck her arm back under the blanket. He should. He doesn't. He raised it somewhat and adjusted his grip, tilting his head as he focused on that feeling. He shut his eyesockets, letting the rhythm drum against his fingers and beat the fear out of his body. He'd never actually touched her skin before, had he? Always wearing those gloves. In his panic, earlier, he'd never registered how warm she was. The warm pulse of her heart was all he could focus on now.

"It's okay. I'm okay."

Her words earlier had been so insistent. She'd been so concerned about Papyrus's reaction to her near death that she's jumped to soothing him rather than focus on her own injury. Was it that she knew her magic would hold out? Or had it only been for his brother's benefit?

He wondered how often she'd had to try and push away the pain to reassure someone else.

He put her arm back under the covers and adjusted her make-shift pillow, the blue cape folded in on itself until it resembled the bed-sheet it used to be. Then he stood and stepped away, his body disappearing into the shadows before she could stir at the disturbance.

She would be fine.

[burninbriight]

higuchi's character, but read from a queer perspective

❗️disclaimer: i'm not saying that higuchi is a canonically queer-coded character and i'm not claiming to be reading her character in the most accurate way, i just want to share my interpretation of higuchi as a lesbian with comphet who really loves her character :]

first of all, i want to focus on higuchi's relationship with akutagawa. we do not know when and how they met, but we know that he is higuchi's superior and that he's been verbally and physically abusive towards her.

higuchi craves his validation in the same way akutagawa craves it from dazai: obsessively and from a man that won't ever give it.

now, higuchi-akutagawa and akutagawa-dazai are two very different dynamics, but just like akutagawa with his ex mentor, the more she gets abused, the more higuchi feels the need to prove herself. the difference is, if we want to read her character in a lesbian-coded way, that higuchi could be mistaking her need for approval for a crush, because akutagawa is a man and he has authority over her so it has to be it, right? but is it really love? or is she just confusing a need male validation (and for validation in general due to her low self-esteem) with love?

second, higuchi's interactions with gin.

their interactions are mostly for comic relief and are meant to put an accent on how obsessive higuchi can be, but, if we want to hit said interactions with the lesbofication beam, then we'll surely notice that higuchi stammers and gets flustered around gin quite a lot, and vice versa.

i mean. fellas is it gay to absolutely lose it over the fact that your edgy coworker is actually a pretty girl with a pretty voice and to invite her out on a date (instead of simply inviting her brother??🏳️‍🌈👩‍❤️‍👩 this is you higuchi). also, higuchi's behavior towards gin becomes all nervous and flushed only after finding out that she's a girl. hm.

lastly, and don't come at me because this is a huge reach, higuchi painfully trying to fit in a place where she knows that she doesn't belong because everyone else around her just seems to have something that she lacks can work as symbolism for the isolating experience that is being a lesbian that has to fit in an heteronormative and men-centered society.

[gingerhastoomanyobsessions]

Spiderverse Theory: It’s All This Guy’s Fault (And It’s Probably Not The Guy You’re Thinking Of)

Theory: Canon isn’t why the multiverse is falling apart. It’s Miguel’s fault, specifically.

Overall, Miguel is a failure of a Spider-Man. This is lampshaded many times (“a vampire good guy? I’d pay good money to see that!” “you’re the only spider-man who isn’t funny.” “are you sure you’re a spider-man?”). Heck, Miguel himself even says “I’m not like the others” when he injects the drug that enhances his powers (which WERE NOT FROM a spider-bite to begin with!). Furthermore, Miguel is not a character parallel to Miles— he’s a foil to Kingpin. Kingpin sought to find himself a family by messing with the multiverse, and Miguel successfully did the exact same thing— until it came crumbling around his ears. I theorize that there is a factor that he is not telling us, perhaps something that he hasn’t even noticed for himself, and that universes are crumbling because he is tampering with them so much— kind of like he’s externalizing glitches into the universes themselves, rather than Them causing Him to glitch. He says he’s “the only one holding it together” and calls Miles “the original anomaly,” despite the fact that he messed with the multiverse first and might be causing all of it. This means that Miguel is, in summation, failing at the ultimate Spider-Man rule: with great power comes great responsibility. He isn’t taking responsibility for the role he may have played.

Further evidence for the non-involvement of canon:

In canon comics, Peter’s child either dies in utero/in infancy or is nonexistent. Mayday should therefore break the canon.

Gwen’s dad resigns. He’s no longer captain. That should break the canon.

