Funnybooks, funny and otherwise.
We live in an age when the Culture War, the most avoidable conflict in human history, continues to drag on. Despite the fact that it turned out to contain practically nothing we haven’t seen before in half a dozen genres of film aside from some inconsequential shading, the moment Todd …
It’s not often that I revisit a television show I’ve already written about in this space, particularly when I’m as busy as I have been lately. But then again, it’s not often that a television show goes so completely and wonderfully off the rails as Riverdale did. The teen-angst TV version …
Armando Iannucci makes deeply political comedies that are not actually at politics at all. This is not the only good thing about his latest project, The Death of Stalin, such a remarkable thing, but it is perhaps what makes it a great film and it’s definitely what saves it from being …
Tonight’s blog entry, which ought to be a relatively simple movie review, is one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to write, which is in itself is illustrative of how thorny cultural criticism has become in late-stage capitalism. The reasons for this are manifold and all worth exploring: …
How do you solve a problem like Maria? Or, to put it in a less cryptic way, how do you say that the new Netflix Punisher series is probably the best Punisher adaptation, and arguably the best of the streaming service’s Marvel series, while acknowledging that these are both extremely high …
The apocalypse in fiction fulfills a lot of deep, and predictably dark, needs in the human psyche. Zombie stories are usually an exercise in psychopathy, indulging a curiously common instinct to portray the commission of mass murder without moral consequences; tales of nuclear or other technological holocaust portray a surface …
I wanted to like Wonder Woman. I really, really did. I’ve always enjoyed the character, for any number of reasons: the intriguing backstory of her creator and his motivations; her origin story, steeped in some of the stranger aspects of Greek mythology; her debut during the early days of America’s involvement …
In these exciting times when the only thing Americans love more than billion-dollar superhero movie franchises is petty intra-party political sniping, I thought it might be time to return to a favorite obsession of mind: the ideological leanings of various comic book characters. This has been explored in-universe a bit …
One of the most common — and accurate — criticisms of the Netflix series based on Marvel comics characters is that they’re so dreadfully long. At a baker’s dozen episodes, each clocking in at an overstuffed hour, even the best of them can become a terrible slog. (Netflix seems to have …
It is a canard often, and falsely, leveled at Hollywood that it has no new ideas. In fact, Hollywood has innumerable new ideas; they’re just all bad. If you’re in the television or film business and have a really shitty idea that nobody asked for or could possibly want, you …
See, here’s the thing: the Spider-Man cartoon theme was, well, amazing. No sane person could argue against that. But the Captain America and Hulk cartoon themes were dumb as shit. And have they gotten any less shit-dumb in the last 40 years? No, they have not. All that has happened …
Earlier this week, we discussed how nostalgia for the superhero comics of ’60s and ’70s, on the basis that the Big Two were creating more original characters and taking more risks, is misguided not because it’s false on its face, but because the original characters being created were fucking ridiculous. …
Many years ago, when ‘blogs’ were a thing, I wrote a series called the Geek Index, in which I examined the DC Who’s Who and Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe series in order to illustrate that comic books were written for mental defectives. It did not require close examination. Nowadays, geeks …
It can be extraordinarily difficult to write about mental illness, in fiction and in reality. Even now, as I write this, I select my words with care when I say that the current trend in television to try and make entertainment out of mental illness — intelligent and empathetic entertainment, …
Joe Sacco’s Palestine was first published in 1993 as a series of single-issue comic books, based on the author’s trip to the occupied territories of the Gaza Strip towards the end of the First Intifada. It was collected by Fantagraphics into a single edition in 1996, at a time when there …
