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The Law Is A Ass

Could S.H.I.E.L.D. Have Gotten That Warrant? Search Me.

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To be honest, I no longer remember what Jane Foster did to make S.H.I.E.L.D. agents go all the way to Asgardia to look for her back in The Mighty Thor vol 2 # 9. But, to be honest, it probably no longer matters.

Whatever it was that Jane had done might to attract S.H.I.E.L.D.’s attention have been undone, when Kobik , those fragments of a Cosmic Cube that had coalesced into a little girl, changed the back story of the entire Marvel Universe to make Captain America an agent of Hydra. So it’s possible that whatever Jane had done, she didn’t do anymore.

Moreover, the people that were interested in Jane Foster were agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. But we’re talking about agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. under the old regime. You know, back when S.H.I.E.L.D. thought restraint was something you found in a BDSM club and overreach was what you did to get the salt at a crowded table. We’re hoping it no longer feels that way under the new regime or that it would still care about Jane Foster.

Att the time, it mattered to S.H.I.E.L.D., however, so we got this nonsensical scene in The Mighty Thor vol 2 # 9. (Boy will I be glad when Marvel goes back to legacy numbering. Cubes and supermodels’ hair should have volume, not comic books.) S.H.I.E.L.D. wanted to know what Jane Foster’s relationship was to the new Thor and, rather than simply reading the recap page of any issue of the comic, it obtained a warrant to search Jane’s quarters in Asgardia. S.H.I.E.L.D., presented its warrant to the officials of Asgardia, and tole them they intended to execute said warrant and search Jane Foster’s quarters with Asgardia’s permission or without it.

Whether S.H.I.E.L.D. actually conducted the search or what they found – the comic cut away from the agents and never returned to them – is the little question. But big question is how the hell did S.H.I.E.L.D. to get that warrant in the first place?

See there’s this little thing called jurisdiction. Jurisdiction isn’t the question of whether a judge has a stuttering problem, it’s the question of in what geographical areas the judge has the authority to issue rulings that would be binding. State court have the authority to issue rulings that cover the state in which they sit. Federal courts can issue rulings covering the districts or circuits in which they sit. The United States Supreme Court can issue rulings covering the entire country. And a tennis court can only make rulings on no-fault matters.

The problem with S.H.I.E.L.D.’s warrant is that Asgardia is a foreign country or realm or whatever it is. And whatever it is, it certainly isn’t the United States. United States courts have the jurisdiction over the United States not over foreign countries.

Look at extradition, which isn’t some Christmas custom you gave up for Lent. If United States courts could issue arrest warrants that were valid in other countries, we wouldn’t have to rely on foreign countries arresting people within their borders then extraditing them back to the USA. But we can’t, because our courts have no jurisdiction over foreign countries, so we do.

Better yet, look at nuclear proliferation treaties and the verification problem. The United States wants the ability to be able to search countries like Iran and North Korea to verify whether nuclear weapons are being built there. If the United States courts had jurisdiction over these foreign countries, they could issue and enforce search warrants. Verification wouldn’t be a problem. That verification has to be negotiated into a treaty leads one to the inevitable conclusion that United States Courts don’t have jurisdiction over foreign countries.

But what about the International Court of Justice, also known as the World Court? Does it issue search warrants? I don’t know. But if it does, could S.H.I.E.L.D. have gone to the World Court to obtain a search warrant for Asgardia? Maybe once, but not now.

If Asgardia were still sitting above Broxton, Oklahoma, then S.H.I.E.L.D. could have gone to a the World Court to get a search warrant, because Broxton and Oklahoma are both part of the world. (True some of the states have been talking about secession, but they only want to secede from the country not the world.) However, Asgardia isn’t in Broxton anymore. It moved. First, bang zoom, to the Moon and then into orbit around Saturn. People who visited Asgardia said it was out of this world. Now it actually is.

Asgardia isn’t part of the planet Earth anymore. Which means that the World Court would lack jurisdiction over it, because Asgardia isn’t just a foreign country, it’s an extra-terrestrial country.

I know of no judge on the planet Earth that would have had sufficient jurisdiction over Asgardia to issue a valid search warrant. And I know of no extra-terrestrial judge who could have issued the warrant either.