Miguel wasn’t bitten by a spider to gain his powers. Neither was Jessica Drew (she got them via experimentation). That should break the canon.

Miles was (allegedly) not supposed to be a spider-man whatsoever, but his universe is still standing.

Lastly:

Both of the movies begin with the stamp “Approved by the Comics Code Authority”— which used to dictate the canon.

Canon isn’t the reason the multiverse is crumbling, Miguel is, and until he acknowledges that, he’s not a Spider-Man at all.

[paperedking]

Happy @batfam-big-bang, everyone!

for @dc-sideblog's fic, Wildflower, which is an incredible flower nymph! Cass AU, and was so enjoyable to read. You can read the fic on AO3, and be sure to check out dc-sideblog's other works on AO3 under batling_out_of_hell.

If you like my art, you can support me directly by buying a commission, or buy something off my redbubble, including this work.

IMAGE IDs:

Image 1:

The image of two women sitting at a wooden table. The woman on the left has dark hair and has her hand reaching out to a small potted plant with white flowers. Her eyes are half-closed and her face has a calm expression. The woman on the right is wearing a purple shirt and is looking down at the woman of the left. She has long, blonde hair. The dark green room is lit by a warm light and specks of dust float through the air.

Image 2:

The image is designed to look like the cover of a comic book titled "Wildflower". The image depicts two women sitting at a wooden table. The woman on the left has dark hair and has her hand reaching out to a small potted plant with white flowers. The woman on the right is wearing a purple shirt and is looking down at the woman of the left. She has long, blonde hair. The dark green room is lit by a warm light and specks of dust float through the air.

The title "Wildflower" is handwritten in large, white cursive letters at the top. In the top left corner is a black circle with the letters "AU" inside. Below the circle it says "ISSUE 1" in black. Below that is a black rectangle with a stylized white bat symbol. Below the bat is rectangle which mimics the comics code authority stamp which reads "APPROVED BY THE BETA APRILJOY97".

In the top left corner of the image is a dark rectangle made to look like a sticker with the words "BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE BBB VOL.5" written in white.

At the bottom of the image, below the drawing, in small white capital letters are the words: "WRITING: DC-SIDEBLOG" and in the next line "COVER ART: PAPERED_KING". Below that is a stylized barcode with the numbers "11420815211919" printed below it. In the lower right corner, a stylized signature is written in white which reads "DSW XXIV".

[sircrayons]

Comics Code Authority approved

[just-antithings]

Whenever I look for reviews of popular franchises to keep up, most of the things I find are call outs/exposed Videos and posts talking about how problematic and "borderline illegal" franchise is.

The content of these posts/videos: maximum cherrypicking of things that don't even are as problematic as the people who created the post made it appear or straight up delulu interpretation.

Then when I go to see that """"problematic"""" franchise, it's the tamest thing you'll consume all week and it looks like it was approved by the Comics Code Authority.

every damn time

[astoundingbeyondbelief]

Kaiju Week in Review (February 25-March 2, 2024)

Brush of the God is finally out in the world, having premiered at the Osaka Asian Film Festival on March 2. Above is the most recent trailer, looking as impressive as ever. A more complete cast list is out too—Yumiko Shaku, Takumi Saitoh, Shiro Sano, and Shinji Higuchi are all in it. Haven't seen any reviews in English yet, but I suspect it's something special.

Lots of comic news this week, but I'm giving Godzilla: War for Humanity #4 its own section because it continues to be so stellar. In the penultimate issue, Godzilla finally comes face-to-face with Zoospora—with the odds now thoroughly stacked against him. Ends on a great cliffhanger, with emotional catharsis reached but a world-class kaiju still left to beat.

Every Monsterverse film has an obligatory graphic novel tie-in, and they've never felt more obligatory than Godzilla x Kong: The Hunted. Kong has the A-plot, taking on the Titan Hunter, a mech piloted by the owner of a construction company who (surprise!) lost his family in 2014. It's pretty amusing watching him get high on his own supply fighting second-rate Titans before an unarmed Kong dismantles him, but the character is just too generic. Godzilla's B-plot is just a protracted setup for the film. (I'm keeping my description vague because the identity of his Titan opponent hasn't been revealed in GxK's marketing yet.) I hope this is Brian Buccellato's last time writing Godzilla, as Fight or Flight and the first five issues of Justice League vs. Godzilla vs. Kong weren't much better, but I probably shouldn't be optimistic. Zid's art is unsurprisingly the highlight, though he's sharing space with Dario Formisani and Drew Johnson. Some stunningly bad scaling and weird-looking Godzillas on those pages. Note that the comic is only (officially) available to backers of the hardcover edition on Kickstarter right now; the paperback edition comes out on March 26, a few days before Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.

