Just imagine if contemporary DC/Marvel comics portrayed modern porn ads as often as 80s comics showed porno theaters and nudie booths marquees. Just: Peter Parker's open laptop screen.
Buy Mutant Thoughts: Examining New X-Men, the Early 21st Century, and Ourselves!
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Just imagine if contemporary DC/Marvel comics portrayed modern porn ads as often as 80s comics showed porno theaters and nudie booths marquees. Just: Peter Parker's open laptop screen.
I'm not saying King Mob (who also wrote werewolf novels) is Zachary Moonhunter, werewolf hunter. But, I am saying I knew Moonhunter's wig was razorwire before I realized Mob's was.
Actually shocked to look it up and realize it was 2009, so after the Mangaverse (but, while we're there, I still don't get how Golgo-13 riffs were right there for the Punisher and they instead went with Peter David's porn search 🤷♀️).
Do you think Gore Verbinski is seeing that memed Frankenstein review and going, "Hey, I directed..."
That first volume is fire and the best-selling thing Marvel released that year in total sales. Big break through to bookstores at the time. And, Marvel was like, "No thank you, we have Ultimate Adventures to publish!"
Marvel had two more volumes written & drawn and pulled the plug on Raina Telgemeier's X-Men digest-size comic with Anzu and Dave Roman because it was "too expensive" to pay them what they were worth and that had the greatest Colossus design ever and Cyclops was explicitly straight edge.
I wrote about this for Comic Watch and it's the one Millar book on own that I really do enjoy, but it's the most Catholic conservative "teen sex" book you can imagine that doesn't have someone possessed by a demon to excuse the sex. Made for TV Special Lesson Movie.
MY BOOK'S OUT TODAY! books2read.com/MatthewKing Four killers meet for dinner, but what do they find? Friends? Murder?! LOVE?! This Horrormance reveals relatable killers whose amusing banter is playful and thought-provoking, tackling issues like gender identity, discrimination, and feminism.🖤🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈💀
Stan Zimmerman's memoir, The Girls, is fun because every character is either people he knows personally, like Madonna, Sandra Bernhard, or someone *I know too*.
I don't remember anything about this except enjoying it. Some of you think I'm hard to please and dislike everything, but really it's remarkably easy to buy me off aesthetically.
Forgot what this was called and it's (not) astonishing how typing in "redhead" "swordswoman" "half-demon" and "weird about rape" don't just give you one movie but a few hundred years of genre.
Mutant Thoughts: Examining New X-Men, the Early 21st Century, and Ourselves is free if you want it to be through my birthday on the 24th. Its flaws lay on me but I'm exceptionally thankful for the editors and the Mutant Watch team, and I hope you check it out.
Here's the thing about "problematic outlets and platforms" that can get lost: They're pretty much all outlets and platforms. The New York Times is slimy. The Comics Journal has done some damage. Suicide Girls actually was Playboy 2.0. Social media is owned & run off your free labor.
Working notes on the piece on Amalgam Comics & disjunction, hauntology & metalepsis, and noting that in DC vs Marvel #1, the NY police is the one being a giant asshole while the Gotham City cop is suddenly "the good cop." That's funny.
That is so disappointing. I'd love to have both figures and not that way, no.
The Collapse of the Superman, a 1918 satire by William R Thayer, starts with how silly, self-terminating, and otherwise unhealthy the German cultural pursuit of conquest and supremacy was, while slowly twisting to show us the other side, the same image, is 1918 America. Today's US, too.
Naturally I'm talking over the podcasters who were being asked, because I'm an ass, but what do we think? Was there an original in the womb physical Cassandra Nova or is she, like Onslaught or the Entity (or Proteus; you read me right), Charles Xavier packing off what he can't let be *him*?
Looming Narrative let me talk about character types & different genres, stock locales, but also urbicide in Palestine via city-smashing comics & movies, looting in disaster or theft in destitution via superheroes like Spider-Man & Jack Kirby's Guardian, rape trauma via 1930s sword & sorcery.
If you're been harassed by Talia stans for saying she's been complicit or directly responsible for mass murder, grand theft, torture, war crimes, etc, rather than coming up with your own examples, and then what their favorite Talia stories are. Use the examples from those. They will be there.
