Ad man, TV talk show host and now a sitcom star. It’s been an interesting journey for Donny Deutsch and he talks about how it took him to his new series DONNY, where he plays a version of himself? Plus martial arts is back on the small screen with AMC’s INTO THE BADLANDS. Series Danny Wu reveals why this new series is definitely binge worthy.
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If you watch our show at all, then you know we are obsessive fans of the totally random and awesome Welcome To Night Vale podcast. Well, now there’s a novel based on the crazy strange desert community of Night Vale where all conspiracy theories are real… and so we, of course, duh, were all over it. The book revolves around Night Vale citizens Jackie Fierro and Diane Crayton, the man in the tan suit passing out papers that say “King City” and a shape-shifting teenage boy. We’ll just come out and say it: TWEEKS APPROVED!
Besides reviewing the novel by Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor this week, we try once again to explain the podcast (SPOILERS: we can’t), and we talk about the WTNV live show with opener Eliza Rickman at The Balboa Theatre in San Diego last Tuesday.
For those who still have no idea what Welcome To Night Vale is…we plead with you to check the Welcome To Night Vale podcast out. However, we just suggest you don’t listen to it while you are trying to do other things. Definitely don’t listen and drive. We suggest it as a night time ritual, while you are having your Me Time before you go to sleep. This is creepy, weird, sarcastic, and totally confusing — but worth the ride.
All Hail The Glow Cloud.
When big pharma hears about the Lazarus Pit it will, of course, take out a patent on it and then… oh, maybe offer it as an option at upscale spas. Oh yeah, the wife and I both took a dip in the pit. Pretty pricey â 11 million and if youâre already dead double that â but boy! Way, way better than a massage…
The Pit, as far as I know, doesnât really exist, at least not in our world. Itâs a fictional apparatus that first appeared in Batman #233, back in the dark ages â weâre talking 1971 â and, like so much comic book material, has recently migrated to television, specifically to a Wednesday night program titled Arrow.
The Pit was originally the exclusive property of a 400-year-old scamp named Raâs Al Ghul, who used it to restore himself when he was on the threshold of the Great Beyond, or maybe a half step past it. It fixed him up, all right, but he emerged from it a raving lunatic, an affliction that gradually abated.
There were conditions: it was strongly implied that The Pit could work its therapy only on Raâs and that it was slowly losing potency â a time would come when it did nothing for Raâs except maybe wrinkle his skin; it was highly toxic, so if anyone other than Raâs dived in, kaput, the end, exit screaming; and it had to be situated over a certain kind of energy vortex â you couldnât just dig one in the back yard if you wanted to one-up the neighbors and their puny swimming pool. Later, like all that lasts, The Pit evolved: it would only work once per person, and, most recently, The Pit can do its medicinal voodoo-hoodoo on someone who was good and truly dead â none of this sissy only-at-deathâs-door bushwa.
Good storytelling demands that limitations exist if youâre working in a serial form and you want to run the bring-âem-back-alive scam. The question naturally arises: why not just revive everybody who dies and â oops! â there goes conflict, suspense, maybe some other plot elements, doggone it. Itâs the storytellerâs job to answer the question.
In a recent Arrow arc, the good guys used The Pit to revive one Sarah Lance, whoâd been dead quite a while â maybe months. The Pit did its stuff, but Sarah didnât recover her sanity until somebody realized that The Pit had taken her soul. The heroesâ team did some procedure, Sarahâs soul was restored, and off they went to another adventure.
The soul business gives me pause. What kind of soul â whose definition are we using? If by âsoulâ we mean some immaterial thing that lives within us, we suddenly face a version of philosophyâs old mindâbody problem: if the soul is immaterial, how can material things â The Pit, for instance â act on it? And if itâs not immaterial⦠where is it?
Maybe I should ask my guardian angel and get back to you.
Ed Note: That awesome graphic atop this column is from, and is ©, The Sports Hero (All Rights Reserved, so watch your ass), âWhere Sports & Comics Collide,â which is a wonderful concept.
Fandoms can be a wonderful thing. People who are drawn together by love of a particular series, be it written/filmed/drawn/created in any way, can and have banded together to do some amazing things. I’ve written about how my fellow Browncoats (a.k.a. Firefly fans) and I have raised money for Equality Now. Supernatural fans have come together along with show star Jared Padalecki to raise money for nonprofit organization To Write Love on Her Arms. Gamers have gaming marathons for various charities throughout the world.