Titanic Creations has released a cover for their Gorgo Legacy graphic novel (amusingly Approved by the Monster Code Authority). It's written by Mac McClintock and Patrick McEvoy, with the latter also illustrating, and will be 60 pages long. Releases summer 2024, with plans for two more.

Volume 7 of Kaiju Girl Caramelise also released last week, and while I was hoping to share my thoughts on it, none of my local libraries have stocked it yet. So here's a simple reminder that it exists.

Netflix's Ultraman: Rising now has a poster and a June 14 release date. S.H. FigureArts and Movie Monster Series figures for the film have also been revealed.

Gameplay videos for Godzilla x Kong: Titan Chasers are starting to show up on YouTube, courtesy of early-access invites going out. Reminds me of that Avengers Alliance game I played for all of a week. And a new month means new Godzilla Battle Line characters; this time it's GMK King Ghidorah and a Biollante variant. They're also overhauling All-Star Battle Mode later this month, letting you chose 50 units to deploy against the CPU (so less underleveled four-stars and other chaff ruining your runs).

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The good news is that Penguin Random House can't buy all the other publishers

Correction: An earlier draft of this article characterized Frederic Wertham as “a far-right conspiracist.” That was incorrect. While Wertham was a conspiracist, he was not far right. I regret the error.

Last week, a US District Court blocked the merger of Penguin Random House, the world’s largest publisher, and Simon and Schuster, the world’s third-largest publisher. This is very, very good news.

https://www.npr.org/2022/11/01/1133032238/judge-blocks-penguin-random-house-simon-schuster-merger

During the trial, the Penguin Random House argued it they would continue to compete with Simon and Schuster for books, bidding against them for prized titles. Stephen King punctured this absurd fiction, noting that this was like a husband and wife bidding against each other to buy the same house:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/02/business/stephen-king-penguin-random-house-antitrust-testimony.html

With the merger halted (pending appeal) the number of major trade publishers stands at five, which, while better than four, is still not very many. Practically speaking, it means that five corporate board-rooms are in charge of nearly all of our literature, deciding what gets published, what doesn’t, and how those books are sold. That is a lot of power to vest in a very small number of hands.

This concentration of power is obviously bad for authors, since a failure to sell your book to editors at a mere five houses means that it will not come out from a major publisher. As Rebecca Giblin and I document in our new book Chokepoint Capitalism, when publishing is this concentrated, copyright is largely irrelevant to authors’ fortunes:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

If you’re in Edinburgh, you can come to our talk about the book at the Radical Book Fair on Nov 10:

https://lighthousebookshop.com/events/chokepoint-capitalism-cory-doctorow-and-rebecca-giblin

We’ll be at Waterstones in Oxford on Nov 12:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/chokepoint-capitalism-rebecca-giblin-and-cory-doctorow-oxford-tickets-443951941207

And at The Peale Museum in Baltimore on Nov 18:

https://www.thepeale.org/event/book-talk-chokepoint-capitalism/

And I’ll be in London for Big Ideas Live on Nov 19:

https://news.sky.com/bigideaslive

Concentration in publishing is also very bad news for publishing workers, a notoriously exploited group of people, whose working conditions are so bad that 1% of the entire sector’s workforce resigned en masse last summer:

https://bookriot.com/great-publishing-resignation/

For these workers, a failure to secure a decent wage at just five employers means that they have no hope of working at any major publisher.

And for readers, all this means that the decisions about what you get to read are gathered into a vanishingly small number of hands. A tiny group of fallible humans will make decisions about what books are widely available, and, possibly even worse, a tiny group of fallible humans can be arm-twisted into not publishing works that governments or pressure groups don’t want to see printed.

In 1954, a far-right conspiracist named Fredric Wertham published a scientific hoax called “Seduction of the Innocent” that claimed that comic books were luring American children into a life of wanton sex, drug abuse and communism and/or fascism.

http://www.lostsoti.org/

Wertham whipped up a “groomer” panic about comic books and in response, bedwetting conservatives burned mountains of comics and demanded government censorship. Opportunistic lawmakers took up the cause and threatened the comics industry with unconstitutional regulation of their publishing programs.

