The Ugly American On Batwoman

So, I've been purposefully trying to avoid Bunny Talk... but I have to get back to it this week.  It's a little depressing, but it's also important.  Sometimes you have to do the Good Work even though it may not feel like fun.

What set me off this time were violent threats sent to certain folks at DC over JH Williams unscheduled departure from Batwoman.  Williams recounts the usual sins when these things happen, and they happen a lot lately.  Stories are broken, creative work gets approved, and then at 11:59pm editorial sends a note saying "change everything, and get that to us by midnight".

The wrinkle here is that Williams specifically pointed to DC vetoing a proposed marriage between Kate Kane and Maggie Sawyer as a sticking point.

Uh oh.  That'll get the Bunnies attention, won't it?

So now we've got death threats coming into DC if JH Williams is a credible source, and I don't see why he'd lie about that.  Not to belabor the obvious, but this is not (just) about a creator leaving a book before the fan base is ready.  This is about an "attack" on gay marriage, and a small but unduly influential group responding as they always do when somebody has the audacity to disagree with them.  The Bunny credo is - think like I do or be silent, be gone, and now…. be dead, I guess.

I've been banging this drum for a while....but are folks finally getting the idea that the Soft & Fuzzy Bunnies are not the tolerant, benevolent creatures sold in the brochure?

It does not surprise me a lick that DC is hesitant to let JH Williams run with his gay marriage storyline.  It's storytelling 101, and DC is (supposedly) in the business of storytelling and not gay politics.  DC has no gay agenda, and no anti-gay agenda. DC has a money-making agenda, and marriage (gay or otherwise) has never been a big breadwinner.

Do people not remember the lengths that Joe Q went through to nix Peter Parker's marriage? When DC went to the reboolaunch, they instantly split up Lois and Clark.  Personally, I think the marriage dampening effect is overrated, and a good writer could very easily concoct some marriage-based stories that would heighten drama, not diffuse it. But the truth of the matter is that people are far more interested in "will they or won't they?" then "happily ever after."  And in the storytelling game, interest is a pretty precious commodity.

Moonlighting figured this out the hard way.

 Things tanked pretty hard when Dave and Maddie finally hooked up, and that wasn't even a marriage thing.  That was just a boyfriend/girlfriend thing.   Of course nobody remembers Moonlighting, so that’s probably a bad example. How about this one? People want to watch Rick Castle and Kate Beckett dance the Dance of Longing, not pick out curtains.  You can build an entire show around sexual tension, and sink the whole ship by finally pairing people up.

But things are even more dire for Batwoman, because they can't even get the initial tension thing right.  Do you have any idea how hard it is to make two chicks making out boring? Williams and Co. have done it. They should probably invent a new Eisner award just for pulling that off.  Batwoman's crime isn't that it wants to portray gay marriage; its crime is that it is deadly dull.  So when Williams is proposing to make the comic even more mind-bendingly dull, DC can and should send the book in another direction.

When all this hit, the JH Williams blog indicated they’d be staying on until issue 26 and then packing their bags. DC saw the excrement hitting the fan and put Mark Andreyko starting with # 25, and you know what? Good for DC! I’m not in love with the editorial micro-managing that appears to be the norm over there, but if somebody is going to shit all over you, they don’t get to pick when they leave. An advisory not to let the door hit your ass on the way out is an appropriate response in those cases.

Everything comes back to bigotry and intolerance and bullying and oppression these days. Except this situation isn’t about being anti-gay, it's about being anti-boring.  Ask Orson Scott Card about DCs anti-gay agenda.

Incidentally, bigotry is still prevalent in comics, in significant doses.  It doesn't work in the manner that the Bunnies would have you believe, though.  Let me show you how comic book bigotry works in reality, on the page.

So let's take a look at how the police are portrayed in three recent comics: Daredevil # 29, The Movement # 1, and Robocop: Last Stand # 1.  It bears mentioning that in order to make this point, I didn't have to dig back thirty years to find three obscure examples of the phenomenon.  What I'm about to show you are very recent examples typical of the way comics depict police.

I'll start with Mark Waid's Daredevil story, in which papier mache redneck cops attempt to frame a black paramedic of a crime, and then attempt to murder him.

“No wonder they didn’t think they’d get caught”, says Daredevil. “Sounds like these racist fanatics have infiltrated the whole justice system. My justice system.”

I have to say, if I were Frederick Douglas, or Sojourner Truth
, or Jackie Robinson, or Martin Luther King, I would be super pissed right now. Because all of those sacrifices I made, and all of that progress I bled for, and all the benefits I worked pretty goddamn hard for…apparently none of it made a difference.

Could I please let everyone writing comics today in on a little secret? It’s not a very well-kept secret, but you’d never know it by reading the books – institutional racism is OVER. It’s over, and it’s been over for quite a while, and I know you like Mississippi Burning, and I do, too. Gene Hackman? The guy is fantastic. But it’s not 1955 anymore, and that’s mostly a good thing. So please do celebrate that!

Do individuals still exhibit racism? They surely do, and it’s not ideal, and we have lots and lots of safeguards to protect against that kind of thing because again… the Institutional Racism is over. Ask Paula Deen how institutional racism is going right now. The institution is now set up to gulag little old ladies with cooking shows if it turns out that they once whispered a mean racist word 20 years ago. That’s how institutional racism is doing these days. By the way, have you met the President? But I digress.

You know, art is supposed to be the lie that tells the truth. But I don’t find any truth in Daredevil’s extended assertion that our justice system is infested with racists, bent on destroying black paramedics. Instead, I find chilling evidence of quite the opposite when I read about Dave Forster and Marjon Rostami.

Did you hear about them? No, you probably didn’t. They’re a couple of reporters for the Virginian- Pilot, beaten by a mob of somewhere between 30-100. As the story goes, the pair were stopped at a red light when one of the mob threw a rock completely unprovoked and broke a window. When Forster inexplicably got out to verbally confront said rock-thrower, pandemonium and many head injuries ensued.

Their own newspaper failed to cover the story, and only one teenager was ever charged. Why wouldn’t the paper cover it, and why wouldn’t the police aggressively pursue the case? Because the assailants were black, and it’s bad form. The institution would rather people be beaten, even die, then appear racist. That’s the bizarre truth. I don’t know what’s going on in Daredevil’s world, because I don’t recognize it. That’s not art lying to tell the truth. That’s just lying, and I call bullshit.