Most recently, Star Wars fans took to Twitter to help a dying fan see Episode 7. Sadly, Daniel passed away a few days after his screening. It may be right out of a movie script (ala Fanboys) but it was a touching gesture by fans, cast, crew, and SW franchise to make sure it happened.
With all this in mind, why am I telling you how awesome fans are? Because sadly, sometimes they aren’t awesome. Sometimes people ruin the friendship that grows out of fandom love. That has happened from the Steven Universe fans. A small group of SU fans appears to be growing increasingly mean to the point of brutal. Another fan documented the escalating issues, which have gotten out of control. Fans have been so vicious to other about opinions on the show, they are using rape and death threats. At this point, the ongoing abuses have caused someone to attempt to take their own life.
No fandom is worth any life. I can’t say that loud enough. I love being in fandom groups but I would give them all up in a heartbeat if it meant saving a life. My personal entertainment does not come at the expense of someone’s emotional wellbeing. If yours does, you need to reevaluate.
Steven Universe is a show a lot of friends have told me to watch. After this, I don’t think I can. Yes, I know I can watch a show without being involved with the fandom. But if I like it, I know I’ll want to see what’s out there. It might be unfair to judge a show by the actions of its active fan base. If this is the negativity surrounding a show that is described as all about love, understanding, and equality, then I need to stop before I start.
The real fear is that this can happen to any fan group because the internet is filled with people who think anonymity means no consequences. That since you donât know the person on the other end in real life, they donât really matter. Good rule of thumb to use: If you wonât say it to someoneâs face, donât say it on the internet. Be respectful to each other. That means you can still argue facts or provide criticism, but you donât threaten someone bodily harm because they have a different opinion.
Imagine a world where every conversation on the internet is an engaging one for the right reasons. Imagine reading the comments only makes you cringe from bad grammar, not crude language. Donât sit there and think it isnât possible. Go make it possible by showing the world there are still decent human beings on the internet.
If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts or actions, please seek help and assistance.
The most disturbing thing that happened to me in comics – non-violent, that is – occurred more than 30 years ago during the early days of the real First Comics. In fact, it didn’t even happen to me directly. It happened to then-associate editor Rick Oliver. That’s how disturbing it was to me.
We had published a story, damned if I remember what it was, about evil robots doing what evil robots do – murdering humans and generally raising a ruckus. That’s been a popular theme over the years, and if you think about it that’s just what Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates were talking about last August when they were talking about the dangers of artificial intelligence. As an aside, any time that kind of brain trust agrees on anything, I pay attention. But I digress.
A gentleman called us quite perturbed that we published such a story. Actually, perturbed isn’t quite the right phrase. Hysterical would be more accurate. He went apeshit because we did a story that violated (actually, ignored) Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. In case you’re not up on such things, those laws go exactly like this:
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
An admirable plot device, and Dr. Asimov held to it consistently for decades… in his fiction. Fiction. He never said it was science fact. Actually, he did say he wasn’t the guy who came up with it, that it was something writer/editor John C. Campbell said to him in December of 1940. On the other hand, Editor Campbell claimed that Author Asimov already had the Three Laws in his mind. But I digress. Again.
If this were an in-person conversation at a comic book or a science fiction convention, the caller would have been arrested and taken to a mental ward for observation. Seriously; he was that upset. When Rick told me about the call, I had newfound gratitude for Alexander Graham Bell.
Most of us understand that there are whack jobs out there (I’m sorry I don’t recall the politically correct phrase for “whack jobs”), and we’ve all seen more than a few hanging out around our Great Comic Book Donut Shop. This gentleman didn’t recognize that the Three Laws were merely a good idea and a great fictional plot device. Hell, he didn’t even recognize we had yet to create robots that are useful enough to need the Three Laws. Today, even drones have human controllers.
He desperately needed to get a life… and probably some lithium. But he represents a danger that we see in all of us who are passionate about our hobbies. You see this sort of thing at media conventions all the time – fans who are disappointed that actors aren’t as familiar with their work as they are. Plenty of times I’ve heard fans say that one actor or another was stupid (or worse) because he/she/it didn’t remember some minutia from a teevee series from many years past.
So. Why am I reminded about this now?
Simple. The fourth Republican debate was on teevee last night.
In Casino Royale, a bartender asks James Bond if he wants his martini shaken or stirred and Bond looks back at the man and responds, “Do I look like I give a damn?” and if your theater was anything like mine the crowd went nuts. It was a clear signal that we were discarding some of the older more tired aspects of the Bond franchise.