Please don’t start telling me about all the extra-terrestrial judges in the Marvel Universe such as Ronan the Accuser or Judge Kray-Tor. Maybe they could only have issued the warrant, but they could only have done it if S.H.I.E.L.D. had gone to them requesting it. And do you think S.H.I.E.L.D. went to one of them to get the warrant?

I don’t. But I cheated. I examined the actual search warrant those S.H.I.E.L.D. agents were flashing using the low-tech equivalent of that tired TV trope, “<a href=”

and enhance”, a magnifying glass. I read the small print that was actually on the warrant. It was issued by a New York state court in Westchester County. Not Ronan or Judge Kray-Tor or Diana Ross and the Supreme Intelligence. So, case closed.

And that leaves only one remaining question. Why the frak didn’t I think to examine that search warrant under a magnifying glass several paragraphs ago, before I started to write about the World Court or extra-terrestrial courts, and spare myself all that typing?

Martha Thomases: TV or Not TV?

lena-waithe-4537192As I was watching the 2017 Emmy Awards last Sunday, I thought about how much the television industry has changed. It’s a cliché to say that this is the Golden Age of Television, but, in many ways, that is true.

However, that is not what I want to talk about.

Women and people of color won an unusually high percentage of awards. I mean, women always win in the “Best Actress” categories, but there were women (and people of color) (and queer people) winning in the writing and directing categories as well. This didn’t go unnoticed. To quote from Master of None writer Lena Waithe’s acceptance speech “And last, but certainly not least, my L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. family. I see each and every one of you. The things that make us different, those are our superpowers. Every day, when you walk out the door and put on your imaginary cape and go out there and conquer the world — because the world would not be as beautiful as it is if we weren’t in it.

Those words describe my favorite thing about superhero comics.

tucker-carlson-2267700Winning awards, especially in the entertainment industry, is not necessarily a matter of quality. A lot of awards get won by people who are good at marketing, or who are owed the most favors. This year seemed to me to represent a real sea change.

There are so many ways to watch “television” these days that sometimes I wonder if we should find a different noun. If I’m watching on my phone (which I never do, because I am old and my eyes are as well) or my computer, is that TV? Maybe, but websites aren’t referred to as “magazines” even when the content is the same. Is it fair to make broadcast television, which is subject to restrictions from government licensing and advertisers, compete with cable and streaming companies? Is it fair to ask me to judge which awards are appropriate when I haven’t seen everything, and I’m already paying for four premium services? Am I made out of money here?

This abundance is, to my mind, a good thing. There are so many different kinds of things to watch. I’m not into reality television but, if you are, there are all sorts of non-fiction programs. Some are good and some aren’t. I very much want to like the Emmy-winning Atlanta, but I can’t figure it out, and I’m fine with that. It’s okay that everything good is not for me. It’s great that there is something good for everybody.

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Instead of fighting over pieces of the pie, creative people (including, in this instance, producers) have made more pie.

More than 25 years ago, when Milestone Media started publishing, this was their attitude. Instead of complaining that the Big Two comics publishers were run by white men, with heroes who were white men, aimed at an audience of white men, Milestone created new characters to appeal to new audiences. Those comics sold like crazy until DC, for whatever reasons, screwed up the marketing. Even now, if you go to a comics convention, you’ll see cosplayers in Milestone-inspired costumes.

Not everyone is happy about this. Insufferable preppie Tucker Carlson who looks and sounds like a lot of the guys who were popular in my high school, and now think high school is the way the entire world is supposed to work, used the Emmy Awards as an excuse to lambaste Ta-Nahiei Coates. Not that Coates needs any advice from me, but he should be fairly pleased that he is such a good writer that he’s getting under Carlson’s skin. If I was Marvel, I would promote Black Panther with Carlson’s clip.

I think it is because there are so many ways to watch “television” these days that we have so much good TV. I think we can apply the same lessons to comics and graphic storytelling. I love my local comic book store but, if I was a new customer, I would be lost trying to find something to read. Bookstores, with a longer history of appealing to different tastes, would work better for my introduction to the medium. And, if I wasn’t ready to invest in printed paper, I’d appreciate a way to sample things online.

Online comics are no more my thing than Survivor (not that they are similar in any other way), but both attract millions of eyeballs every year. Both provide a way for creative people to earn some money and express themselves.

Time and the marketplace will determine what’s good and/or what people want.

