Comix – Page 16 – Wis[s]e Words

The sliding timescale of Captain America’s resurrection

Published on November 7, 2022Leave a comment

America’s favourite comics shop owner Mike Sterling incidently touches on something I’ve been thinking about recently in his post on how The Justice Society managed to stay so young:

This could have been the Steve Rogers/Captain America solution, where a WWII character is taken off the table and “preserved” for an indefinite amount of time, with his revival pushed farther and farther into the future as publishing of the character continues. When Captain America was first revived in the 1960s, he’d only been “gone” for 20 years. Now that we’re in the 2020s, that time he was frozen in the ice is now, what, 60 years? It’s attaching that modern hero “sliding scale” to Golden Age characters.

From Avengers 4: Captain America lying unconscious on a bed, his shield on his stomach, with Thor, Iron Man and Wasp commenting he must be Captain America

Which is the difference in having Captain America wake up in the early sixties, twenty years after World War II or in the 21st century. If Captain America is always assumed to have been revived “ten years ago” that means that right now he only woke up in 2012, in Obama’s presidency, his new life younger than the iPhone or Twitter. Even that famous scene in Civil War: Frontline in which Captain America’s ignorance of Myspace is supposed to prove he was on the wrong side had to be retconned into being ignorant about Twitter. (I always found that mildly insulting. Mark Gruenwald had Cap start his own computer hotline all the way back in the eighties, but I assume that, like the time Ronald Reagan turned into a snake, are retconned now too.) You can argue that this is all ephemeral stuff, small details that don’t really matter to the stories, but you’d be wrong.

From Secret Wars 2 issue 1: Captain America convinces the pilot of a jet to turn back and the pilot tells him he saved his platoon in Normandy

Because context matters and Steve Rogers returning to a world he’s twenty years or eighty years out of date of changes a lot of things. When Cap originally came back in 1964, he came back to a world in which the nineteen, twenty year old GIs he fought along are now fortysomething family men, settled down in their careers, with their children starting to rebel against the conformist ways in which they had brought them up. Cap would constantly run into ordinary people who knew what the war was like and what he went through, because they themselves had gone through it as well. Even in the mid-eighties, like in the panel above from Secret Wars II #1 Cap could still run into people he had once saved, though they were by now in their late fifties if not early sixties, on the brink of retirement. Have Cap revive in 2012 and he arrives in a world in which most of these men are dead and those who aren’t, are pushing ninety or more, likely stuck in some retirement home. For the vast majority of ordinary people he will encounter, he’s no longer somebody who they knew from having served with him, or even from stories from their childhood, he’s just another historical figure they have no real connection to.

It’s of course understandable that this happened, you can’t keep Captain America or any other Marvel hero tied to the sixties, you need some sort of sliding timescale anchored to the present to keep them relevant, but it is a shame that Cap’s roots have been severed this way. You can still tell good stories about his personal connections to WWII (like this), but the type of story you can tell has changed when most if not all the people he fought along are dead.

Credits: First image from Avengers #4, Jack Kirby (natch). Second image, Secret Wars II #1, Al Milgrom/Steve Leialoha.

Is this how Japan treats people with ADHD?

Published on September 3, 2022Leave a comment

This is almost a too on the nose example of Japan as an ultra conformist society. From Caitlin Moore’s review of How My Brain is Different:

One of the consequences of allowing people to speak in their own words is that there are stories where, even though we share the same condition, I struggle to understand the narrator’s perspective. Iku describes how it feels once the ADHD medication Strattera starts working. Her head feels clearer and she’s able to function professionally, but her emotions feel muted and she’s largely lost interest in most of her hobbies. Despite the disadvantages, she feels positive about her experience with Strattera.

During my brief attempt at taking Strattera, I had similar side effects, which to me put it squarely into “not worth it” territory. I hated the sensation of my passions and emotions being dampened. Horrified at the idea of living like that long term, I insisted on going back to stimulants.

Regardless of my own feelings on the matter, Iku’s experience and priorities are just as valid as mine. This could even be culturally informed; in Japan, Strattera is the first-line medication, with the only alternative being Concerta if the Strattera doesn’t work. All other forms of stimulant medication—Adderall, Ritalin, and Vyvanse, which are popular options in the US—are illegal.

If Japan forbids the use of medication that allows ADHD sufferers to keep more of their personality, while the main drug available is one that turns you into a functional but emotionalless drone, what does that say about the country?

Your Happening World (clean out your tabs! clean out your tabs!)

Published on May 29, 2022Leave a comment

Some of these tabs have been open for months.