In Spectre, Bond orders a martini, adds that he would like it “shaken not stirred” and it was a deflating moment. It was a sign that for whatever reason the people responsible for making Bond movies are no longer interested in making something exciting or fresh (or even a transparent attempt at grabbing for Bourne fans) but to make the thing they’ve made so many times before. While Casino Royale felt like a look ahead in to the 21st century of action movies Spectre is a wistful glance back at the 1970s, and that’s not what I want out of a movie anymore. Spoilers ahead.
The thing that separates Spectre from the Bond movies at all is that the plot continues its trajectory away from sweeping supervillainy and more towards personal conflict. While the eponymous organization is surely evil as their board meeting of crime activity suggests the plan they hope to execute in this film is honestly rather mundane. Spectre wants to be the technical backbone for a multinational security surveillance treaty, essentially a slightly more evil version of the Trans Pacific Partnership, a bad thing certainly but it pales in comparison to irradiating all the gold in Fort Knox or holding the world hostage with stolen atomic bombs. Perhaps this is supposed to reflect the changing face of global fear in the modern world but once I’ve accepted all these other things it just feels like lower stakes.
Where the stakes are much higher are with Bond himself. This movie goes to incredible lengths to show that all of the personal problems, depicted on-screen or otherwise, that Bond has experienced have been the direct result of the machinations of Ernst Stavro Blofield, the man in charge of this massive criminal organization. The events of the previous three films were all leading to this and it’s probably best you don’t pick at that too much because it doesn’t make much sense at all. I see what they’re going for, that it would be nice for these movies to feel a bit more personal, but I’m quite sick of hearing about Vesper at this point and it makes the film feel more generic because every action film is going for this kind of thing, the climax of this film could easily have been a Lethal Weapon finale, it doesn’t feel particularly unique.
I might be asking too much from a Bond movie. Spectre provides so many of the things we expect from these movies. There are stunning locations, beautiful cars, exquisite tight-fitting clothing for both men and women, and a healthy dose of quips in dry British accents. That’s the franchise right there, that’s enough for the vast majority of the audience and if we accept that those are the bullet points Bond movies are supposed to hit this one does a great job: I would very much like to visit Morocco, drive a DB10, look as good as Daniel Craig and be as cool as a British secret agent. This is top-notch escapist power fantasy.
I don’t understand all of the casting choices in Spectre. Dave Bautista is asked to show none of the charm he displayed in Guardians of the Galaxy as he basically plays a brick wall for Bond to bounce off of in this film. I’m not even sure he has three lines if we’re not counting screams and grunts. Christoph Waltz is a brilliant performer as ever but he gets only the bare minimum of screen time for a Bond villain. He gets to reveal his evil plan, he gets to arrange an elaborate death trap, and he gets to participate in a chase. Waltz is in one scene in the first half of the movie and that creates anticipation but also makes the rest of the events feel less important. The worst casting was Andrew Scott as the head of British intelligence. You can’t cast someone most famous for playing a scheming villain, cast him as the smarmy new authority figure and then expect to get a meaningful third act beat out of his inevitable betrayal.
Perhaps I was just wrong about what this run of Bond movies was supposed to do. It seems that they don’t want to move in a new direction for the franchise, instead it looks like they wanted to create the illusion of a brave new direction while they went and rebooted everything even further back. We have a stuffy older man as M again (sorry Ralph Fiennes), we have Moneypenny back again, we have Q delivering tricked out Aston Martins, and we have villains in elaborate remote bases with their fluffy cats and their slow avoidable death traps. Pierce Brosnan could have been in this movie; hell, with a filter or two this could have been Timothy Dalton, and that’s disappointing. This could be a modern action franchise but instead it seems willing to go back to trading in nostalgia and clichés.
Iâve only been writing this column for a month now, and if youâve been reading you might have guessed that the next opportunity Iâd have Iâd write about Iceman coming out in Uncanny X-Men #600. Well, congratulations! You were right. Iâll try to be less predictable in the future, but I make no promises.
As you may have heard, last week the present day Iceman came out to his past self, thus confirming that Iceman is gay in both past and present. This move has gotten a great deal of praise, with many highlighting that this now makes him the highest profile gay superhero in comics. Though Iâm a big fan of the X-Men in addition to being gay, I honestly did not care much for how Iceman coming out was handled.
