Now here’s one of the reasons I shelled out five books for a subscription to Metafilter, posts like these leading me to blogs like Busty Girl Comics and cartoonists like Rampaige. I love the artwork on these cartoons, it reminds me of Chynna Clugston’s art on Blue Monday, loose, somewhat manga influenced and cute.
For all the annoyances the internet can bring you daily more faster and more often than traditional media could, you have to thank it for something like this. Fifteen-twenty years ago a series of cartoons about the real problems large breasted women face would at most have been a self published mini comic, maybe getting half a paragraph in a TCJ column, mostly gone unnoticed otherwise. That’s progress.
Right, so the popular image of the American South in the fifties and sixties had been of rednecks, klansmen and big white cops beating up and shooting at peaceful Black civil rights activists. If you came from the south and were white, you were ignorant at best, stone cold racist at worst. Politically you had that old rotten to the core southern Democratic Party as the flag bearer of that image of the old south, corrupt, segregationist and resist to all change while the country was changed around it. In short, not a nice time to be white, from the south and not a stick in the mud bigot.
And then the seventies came and things changed. The south got less racist, you got a new generation less redneck, more hippie, less racist but not ashamed of being southern either. The south seemed to move away from its past, experience somewhat of a boom as cities like Atlanta attracted new businesses and inhabitants alike as the region got richer and less yokel. Meanwhile Nixon’s great southern strategy –as thought up by Lee Atwater[1]– by which he appealed to that core of racist old Democratic voters by well, stoking their racism, has started to work, which means that the Democratic party in turn can be cleansed of its racist past, become more like it is in the rest of the country.
And so you have this vision of a New South in the mid seventies: young, optimistic, integrated, liberal, proud of its heritage but no longer mired in its past. With the culmination of that vision being Jimmy Carter’s election as president in 1976. Here you have the first true southern president since the Civil War, somebody both a liberal and from what rightwingers like to believe is their heartland, a Southern Baptist even, but liberal, who had southern rock bands like the Allman Brothers Band campaigning for him.
Is it any wonder that Republicans hate Carter, even now hate him even more than they hate Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, two other Democrats who “stole” their presidency from them? He represented a vision of the south, of their American heartland in direct opposition to what they wanted it to be, a south in which racist dogwhistles would no longer get their core voters worked up. He was a direct threath to their power and they would go to any length to make him lose the election, even going so far as to make deals with what they themselves would call an evil country, Iran, to make sure that the release of American hostages would not take place before the election so that Carter couldn’t profit from it.
that’s Andrew Weiss’ judgement of the seventies and while he may be bitter, he is sadly more right than wrong. The seventies is when the Republicans got their pretty hate machine really going, first used it to kill off Carter and the New South, then just kept dragging the whole of America ever more rightward into the mire, in the process replacing the real south with their Disneyfied, Nashvilled simulacrum of what they wanted the south to be.
[1] Lee Atwater in 1981: You start out in 1954 by saying, “N*gger, n*gger, n*gger.” By 1968 you can’t say “n*gger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
At the Edge of the Solar System
Alain Doressoundiram & Emmanuel Lellouch
205 pages including index
published in 2008
In 2006 the International Astronomical Union demoted Pluto, long the ninth and last planet in our Solar System from being a planet into a socalled dwarf planet, a new category not just meant for Pluto, but also a half dozen other planets that had been recently discovered at the edge of the Solar System. With the number of planets rapidly rising and estimates raging from a 200 to 2,000 more to be discovered as well as the general feeling that Pluto, only one fifth the mass of the Moon just did not fit in with the rest of the classical planets, this new categorisation was needed, halfway between true planets and asteroids or comets, now classified as small Solar System bodies.
Surprisingly for such a dry subject, the reclassification of Pluto led to a huge amount of media coverage and some controversy; many people, including myself, saw the argument as somewhat specious or had a sentimental attachment to the idea of the classical nine planets. They now were confronted with the reality of the Solar System being massively more complex than they had suspected, with our knowledge of the very edges of it having expanded massively since even the late seventies. Which is where At the Edge of the Solar System: Icy New Worlds Unveiled comes in: an introductionary text book about these discoveries and how they were made.
So last Summer, nine year old Caine was stuck at his dad’s used car parts shop and bored, so he started making classic arcade games out of cardboard boxes. He got a little bit obsessed with it to tell you the truth, in that way nine year old kids can get obsessed over their hobbies. There was just one little problem: he only had one customer and would’ve liked to see more people play his games. But luckily that solitary customer was geek/film maker Nirvan Mullick and he set out to give Caine the best day of his life.
They can be wearisome sometimes, self congratulatory and up themselves, but sometimes they show that things can get better with geeks. This was a brilliantly sweet thing to do for one lucky nine year old.
I guess the first thing I would say is, I understand how you feel. I have certainly felt that way about things. I would say I understand that kind of an emotional response to something that meaningful. I think it’s all fair game. I’ve read some pretty nasty things said about myself, for example. I can deal with that. There are times when I wish some of these guys – because I think some of them know better – I wish they would take a moment and stop and think. And instead of referring to a man like [veteran artist] Joe Kubert as a scab or a disgrace, you might want to stop for a minute and think with this diverse group of talent involved with the project, maybe there is more to the story than they know. Maybe there are reasons people are willing to work on this. Maybe its not as clear cut as a lot of people think. I’m speaking about this from a distance. I was never in the room, while anything went on, but maybe there’s just more to the story than people think.
To be fair, the difference between working on Before Watchmen, where the originally creators were –legally!– screwed out of their rights and the primary creator has strongly stated his disdain for these prequels and working on your average DC or Marvel company owned titles, where said screwing was done decades ago and most of the original creators are safely dead or bought off, is one of degree not kind. And you certainly cannot fault somebody like Joe Kubert for doing any of those Watchmen prequels. He has worked all his life with the constrains of American commercial comics publishing; this is just another assignment for him.
But that doesn’t mean Darwyn Cooke should get away with his passive aggressive complaining here. He is more than just a hired hand on this project, he has been an active propagandist for DC and its actions, happy to be a cog in its machine (as John Byrne once was at Marvel). He’s somebody who has the kind of talent, opportunities and reputation to do anything he wants to do in comics, but choses to be a company man, working on endless revamps (Catwoman), adaptations (Parker and re-imaginations (New Frontier, doing the same thing as Roy Thomas’ The Last Days of the Justice Society and James Robinson’s Golden Age, but in a slicker art style).
He isn’t the first cartoonist to be happier working on other people’s creations of course, but he does combine this lack of creativity with an aggressive public persona as company spokesman, attacking Alan Moore for being annoyed about the Watchmen prequels, lending himself and his prestige to these attacks, revealing himself to be, well, kind of a douche.
Darwyn Cooke is a slick but limited imitator of better artists, somebody who will at best be a footnote in comics history in fifty years time, while Alan Moore is one of the greatest writers working in comics of the past fifty years and certainly one of the most principled ones. His attacks on Moore are as a fly buzzing a giant: harmless, but that doesn’t mean you don’t want to swat the fly anyway.