Notes, Vol. 1: Born to Be a Larve by Boulet

Boulet is one of those European Cartoonists who are so cool they only need one name, like Herge. (And several others — I feel like there’s a lot of them, but can’t be bothered to research the question right now.) Or maybe it’s not a coolness thing — perhaps it helps them avoid the social shame of being known publicly as a cartoonist? Or maybe it just fits better on a comics page as a signature?
So many possibilities.

Anyway, his real name is Gilles Roussel, but he works in comics as Boulet. And he started a blog in 2004, which seems to be what really pushed his career forward and gave him some momentum. (2004 was a good year for blogs — most of the years since, not so much.)

The blog has been collected in several volumes in French, under the overall title Notes. (Wikipedia lists four volumes, but that’s only through 2010. Actually, that Wikipedia entry seems to stop listing anything as of about 2010, which leads me to believe it hasn’t been updated this decade.) Last year, Soaring Penguin Press — which I’ve never heard of before, though I immediately like them for their name — had the first volume translated and published it in the UK. And somehow one copy of that edition found its way to an independent bookstore in New Jersey and finally into my hands.

That book is Notes, Vol. 1: Born to Be a Larve . (Not sure why it uses the French spelling “larve” rather than the English “larva,” but that’s just my editor-brain kicking in when no one asked it to.) And it collects roughly the first year of that comics-blog, plus some framing pages of Boulet talking to a woman (his editor? a friend? another comic-blogger? she doesn’t seem to be a girlfriend,  and I can’t find anywhere she’s named) about assembling and organizing this very book you’re reading.

The new material (well, “new” as of 2008 when the book was assembled) comments on and contextualizes the older blog entries — this is a fancy way to say that Boulet and his unnamed female interlocutor talk about the story on the previous pages, and Boulet sometimes gives more details about those stories.

Because this is the kind of blog that’s based on real life. (They all supposedly were, and it can be hard to tell how much any individual blog is “real,” I suppose, but this is mostly day-to-day life-of-a-cartoonist stuff.) There’s some stories about conventions, and some stories about daily life as a cartoonist, and the inevitable here’s-the-dream-I-had-last-night-because-I-can’t-think-of-anything-else-this-week entry. All of the old blog entries are in color — some seem to be watercolored, and some are more traditional spot color (by Boulet, presumably) over pen-lines. The new stuff is mostly black-and-white, except for the orange of Boulet’s hair. (Which is a fun design element, and also shows how much his style loosened up between the initial blog entries and this book.)

Some of the stories are a single page, but they’re generally longer than that — enough to tell a little story, or run through a series of events. The stories themselves are not dates, though Boulet mentions several times how much trouble it was to find all of them and put them in the correct chronological order.

So this is a book of parts — Boulet explicitly worries about that in his framing material up front, and revisits the idea at the end — like a book of short stories. It’s all things that happened to this one French cartoonist (even if some of them, as with many creative folks, were things that happened entirely in his head) over the course of a year more than a decade ago.

(By the way, the blog is still going, and there’s an English version now — the latter is available here .)

If you’re the kind of American whose conception of “comics” is entirely filled by people in bright colors punching each other, this is very much not the book for you. I hope there aren’t actually that many of you, but — since I’m a pessimist — I tend to assume you’re the majority, you thick-knuckled vulgarians you. But, for the rest of us, this is a neat book by an interesting creator, and for other comics-makers, it’s an intriguing look into a life in comics in a somewhat different market and ecosystem.

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Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Tweeks Supernatural Interview Pt 1

Supernatural will begin it’s 13th Season on October 12 on The CW. That is only three weeks away! So to catch you up to speed, here is our interview with Jensen Ackles (Dean), Jared Padalecki (Sam), and Misha Collins (Castiel)!

The possible spin off that was announced at SDCC, Wayward Sisters, is mentioned briefly. We’ll bring you more info on that when we have it, but so far we know it will be an episode during this season of Supernatural that will serve as the pilot. It will star Kim Rhodes as Sheriff Jody Mills, Briana Buckmaster as Sheriff Donna Hanscum, Kathryn Newton as Claire Novak, Clark Back as Patience Turner, and Katherine Ramdeen as Alex Jones.

I Told You So by Shannon Wheeler

I can’t claim any connection to the cartoonist Shannon Wheeler, despite the name similarity. Oh, he lives in Portland, as does my brother — but I think that’s as close as it gets. The Wheelers are a vast clan, with our fingers in all of the world’s pies, and Shannon’s branch is very distant from my own.