Now, before anyone reading this starts either rolling their eyes thinking Iâm gearing up for a rant on how Brian Bendis and Axel Alonso must be homophobes or donât understand diversity for not handling this how I would have liked, or are gearing up to rally with me on that point, Iâm going to stop you there. Bendis himself is Jewish, and two of his three daughters are adopted, one African-American and the other Ethiopian. He co-created Miles Morales, the half African-American, half Hispanic Spider-Man that has since become a major hit at Marvel. Axel Alonso himself was editor on Peter Milligan and Mike Allredâs X-Force/X-Statix run that introduced three queer X characters. The issue I have here is not personal and I acknowledge that they have made great decisions regarding diversity in the past. Itâs about the handling of Icemanâs coming out and how that affects LGBTQ representation at Marvel. Now letâs get into it.
First off, Jean Grey is here for seemingly little reason as past Iceman has his talk with present Iceman. She was my and many other peopleâs point of contention when this was first brought up in All New X-Men #40, when she outed him. Some people donât feel that she outed him, but having read it, thatâs the conclusion I came to myself. Telling someone what their sexuality is when theyâre questioning it can be damaging. I know when I was a teenager and had people in my life telling me I wasnât gay, that it did hurt me and took time to get over. When Jean did this, it took away from Icemanâs agency. Rather than a coming out story, we got a âJean told us weâre gay, so we are now,â story, and thatâs significantly less compelling. I wish I had the time to go into how troubling the bi-erasure was in this story as well, but Iâll talk about bi-erasure in mainstream comics next week.
Second, starting with the âYouâre going to be a mutant and gay. Wow,â line that present Iceman says to past Iceman, and going into how he put all of his effort into the X-Men over his own happiness, I was just completely taken aback. This made no sense at all.
How can present Iceman talk about putting all his effort into the team when he has never led the X-Men, and he left the team to go to college for a bit, and he had a fairly long relationship with Opal Tanaka that he put his all into, going as far as heading to Japan with Jean Grey (funny, right?) to save her from Cyber Samurai, and he tried to ruin Polarisâ wedding to Havok because he was still into her, and has seen several other X-Men over the years come out around him even as mutant numbers dwindled⦠and thatâs just to name a few things. Not to mention how Cyclops, Storm, Professor X, even Magneto all made time for their own happiness and had a much more important role in the world than Iceman ever did. It would be one thing if this was because present Iceman was being selfish, but heâs making it out like he stayed in the closet because heâs selfless, and that doesnât quite hold up here.
Building on that point, Iceman being a blonde hair, blue eyed, young, white, attractive, able-bodied, cisgender man with a six-pack complaining about how hard it is to come out was disappointing. Look, everyone has problems and hardships, even young attractive white guys, and I understand and acknowledge that. However, this is a fictional world where Iceman has been on life and death missions, gone through space, time, fought aliens, vampires, deities⦠and coming out was harder than all of that?
If this was the 80s, Iâd totally get that. Even the 90s. Itâs 2015, and that coupled with living in such a fantastical world makes this too hard for me to swallow. Not to mention how many of his teammates and fellow mutants are not nearly as privileged as he is. Iâd dare even say that Nightcrawler and Beast might have a harder time being straight than Iceman would have being gay.
Finally, on the last page of this scene young Iceman asks present Iceman if he thinks Angel is hot and they agree and have a good time about it. If youâre going to make the next LGBTQ X-Men character a young, attractive, blonde hair, blue eyed, able-bodied, cisgender white man with a six pack, can we at very least have him talk about being attracted to someone who isnât also all of those things? It just feeds into so many of the negatives in the LGBTQ community that are trying to be addressed. It was a way to wrap up the scene that was clearly intended to be sweet that left me feeling sour.
Iâm not trying to be ungrateful about having more representation in mainstream comics. However, we should be holding ourselves to a higher standard and demand more, better, and thoroughly thought out LGBTQ representation.
I do want to end on a positive note. Bendis has updated Iceman in a way that will give future writers something new to explore with the character and Iâm thankful to him for that, and despite how I may have come across, I am eager to see what other writers will do with him. Hopefully an LGBTQ creator or an ally like Peter David or Kieron Gillen who handle queer characters respectfully will get to tackle him, and maybe Iâll soon be reading the greatest Iceman story ever told.
