Wax Banks

Dave Sim on superheroes.

Dave Sim from way back:

I see the superhero as a specific personality which is not dependent on the cosmetics of the tights and whatnot. It's the complete outsider who adjusts to his "outsiderness" by developing an over-inflated self-opinion. To me, that's the way the Roach character works. It's interesting to bring someone in who is completely clueless but thinks everything is related to them. The world revolves around them.

[...]

They've so dominated the medium for 50 years. I wasn't here for the first 18 years that Superman was around. And that's well worth looking back at. Why did that endure? Why did something that's so... if you look at the seminal point, ÔSuperman' was used extensively in the popular vocabulary because of the Nazis. Jerry Siegel grabbed this word and said "Yes! A comic book about Superman." And then his next trip to the well is to do the Spectre. And it's like "Yeah, that's another word going around; the spectre of war. Superman. Geez. That's kind of scary when you start to think of it." This environment where that endured in its context and in its own subtext without any kind of purge. It's one of the things that I don't think people look at with the 1954 clampdown on comics. Yeah, it was about horror and terror comics. But they were talking about superhero comics, too. "Let's not have these God-like guys. It's a little disturbing that it's 1950 and my kid's still talking about Superman. The only time I heard about Superman was when Adolf Hitler was talking about Supermen." Captain America! We'll make our own Superman. "America's Superman can beat Nazi Superman." No, we fought this war to put the idea of Superman into retirement.

Sim is one of my favourite artists ever, in any medium; and I say that in full knowledge of the abhorrent, hopelessly naive things he thinks about most people on earth (and says just a couple pages down in this interview). He's been a great inspiration to me, not just in his singleminded devotion to his craft but in his teaching impulse -- and I really do think that with all its faults, for all its eventual moral repugnance, Cerebus is the Great Work of the comics medium so far. Whatever that means.

Anyway, neat quote, I thought.

Obamaguts.

Some guy:

I appreciate the slim possibility of this happening, but would the activist left now please shut the fuck up about what a coward President Obama is. He may have just kissed off a few swing states--and in the kick-off to a presidential reelection campaign, it doesn't get any gutsier than that.

Some Sullivan:

impossible to believe that marriage and inclusion in their own families was possible for them, so crushed were they by the weight of social and religious pressure. I think of all those in the plague years shut out of hospital rooms, thrown out of apartments, written out of wills, treated like human garbage because they loved another human being. I think of Frank Kameny. I think of the gay parents who now feel their president is behind their sacrifices and their love for their children.

Still the cutest.

Thinking of reading the 'Fifty Shades' trilogy? Don't!

Its problems include but are not limited to:

• Utterly juvenile depiction of D/s relationship
• Lost-style trauma-psych backstory nonsense
• Horrific dialogue, description
• Miserable, repetitive sex
• 'Commentary' on Twilight's self-abnegating abuse-fetishism that swerves right into pure, unadulterated, unself-conscious self-abnegating abuse-fetishism -- this is the really bad part, the unforgivable part, the part where an ostensibly grown woman (a mom!) wrote yet another novel about how it's OK if some bastard works out his trust issues by destroying your life, as long as he's hot hot hot and (by the way) super-rich and secretly the nicest most caring little snuggly-bear Secret Victim in all the land
• Oh, and she can't write American English for shit

Why are these bottom-scraping shitbrained books popular? For the same reason adults read Twilight.

Good for 'E.L. James' for making a buck off her self-published novel -- and for turning it into millions of gullible-publisher dollars, a fine scam -- but folks, please spare yourself the agony. If it's pornos you're after, stop by Good Vibrations; they've got plenty of this stuff around, only not (all) shit.