One Plus One Is 2004 [2004 Week]

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One Plus One Is 2004 [2004 Week]

It’s 2004 week! Since the last theme week we’re moving 64 years into the future (past) and it also feels that long ago since we actually had 1940 week. It’s been far too long but somehow I never found enough time to prepare a week full of seven posts. But now it’s here! I was 24 in 2004 and still at university. It was three years after 9/11 but apart from that I’m not really sure what to expect. The 2000s are still so hard to grasp for me, still too close but full of personal history that I’m probably also still digesting. But I look forward to this week because unlike 1940 this week will find some resonance among my readers (or I just have to remember to write a lot about spanking…). Ready, steady, 2004!

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Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

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Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

Avengers: Age of Ultron is basically what you want it to be: an entertaining movie based on comic books that has exciting action and fun Joss Whedon dialogue. The movie delivers on all those promises and that’s enough for an enjoyable comic book movie for me. It doesn’t go that extra step that Guardians of the Galaxy went, but on the other hand it has a much more fascinating villain and a more coherent plot overall. The character interactions are fun and this, unlike the first movie, every character gets enough opportunities to shine. It is amazing to see how many actors these movies are able to gather. It’s hard for me to tell how much fun such a movie is without having the background knowledge of the comics, but as a comic reader it is hard to deny how much fun it is to see those characters come alive and do their thing. Not everything makes complete sense and, just to be clear, this is no masterpiece of moviemaking (despite some great shots). It’s a fun movie, a million times better than the dreadful Man of Steel, proving (likes Guardians) that comic book movies are not all alike. It was mostly what I wanted it to be.

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Comics Are for Everyone: 1940 Edition - Spanking During War Times [1940 Week]

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Comics Are for Everyone: 1940 Edition - Spanking During War Times [1940 Week]

(Coincidentally, this is the 200th post on this blog! Yes, go and count, it's true. Hooray!)

Comics in 1940 were very different than they are now. If you know anything about comics history you know that publishers back then didn’t really care about artists or writers, let alone royalties. Stories were cobbled together with no time and not much care. That the mess of the origin of many famous characters is the basis for what we still read and watch today is somewhat amazing. If you actually look at those comics, you see no great art in most cases and certainly no stories that are well-written. I decided to take a look at some #1s that came out during that year and focus on the most interesting, funny, weird or problematic panels.

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Comics Are for Everyone: 1988 Edition [1988 Week]

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Comics Are for Everyone: 1988 Edition [1988 Week]

Because of the amazing comics that have been released in 1988, I decided to have another comics section in this theme week. Grant Morrison and Alan Moore are big enough names for this, I guess, but we shouldn’t forget Jamie Delano. I’ll just focus on the issues published in that year, since that’s enough already. Let’s go!

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Comics Are for Everyone: 2012 Edition - Occupying Jokers, Transgender Aliens and the Web of Life [2012 Week]

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Comics Are for Everyone: 2012 Edition - Occupying Jokers, Transgender Aliens and the Web of Life [2012 Week]

As I mentioned before, 2012 had a lot of comics in it and I read many of those. So I thought today I spent some time flipping through more than 1,000 issues to see what is noticeable in those comic books. What, you say that’s crazy? Too much? You’re right, actually. I’ll try to focus on which current events were portrayed in some of those comics and also look at some interesting messages regarding humanity. So, the usual.

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Comics Are for Everyone - Africa, Five Years From Now (Futures End)

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Comics Are for Everyone - Africa, Five Years From Now (Futures End)

This time around, I thought I look at a collection of relatively recent comics at things I noticed. Much like Daniel Quinn, I’m trying to avoid Africa for now (until I work on it with my current course), but it doesn’t hurt to take a look at it from time to time. It’s one of my favorite topics because its stereotypicalization is so widespread and accepted. It’s AFRICA, one continent where all the problems are the same everywhere and no distinct culture is really known. Africans are starving, poor and need our help. That’s the short version.