But, still, he is a Wheeler, and thus one of the best in the world at whatever he chooses to do, by the power of that exceptional name. In his case, first there was the hit comic Too Much Coffee Man (in several formats, for a long time, and not quite done even now). But he’s also been working seriously on New Yorker-style single-panel cartoons for at least a decade now, with some success in that fine magazine.

And, since he’s a guy who publishes the cartoons he makes — a man wants to eat, and his audiences wants to laugh — I’ve seen two books of those cartoons so far: I Thought You Would Be Funnier and I Don’t Get It .

I don’t actually know how many of those books there are, now — I have a vague sense Wheeler has been putting out one a year, since since when or until when is less clear — but I found and read another one last month: I Told You So , published in 2012.

This one is loosely organized by place — San Francisco, New York, Portland, The Suburbs, The Internets, and Unexplored Places — which are, more or less, where the respective cartoons take place. It’s as good an organizing principle as any other, I suppose.

And it’s full of single-panel cartoons, in the arch, somewhat artificial New Yorker style. (All art is artificial, of course — that’s what makes it art. So that is in no way a dig.) Wheeler has a classic cartoony style here, full of tones and soft edges, that primes the reader to look for this kind of humor. (Well, it does for me, at least.)

Again, he is a Wheeler, and therefore excellent at what he does. It’s no surprise he was good at this kind of cartoon. If you like New Yorker-y cartoons, Wheeler has a number of these little books full of them, and so far I can recommend them all.

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Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Glenn Hauman: Do You Really Need To Say It?

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Scènes à faire. Ever heard of it?

It’s an interesting concept that writers and artists encounter when they work, although they may not know what it’s called. It’s French for “scene to be made” or “scene that must be done”. In practical terms, it refers to a scene in a creative work that’s pretty much obligatory for the genre.

If you’re doing a story about a doctor, you will sooner or later have a dramatic shot of a patient on a cart pushed through swinging hospital doors. If you’re doing a story about a lawyer, sooner or later there will be an impassioned speech in front of a judge. If you’re doing a story about a little old lady in Maine who writes mysteries, sooner or later there will be a dead body. If there’s an evacuation, there will be a shot of a toy sadly left behind; if there’s a fruit cart during a car chase in an ethnic neighborhood, the fruit will become ingredients for a smoothie; if there’s a gun on the mantelpiece, it will be fired— on and on and on. ComicMix’s house metaphysician, Del Close, used to have a saying: “Never share a foxhole with a character who carries a photo of his sweetheart.”

And if there’s a superhero story…?

Sadly, you can probably come up with a lot of things in here that just seemed preordained to show up.

First off, it’s a one in a billion thing. A lightning bolt will hit a rack of chemicals that you’re near, a radioactive spider will bite you and not kill you, an alien will come down and give you a thingamabob of immense power, you’re the one in a generation prophecy made flesh, or a completely random mutation, or your billionaire parents were shot dead in an alley— you can list these as easily as I can.

At the same time or shortly thereafter, you get THE MOTIVATION. That’s the reason why they get dressed up and do what they do, and that is important, because that often reveals character. (It better reveal character, the person has suddenly decided to start wearing funny clothing outside and potentially be shot— “it seemed like a good idea at the time” just won’t do.)

Now: can you tell a superhero story without telling the origin?

Well, yes. Spider-Man: Homecoming avoided telling (or retelling) the more famous moments of Peter Parker’s backstory (although we do see how he gets various iterations of his suit) and instead focused on what he does now as a person. There was an early draft for a Green Arrow/Suicide Squad-ish movie called SuperMax where Oliver Queen was just tossed in prison with a bunch of supervillians and had to get out. No origin, no recap, just hit the ground running. The first X-Men movie doesn’t go into the backstory of all these mutants, just throws in the plot, the sides, the stakes, and go.

Some stories are even doing this now with fight scenes, because fight scenes rarely reveal character. The most extreme example that comes to mind was what Peter David did in Captain Marvel between issues #5 and #6, he had an entire cosmic crossover battle and destroyed the universe— and did it all off-panel.

The point? The point is: get to the point. We’ve seen the classic bits already, and many of us can pretty much take them as given. The point is not the origin itself— but how and why this changes the character.

We’ve seen the universe end before. Show me why your character wants to end it.

(Hat tip to Jim Valentino for Normalman #1.)