Charles has a tendency to throw off "not me" psychic forms. He has at least two, if not more, aside from Cassandra. I did a breakdown in the Examining book, but "everyone had a mummudrai." Charles just happened to be such a mutant that his reaction to that could be different.
Everything that goes on a comic book page is art. That includes lettering. The same thought and care that goes into drawing or coloring should go into the lettering. Lettering is art.
There is an I in tiim. Trouble is there's two of them.
Here's the thing about "problematic outlets and platforms" that can get lost: They're pretty much all outlets and platforms. The New York Times is slimy. The Comics Journal has done some damage. Suicide Girls actually was Playboy 2.0. Social media is owned & run off your free labor.
ko-fi.com/travishedgec...
Mutant Thoughts: Examining New X-Men, the Early 21st Century, and Ourselves is free if you want it to be through my birthday on the 24th. Its flaws lay on me but I'm exceptionally thankful for the editors and the Mutant Watch team, and I hope you check it out.
If the miscarriage happened. Our confirmation is a psychic trap full of things to deliberately upset Charles & that she has his DNA, but we see her shooting up DNA of other characters earlier and not in a questionable mental trap. It's likely there never was an "original" physical Cassie.
Eager to listen but also nervous to listen.
I have two messages for you. One is AAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaah! The other is that I hope you enjoy some of the work I do.
Smoked: "Bring back the card catalog!" Woke: "Bring back the clay tablet catalog!"
Are we having Magneto discourse again? Jesus guys. Grant Morrison was right about adults and fiction. Magneto has been published for almost 60 years. He’s been right, he’s been wrong. He is often both! Just have the actual political discussion you want to have! #xspoilers
Reminder that as recently as YESTERDAY, Grant Morrison is still showing off their genAI “creations” with almost every single update of their Substack. This has been happening for years
The Collapse of the Superman, a 1918 satire by William R Thayer, starts with how silly, self-terminating, and otherwise unhealthy the German cultural pursuit of conquest and supremacy was, while slowly twisting to show us the other side, the same image, is 1918 America. Today's US, too.
The promo for the figure also uses, exclusively, "She."
I've only just been introduced to the McFarlane Toys version of Shining Knight, and he/they ain't binding and that's really really really annoying.
Can't afford to be precious.The ko-fi books will be on Amazon, as well. Still deciding if/how I want to collect various Batman-related things into an ebook that isn't slapdash, including a seventh chapter to Five Ways to Read Final Crisis and a more subtle version of I'm Glad Killer Croc is Trans.
If you haven't read Us Living in Fictional Cosmogonies (shame on you! you can read it free right now!), Beetlejuice and particularly this cartoon get a solid presence and in a chapter you probably won't be expecting. All respect, all the time, for good old Bettyjuice!
K. Before I'm ashamed of myself, I'm gonna go nap.
youtu.be/g_mIFv79JaM?...
Somewhere Outside of North Carolina was, naturally, shot outside of North Carolina.
Looming Narrative far and packed away (buy it now! go read it for free!) I am watching Robert Altman's Bressonian Quintet and reading the essay, Zoology in "Seven Soldiers of Victory": Analysis of Animals Present in This Comics and Possible Use for Educational Purposes.
Gogai, gogai! We don't get BRAND NEW NEVER BEFORE SEEN official artwork often here in the Revolutionary Girl Utena fandom, but when we do, it's Chiho Saito serving us post-series sapphic HELL YES. This was part of a merchandise drop from Rose-nik, cleaned from a scan by purpleriot with permission!
I suspect the machine is done for this time, but I love a good life after death. Apropos, a reason I do not differentiate the Self-Elected Investigator and the Occult Detective in Looming Narrative is that I think they are the same thing. Both self-election and investigation lead to the latter.
Pat Mills called out my favorite single issue of Captain America as ahistoric American propaganda. Rightly. So, if I look at the eroticization of "slave fight Superman" in the light of Mandingo & Hurt Locker, I think you can weather it. Mills was right and I think I am, too.