Then you've got Gail Simone's Movement story, in which a pair of dirty cops confiscate some recreational drugs from some street youths. Their intention is to take it back to the car for “evidence”, because that's what cops do in 21st Century comics.  They don't stop crimes, they create them. They harass and bully people who have done nothing wrong, with no motive other than the intense pleasure they derive from doing so. You’ll notice the racist officers doing a lot grinning in these scenes, because they love it so much.

The crooked cops are considering letting the kids go, but not before Joe decides he needs to see one of the girls naked.  Who knows where things would lead from there?  We'll never find out, because the creepy degenerate Movement folks step in and prevent whatever crimes were about to occur.  Sexual assault of some type was on the menu for sure.

Speaking of cops committing sexual assault, how about the OCP merc police in Robocop: The Last Stand # 1?  These guys are even worse.  Not even any idle talk about letting these ladies go.  Nope, here the police just want to get straight to the raping.

Robocop kinda sorta gets a pass because it's a dystopian tale dedicated to the idea that there is only one good cop, and that's Murphy.  It's hard to tell the story of a world gone bad with only one good cop unless the other cops suck.  But it kinda doesn't get a pass, because it might be worse to build your story around reinforcing the stereotype.

I’ll give Gail some credit as well, because not all of her cops are strict caricatures. The Captain has a little more literary meat on his bones, and he suspends Joe and Luis. But I don’t think the Bunnies would forgive a movie featuring characters in black-face just because it also starred Sidney Poitier, so I’m not sure how much leeway is due there.

The “Bad Cop” stereotype exists everywhere in today's funny books.  The Ugly American has already recounted the tale in which he ejected from Green Lantern over the terrible, horrible people in law enforcement that had audacity to believe that Simon Baz might be a terrorist just because he happened to be a Muslim driving a stolen truck filled with explosives that accidentally blew up a whole building.

Bendis and Maleev's Scarlet comic is built from the foundation of dirty cops murdering her friend.  And hey, here's a new book:  Hit Police!  Well, now it's just "Hit", they took the police part off the title.  But make no mistake about it, those are definitely cops working outside the law to commit murders.  Because in comics, that's pretty much all the cops do. Sort of.

I guess there are four types of police officers currently depicted in comics:

• Cops that are racist
• Cops that like to rape
• Cops that commit murder
• Racist, rapey, murderous cops

Mostly, comics are populated with Cop # 4.  By the way, police corruption is a real thing, (entire history of New Orleans, I'm looking at you) and I'm not suggesting that writers can't talk about that.  What I'm telling you is that there are a wildly disproportionate number of despicable, evil, racist police officers.  These depictions are cartoony, largely inaccurate, ham-fisted, lazy, and destructive.

Listen, by day I work with police officers all the time.  They can be a difficult group to deal with, to be sure.  I see arrogance, and short fuses, and apathy, and all sorts of other human foibles that come with being human.  Mostly what I see are good people putting themselves in harm's way both physically and psychologically trying to protect ingrates that don't appreciate them and communities that don't support them.

Can you guess how many racist, rapey, murderous police I work with?  I don't think I've met one yet.  And I've met a lot.  Sometimes they don't come right out and announce that they're rapey murderers, so there might be some error variance to account for.  Let's say that as many as 4% of police officers might be racist and rapey and murderous.  You'll find bigger numbers than that at your PTA meeting, folks.  Comics are demonstrably and crushingly unfair to the police.

Except...hmmmm....is it all the police that are bad?  Because if we go back to The Movement # 1, there are two officers in that scene.  One of them wants a "peek" at a victim, and the other guy has a darker complexion and is named "Luis".  It's non-white Luis who actually suggests they let the kids go, and then evil white Joe suggests that not-as-evil-because-he’s-more-brown Luis should sack up and get on board with the sexual harassment part.

So is it cops that are bad, or is it white cops?  Hmmm.

If we go back to Daredevil, all of the white cops and the white judge are twisted and criminal.  The only officer in the whole book who isn't on the take is the Asian female cop.

 Huh. Interesting. If you're an Asian female cop, you're just trying to do your job, and you're hyper-observant, and you twig onto what's happening and valiantly try to stop the racist white cops.

So really, the message is that mostly cops are bad, but not all. A minority cop might be OK.  White people, though?  Evil.  Always evil.  Put a badge on them and all they can think about is forcing your sex from you. And executing you.

Incidentally, you'll never catch the Bunnies crying about any of that.  You won't find any lamentations over police depictions over at the Comics Beat.  I really doubt we'll get a "white people crunching" chart over at Bleeding Cool this month.  Why is that, do you suppose?

The answers are a little too involved to get into in this column entry, which is already overly long. There's enough material there for a book in those answers, honestly.  It's a complex cocktail of good intentions, vanity, willful ignorance, greed, and fear. Lots and lots of misplaced fear. Maybe I'll start attacking that next column, or maybe not.  It feels important to me, but I want us to enjoy ourselves as well.  I don't want to turn this column into an endless screed.

In the meantime, you'll notice that the “mean and insensitive Ugly American” is not only taking a pass on threatening Waid, Simone, or Grant with any violence...but I enjoy the work of all three.  I don’t believe these authors are doing anything for the greater good by stacking on to the Fallacy of the Omnipresent Dirty Cop/Evil White Guy, but I don’t see any malicious intent, either. I believe that each is probably a good person stuck in 1955 and simply running the playbook with the best of intentions. Of course, how would we pave the road to hell without those? My point is not to grind an axe or tell anybody to shut up.

My point is that we need to start publicly talking back to this stuff, because ultimately we get the world we deserve, and you don't solve bigotry with different bigotry. 

We need to get smarter fast, though, because running wild with New Bigotry is giving rabid Bunnies the idea that they have license to threaten people with violence, and with impunity.  It's getting scary out there, folks. Danger, Will Robinson!

Ugly American #36 – Marvel: a tale of booty, and re-booty!

I have no idea why, but I spontaneously became interested in the age of Marvel’s current stable of books. Now, DC was very open about re-setting their entire publishing slate in September of 2009. Well, it was kinda open about it. They were adamant that it was a “soft reboot”, which was mareketese for: “We’re keeping some continuity for the five books that sell for us, and throwing the rest in the trash.”

I do know that everything got a new # 1.

Across the street, Marvel responded with the NOW! initiative. The core titles got fresh new creative teams and new # 1s on the covers. There was no erasing of any continuity, or at least no more than usual. I mean, if Bendis wants to represent Emma Frost in a manner that strikes absolutely no resemblance to the woman she’s been at any point in her history, well…who’s going to argue with Bendis? But that’s just business as usual over there.