Box Office Democracy: American Assassin

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I don’t really know what it’s like to be an actor and even less what it’s like to be an aging actor, but I have to wonder what made Michael Keaton take this role in American Assassin.  He signed on to play this role after being nominated for an Oscar for Birdman and having wrapped production on The Founder, so he had done two big meaty acting roles in a row and he chose…this.  Maybe the money was too good (and he didn’t know he would sign to be The Vulture a month later), maybe the phone just isn’t ringing off the hook for older actors if you aren’t in the Clooney-tier.  American Assassin is a bad movie and it makes Keaton look like a dime store Liam Neeson.  He should be doing better things than this, everyone in this movie should. Movies should be better than making movies like this.

American Assassin has all the narrative nuance you would expect from a movie based on a book written by a consultant on 24.  Mitch Rapp (Dylan O’Brien) is a man haunted by the murder of his fiancée by terrorists and turns himself in to a one-man terrorist vigilante.  He can speak Arabic, do MMA, and shoot a gun so he’s definitely capable of single-handedly infiltrating big secretive organizations and immediately talking to big-name terrorists.  He’s arrested in the middle of one of his operations and recruited in to a secret CIA terrorist-hunting squad led by Stan Hurley (Michael Keaton) who also does not play things by-the-book but also hates Mitch for not following the rules.  There’s a big hunt for a nuclear weapon that is being sold by a former protege of Hurley’s who also does not like following the rules.

The CIA depicted in this movie is an organization full of people who constantly belittle each other, don’t follow procedure or even direct orders, and play fast and loose with each other’s lives and the lives of millions of people if we take the whole atomic weapon thing seriously.  It’s kind of inconceivable to imagine this organization is capable of stopping any kind of foreign plot.  I understand that they want our protagonists to feel like rugged individualists (why else put “American” in the name honestly) but there’s never any contrast.  I can appreciate the plays-by-his-own-rules characters only if I have a baseline to compare them to.  This works in cop dramas a lot more easily because I know what a standard police officer looks and acts like; I have no such standard for black ops CIA operatives.  If all you ever show me are the iconoclasts they don’t stand out at all.

I honestly thought we were past the point of making movies as overtly racist as American Assassin but it would seem I am just naive.  There is one Middle Eastern person in this movie with lines that is not working with terrorists, and even he is working directly contrary to the interests of the US government but is just honorable about it.  Moreover, while all of the bad guys who get few lines and exist just to be chased and die are Middle Eastern, the grand schemer behind the whole plot is another white guy.  They made a movie about how all these brown people are evil and didn’t even have a meaty villain role to give to an Iranian actor.  It’s insulting, it’s sad, it makes the movie more predictable, and it shouldn’t be ok in this day and age.

Even if the politics weren’t a garbage fire, American Assassin just doesn’t have interesting action beats.  The very best scene in the movie would be the worst action scene in the most recent Bourne movie.  There’s a sequence where an agent gets murdered in the field and it leads directly in to a car chase where nothing happens and there’s no interaction between the two cars.  There’s an MMA-style fight that features someone getting a full mount on their opponent and then that same opponent immediately kicks them in the face.  I’m not a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu expert but that doesn’t seem possible.  Even the big finale featuring a live nuclear warhead doesn’t seem particularly important or impactful and I cared so little about the characters that as soon as the effects shots were over I was ready for them to fade to black.  I could not make myself care about the fates of these characters.

There’s no shortage of spy thrillers out there right now— I can’t imagine what made anyone look at the movie landscape, then look at this script, and think they had something worth making.  The best thing I can say about this movie is that it’s usually boring and only occasionally racist and/or confusing.   American Assassin is a movie with nothing interesting to say, nothing interesting to show you, and only a couple of reasonably interesting ways to point a camera at something.  This is a movie everyone involved with should be embarrassed about and if we’re lucky maybe everyone will just forget it ever happened.

REVIEW: Wonder Woman

wonder-woman-3d-e1502390466111-5884053Having earned over $800 million, Wonder Woman has proven itself on many levels. In a year that started, more or less, with Hidden Figures, and with a summer that had three hits featuring women (the others being Atomic Blonde and Girls Trip) the female half of the movie going audience is finally receiving their due. Director Patty Jenkins has certainly shattered some records and glass ceilings along the way while Gal Gadot has now proven she can open a movie.