Amy Schumer has become quite the comedienne, taking the stage, television, and now film by storm. Trainwreck, her starring vehicle for director Judd Apatow, was my first sustained exposure to her and thought the fresh eyes could glean what the fuss is all about. Still trying to figure it out.
The story is about a woman who is professional star and a personal wreck who meets and falls for a guy, only to screw it up at much the same time she screws up her relationship with her sister, and loses her job. That it is about a woman and not a man has garnered a lot of buzz but the overall story is tired and predictable.
Apatow’s previous films have offered up fresh takes on old themes along with sharply delineated characters that avoid the clichés and bring with them a tremendous amount of heart. In The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, and This Is 40 were all written by him and perhaps he should have been allowed to give Schumer’s script a pass.
We’re told that Amy Townsend is the star writer for S’nuff, a magazine that makes Maxim and FHM seem tame. She is assigned to interview a sports doctor despite disliking athletics of all kinds. Her boss, Dianna (Tilda Swinton) holds out the Executive editor’s post as a carrot for taking on the work. Meantime, she is avoiding emotional entanglements, drinking, dancing, and having a series of one-night stands which seems to stem from words of advice given to her and her sister Kim (Brie Larson), by their crude father Gordon (Colin Quinn). On the other hand, she has a warm spot for dear old dad, now confined to a nursing home given his multiple sclerosis.
She finally seems to settling into a relationship with the musclebound and possibly closeted Steven (John Cena). Despite being rude and crude, he gets his heart broken when Steven discovers Amy has been sleeping around and tells her she’s not a nice person and honestly, she isn’t.
That starts to change when she beings to interview the near-perfect Aaron Conners (Bill Hader) and a softer side seems to emerge. Over a period of time, she falls for the doctor and they begin to date and she’s having her first genuine adult relationship. She doesn’t want to screw it up but of course does, triggered in part by her father’s sudden death. She spirals downward just as one would expect towards the end of Act Two.
Everything comes crashing down around her until she finally hits bottom and rebounds making amends first with Kim then with Aaron. Her final over-the-top act comes out of the blue and is intended to be a showstopper when it just stops. They still kiss and all will be well. Awww.
Amy and Aaron, though, are deeply under-developed characters and you are not emotionally invested in either nor is there real warmth and chemistry between the performers. In fact, Aaron seems more himself with his patients including LeBron James, who provides as adept with comedy as he is with a basketball, stealing every scene he’s in.
Schumer may be a gifted talent but it’s not on display her since Amy is unlikable, the humor is tame, and nothing feels new and different, just tired and by the numbers. None of the supporting characters feel fleshed out, spoiling a rich ensemble.
Universal Home Entertainment has released the film in a combo pack that includes Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital HD. Additionally, both discs come with the theatrical version and a four-minute longer unrated version. From what I can tell, there’s just more, nothing earth-shattering and special.
The film comes with a nice assortment of Special Features including additional Deleted and Extended Scenes; a two-part Gag Reel; Lin-o-Rama, where several actors are shown ad libbing for scenes; a traditional Behind-The-Scenes featurette; Directing Athletes: A Blood Sport , a more scripted than not look at working with James, Tony Romo, and Amar’e Stoudemire; The Dogwalker, the complete film-within-a-film starring Daniel Radcliffe and Marisa Tomei; and finally, from Comedy Central, the Trainwreck Comedy Tour Featurette.
The Doctor: âHow are you going to protect your glorious revolution from the next one?â ⢠The Zygon Inversion ⢠Doctor Who, Season 9, Episode 8 ⢠Written by Peter Harkness and Steven Moffat
What the fuck is with all these fucking commercials!
I mean, seriously, I get that BBCAmerica wants its moneyâs worth out of Doctor Who, but câmon, are you fucking kidding me? Ever since the passing of the TARDIS to Peter Capaldi, the commercial breaks have gotten absolutely fucking ridiculous â what is it down to now, every five minutes? And the breaks seem to be longer than the actual story in between the damn commercials!!!! How the hell can anyone actually enjoy the show?
Because of the stupid commercials, I missed so much of the nuances of both The Zygon Invasion (which first aired last week on October 31) and Saturdayâs The Zygon Inversion that I watched them at one sitting today, Sunday, November 8, on Amazon Prime. Yeah, I paid $2.99 for each, because Season 9 is (not yet) part of my Amazon Prime membership, but it was worth every penny.
I loved it.
No, more than thatâ¦
I adored it.