So, pretty much all of the DC books that came out last month had a # 21 on the cover. Pure curiosity set me to wondering…how many Marvel books featured a number higher than that? My general sense was that about half of the Marvel books would qualify. What I discovered is that there were 10:
• Journey Into Mystery # 653
• X-Factor # 257/258
• Red She-Hulk # 66
• Astonishing X-Men # 63
• Venom # 36
• Wolverine & The X-Men # 31/32
• Ultimate Comics X-Men # 27/28
• Daredevil # 27
• Ultimate Comics Spider-Man # 24
• Avenging Spider-Man # 22

That was a shockingly low figure to me, but that number was about to shrink, because I smelled bullshit on some of those titles. Journey Into Mystery,

for one. What I really wanted to track was how many titles Marvel was publishing with a longer consecutive history. JIM took over from Thor’s numbering at # 622, so the figure is sort of 34 issues, not 653. But really, JIM switched characters and creative teams in mid-stream, so Journey into Mystery # 653 is actually Sif # 8, if we’re being honest with ourselves. Sorry, you don’t qualify as a more veteran book than the DC books.

X-Factor is also weird, because Marvel gets pretty cavalier with its numbering habits. In this case, Peter David has been telling a consecutive, unbroken narrative for about 109 issues beginning in December of 2009. That’s positively ancient by today’s standards. Unfortunately, after issue #50, we got issue #200, so that puts X-Factor at about 59 issues without a re-boot. So it still qualifies as older than the DC line, but the 258 issues is a bit of a sham.

Red She-Hulk has some of the same issues that plague Journey into Mystery. It started out as the Jeph Loeb Rulk book, and then became something entirely unrecognizable – new creative team, completely different lead character. That comic should really be Red She-Hulk # 10. Again, newer than the New 52.

Most everything else on the list looks older than DC, but those higher issue numbers simply reflect Marvel’s practice of double-shipping. Ultimate X-Men, Ultimate Spider-Man, and Daredevil seem senior at first blush, but they were all born in September of 2011 just like the New 52. At best, it’s a tie. I scratched them off the list. Same with Avenging Spider-Man (born November 2011), and can you believe Wolverine & The X-Men? Jason Aaron and company cranked out 32 issues of that comic between October 2011 and June of 2013. I can’t decide if that’s more impressive or depressing. In either case, I don’t count them as having a longer publishing history than the re-launched DC titles. Chronologically, they’re younger.

So after all that, how many Marvel titles have legitimately longer, non-rebooted, non re-numbered histories than the New 52? Buckle up, kids. It’s a grand total of 3 books:

Astonishing X-Men with 63
X-Factor with 59
Venom with 36

Astonishing X-Men is unequivocally the grande dame of Marvel Comics, published consecutively without a reboot since May of 2004. And in true Marvel fashion, the title with their “richest” history is a book they clearly should have stopped publishing years ago. As soon as Whedon was done, everything unique and relevant about that comic left with it. But as per usual, Marvel is better at making dollars than making sense. (there’s another horrifying pun for you, Monster Mike) (Ahthankyousir - Monster Mike) Astonishing is also rumored to be on the chopping block.

No rumors necessary for X-Factor, confirmed to be ending with # 262. Rich Johnston is convinced that Marvel will announce X-Fatcor re-boot news at San Diego, because why wait for the body to get cold before you take another run at her? I suppose if it gets me my Layla Miller fix, I shouldn’t complain.

Which means that in the very near future, that Venom book Rick Remender started writing WAY back in March of 2011 will be the longest tenured book in the Marvel publishing line. How crazy is that? I don’t consider it a good thing or a bad thing, really. To me it’s an interesting thing, because Marvel is not what I would consider the subtle half of the Big 2, but they’ve very quietly turned over everything real quiet like, so nobody would notice.

I wouldn’t expect them to be done turning things, either. They went about 50 years without re-numbering the original X-Men title, to the point where they trotted out reprints for several years instead of re-starting it. Now we get a new Uncanny X-Men title about every other year, and will probably continue to do so. The next Wolverine ongoing will be what…the 13th or 14th iteration? If you can’t keep Wolverine afloat, that would cause some concern, one would think. Marvel doesn’t seem to mind.

DC, on the other hand, does seem to mind about these things. Because they were so vocal about it, they almost can’t go back to the re-boot whip without looking like colossal failures. Which might be the case.

Share “Your” Universe

Speaking of colossal failures, let’s get to the new “Share Your Universe” farce - I mean initiative Marvel is parading around at the moment.

Where to even start? I wish I could tell you exactly what this program entails from the Marvel perspective, but I can’t. I say that as a man who just finished listening to the press conference. The reason why I can’t explain it is that it was presented with little concrete detail. Plus, the conference was constantly being interrupted by what sounded like aliens from District 9.

Apparently, that was actually just the rudest person on the planet typing throughout the conference call.

I think that “Share Your Universe” has something to do with pointing other people, preferably younger people, toward Facebook and like, stuff? Facebook and like, stuff will then point these young people to comics they have absolutely no intention of reading. By the way, they point-blank admit on the call that there really aren’t any kids comics at Marvel to point them to. Not that it matters. R kdz Evn abel 2 rd hole wrdz thz daze? OMG ROTFL

Joe Quesada and Dan Buckley painted a verbal Rockwell on that conference call, in which parents pass the comics torch down to their children, nieces, cousins, and annoyed strangers. I guess it’s sort of like an old Saturday Evening Post cover, only with more bong mist. Hey, somebody introduced you to comics, old timer! Time to go forth and do likewise. Why?

Why?

Well, according to Dan Buckley, because it’s YOUR universe, and you will receive an unlimited supply of warm fuzzies by bonding with your loved ones via YOUR universe.

Ummmm, Mr. Buckley? One problem. I don’t want to belabor the obvious here…but if it’s my goddamn universe, exactly how many points am I getting, and why hasn’t my incentive check arrived?

Huh. That’s weird.

I guess if King Kirby never got his points, I probably shouldn’t hold my breath waiting for mine, should I? Yeah, probably not.

So let’s be real, here. I know facing down reality isn’t really en vogue in 2013, (although En Vogue was pretty much the cat’s ass in about 1990)

but it does have some benefits, contrary to popular belief. The Marvel universe is not my universe. It’s a product I have enjoyed, when it hasn’t priced me completely out. I like reading some of those comics. Hawkeye and Avengers Arena? I buy these books, I adore them, and I often write about them. Publicly, even.