Reminder that DC Comics owns a character with an abnormally large David McCallum caricature head, named Kwitcha Belliakin. And. They. Don't. Use. Him.
Ran across a message from Albert Pyun's widow, last night, and am again hoping we see a full release of his Captain America director's cut, which is both "left-leaning" and "downbeat," because even truncated, it's the most heart, soul, and solid politics I've seen in any Cap movie & look at them!
In 2014 I Liked: Bachalo’s facial expressions are killer. Today I Dislike: Chris Bachalo’s tendency to eroticize teenaged girls. Rereading the Age of Apocalypse to let 2014 & 2025 me meet 1995 me! travishedgecoke.substack.com/p/age-of-apo...
David Mitchell may be funny but I'm willing to bet this is the funniest he's ever been.
always worth taking a moment to remind oneself of just how much of a shitheel Hank Ketcham was … don’t let that superlative nib technique fool you!
They say "kill your darlings" but I couldn't not put this into Looming Narrative. For me.
erik the opera ghost killed AT MOST maybe two people and they were both being rude so let's all calm down a little
You can tell I'm trying to be patient if my enunciation turns into Sherry Lynn doing Sasami in Tenchi Muyo.
No matter how smart or educated someone is, sometimes it is imperative to question them.
"I don't listen to foreign music"/"read foreign books"/"watch foreign movies"/"tv"/"poetry"/"comics" is forever mind boggling to me but it's also impossible. I don't care who you are, you have. I know you lie!
"Everything is just too commercial, like a sprawling octopus, too much part of the system. Sometimes you feel like you’re walking around in that movie Invasion Of The Body Snatchers and you wonder if it’s got you yet." – Bob Dylan (on John Lennon) I'll do my Dylan & Robert E Howard piece someday.
"I'm not bad. I'm just drawn that way." Not to solely promote Us Living in Fictional Cosmogonies, but I love Twin Peaks' own Jessica Rabbit, the judgmental and always judged Tamara Preston, and the way looking through a blue filter shows us the calculating nature of misogyny in good men.
Now this is horror microfiction.
Angela Baker and Jason Voorhees would probably just have a fun time at camp.
If you want to hear me talk about Sleepaway Camp, Jeepers Creepers, Victor Salva, child abuse, rape, transphobia, disability, and 1980s issues of New Mutants and Fallen Angels, here you go. travishedgecoke.substack.com/p/me-episode...
Someone (not me) should write a piece on the archons of Leiji Matsumoto. The Noos/Nous; the dragon which is the embodiment of all human hate; Maya.
When making recommendations or giving gifts, up pops in my mind when a friend of mine was going to give me a pass to her Onlyfans and a personalized set and her husband suggested I might like brownies or a scarf more. Thinking it through is hard, you might get it wrong, but try. Always try.
Inspired by Robert Carlyle (who I've never talked to), Ben Smith (who I'm pretty sure wouldn't want to talk to me), and Larry Hama (whom I'm always honored to talk with), it's four weeks revisiting the Age of Apocalypse in glory and mess.
Ramona and Beezus and Ted and Alice
Comics artists and artists in general: A) Learn how to draw high-heeled shoes right and B) learn how to draw women not standing in high heels without standing in invisible high heels.
I know it's not a weird hand, but every time I see this I think it is. Just weird swollen hand giving thumbs up.
These two were based on a beloved relative of Charles Schulz's and her long term partner, and this strip was apparently to get her goat when the partner was staying with him for a month.
I scheduled the first part of Age of Apocalypse Again for Monday morning and didn't release it immediately. Praise me and my wonderful patience and stoicism. Gaze upon my restraint and glory. This sort of thing will never happen again. Expect part 2 on like Wednesday.
The Beatle of New Orleans and Love is a Beatlefield, but it's little known that one of those is actually a cover.
Going back to the Age of Apocalypse to see if I've grown any as a human being. This time *I like that Magneto has braids!*
A writer was once crowdsourcing recommendations for artists to work with on an anthology of single-issue comics stories. I suggested Sue Coe and Trina Robbins. It turned out to be an Avengers run, at Marvel, and you know, I would like to see what Sue and Trina would have done with that.