In fact, im-absolu-fuckin-lutely-not-so-ho, this two-hour story will be the one that definitely defines Peter Capaldiâs ownership of the Doctor. His delivery on the futility of war was brilliant, combining pathos, hope, desperation, and even bits of humor. I was riveted, I couldnât take my eyes off of him â and, in fact, I ârewoundâ those ten climatic minutes three times just so I could watch and listen to him again. Now, I do have to say that I was a bit âquibbledâ last week when the show hit us all on the head with a very, very heavy hammer:
The Doctor: âThis is a splinter group. The rest of the Zygons  â  the vast majority  â  they want to live in peace. You start bombing them, youâll radicalize the lot. Thatâs exactly what the splinter group wants.â
Yes, yes, Steven Moffat and Peter Harness, we got the analogy â and if you didnât get the analogy then Iâm not talking to you â and perhaps you didnât have to swing Mjolnir again when the ânormalizedâ Zygon pleaded that he just wanted to live in peace before he killed himself. The best part of any science fiction, whether it be in book or television or movie form, imho, is when it addresses and/or attacks our real concerns, assumptions, and prejudices and, hopefully, makes us actually think about them.
The Doctor: âListen, I just want you to think. Do you know what thinking is? Itâs just a fancy word for changing your mind.â
But this is the real world, and it will take more than Peter Capaldiâs breathtaking performance and a great, great episode of Doctor Who to change the minds of radical âsplinter groupsâ bent on war to realize that the box â both of them â is empty.
Even the Doctor has been through this 14 times before.
The more things change… the more they change. The very first StreamCon, a convention that’s all about online influencers and digital content, was just held in New York City. It’s a show that’s blended for both industry professional and fans, just like the bigger comic cons. And it was held in the Javits Center, just like New York Comic Con, so it brought back a lot of memories of the “early days” of what has become one of biggest comic-cons in the world.
There’s been a lot written about New York Comic Con and the continuing growth of Geek Culture. It’s hard to believe it’s been 10 years since the first NYCC. No one knew quite what to expect. It was held in just one section of the Javits Center, in stark contrast to the sprawl of recent years. And that first year, when the crowds got too big, the Fire Marshalls put a halt to anyone entering, or reentering the convention floor. (You can imagine how well that went over.) How could they not have known that it would soon become the biggest show in the convention hall?
On the first day of StreamCon the crowd wasn’t overbearing. It was so easy to get from point A to point B. There was a casual and relaxed atmosphere. And there were only handful of cosplayers. To be fair, Day #1 was meant to be the Industry Summit day, so that was all by design.
But the fascinating part, during this designated professional day, it was all the stress and strains of the marketing community in flux. Sure, there were “industry experts” present but there were also a lot of professionals there to learn about who the YouTube/Vine/Twitter media stars are and just why fans love them so. These folks may have been a little overwhelmed, but the NYC marketing community is nothing if not tough, and you didn’t see anyone sweating.
But It was soon clear that the days of advertising agencies reaching out to the most popular celebrities product spokespeople based on the top network TV shows are long gone. For today’s millennial audiences, the first thing they reach for is their cell phone. And fewer and fewer of them even watch traditional shows – and when they do it’s usually not on their television. It’s one a different screen. TV stars like Tim Allen and Ted Danson are irrelevant to them. Instead they live in a world dominated by online celebrities like PewDiePie, Smosh and Allicatt. In fact, in Variety’s recent ranking, Taylor Swift just barely cracked the top 10.
During the conference, you could see the struggles as many professionals tried to keep up. They worked to make sense of this world of “non-scripted reality fiction”, cord-cutters and the deemphasizing print media. Carrying around a newspaper or telling stories about things like “waiting in line at the bank” were clearly out of place.
One parallel, of course, is how rapidly Geek Culture is also changing. Movies and TV shows serve as not only the gateway for many fans. And these versions are quickly becoming the “alpha continuity” as well. Cosplayers have leapfrogged from being labeled as “nuisances” at comic cons to becoming main attraction. In fact, now there are whole conventions built around cosplayers. Many women now lead the way in creativity and fandom. And with the recent blockbuster debut of Supergirl on TV, you just know that more female fans are being created every Monday night. (Disclosure: I liked it too!)
Change is good! Change is exciting! Flux is the new norm… or the new black or the new orange or something like that. It’s a fascinating ride to be on, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. How do you feel about it?
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
Stephen Colbert, we have your writer for “The Chronicles of Amber”!
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