The comics industry caved: a handful of cowardly executives formed a self-regulatory body called the “Comics Code Authority” whose seal of approval was withheld from all but the most inoffensive and bland of stories and illustrations. Most comics retailers refused to carry comics unless they bore this seal, and stores that bucked the Authority were raided and their owners fined or even jailed:

https://cbldf.org/about-us/case-files/cbldf-case-files/

The CCA continued to have veto power over most comics until the year 2000 — for nearly half a century, an unaccountable star-chamber of prudes ruled over an entire art form. That was only possible because that industry was first cornered by a handful of unaccountable executives, who then handed power to the CCA.

Readers, writers, retailers, editors and publishers all suffer under publishing monopolies. The fact that the court blocked Penguin Random House from gobbling up Simon and Schuster is good for all of us.

Except…

There’s a reason PRH wanted to devour S&S. Back in 2010, the Big Six publishers entered into an illegal conspiracy with Apple to price-fix ebooks. The publishers wanted to force Amazon to stop subsidizing the Kindle books, selling them below the publishers’ wholesale cost, and ensuring that all ebook purchases were Kindle book purchases, generally locked to the Kindle forever by DRM.

Amazon has bottomless access to the capital markets as well as profitable divisions that it can use to prop up money-losing ones. The Big Six publishers understood that Amazon’s ebook subsidy wasn’t motivated by generosity towards readers — rather, it was about locking readers into the Kindle platform, and using that to secure leverage over publishers.

The publishers knew how Amazon would use that leverage. In the early 2000s, Amazon launched “Project Gazelle,” an internal project to locate weak, small publishers that were dependent on Amazon for sales and then drive them out of business by demanding unsustainable discounts, like a cheetah hunting “a sickly gazelle”:

https://www.businessinsider.com/sadistic-amazon-treated-book-sellers-the-way-a-cheetah-would-pursue-a-sickly-gazelle-2013-10

So they conspired with Apple to only sell ebooks on the Ipad, unless Amazon agreed to end its predatory pricing scheme. That was wildly illegal and the publishers and Apple all paid hundreds of millions in fines as a result:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/07/apple-450-million-settlement-e-book-price-fixing-supreme-court

More than a decade later, Amazon is an even bigger threat to publishers. For one thing, it has substantially expanded its own publishing program, directly competing with print, ebook and audiobook publishers. Amazon has eye-watering quantities of data on these publishers’ customers — what they search for, which books they buy together, where they are when they read, how many pages they read before pausing or giving up, and more.

The publishers have none of this data. Amazon has mountains of data about the publishers’ products that the publishers themselves lack, and Amazon is a publisher, but it’s also their single most important retailer. The publishers are massively fucked here.

Which is why there’s all this pressure for the publishers to merge. When the CEO of Penguin, the CEO of Random House, and the CEO of Simon and Schuster meet to discuss Amazon pricing strategy, that is an illegal conspiracy. But when the presidents of Random House (a division of PRH/S&S), Penguin (a division of PRH/S&S), and Simon and Schuster (a division of PRH/S&S) meet, that’s just business.

And we’ve just blocked that. Which is good. The highly concentrated publishing industry is a real problem, but there’s concentration all the way up and down the supply chain. For example, there’s one national brick-and-mortar bookseller left.

It’s even worse in distribution: Ingram is the only major national book distributor left. If you’re an independent press who doesn’t want to go with Ingram for distribution, you’ll almost certainly end up being distributed by Penguin Random House — that is, your largest competitor. This is very bad for readers, writers, publishing workers, and literature itself.

This is the problem with monopolies: once there’s a monopoly in your supply chain, everyone else in the supply chain has to form a monopoly or a cartel, or the monopoly will devour them. That’s how the US got its infinitely cursed health-care system. Big Pharma merged to monopoly and price-gouged hospitals. Hospitals formed regional monopolies to fight pharma prices — and then gouged the insurers. The insurers merged with one another and divided up the country like the Pope dividing up the New World, and fought hospital pricing.

The whole health supply chain is monopolized, except for the patients at one end (paying higher prices for worse care) and the health care workers at the other end (getting paid less to work under worse conditions). The giants that run the industry may fight one another over how to divide the pie, but they all agree that we should get crumbs.

