#$@&! Manara

Comix
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Scarlet Witch variant cover by Milo Manara

I don’t understand people who thinks this is a nice drawing. That’s not the Scarlet Witch, that’s the bog standard Manara woman cosplaying her, with her far too long legs, strange breasts, porn face and all.

Manara has always annoyed me to be honest, as I never understood why he is so popular or respected. He’s a decent draughtsman, but no more than that, who has specialised in really quite dodgy softcore stroke books. An invisible man rapes women until they like it, or a scientist implants a device in the brain of the woman who rejected him to turn her into a slut but it turns out the device doesn’t work and she really is a slut; not very feminist or sex positive and worse, all you get to see is some tit and arse. It’s just gutless and boring and to see the same strange fake orgasmic expressions on Marvel superheroines is just offensive.

But then Marvel thought Greg Land was a good artist too.

CPL 593H

Music, Sandra, video
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I’m slightly too young to have known Roxy Music as anything else but that band wot did “Avalon” or not think of Bryan Ferry as an aging creepster, but Sandra had been just the right age for glam rock in general and Roxy in particular. Roxy was the first great band of her generation, some years before punk, coming from but not actually having been a part of the whole hippie/psychedalic rock movement. Did you realise they’re forty years old this year?

Yes, I know. A couple of decades and all those small differences between rock movements aren’t all that important anymore but to music nerds, which Sandra never was. That sort of obsessive compulsiveness cataloging and categorising is usually more of a male pursuit anyway (certainly was in our hosuehold). She just liked the music that she liked, had a keen sense of why she liked certain bands or genres, but no desire to become all stamp collecting about it…

And this was her favourite Roxy Music song.

Books read Augustus

books and books review, posts interesting only to me
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I thought I had read more books this month, but I come to only seven in total. I blame work as well as my continuing addiction to Football Manager. Hey, Plymouth Argyle won’t win its fit Premiership championship in row on its own, no will it?

Britain’s War Machine — David Edgerton
Exploding the myth that Britain went unprepared into World War II, or couldn’t keep up with the Axis or its larger allies during it.

Double Vision — Tricia Sullivan
An interesting failure this, a mindfuck novel written in 2005 but set in 1984. Cookie Orbach is a psychic, or at least that’s what she believes she is, who watches the Grid, an alien planet she can only observe through watching television. But is it real, or is her talent being exploited for much baser purposes than she imagines?

The Black Opera — Mary Gentle
A freethinking opera writer has to write the best opera he has ever created to save the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies from a miracle.

The Moving Toyshop — Edmund Crispin
Somehow I don’t think this was an entirely serious detective novel. Made me laugh out loud in a couple of places. Watch out for the cameo appearance by a certain Philip Larkin.

From Egypt to Babylon — Paul Collins
A visually orientated history of the Bronze Age in the Middle East and Near Asia. Lots of gorgeous pictures, decent overview of the history there.

The Saxon Shore — Valerie A. Mansfield
Much more limited in scope is this, looking at the reality of what might have been the “Saxon Shore”, mentioned in just one surviving Late Roman document. I’ve been interested in this for a while and found this handbook in a bookstore in Plymouth earlier this year.

The Jewel in the Skull — Michael Moorcock
I’ve had the graphic novel adaptation Jim Cawthorne did in the seventies for ages, but only recently bought the novel. First in years I’ve read a proper Moorcock fantasy novel.

Of course ATOS sponsors the Paralympics

Life under Capitalism, UK politics
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So ATOS is the mercenary company that does the UK government’s dirty work, throwing disabled people off welfare, telling cancer patients on chemo that they’re fit to work, killing some 32 people a week according to some estimates. It’s also the company that sponsors the London Paralympics, which understandably got a lot of people outraged. Here we have the event that celebrates disabled people overcoming their handicaps, yadda yadda and it’s paid for by the profits of the company that does its best to kill them off? That’s bound to tick any right thinking person off.

But to be honest, it makes perfect sense. The paralympics celebrates the good disabled, the ones that inspire us and make us feel good that they may be in a wheelchair but didn’t let that stop them becoming world class athletes. Those parasitic dole scum on the other hand, who have been holding up their hand to decent hardworking tax payers, those are the evil disabled, the people struggling to live their daily lives we’d rather not see, not fit and good looking or having a photogenic handicap. The Paralympics is the other side of the coin of that media portrayal of disabled people as benefit scum unwilling to work.

On the one hand we hear day in, day out about benefit cheats, we live in a media climate in which every disabled person is a cheat and treated as such, then every four years there’s a feel good media circus where we see that if they have enough will power, disabled people can do anything. What’s missing is seeing disabled people leading day to day lives: it’s either the one percent of incredibly lucky, incredibly fit top athletes, or the much much smaller group of pretend cripples. Yet most people, temporarily able or not, are neither top athletes nor fraudsters.

It’s easy to other disabled people; has anybody ever been jealous of a guy in a wheelchair, even a gold medalist in a wheelchair? If we’re healthy and able (for the moment), we tend to just ignore or exclude those who aren’t, despite the very real possibility that we ourselves will join at some point in our lives. We want to keep our ideas about disabilities simple and clean, put every disabled person in a box labeled hero, villain or victim, rather than deal with the messy reality where the guy in the wheelchair is just another bloke.