With Wonder Woman out today on Blu-ray from Warner Home Video, we have a chance to look back and enjoy it all over again. While it fits neatly in the larger DC Cinematic Universe thanks to the framing sequence, the movie largely works on its own with a vastly superior tone and vision than its predecessors.

There is sumptuous color representing Themyscira, home to the Amazons. All the scenes there are a delight as we see women of age and color living harmoniously with the land and training because they know that man’s world remains a violent one.

When the First World War literally arrives on their shores, the women are ready and the beach fight is a spectacle. It also means it is time to re-engage with the world and Diana insists she be the emissary, bringing Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) back to his people. It’s clear to the Amazons that Ares (David Thewlis) is behind this and Diana brings with her the god-killer sword, convinced men will lay down their arms once Ares is defeated.

The remainder of the movie is Diana’s journey, less a fish out of a water story, more of a series of discoveries. She learns to trust men, marvel at ice cream, and show compassion where others would demonstrate might. With Trevor, she collects a select team of agents, each with their skills, but all in awe of what she can do. The team – Sameer (Said Taghmaoui), Charlie (Ewen Bremner), and Chief Napi (Eugene Brave Rock) – give her someone to talk to along the way and they demonstrate that not all men are square-jawed righteous as Trevor is or as devious as General Erich Ludendorff  (Danny Huston). Similarly, Trevor’s British contact, Etta Candy (Lucy Davis) is contrasted by Doctor Poison (Elena Anaya).

wonder-woman-in-action-e1505660961165-2044316Her arrival in No Man’s Land, changing the months-long stalemate, is perhaps the film’s best sequence as it shows Diana as Wonder Woman for the first time and it’s a joy to behold.

If there are any quibbles it is the one many comics fans made, the final fate of Steve Trevor. Set in World War I, there was not plausible way for Trevor to be a part of her life in the modern world so his story had to end. It just didn’t need to repeat the end of Captain America; The First Avenger.

The film is released in the usual assortment of packages including the popular Blu-ray, DVD, Digital HD set. The high definition 2.39:1 transfer is brilliant, letting Themyscira glisten and not losing a detail during the less color-saturated war sequences. The Dolby Atmos sound track is a delight, showcasing Rupert Gregson-Williams’ excellent score.

wonder-woman-steve-trevor-e1505660996285-2743816As it deserves, the film is accompanied with a rich assortment of special features, starting with Epilogue: Etta’s Mission, a brief bit that toasts Trevor’s memory and establishes the team as force, on the hunt for a Mother Box (hinting at Justice League of course).

The behind-the-scenes material begins with Crafting the Wonder which explores the look of the film and how much the lighting was influenced by the paintings of John Singer Sargent. We then get five short A Director’s Vision pieces: Themyscira: The Hidden Island (4:53), Beach Battle (4:54), A Photograph Through Time ((5:01), Diana in the Modern World (4:37), and Wonder Woman at War (4:58).

Warriors of Wonder Woman (9:50) introduces us to the international assortment of women who spent four months physically training to become Amazons.

wonder-woman-godkiller-sword-e1505661047793-8691677The Trinity (15:56) has cast, crew and comics creators Greg Rucka, Phil Jimenez, Liam Sharp, Paul Dini, Cliff Chiawonder ng, Jill Thompson, and Lauren Montgomery who directed the 2008 animated Wonder Woman film, examine DC’s holy trinity of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. They discuss their similarities and differences and how they balance once another in print and on screen.

The Wonder Behind the Camera (15:31) focuses on the many women Jenkins hired to work on the production, as seen through the eyes of aspiring female teen filmmakers who visited for a day.

Finding the Wonder Woman Within (22:40) has award-winning poets and a wide assortment of public figures (including Dee Dee Meyers and Danica Patrick) discuss what female empowerment means to them along with their connection to the Amazon Princess.

There are six Extended Scenes which are worth a look and the usual Blooper Reel.

Joe Corallo: Diversity, Comics, and the Culture War

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m35vsi9s_400x400-2231331There are so many things that have happened in the past week that I’d love to talk about. I’d love to talk about our successful Kickstarter campaign for Mine! which raised $9,360 over our goal. I’d love to talk about what I thought of Runaways #1. Unfortunately, what I need to talk about is Aubrey Sitterson and Diversity and Comics.