Marvel is a business, and it isn’t mine. Share “my” universe? That’s a farce, and an offensive one. Stripped of all bullshit, this initiative would be titled:

“Marketing to new readers is tiresome and expensive, so….hey, you stupid assholes already forking over way too much money for our product? Yeah, you do it for us, instead. For free.”

Unfortunately, the accuracy of the title makes the brevity suffer. But that’s exactly what’s happening here. This is a business, and a business, mind you that produces BILLION dollar movies and has decided the problem with print comics is that the customers AREN’T DOING ENOUGH.

Where do they find the audacity? And why are there so many of them?

I’ve got it coming from all sides, now. Marvel has decided I need to be doing pro bono marketing work for them. Eric Powell wants a Goon movie. Fine. Why bother with investors you might have to share profits with when you can just Kickstart a $400,000 story reel from fans in exchange for…..nothing. Backers weren’t promised so much as a file of the reel, much less tickets to the movie that may or may not ever get made. Powell got $441,900 toward a goose that might shit golden eggs, and the fans got zilch.

Then there’s Gerry Conway attempting to crowdsource fans into providing paperwork and research toward getting himself and other people paid large sums of money – again, in exchange for nothing. Listen, I hope Conway gets stacks and stacks of money for his creations. I really do. But that’s his money, and his problem.

Near as I can tell, the issue with DC now is that Levitz isn’t doing the paperwork for the creators any more, and the company won’t pay retroactively for use of the characters. So if you created the Psycho-Pirate or something, and he’s appearing in the upcoming Justice League movie, you need to file your paperwork in advance to be compensated.

So here’s the deal – if you really want the money, pay attention and hire a lawyer. Let me assure you, if I had the potential for thousands of dollars coming my way, all the horses in King’s Landing could not pull me away. If you’ve got a payday coming, and you can’t be arsed to bookmark latino review and keep an eye on things, then clearly you don’t want it badly enough. Pick a bone with Warner Bros. over having to do the work if you like, but how is it ever my responsibility to make you money?

Where does this prevailing, creepy, bizzaro, collectivist thinking come from, and how do I make it go away? Let me spell it out clearly for the uniformed:

When seeking monetary gain, you must offer value in return. We have a word for profiting off another while offering nothing in return. It’s called stealing.

I’m not talking about charity. I have given money to Peter David for medical expenses, and to aid Gary Friedrich in a time of need. Nobody was looking to get rich in those instances. I wouldn’t assist Friedrich’s legal battle for royalties without a piece of the action on the back end, as an example. I was looking to make sure the guy had a sandwich to eat and maybe a roof over his head.

If Marvel wants to grow their business, I recommend they offer a great product at a reasonable cost. They’re pretty darned good at the first part, and need significant work on the second. Maybe if they fixed that piece of things, they wouldn’t have so much trouble getting new readers hooked in? Just a thought.

Look, I’m the paying customer. I don’t mind making Marvel rich, provided they give me value in return. When I buy the books, I’ve already done my part and then some. They’re in business because people like me are buying Daredevil and Young Avengers. That should be cause for celebration, not disappointment. They should be going out of their way to make me happy, not attempting to squeeze the last drop of blood from my turnip body with free PR work.

It presumes on the relationship, and has everything backward. It would be like approaching a guy that was kind enough to loan you some money in a pinch and go:

“Hey, you’re the dude that gave me that $20, so you should definitely help me move this weekend.”

Wha-huh? No, dude, you have it backward. If that guy did you a solid, you should be helping HIM move, not compounding your social debt by demanding even more.

I’m not responsible for growing your business, Marvel. It’s your booty…you dig it out, dig? It’s sort of bizarre that a concept so simple needs explaining, but here we are. Space Brothers, I am ready for pick-up! Things do not make sense here.

Ugly American # 35 – The Rundown!

Because the Ugly American found nothing in the news sludge worth dissecting, (although he’s sure that will change during the upcoming San Diego Comic Con info-dump) here is some stuff he read and comments you may or may not find edifying:

Five Weapons # 5 – Image Comics
Script: Jimmie Robinson
Art: Jimmie Robinson

There is good news and bad news on this one. The good news is that this was supposed to be the final issue of a limited series, but I see a solicitation for a sixth issue. Apparently, sales have been strong enough to warrant an ongoing, and I like to see creator-owned projects succeed, particularly when the content is strong.

The bad news is that the deeper I get into the series, the weaker I find it. Five Weapons is an all-ages mystery book in which a hyper-clever protagonist uses his Encyclopedia-Brown-level observational skills to survive as an outsider in a school full of lethal weirdos.

Each of the issues ends with a cliffhanger. This issue opens with our hero completely out of ideas and facing off against the president of the gun club…completely unarmed. Now that’s a situation rich with tension, and worthy of a series finale. Unfortunately, all of that tension is resolved in the least satisfying manner possible as a Deus Ex Machina stumbles into the party with all the grace of a drunken rhinoceros.

I’m sure if I go back and reference the back issues for clues, Robinson laid groundwork for the character’s appearance. One of the strengths of Five Weapons is that Robinson always leaves clues in the text for all of Enrique’s revelations; nothing appears out of thin air. The problem is that all of that Vera stuff still ruined what should have been the biggest payoff in the series in exchange for her griping, which the reader has no way to care about.

I think the book still works on the whole, particularly for a younger crowd. Enrique is a very solid, likeable main character, and the parts where he builds relationships with his peers and battles his elders are strong. The puzzle-solving piece of the equation is really hit-and-miss, though, and the book has a little more whimsy than middle-aged Ryan is interested in. So I think I’m out. If somebody asked me to recommend a comic for a tween, though, this is what I’d give them.

Five Ghosts of Fabian Grey # 4/5 – Image Comics
Script: Frank J. Barbiere
Pencils: Chris Mooneyhan

Five Ghosts: The Haunting of Fabian Grey is the story of a pulpy Indiana Jones type, blessed/cursed with five literary ghosts after exposing himself to something called a Dreamstone. When the Ugly American exposes himself, all he gets is a stern lecture from his parole officer, not super powers. That’s bunk.

One of the problems with Five Ghosts is that you tend to get more usable information about said five ghosts from the solicitation copy or the back matter than you do from the contents of the book itself. Issue four is nice in one sense because it goes a long way toward clarifying the rules of Fabian’s affliction, while adding another cool layer – the ghosts inside of him are pissed.

It’s a nice twist that raises the stakes, and Five Ghosts # 4 is about Fabian Grey taking a journey inside of himself to make peace with his ghosts. I call that a world-class hook.