There’s a joke whose punchline goes, “If you wanted to get there, I wouldn’t start from here.” The existence of the Amazon monopoly means that when we block mergers elsewhere in the publishing supply chain, we just leave those un-merged companies vulnerable to Amazon’s predation. That’s not to say that un-merged companies are good, or letting them merge is good — just, if we wanted to get there, we wouldn’t start from here.

But here we are, at the tail end of 40 years’ worth of unbridled, uncontrolled corporate mergers. Simon and Schuster isn’t just “Simon and Schuster” — it’s part of Paramount, which owns dozens of TV networks (Showtime, MTV, Comedy Central, etc) as well as CBS and a bunch of amusement parks.

If we wanted to get somewhere we shouldn’t start from here, but here we are, so what do we do? Well, there’s an obvious remedy for companies that have merged to monopoly: break ’em up!

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/29/break-em-up/#break-em-up

But breakups are achingly slow. The breakup of AT&T took sixty-nine years:

https://onezero.medium.com/jam-to-day-46b74d5b1da4

There are other tools in our toolkit, though. Trustbusters once relied on “structural separation,” the idea that companies that provided important platforms for other businesses couldn’t be allowed to compete with those business — for example, rail companies couldn’t own freight companies that competed with the shippers that were the rail companies’ customers:

https://locusmag.com/2022/03/cory-doctorow-vertically-challenged/

Structural separation would force Random House to decide whether to be a publisher or a distributor, and force Amazon to decide whether it was a retailer or a publisher. Structural separation is enjoying a renaissance: the EU Digital Markets Act bans large companies from competing with the apps in their app stores:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/11/01/europe-confirms-its-digital-markets-act-will-go-after-apples-app-store

But even if Random House decides to be a publisher and not a distributor, that leaves Ingram as the only major trade distributor. Even if Amazon stops being a publisher, it’s still the only major ebook retailer. Power is still in too few hands!

How do we pluralize that power? Here’s my idea, which is either a crank notion or a stroke of genius (I go back and forth on this question nearly daily): declare a tax-holiday for capital gains from voluntary corporate breakups.

https://doctorow.medium.com/shovel-ready-3433e0268c2e

I’m old enough to remember when corporate raiders and finance bros were obsessed with taking over companies and selling off their divisions, not merging them with their rivals. If we declare a three-year tax holiday for capital gains resulting from unwinding economically significant (>$1B) 21st century mergers, could we lure those corporate crooks out of retirement for one last heist?

I’m the first to admit that this has lots of downsides. For one thing, we’re paying the finance bros who destroyed our economy rather than, say, displaying them in stocks and pelting them with rotten vegetables. That’s galling. I hate it.

The other major possible downside is that whatever limits we put on this (a three-year expiry, or a 20-year ban on re-merging companies after breakups) will be overridden by finance bros, who will use some of the profits from the program to expand it.

But I don’t know for sure that either of those should be dealbreakers. If all we do is block terrible mergers between giant companies but we don’t break up the monopolies that are choking every supply chain, we’re just handing control to the monopolists who got in under the wire.

It’s so crazy it just might work.

[Image ID: A modified version of Goya's 'Saturn Devouring His Children.' The body Saturn is devouring is labeled with a Simon and Schuster logo and wordmark. Saturn is labeled with a Penguin Random House wordmark. A larger head of Saturn is devouring the Penguin Random House Saturn. It is labeled with an Amazon logo and wordmark.]

[bloodof-leaves]

My brain is a mess atm so I'm gonna try to keep this as cohesive as possible but god. I saw Across the Spiderverse for the second time yesterday night and I had completely forgotten the opening with the Comics Code Authority seal. My first time watching me and my friends laughed at that scene, "Haha lmao they're spoofing on the comics code authority a bit, hell yeah" I had thought, and I moved on to the masterpiece that was ATSP. The second time though, after knowing all the themes and ideas of the movie, the comics code seal hit me like a truck. Because Miles's story could NEVER be approved by the comics code. Neither could Pavitr's, nor Gwen's and definitely not Hobie's for that matter. And this ties back exactly to the themes of the movie because Miles's story is about rejecting conventional storytelling and the norms of what a Spiderman story should be. In the same way that Miguel is so obsessed with maintaining canon, maintaining the status quo of the Spiderman mythos, the entire point of the comics code was to restrict stories with new perspectives that didn't fit a certain agenda. It was when comics were able to break free from the code that we got so much innovation and diversity and complexity. And I know that morally Miguel and the Comics Code are definitely not a 1 to 1 comparison but in a meta sense, viewing ATSV's themes as a commentary on storytelling conventions, it fits perfectly I think.