Aubrey Sitterson is currently writing one of the G.I. Joe comics over at IDW. He has a reputation for poking the bear when it comes to those on the right who are upset about decisions he’s made in changing characters and the roles of said characters in order to create a more diverse book that will appeal to new audiences; something that properties like G.I. Joe could always use. Last week on September 11th, Aubrey sent off a couple of tweets regarding 9/11. He talked about who has a right to be upset about what happened on that day and questioned the sincerity of some people expressing anger and grief over what happened.

While I agree with Aubrey’s politics in terms of pushing for wider diversity in comics, in comments regarding 9/11 were very inappropriate. They were not comments made to friends in private, or even on a private Facebook page; they were public statements made on his public Twitter account. I have every right to be offended by what he said as do many other people.

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Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. I’ve been disappointed to see some reporting on the left side of comics politics that make it out as if Aubrey Sitterson’s comments didn’t mean what he said they mean, and that by being upset with his words that we are somehow allowing those on the right side of comics politics to score some sort of victory. While I don’t feel that he needs to be fired or anything like that, we don’t have to act like what he said was great and unworthy of criticism either. No one wants to hear your hot edgy take about 9/11 on 9/11. No one.

That being said, if the reason you’re calling for the firing of Aubrey Sitterson is because of Diversity and Comics, then we need to talk about that.

Diversity and Comics is the equivalent of a right-wing pundit for the comics industry; think Alex Jones’ Info Wars. He came to the scene earlier this year and his following has been growing massively on Twitter and YouTube. I hadn’t been paying too much attention to what he was doing, but over time he began to make very personal attacks towards writers I admire like Kwanza Osajyefo as well as personal friends and Mine! contributors Sina Grace, Gabby Rivera, and Mags Visaggio. He has stated that he wants a Comics Culture War. This is a problem that needs to be addressed.

What Diversity and Comics does, similar to what Trump and the far right often do, is to take a universally recognized problem and spin things to find a scapegoat they can rally around using bigotry and guttural emotions. Many people would agree that the comic industry could be doing better, or at least we would like to see it do better. Diversity and Comics takes those who are looking for an answer to why comics aren’t doing better and offers up a solution; it’s SJWs, the far left, women, queer and minority creators. This results in targeting specific creators and vile, personal attacks fueled by bigotry and hate being thrown around in an effort to try to force people out of comics that they don’t like. I don’t care to share any of those attacks in this piece.

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People often talk about leaving trolls alone and they’ll just disappear. In this instance, Diversity and Comics has been growing his following this whole year. He has more Twitter followers than ComicMix, a Patreon where he brings in several hundred dollars a month, YouTube channel with over 37k subscribers and over 9 million video views, with many videos over 10k views a piece with hundreds of comments. I don’t see him going away anytime soon, and his followers and subscribers have grown between this past weekend and me writing this. Many people were wrong about how much support a candidate like Trump would have, and you may be wrong about how much support Diversity and Comics has too.

This is a sizeable group of people that exist. They want comics for them; them being cishet white guys and some outliers. In their effort to do so despite having the majority of mainstream comics already catering to them, they have made many creators at best feel unwelcome and at worst feel unsafe. It’s not a sustainable way to operate in a fandom the size of comics.

Some of the people involved will never change the way they feel or operate, and that’s how it is. Some of them got caught up in the rhetoric and maybe don’t truly believe the horribly sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic and Islamophobic words used to promote the ideals of Diversity and Comics, but rather found his answers about the industry to be plausible on the surface. Those people may come back around one day as they see he does not have the real answers to the woes of the comics industry, but rather an agenda to craft a comics fan base in his own image.

Targeted creators do not want you to look at what Diversity and Comics is saying about them and reporting back. Don’t do that. It just hurts people. What you can do is if you see inappropriate behavior, nasty personal attacks, or threats to report them to Twitter or whichever platform you are using and see it on. The comics community is small, but we need to step up and help creators to feel safe and welcome.

Please help all of us to have a safer, more welcoming community for creators now and well into the future.

REVIEW: Arrow: The Complete Fifth Season

arrow-s5-bd1-e1496773124819-8370652All along, showrunners Marc Guggenheim and Wendy Mericle have been telling us Arrow was seen as a five-year odyssey, intended to be the same amount of time post-Lian Yu, to show how he has grown since being stranded there. Other than that noble notion, the execution has been incredibly uneven season to season.

