A while back I spent the weekend at my parents and I took the opportunity to pick some of the several thousands individual comics –floppies– I still have stashed away there. It’s been well over a decade since I last bought a new comic in this format, back when I was still a serious collector. Back then I was all about the floppies, buying everything that looked interesting and cheap, but not having been a comics collector for the better part of the last decade has cured me off that. The big disadvantage of the classic comic being that they’re relatively hard to store and, well, look a bit naff when left out in your living room.
It was Tom Spurgeon’s recent post about which comics you read during the eighties and which you regretted missing out on that got me thinking about floppies again. I started seriously buying comics at the tail end of the eighties, spending much of the nineties combing through back issue boxes looking for interesting series I’d read about. That was really the only way you could get your hands on many classic series back then; the internet was too slow for pirating comics, while the great reprint programmes only got started at the turn of the millennium. Even quite recent Marvel or DC stories and titles were only to be had in back issue form, let alone series done by now defunct publishers.
The end result was that I built up a collection full of holes and odds and sods, a couple of issues here or there of series I saw advertised in Comics Interview, half a run of something praised in Amazing Comics, loads of comics that looked familiar and were cheap enough to take a chance at, but very rarely complete runs. Spelunking through comics boxes at shows or obscure comics shop was fun, but readers never had it so good as now, when so much is available at the click of a mouse at Amazon (other online retailers are also available).
The appeal of buying single issues as opposed to trade paperbacks or collections has long faded, but getting these comics out has gotten me a bit nostalgic nonetheless. With floppies you have so much more of a connection to comics as a wider field, through house ads, letter pages and editorials, not to mention having that weekly Thursday evening ritual of trekking to the local comic shop and picking up the latest issues. You don’t really have that buying a Peanuts collection from a bookstore.
(Pictured above, complete runs of, clockwise from the top: Hawk and Dove, Barbara & Karl Kesel, Greg Guler, War of the Gods, George Perez and Russell Braun, the Perez/Ralph Macchio Black Widow four parter from Marvel Fanfare, Kurt Busiek’s and Perez (notice a pattern?) run on The Avengers, followed by the Perez drawn crossover series Infinity Gauntlet (with Jim Starlin) and Crisis on Infinite Earths (Marv Wolfman), Elaine Lee and Kaluta’s Starstruck, Steve Gerber and Phil Winslade’s Nevada, Strikeforce Morituri, the first 20 issues by Peter B. Gilis and Brent Anderson, the O’Neil/Simonson Manhunter, Howard Chaykin’s Black Kiss and finally perhaps Mark Gruenwald’s finest hour on Captain America, #357 to 370, with Kieron Dwyer and Ron Lim. )
The 2011 Nebula Awards were awarded last night and the deserved winner in the novel category is an old friend of mine — Jo Walton:
Novel Winner: Among Others, Jo Walton (Tor)
Other Nominees
Embassytown, China Miéville (Macmillan UK; Del Rey; Subterranean Press)
Firebird, Jack McDevitt (Ace Books)
God’s War, Kameron Hurley (Night Shade Books)
Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, Genevieve Valentine (Prime Books)
The Kingdom of Gods, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
Unlike this year’s Hugo Awards, which were disappointing to say the least, that Nebula shortlist is fairly strong, with only the Jack McDevitt –who has never written anything not bland and workmanlike– out of place. It was also nicely diversive, with five out of six nominees being women and at least one person of colour (N. K. Jemisin) on it. In a genre where all too often award shortlists are filled with legacy white male candidates, more voted for due to their name than their books, this is a good thing.
Among Others was one of the best novels I read last year and I’m glad it got the recognition it deserved.
I’m not a child. I don’t pinky swear. I don’t do patronizing sing-song voices. I don’t like to be touched by strangers and I don’t like strangers trying to force me to look at their faces, touch them, or promise them anything. And I don’t like being called a shithead for not responding to these things or looking terrified by these things. That goes double if you said shithead in the same light-hearted, patronizing way you would to a cat who just put their teeth on you for petting them too long. So don’t think that “I was just joking” would change my mind.
That this woman might mean well is of course no defense of her actions or her inability to understand that you can’t treat grown ass people like troublesome pets, but I can see how easily genuine concern could slide into patronising or worse. It’s the sort of thing I struggled with during Sandra’s illness, to keep treating her like the adult she was, to not let her illness get in the way of her.
You want to know what I find really depressing these days? The Marvel superheroes used to be figures of the counterculture. I don’t want to press on this point to hard, because it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that Stan Lee pushed the characters as being part of the sixties counterculture when he saw that he could leverage a small but enthusiastic readership of college-aged kids into cultural cache.
Which is something I’ve been thinking about as well. Marvel always used to be, if not a leftist, at least a liberal leaning company. Most of its heroes were always either being distrusted by the proper authorities, or were in active conflict with them in some way or another. In fact, the whole Marvel Universe was founded in an act of rebellion, with the Fantastic Four sneaking off on their ill fated rocket flight against the orders of the military. Then there was the Hulk, in which a scientist working for the military industrial complex gets irradiated by his own weapon and turns into a monster. Not to mention Spider-Man, or the X-Men, both hated and feared by a world they repeatedly saved, etc. etc.
It’s all a far cry from the espionage/black ops/governmental superhero death squads of the modern Marvel Universe, where Captain America is no longer a Roosevelt Democrat turned into the symbol of the American dream, but just another Republican thug. Which is one reason why I no longer read many Marvel comics, as even the good ones are drenched in this fascistoid atmosphere.
I’ve dreaded writing about this song, because it’s witty, clever, and one of the catchiest things Ray Davies ever wrote, but it also perpetuates some negative stereotypes about trans people. However, it also shows more respect to trans people than any other pop song I could think of
Which might just be laying too much weight on what’s largely an ironic song gently mocking a young boy having his first encounter with what I always thought was a male transvestite, what with the last line of the song being “But I know what I am I’m glad I’m a man and so is Lola”. It’s the old story of boy meets girl, boy discovers girl is also a boy, boy discovers he couldn’t care less: well, nobody’s perfect.
If you look at it unfavourably, I guess you could say that it enacts that hoary old homo and transphobic fear of straight men being “tricked” into having sex with somebody who’s “really” a man, something that used to be a staple of bad American raunch comedies (or even the Police Academy series).
But I think that’s completely missing the point of “Lola”, which is really about love conquering all, gender not mattering and becoming fluid anyway (“Girls will be boys and boys will be girls, It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world except for Lola”). It’s all done with a wink and a smile, but at its heart it is accepting of trans people more than you could say it is damaging.