[notfernintheslighest]

an essay on Batman I wrote at 13 on paper about Queerness in Batman

Trigger Warnings: media censorship, homophobia, if things like the Hays Code are triggering this will be too

Batman has been around since May of 1939, and has gone through many changes since then. Two big changes reasons for this change have been, the introduction of the Joker in 1940, and the book “Seduction of the Innocent” written by a German Psychologist, Fredric Wertham in the year 1954. The Crown Prince of Crime, created a worthy opponent for Batman, and Wertham’s book created censorship for how this opposition would be portrayed. “Seduction of the Innocent” also brought about the Comics Code Authority. The Comics Code Authority created a seal of approval that let parents know if the comic was up to Wertham’s standards. This censorship created a large shift in comics’ content from mature to childish.

“Seduction of the Innocent” linked violence, sexual perversion, disrespect, and general rudeness to comic books. “The Batman type story may stimulate children to homosexual fantasies, of the nature of which they be unconscious,” Wertham wrote on Sexual perversion in the Batman comics. In that quote, Wertham is referring to the relationship between Robin (Dick Grayson,) and Batman (Bruce Wayne,) in which they share a bed, and get tans, among other couple’s activities. Wertham believed that seeing relationships like Batman and Robin would create homosexual fantasies. When “Seduction of the Innocent” was published, many concerned parents started thinking that as well.

Enough parents were so concerned with comic books that there became a need to know how mature a comic was just by looking at the cover. This need created the Comics Code Authority. The Comics Code Authority, or CCA, had 41 provisions in what was allowed for children to read in comics, if a comic got the CCA seal of approval, it would be sold, if it did not get the seal, it would more than likely not be sold. This created a brand new age of comic books. Under the “Marriage and sex” article seven states, “Sec perversion or any inference to same is strictly forbidden.” The “same” being referred to is homosexuality. This rule created a similar result to the Hay’s Code, which made many monsters written as queer. These rules, made the villains more flamboyant if they were men and more butch if they were women. It also resulted in men, such as the Joker, wearing make-up.

The Joker is a man who originally got his clown like appearance entirely from a chemical mishap, but it was later changed to him simply wearing make-up. This change also had Joker occasionally wearing women’s clothing. He also started a pattern of flirting with men. This flirting even went as far as him kissing Bane. Joker also confesses that he’s in love with Batman, twice, to Catwoman. Harley Quinn also makes the realization that Joker loves Batman, not her, in her self entitled HBO show. A great example of this dynamic is when Joker is crying on his knees at his shrine to Batman while Harley is show on a bed in under-garments waiting for him, with a yellow box reads, “It just wasn’t with me.” Batman: Curse of the White Knight has been regarded as non-canon, but this is not the only time Joker has been described as in love with Batman by Dr.Harleen Quinzel, it also occurs in “Harley Quinn (The Animated Series.)” Joker is given a choice by the Riddler, to save Harley or Batman. Joker immediately chooses Batman. This causes Harley to have the realization mentioned earlier, that Joker cares more about Batman than her. She recalls a past event in which Joker had said “‘Til death do us part” and realizes that he had meant Batman, not Harley.

Batman is someone who never maintains a singular love interest for long, he is a perpetual bachelor. Batman much like the Joker, never seizes the opportunity to kill the other. Most people claim that this is because of Batman’s moral code, which says nothing about not letting his enemy starve, fall to their death and many of the other deaths that Batman saves Joker from. Batman even mourns Joker’s death in universes where he dies. In the words of Joker in “Batman the Dark Knight, “You complete me” which is actually quoted from the romance movie “Jerry Maguire.” “You complete me” is arguably the best quote to describe the famous pair, Joker is as quintessential to Batman as Robin. Many people argue that heroes and villains can not/would not date but that’s also false, Batman dates Catwoman, has a fling with poison Ivy, and Talia Al Ghul. Also in an alternate reality in which Bruce dies instead of his parents, his parents become Batman and Joker, and continue to pursue a romantic relationship.

In the end Joker and Batman need each other. Years of censorship created these circumstances, and now that the censorship is ended, it has only been made more explicit. In newer adaptations like “The LEGO Batman” made in 2017 it is made clear that hate is a substitute for love. Their “hate” for each other is the driving force of the movie.

holy shit did i have no friends in 8th grade or something mein gott