Unfortunately, the execution is lacking. Grey is forced to endure a series of tests where he must receive the approval of a particular ghost before moving on. Sherlock Holmes tests him by raising some kind of spirit-demon and chasing him through the streets of London. The supernatural would represent something the uber-rational Holmes would scoff at, not exemplify. Used correctly, that test should have shown Grey using his reason and senses to defeat the demon by proving it a fraud.

Instead, our super adventurer “defeats” the threat by running away like a scared little girl into Holmes address – 221B Baker Street. The ghost of Sherlock Holmes watches this travesty of superstition and cowardice and declares him a pass. Wha-huh??? The greatest detective in literature is comfortable that he’s found a worthy host because he remembered an address? Weak. WEAK.

On the plus side, I find Chris Mooneyhan’s pencils to be divine. I think the book is colored oddly, but I’m sure a real auteur like Monster Mike will correct me on that. This comic looks fantastic, it’s paced briskly, the designs are great, the core concepts are fertile for imaginative expansion…it just needs a little more meat on the story bones. At this point, I’m very excited to look at Five Ghosts, and not in a terrible hurry to read it.

Avengers A.I. # 1 – Marvel Comics
Script: Sam Humphries
Art: Andre Lima Araujo

The Ugly American did not read Age of Ultron, but he did smell something akin to a wet dog’s dirty diaper every time he passed it on the rack. That’s my way of saying I didn’t have high hopes for Avengers A.I., spinning directly out of AU. On the other hand…..It’s got Vision, a surly Doombot, and a Victor Mancha. It also has a $2.99 price point. All right, let’s crack her open and see what the guts look like!

The book opens with a random Atlanta hospital being bombed for absolutely no reason, and then a title page. That title page contains some awkward computery language introducing the concept of the books as such:
PYM OF THE PAST ASSISTED PYM OF THE PRESENT IN DESTORYING [sic] ULTRON. RESULT - DR. HENRY PYM IS A NEW MAN. RESULT [B] - SCAN FOR UNANTICIPATED VARIABLES
OUTCOME - THE AGE OF ULTRON IS OVER. THE AGE OF A.I. IS NOW
:EJECT [A.I. NO 1 RECAP

Yes, please do eject that clunky ass recap. Why would I want to read that book? Pym of the past helped Pym of the present, so he’s a new man….what does that even mean? The unanticipated variables are what…that it’s now the age of A.I.??? That tells me nothing, other than the fact that it sort of confirms my suspicion that Age of Ultron was a time-travel debacle best left avoided.

Well, after that warm invite we meet Monica Chang, and she’s kind of acting as an Amanda Waller for SHEILD, and she’s been assigned to create a Suicide Squad task force aimed at stopping Hank Pym’s Ultron antidote.

She brings in Pym and explains that the artificial intelligence he created has gained a form of sentience, and has a 99.98% chance of ultimately exterminating the human race. And at that point I thought to myself –

This thing is practically guaranteed to wipe out our species, and the “recap” page is telling me this book is about Hank Pym being a new man??? Talk about burying the lead! Here’s your new credits page:

IN ORDER TO PREVENT THE AGE OF ULTRON, HANK PYM CREATED AN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WITH A 99.98% OF EXTERMINATING THE HUMAN RACE.
THIS IS THE STORY OF THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO CAN STOP IT.

Bang! Now that’s a book I might even want to read. Hank Pym is a new man…don’t make me yawn. Marketing aside, at least they’ve given the book a purpose and a focus. Most of what the Big 2 put out can be encapsulated as “the superhero adventures of X”. Avengers A.I. knows what it’s about, and has a prime force to move the plot along. Very nicely constructed.

The characters are all distinct, and Humphries has clearly thought about his approach to each. Not sure how fresh or deep they are, but he’s clearly thought about it. Pym is sort of an arrogant, excitable goofball, and bears no resemblance at all to the cat who was an instructor at Avengers Academy. (they did warn me he was a new man, I guess) Victor Mancha is having identity issues, which is made evident by the fact that he changes his code name to something more absurd about every six panels, just in case you forgot. Vision has levelled up after curling up into the fetal position near the sun for a while. And the Doombot hates everybody, and is not shy about sharing that fact. If he didn’t have a charge in his head ready to deploy a mini-black hole, he would certainly kill us all.

It’s basically the bit that Warren Ellis ran with Aaron Stack in Nextwave, only less subtle. If that’s even possible. Honestly, why isn’t Warren Ellis writing this book? He was born to do it. I don’t know, Avengers A.I. is perfectly competent, and maintains a surprisingly light, fun tone for a book about a bunch of people who don’t like each other basically forced to work together against their will to stop an extinction level threat.

I can definitely imagine a possible audience for this. I’m just not it.

:EJECT [UGLY AMERICAN] --- AVENGERS A.I.

Other Stuff
All of that seemed a bit disappointing, so I thought I’d talk briefly about a comic I really adored – Hawkeye # 11. It’s a story told entirely from Pizza Dog’s perspective, so there’s almost no verbiage. Just a few key words that a dog might focus on.

It would be very easy for something like this to get a little too cute and waste all that story space basking in its own self-indulgence. My take was that it was a wonderful departure from the standard reading experience, and I think I got more out of that story trying to decipher Aja’s symbols, not less.

Hawkeye # 11 is a noir detective story where the hard-boiled dick is a dog missing an eye, and the femme fatale is literally a bitch. Without words to shorthand for you, it takes some time to parse what the symbols mean and whether they represent a scent, a sound, or a memory. The end result is that this “silent” issue actually takes more time to absorb then most text heavy books, with the possible exception of Turf # 1. It’s got action, drama, broken hearts, and a major turning point in the Clint/Kate relationship.

Wonderful, wonderful stuff as usual from Fraction and Aja. Hawkeye is pretty close to perfect. There’s more vitality in one issue of Hawkeye than in 2/3 of DCs publishing slate put together. That’s because they haven’t outlawed fun and creativity at Marvel. If you look at the numbers, turns out that’s actually a good business decision. Didio….Johns….Lee….is this thing on? Can you hear me?

And then there’s Lazarus. Oh, Lazarus. I’m running long here, so I’m definitely not attacking it this week. Maybe just better to leave that one alone entirely. But I may not be able to help myself…tune in next week to find out!

Ugly American # 20: Crunching Gender-kvetching

One of the things that is guaranteed to get my blood pressure spiking is the monthly Gender-crunching report over at Bleeding Cool. Some cat named Tim Hanley has decided that it is worth the time and effort to catalog everything that Marvel and DC are publishing, and figure out how many of the creators involved have a uterus. The question is…why?