Heartbreakers Beach Party is the funniest fuck you. "Let's all eat potato salad!" Also, Girl on LSD.
If a comics franchise was handed over to critics, theorists & teachers who work with that franchise for one year, which one do you think you'd likely still be buying multiple titles by the end?
Years ago I did a big Age of Apocalypse thing for the Comics Cube. Today, I have given myself an obnoxiously big experiment to do. Hey ho let's go all around the mulberry bush!
The disjunctions at the end of Ken Russell's Gothic — the day personas vs the night & then the tour — feel like light, silly metalepsis, while being intelligent commentary, but I also used to live with a guy who was so invested in the nighttime reality, when it got there he protested and threw up.
The which way western men are fighting.
rape tech from the genocide company, love too boil the oceans so incels can have a better time fapping it
An older couple pitched a fit in the waiting room over my t-shirt, saying, "God hates transgenderism." I don't know that the guy in a brown robe, hood & sandals is an actual monk, but I appreciate him interjecting, "I assure you He does not." And, I really appreciate that he got the giggles after.
I agree that when we lose a language we lose an entire world-view... ...but it's kind of neat that there's a language whose only surviving texts are snake spells.
When I say you can do whatever you want with these characters or that public domain cannot be stopped, I don't mean an owner can't sue or a city paint over, I mean you can keep doing. The best Superman, Robin Hood, or Duckula lives in our minds.
Gavin Newsom is a Troma villain.
Did you know that the 1 dollar coin wasn't even supposed to have a loon on it? The original design was stolen from the mint
#TransVisibilityDay reminder that despite a movie's fiction or attempted reputation repair, Ed Wood did identify, live as, and was a woman. Lived exclusively without boymoding for over a year and lived most of her last years exclusively presenting as a woman. Let's see Shirlee.
I say this knowing I'd also manage to impale myself with the skewer while trying just because customers can see me.
"Alternative title: You become a queer elder by accident, not because you are good at living but because you are slow at dying." —Loren Maria Guay beestungmag.com/issue24/one-...
Lunch plans shifted from kebabs to wraps because the cook doesn't know how to do the kebabs and the other cook is on lunch. I don't want to downplay the skill which goes into good cooking, but I feel like you could fake kebab cooking enough for average diner standards.
When I help plan invasions of foreign nations and how to spin that so domestic protestors look like shits and then build an entertainment career focusing on how sad and difficult my position is because I did that, is when I
Gravedale High had Rick Moranis, Kimmy Robertson, Jackie Earle Haley, Tim Curry, Ricki Lake, Ruth Buzzi & Eileen Brennan. Which is pretty good for a one season cartoon about monsters in high school.
Feel free to indulge any overlord/weird-dommy-editor fetish you have and make me write about times superheroes have been made marionettes or how comics press pushes to convince you Mark Millar is a churchy socialist.)
Also, rules being rules even when arbitrary, if you buy me a comic, I have to write about it, and if you pay the commission fee on ko-fi or Substack, you get to dictate the parameters of something I write.
Usually I ask for tips or gifts for buying the dog and me a sandwich or something, but it you're feeling appreciative during my birthday month, here's two greedy hands outstretched. www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/...
The official comic of Looming Narrative's bad mood fourth act.
Hope the day treats you well. And, if not the day, the night.
Universe where Sabrina Carpenter is Spider-Man and Spider-Man is Sabrina Carpenter and it's always been that way. That's actually our universe, you just don't know cause it's always been that way.
Anyone wondering if David Watts is a gay song, this is a paraphrase of it's origin: I wanted my brother to marry this beer guy so I'd have free beer but instead I wrote a song about the school head I crushed on but used beer man's name because I still see mine all the time.
Comphet Bobby Drake saw a Black man in Watts handing out church flyers and
Tubby Watts, Woozy Winks & Etta Candy are all mad cool, but Peachy Pet is other levels.
There's been more than a few essays on metalepsis and comics, a medium which has had more consistent breaks and apertures than, perhaps, any other in the last 400 years. But, I think I may still have some room to work, if I get time to think it through/make sure I'm not repeating other people.