As the series entered its fifth year, they began the season uncertain if this was going to be its final one so they made certain things got tidied up. The tedious flashbacks had to wrap up the five years before the series’ start and move Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) and his friends towards a point where, should it be canceled, viewers were left satisfied.

Somewhere during the production of the final nine episodes, they got a sixth season renewal so shifted the planning to bring things to a climax and a cliffhanger. The messy 23 episodes are now collected by Warner Home Entertainment in Arrow: The Complete Fifth Season.

Oliver Queen’s story was one of redemption and responsibility wrapped around his family. Along the way it has taken interesting twists and turns and this year it was clear the intent was to get back to the street-level threats that propelled the Hood, the Arrow, and Green Arrow to protect Starling, now Star, City. As a result, it was an odd monkey-wrench tossed in when the series had to acknowledge the existence of aliens among us with its participation in the four-part crossover. The planning was haphazard since the episode had to double as a celebration of its 100th episode and therefore focused more on that than the crossover, spoiling the impact it should have had.

Oliver realizes there is so much to do, as both the Arrow and as Mayor, that he needs a team now that Diggle (David Ramsey) is in prison and Speedy (Willa Holland) has had her fill of costumed adventure. Slowly, and reluctantly, he rebuilds with the addition of Wild Dog (Rick Gonzalez), Artemis (Madison McLaughlin), Ragman (Joe Dinicol), and Mister Terrific (Echo Kellum). Later, detective Dinah Drake (Juliana Harkavy) uses her sonic powers to join the team as the future Black Canary III. These newcomers offer a breath of fresh air to the series’ dynamic, especially as they are trained and then sent out to fight, not entirely agreeing with the hows. Artemis’ betrayal is a surprise but she’s off-stage for so long that when she turns up as Prometheus’ sidekick, we wonder where she’s been. Her arc deserved better since the betrayal is important.

arrow-s5-underneath-e1505576670659-3207597Picking up from the Olicity breakup at the end of season four, the season’s best episode may have been “Underneath”, which focused mainly on Ollie and Felicity (Emily Bett Rickards), allowing them to air out their emotions showing more can be done with less – a lesson I wish all the CW series would learn.

Instead, Prometheus (voiced by Michael Dorn) is the Big Bad, the son of someone Arrow killed way back in season one and has spent the last four years not only training himself to be the hero’s physical equal but to be psychologically ahead of his target. Throughout the season he takes out the people around Ollie until he gets Ollie himself and forces him to look deep inside himself to confront some harsh truths.

The problem with Adrian Chase (Josh Segarra) as Prometheus is that he’s too smart, too sophisticated and accomplishes way more than he should be capable of. He’s too perfect of a villain to be a true threat and I reached my limit when he produced Ollie’s secret son William (Jack Moore).

arrow-s5-team-e1505576699403-4674868Muddying the storyline are threads that never went anywhere such as Ollie’s sort of romance with journalist Susan Williams (Carly Pope), and the periodic appearance of Vigilante, who in the comics is Chase, so makes us wonder who this one is.

And with such a sprawling cast, Quentin Lance (Paul Blackthorne) doesn’t get enough screen time but what he does get, is usually as a foil to Wild Dog – their dynamic is at least a fresh one. Holland’s coming and going from the series was never adequately covered so her character is under-served and deserves far better.

Personally, I felt Ollie never should have left the island and the flashbacks should have ended about three seasons earlier. That said, I am fine the Russian thread got dealt with and we can move forward.

arrow-s5-prometheus-e1505576726227-4535577The climax, set where it all began, on the island, brings everyone to one place then doesn’t do anywhere enough with them, including Talia al Ghul (Lexa Doig) , who felt more tacked on that useful. As it stands, the past has been figuratively and literally destroyed in the final episode so truly, the new season next month can finally move forward.

The 23 episodes come complete with a series of related deleted scenes and the ever-popular Gag Reel. We get the third installment of Allied: The Invasion Complex, this one focusing on using the alien tech to let the Arrow characters see alternate histories, which reset Oliver’s goals for the remainder of the season. There are two other featurettes: The New Team Arrow where the production team talk about how the new team members were selected, designed to be fresh and allow the writers to change-up the character interplays; and Returning to the Roots of Arrow: Prometheus, examining how the series unintentionally set this up and how it got to be paid off (without really discussing the comic book origins of Prometheus or Adrian Chase).

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