Well, here’s Hanley’s answer:

“Women account for half of all human beings on the planet, but in terms of making comic books they are seriously under-represented. This shouldn’t be a shocking piece of information to anyone…we all know that comics are a male-dominated industry. But we know this anecdotally, not with solid numbers behind it or breakdowns of what women are doing where. Thus, this women in comics statistics project.”

Hmmm. Hanley is only half playing fair there, methinks. On the plus side, he’s not perpetrating any farcical objectivity. “We all know” the game is rigged and that the males are on top. Gender-crunching isn’t an investigation where Hanley wonders what he’ll discover. It’s numerical propaganda. Why tell us what we already know? One wonders what the point of the exercise is.

Except…we all know that, too. The point is activism and indictment, and that’s not plainly stated, but it’s there. Of course, it doesn’t have to be stated. In fact, it’s the unstated that roots the deepest. The current cultural narrative we have about gender works like this:

• Males are bad
• White males are really bad. (not super bad like James Brown, which is good, but despicable/immoral)
• Rich White Males are the author of all human evil (that would be the owners of Warner Bros and Disney, for those scoring at home)

So if the roster demographics at Marvel and DC don’t line up with the population at large, well, then that’s got to be part of a diabolical plot. Duh, they’re evil! And that’s why Hanley uses the words “seriously under-represented”, and that’s why he uses the term “male-dominated”. It’s not an accident. A variance can be random, but a serious under-representation cannot. Dominance implies aggression. He’s counting the numbers to call out the Big 2 for their gender transgressions, or at least what Hanley (and the Soft & Fuzzy Bunnies) perceive as transgressions.

And that’s fine, by the way. Like most of the Bunnies’ most annoying and destructive behavior, it comes from a good place. They would like to see more women in comics, and I’m happily on board with that. Hanley’s results seem to indicate that women comprise about 11% of Marvel and DCs creative teams. That’s a rough but useful figure, you can certainly hit gender-crunching if you want more specifics. And those figures do seem a little odd at first blush, I’ll grant you.

But on the flip side, there are all kinds of groups under-represented or not represented at all. The latest figures I could find on the US census indicate that Asians are 10.4% of the general population, but I can count the number of Asian comic creators I’m aware of on one hand. And I’m assuming things, of course, as I count. I think Tan Eng Huat is Asian, but for all I really know, the guy is Bolivian. And there’s another under-representation – how many Bolivian creators are being denied their place in comics by the dastardly Big Two? Sheesh, how many conspiracies are these guys doing right now?

Also, I see almost no ninjas in comics. Seriously, seriously under-represented. There’s just Jeff Parker. Don’t buy into that “aw shucks” southern bit, folks. Right now Jeff Parker has infiltrated the Russian consulate, and there aren’t even any Russians any more. That’s how good he is. But still, he’s the only ninja. The horror

Imagine this scenario:

A packet arrives on an editor’s desk at DC. He (or maybe she, since the editor job seems to be more readily available to women) looks at a pitch for a Red Tornado ongoing, and word has come down the pipe that Didio really wants the Tornado in the next wave. The take is strong, the direction is clear, even the supporting cast are distinct and compelling. There are four pages of preview artwork - the storytelling is impeccable and the action pops. This could work!

“If only this wasn’t pitched by skirts, I’d do it in a heartbeat!” He (or maybe she) throws the Golden Pitch into the wastebasket.

Does that sound even remotely plausible to you? Because it sounds like bullshit to me.

Think about Marvel for a few moments. I know it’s painful, but do it. Do you think they’d pass up making a nickel over a little vagina? No way. If Marvel could make a nickel bashing kitten skulls with cricket bats….you’d better get a helmet for Mr. Mittens, because Tom Brevoort is coming. That’s the reality I understand.

DC takes the worst of the gender lashings, but that makes even less sense to me. Was the ship largely guided by Jennette Kahn, Diane Nelson, and Karen Berger really female unfriendly? Or maybe it was that noted misogynist Paul Levitz? I suppose Geoff Johns, Jim Lee, and Dan Didio distributed that email declaring the New 52 a “cocks only” club. Oh wait, that email doesn’t exist. Nope, none of that makes a lick of sense to me. Who is it exactly keeping women from working at DC?

Folks with really spooky memories will recall that I asked Sheriff Mark Waid that very question when he appeared on Where Monsters Dwell. He said that it was too strong to suggest that women were “barred” from working in comics, but that he knew of editors more comfortable working with men. Sheriff Waid would not name names, though. Nobody does.

I think it’s weird that nobody can point out a problem editor or executive, especially these days when kids are telling so many tales out of school as they leave. Surely somebody would have pulled a Roberson and blew a whistle by now? I suppose that the prospect of confrontation will make some uncomfortable, and the spectre of rescinded future work will scare others into silence.

But really, it isn’t 1955 any more. Outing a misogynist is more likely to be greeted with obligatory golf-clapping then ostracization (somewhere Dave Sim is nodding, and doesn’t know why). In any case, wouldn’t it be worth it to build a better industry? I think the support is there for that sort of thing, it’s a progressive’s world at this point. (somewhere Orson Scott Card is grimacing and doesn’t know why).

But no, there is no bogeyman to be found, and I think the most likely reason for that is… there simply isn’t one. But don’t take my word for it, because I’m not there at DC. Judd Winnick is there. And this is what he had to say on the latest episode of Word Balloon right around the 35 minute mark:

And there was some kerfuffle going on, and not necessarily wrong, about the lack of women writers we have at DC, which is still going on.
And I will say this, and you know we’ve talked about it internally, that it isn’t for..you know, it isn’t like…{laughs} let me put it this way…
If there was a male writer and a female writer, and they’re both of equal talent, and they’re both putting in good pitches and they’re interesting, you don’t think DC, at this - you know at ANY point would say:
“No, we’re going to hire her, because man, we need some more women writers and some women energy in here and like, you know, this dude’s good, but, you know, maybe not right now.”
They would jump at the chance to have, like, a really strong female writer, and I’m not saying there aren’t female writers, I guess I’m saying more to the point – if women are interested in writing superhero comics, get in there! Just push as hard as you can to get into DC because they really do want you, and many of us want to read you. It’s, it’s, and I’m really, I’m really not even talking out of my ass, I’m not even speculating. I’m talking about actual conversations with people who would do the hiring and firing. They would love strong women to come in who want to write strong characters. They really would!