We’ve Made a Rare Animation Artbook Free to All — The author of Cartoon Modern, Amid Amidi, owns the book’s copyright and digital rights — and has written that he wants to see it reborn. “Would be delighted if someone scanned in and made available a high-quality PDF of Cartoon Modern,” he tweeted in 2019. “Book has been out of print for a long time and should be readily available to all.”
Download Cartoon Modern: compressed .PDF — 319 MB or uncompressed .CBZ — 4.6 GB.
Out of Touch/Out of Time — We remember the ghost of Lucky Star, so representative of what it meant to be an anime fan at that time. What was contemporary fan service is now a time capsule. Before legal streaming and simulcasts, before anime was something Netflix would spend millions remaking into live-action, when anime was kind of, well, cringeworthy. Maybe that’s why more problematic elements stand out these days. At the time, you had to take the embarrassment as par for the course, even a badge of honour that you could take it, unlike the normies. Lucky Star is a bit cringe.
Iraq, The Last Pre-War Polls — The final polls to be published before the war in Iraq started, conducted last weekend, all found a shift in public opinion in favour of British involvement in the war but still found a majority disapproving, both of military action and of Tony Blair’s handling of the Iraq crisis. Still relevant twenty years on as evidence that no, not “everybody” was in favour of the War on Iraq.
Dub Influence Vol 3: Snoopy — Yes! For our third installment of ‘Dub Influence’ we are very lucky to have a chart from the legend that is Snoopy. What Snoopy doesn’t know about reggae, dub and music in general… ain’t worth knowing. This got me on a dub/reggea kick a few months ago when I read this.
Transformers UK — the comic that (nearly) cheated death — This is the story of the comic that never was. Or, more accurately, the comic that nearly was.
bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/lists/50-key-anime-films — From the breakthrough of Akira in 1988, through the exquisite films of Miyazaki Hayao and others, Japanese animation has captivated audiences around the world. But anime’s history runs deeper still. Here we select 50 titles that celebrate its full, fascinating riches.
We’ve Got A File On You: Insane Clown Posse — VIOLENT J: And the amount of gay Juggalos out there is really surprising. I think about them doing their research and getting the old records, getting excited about it, and getting their hearts broke or something, you know? I tell my daughter, “For the rest of your life, when your friends ask why your dad said that, say it’s because your dad was a fool. Don’t defend me. Say I was a fool then, but I’m not now.” There’s no excuse. I was going with the flow, and that’s the very thing we preach against — being a sheep. And that’s what I was doing.

Grief is still weird — Friday Funnies

Published on January 14, 2022Leave a comment

I’ve had dreams like this. Dreams in which Sandra was alive and I realised halfway through that hey, shouldn’t you be dead? Never quite sure which ones were worse: those, or the ones in which I only noticed after waking up. The dreams itself weren’t bad, just the same mix of anxiety dream and vague memories of living together in a house we’ve only lived in in dreams. It’s just the realisation that this is not real that hurts. No surprise than that this page from chapter 67 of Kuzushiro’s Ani no Yome to Kurashite Imasu / Living with my Brother’s Wife hit me raw.

A manga page showing a girl seeing her dead brother eating breakfast and getting excited he is actually alive before waking up

Kishibe Shino is a seventeen year old girl whose married brother died six months ago, leaving her as well as his wife and her sister-in-law Nozomi behind. She has no other family, her parents having died when she was much younger. Therefore she’s living together with her sister-in-law, determined to not be a burden to her, while she is equally determined to be a shoulder Shino can lean on to. Most of the series is Shino and Nozomi learning to live together as a family when all they had in common was the person they’re both still mourning. Grief is an understated, but continuous presence in the story and around chapter 67, from which this is taken, the story has progressed towards the one year anniversary of his death. And because most of the story is centered around two awkward people learning to form a family together, with their grief in the background, chapters like this that center it, hit that much harder.

Why Haruhi is just like Superman — narratives shaped by media

Published on December 17, 2021Leave a comment

Pause and Select‘s video about the anime media mix and the way it can shape narratives and the changes in how it has done so got me thinking. In the interview here with Marc Steinberg, who has written a book about this, they discuss how the media mix works. How a franchise like Star Wars creates a narrative through the use of different media: comics, movies, books, cartoons, television shows and how that changed for the anime media mix with Haruhi with the character becoming the world rather being part of a narrative within that world. No longer on a consistent narrative within one world, but with the narrative changing, the world altered depending on which particular bit of media you’re consuming. You’re reading for Haruhi and it no longer matters which narrative she’s part of.

Which got me thinking.

You know what sounds really similar to how Haruhi is presented and sold? How DC Comics traditionally dealt with Superman. Because what you see there is that from 1938 to the seventies, what they’re selling is not the world of Superman, where you have different stories in different media but all set in the same world, but rather the same character in different contexts. The Superman comics told different stories from the newspaper strip, the Max Fleischer cartoons, the tv and radio shows or the underoos, but had the same recognisable characters. The comics themselves were often not even that consistent, with no real continuity, taken place in an eternal present. Then there were the imaginary stories, where the writers would place Superman in deliberately world ending scenarios and presented it explicitly as not real in a very different way from how every other Superman story was not real.

In this context, the Haruhi media mix is the older model and it was Marvel which introduced the media mix as narrative, by explicitly setting its comics in the same world, with a continuity that means one story is set after another and characters can cross over into other stories, expecting the reader to pay attention and directly refering to the older story when relevant through recapping or editorial notes. At first this was of course only limited to the comics themselves, with any other media adaptations just being that, adaptations, but its ultimate form is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, having introduced superhero comics continuity to the cinema, where stories can continue in different movies, tv shows and even comic books!

What sets the Haruhi media mix model apart from the Superman model is a greater self consciousness and awareness of the media mix as a whole, rather than seeing the comics or the movies as the primary component and the rest as mere adaptations, optional elements, to be discarded when no longer relevant. (Sometimes even discarding its own primary continuity, as in Crisis on Infinite Earths.) Haruhi has character as primary mode of engagement much more than Superman ever had, which still had a rough consistency across all its media elements, elements that once added, would crop up everywhere. With Haruhi on the other hand it’s just enough she’s Haruhi.

Which of course brings me to vtubers. The ultimate form of character as world, with the narrative rising organically from day to day streaming, where the core elements of the character (Subaru is a loud duck, La+ is a chuuni fork) are what sticks but the context in which they’re established barely matters. Meaning created out of thin air. The ultimate post-modern entertainment.