In Action Comics: Futures End, one of the issues of DC’s Futures End month, we see Clark Kent in the future (five years from now… don’t ask, it’s complicated – or rather convoluted) being another white savior.

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Comics Are For Everyone: The Last of the Greats/Avengers vs. X-Men #6

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Comics Are For Everyone: The Last of the Greats/Avengers vs. X-Men #6

“Humans are flawed and this is why they destroy the earth.” Would anyone doubt that assumption? Probably not. I do because I think it’s not humans but culture that is flawed. Anyway, I want to look at two comic books today that ask the question: What would happen if all the problems in the world could be solved? What would humans do then? Those are intriguing questions that revolve around the notion of humans being flawed or not. If they are not flawed, solving all the problems would save the world. If they are flawed, all the problems will just come back. Looking at these questions are Joshua Hale Fialkov and Brent Peeples in their mini-series The Last of the Greats, published by Image in 2011 and 2012, and Jonathan Hickman and Olivier Coipel in the best issue of the event comic Avengers vs. X-Men (or just AvX because it’s so cool), published in 2012 by Marvel (which was written by every major Marvel writer but was quite a mess overall).

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Comics Are For Everyone: Mara #6

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Comics Are For Everyone: Mara #6

Mara, a six-issue limited mini-series written by Brian Wood and illustrated by Ming Doyle and published by Image Comics in 2013, is the story of a woman who is the best and most famous sports star in a slightly futuristic world. The comic mostly shows how stardom and the media are connected and the consequences this has, thereby directly reflecting upon our society’s treatment of stars and sports (as Brian Wood rarely writes a comic without reflecting upon our society). It’s a great if slightly weird comic because it does never go where we expect it to go and the ending can’t do anything but leave you astonished in its boldness. It’s a really great comic and I can only recommend it, but since I don’t want to spoil it, I’ll just focus on one aspect today.

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Punisher: War Zone (2008)

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Punisher: War Zone (2008)

(spoilers ahead)

Punisher: War Zone. I mean, the title alone asks for trouble. Let me just say that as much as I’m a comics fan, even a superhero comics fan, The Punisher is a character I really loathe. Frank Castle’s family was killed by gangsters, so he kills gangsters now as the Punisher. He is the ultimate vigilante, showing that our laws don’t work, because they always let the bad ones go. Most of the time it’s an excuse for lots of violence and shooting and torturing, etc. I haven’t read a lot of his comics, but most of them are like that, even if there are exceptions (Mark Millar of all people seemed to have understood that Frank Castle is insane when he wrote him in Civil War). The first (or second if you remember Dolph Lundgren) movie was as you could have expected, telling the basic story and having lots of cruel violence. It wasn’t great. But now this one wants to take it many steps further. I respect director Lexi Alexander because she is very outspoken about women in the movie business and says things most people don’t even think about. But this movie is awful. This might be due to some difficulties with the studio, so I don’t want to put all the blame on her, but it is what it is.

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Comics Are For Everyone - Captain America Comics #1-19

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Comics Are For Everyone - Captain America Comics #1-19

Comics are of course no exception when it comes to depicting stereotypes, dealing with authority and discussing our society. I have a long list of comics that deal with various topics and now is a good as any to start digging through my archives. And when I say “archives”, it sounds like going way back in time, so let’s do that.

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Bloodthirsty Kids

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Bloodthirsty Kids

It’s been a while since I read an interview with Alan Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta), one of the best and most influential comics writer ever, who is known for having “extreme” opinions and for favoring anarchism. This interview was published in 1987 and is very long and very interesting. What I want to look at is something he said that keeps coming back to me ever since then:

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Comics Are For Everyone - DMZ: No Future

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Comics Are For Everyone - DMZ: No Future

Tying in to yesterday’s post about Four Lions, I thought this is a good time to write about something that I also care about a lot but haven’t mentioned yet, which is comics. In fact, since I started again trying to watch every movie ever produced, my comic reading has been strongly reduced. Anyway, I recently read another volume of DMZ, the post-9/11 analogy by Brian Wood and I liked it a lot and thought it was worth writing about.

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