I was going to clean out all the little imperfections in Winnick’s speech patterns to make it look better in text form, but I decided to leave them in because I think they tell an important story about how desperately uncomfortable he was addressing the truth of the matter. Why? Because it goes against the culture’s narrative grain.

Look, Winnick is a Bunny. Big time. If you want to hear the golf-clapping at the end of your sentence, you need to stick to the script – men bad, white male corporation bad, women oppressed, boycott, twitter, picket, the end. You don’t get points in the Bunny Briar for facing the reality that there are likely no hobgoblins at DC looking to keep the fairer sex down. I give him massive credit for that. If you listen to the interview, he really struggled internally to spit that out.

Why is that? Why does it feel so dangerous to admit that maybe things aren’t so bad after all? Why do we recoil at the thought that maybe the comics world is populated mostly by people who are happy to work with women and want them to succeed in order to produce the best product? Shouldn’t that be cause for celebration?

I think the reason why we prickle at acknowledging real progress is complicated. There is a lot of currency in victimhood these days. Success brings derision, not praise in 2013. If you want status now, you have to be oppressed. These are the bizarre times we live in. But more than that, there is a sense that if the culture ever relaxes in its diligence against sexism, the males will instantly pounce on the opportunity and it will be barefoot and pregnant for the next couple of centuries.

So rather than assess the culture reasonably, we lock ourselves into “ism” (sexism, racism, ageism) mode whether the shoe actually fits or not, because the alternative is to hand the world back to the “ists”. That fear is absurd, of course.

It’s absurd, but it’s very real. You’ll notice that Winnick’s opener absolutely contradicts everything that follows it. He leads by saying that the “kerfuffle” over DC not hiring women is not necessarily wrong. He then spends the rest of his time on the subject explaining how that charge is absolutely wrong. DC is in fact tripping over itself to bring in female talent. Winnick is in a tough spot where culturally he must state that DC is sexist, because if he doesn’t, he must turn in his Bunny card and (in his mind) promote sexism. Except in his experience, there is no sexism there – and you can listen to his brain break as he tries to articulate that.

There are consequences for this madness, folks. I don’t know that I have a satisfactory explanation for why there are so few women creating comics and attempting to get into comics. I do know that if I were a woman and interested, but once a month some asshole showed me a chart explaining that I have no chance…that wouldn’t exactly invite me in. You can’t make comics if you never try.

I find no evidence, anecdotal or otherwise that women aren’t working in comics because of something systemic directed at them specifically. And let’s be real here; the deck is stacked against everybody. The old saw is that nobody breaks into funnybooks the same way, because once that method is revealed they plug the whole. There are a lot of talented people out there, and not very many jobs at the Big Two to go around. In order to get in, you have to beat the best in the world. You know, no pressure.

If the comics punditsphere were actually interested in creating opportunities for women, they’d spend less time making depressing pie charts and more time advertising the Winnick Plan:

Get in there! DC wants you, and we want to read you!

I don’t see that happening. The only place you’re ever going to hear about that Winnick quote is the original podcast and the Ugly American. Truth isn’t nearly as sexy as putting on your Pharisee robes and showing everyone what a Not-Sexist you are. My theory is that you’ll get more traction telling women the truth about how in demand they are, instead of painting them as eternal victims. My theories aren’t popular in the comics punditsphere, though.

And hey, if I’ve got it wrong, you can always correct me by commenting below….

Ugly American # 18 – Color Me Bad Edition!

Follow Up:  Playing the Orson Scott Card

Well, looks like the Bunnies got their way, as they often do in these dark days.  Chris Sprouse has bowed out of his penciling duties and DC has shelved Card’s Superman story until it can hire another artist.  I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for that story to see print, folks.

Sprouse claims that the media attention was affecting the work, and that he couldn’t abide a decline in quality.  I have nothing against Sprouse, he’s a grown ass man in a tough spot, and he’s free to do what he wants.  But that story smells like bullshit.  I don’t even know what that means, really.  Is he implying that he can’t concentrate on the work with the hullaballoo, or that he’s doing so many interviews he doesn’t have time to work?  It makes no sense to me.

What I believe Sprouse would tell you, if he lived in a society that would support honesty is that he’s uncomfortable and afraid.  He doesn’t want to be the guy who thinks it’s OK to work with The Guy That Hates Gay People.  He doesn’t want to have to answer the questions, he doesn’t want to have to swallow hard before he opens his twitter account, and he doesn’t want to be the guy with a front yard packed with villagers carrying torches and pitchforks.  Before you accuse me of hyperbole, it wasn’t too long ago the Bunnies decided George Zimmermann needed to pay for his alleged crimes and Spike Lee published what he thought was Zimmerman’s address on Twitter, so that interested parties could…I don’t know…debate the case, I guess?  I’m sure his motives were pure.  Turns out it was the address of an old couple having nothing whatever to do with Trayvon Martin.  No charges filed on that, by the way, but he did pay them some settlement money.  So yeah, if I’m Chris Sprouse, I’d want to extricate myself from the situation as well.  Weird stuff happens when you cross the Soft and Fuzzies.

Now I’ve got people lining up on my Facebook wall pretending like something wonderful just happened, but really it’s just the return of a new flavor of McCarthyism.  Trust me, folks, that’s nothing to cheer about.  Not that even 1% of the 99% would even know who Joe McCarthy was, which is exactly why these little bouts of ideological bullying cycle around again and again.  Oh, they know about chucking disgruntled birds at pixilated structures and how to text blind with the phone in their pocket.  They know the Duck Dynasty guys.  But Senator McCarthy, your little war against the Communists has been forgotten – say it isn’t so, Joe!

And just like this new brand of insanity, the old brand originally came from a good place.  We had some Russian rats in the pipes, and guys like Alger Hiss probably needed to go.  But it starts with Alger Hiss, and then the power starts to make the fevered egos a little too drunk, and by the end of it you’re clapping irons on janitors and blacklisting actors and directors from working in Hollywood.  That’s what has happened here with Superman Adventures.  It starts with people wanting basic human rights for all, but it ends with little would-be dictators deciding that anybody who doesn’t agree with their point of view shouldn’t exist.  So Orson Scott Card is gone now.  He’s effectively blacklisted. 

So now what?  Should DC distribute a liberal test to decide if writers and artists are progressive enough to work there?  I saw an article linking to Sprouse’s other projects so Bunnies could reward him for his efforts, which I thought was more than a little odd.  If I want a good hamburger, I don’t ask if the cook agrees with me about immigration policy.  I ask if the food is good.  Apparently in the Bunny Briar, you read comics if the creators agree with you about politics, and you end the career of anybody who doesn’t.  It’s appropriate to be worried about the future of America.

I guess the good news is that DC didn’t curl up into the fetal position and cave to the pressure.  They did the right thing and explained that what their employees believe in their off time doesn’t really have much to do with them.  Not everybody caves to the Bunnies, and there is still hope.  But mostly this stuff is just depressing.

So let’s talk about Sex, instead, shall we?

Sex # 1

My take on Joe Casey by now is familiar to Insomniacs.  I love the idea of Joe Casey.  I don’t want to imagine a world in which Casey is not making comics.  Every single blessed time I see a solicitation or a teaser campaign for one of his projects, I say to myself “Oh man, I have GOT to get on board with that!”  It was no different with Sex.  And every time I dive into the actual guts of the Joe Casey comic, something seems out of synch or intrinsically broken about it.  It seems like it will be no different with Sex.

The single greatest and most important element of Sex # 1 does not appear in any panel, but the back cover.  In the bottom-right corner it says:



I laughed so hard when I saw that…quintessential Casey!  There is indeed no shortage of bullshit in this comic, starting with the snarky little “Collector’s Item” tag on the front cover.  Just in case you missed how much distaste he has for the collector’s market, it looks like the same tag will be gracing issue # 2 as well.  I imagine the joke will continue to get more delicious, and by issue # 8 we will all be tearing up before we even get to page one.  Does that (admittedly juicy) little piece of meta assist the reader with processing the tone or themes of the comic inside?  Ahhh, no.  Not really. 

Except it kinda does, because it’s a Joe Casey comic, and that means anything goes.  In Casey World everything goes into the stew, because if he thought of it, then it fits.  Mostly, Sex is about Simon Cooke, the world’s most dull ex-superhero.  It’s hard to be exactly sure this early in the game, but it seems like Sex is going to be some kind of perverted Shane trope.  Mr. Cooke used to be The Armored Saint, crime fighter and defender of Saturn City.  He made a promise that he would hang up his costume to somebody who has subsequently died, though.  So now he does….well….nothing, really.  But talk.

There is an awful lot of talking in Sex # 1, and a lot of awful talking.  Talk about where to set the helicopter down, talk about civic functions and meetings and potential pay increases, talk about things that are happening in other places, and talk about things that used to happen.  Nobody in this comic is particularly interested in doing anything here and now, though.  There are a lot of dour faces with moving lips, but everything else is limp.  In fact, by the time we get to the actual sex of Sex, Mr. Cooke is too distracted by that previously-mentioned-dead-person’s Inception totem to even notice the super hot chick with her face buried in the other hot chick’s fully rendered taint. 

There’s a lot of talking, but nothing that pops at even 20% of the intensity and energy of the letters page.  You’ll hang on every word of Joe Casey’s during the back matter, as always.  He is an out-of-the-box, passionate, entertaining cat.  If any of the characters actually talked like Casey, you’d never want it to end. The puppets inside of his panels…

“I appreciate what you’re trying to do.  Maybe it’s just a bit too soon.  I dunno….”

Yawn.

And for all I know, that’s the bit.  There’s always a bit (or five) in a Joe Casey book.  Maybe the trick he’s trying to pull off in Sex is showing how dead Simon Cooke and his world are, and then he finds some kind of vitality in the continuously escalating sexual journey he’s about to embark on.

 Reviewing a first issue is really like reviewing the first 20 minutes of a movie.  Would you give the first 20 minutes of Sixth Sense four stars?  You sort of need the end, or at least a grasp of the bigger picture to assess it.  I’m admitting I don’t have enough info to properly diagnose what Casey is doing yet or how well he’s doing it….but it feels a little like we’re headed toward a weird train wreck where a really unimpressive Shane decides to fuck a lot of whores instead of picking up his guns to save good ol’ Saturn City again.  What a bunch of fuckin’ bullshit, indeed!

There’s other crumbs of oddness.  There’s a not-too-subtle phallic arrow on the cover, and then you open the cover and there’s a large building shooting out of the ground at a perfectly erect 45 degree angle.  The title of Chapter One is “The Summer of Hard.”  I don’t have a problem with any of that.  Good God, if you’ve heard my show, you know I don’t have a problem with that.  The problem is reconciling the juvenile, playful stuff on the periphery with the stuffy, plodding contents.  Am I taking this seriously or not?  Sex is like a Deadpool comic inviting you to an insurance seminar that breaks out into some porn at the end.  As the credits roll, the director cuts them short, shrugs his shoulders, and essentially admits that the whole thing was an abject failure with good intentions. 

How bizarre is that?  Then, just up the ante a little further, let’s throw colored boxes around pieces of dialogue.  Every page of this comic contain balloons with a word or two highlighted in a rainbow of fruit flavors.  It’s painfully distracting.  I had some fun trying to decipher what the colors might signify, briefly.  Are the light colored words sexy, and the darker colored ones not?  Ehhhh, not really.  I’m told the average male has a sexual thought every 2.6 seconds or something like that.  Could this be Casey trying to indicate a sexual thought with a blip of color?  I don’t know.  I wouldn’t put it past him.  That kind of thing is fun in the abstract, but in terms of reading mechanics, it’s like somebody throwing rocks into your transmission.  What a bunch of fuckin’ bullshit, y’know?  That’s the Joe Casey experience.

You know, a lot of artists are intensely afraid that they aren’t actually any good, secretly dreading that someday the world will discover that they are frauds.  I’m talking about hyper-talented, top-of-the-game people hide this fear in their hearts.  Sometimes I think Joe Casey is afraid to play a story straight, because it won’t be any “good”, and he’ll be “exposed” as a fraud.  But if you hang a bunch of sophomoric dick jokes, collector’s mentality meta-commentary, oddly colored word balloons, and an alert at the end about what a bunch of bullshit the comic is, you’re off the hook.  The absurdity shields you from real criticism, because either A) it’s just a gag, relax, I’m not writing War & Peace over here or B) it was an experiment the critic was just too lame to “get”.  The problem is theirs.

Or maybe I’m just projecting, because that pretty much sums up myself, and I should just leave Joe Casey out of my own psychological foils.  But I would really, really love to see Joe Casey write something with all the horses pulling the wagon in the same direction.  This comic isn’t that.
I don’t know. 

Feel free to add your own thoughts about Joe Casey, Sex, or my misguided armchair psychology – that could be fun, right?