Two episodes again this week, because we love to talk about comics. And sometimes we say stuff about "Punisher: Butterfly" and "Girl Comics" and "First Wave." We court controversy by daring to criticize one of those comics. Bold, we are.Oh, and I pimp "Project Rooftop 2.0," because I'm all over that.
And, other stuff.
LISTEN: Splash Page Podcast 7.1!
I think we criticised more than one of those books... or was criticising one of them specifically courting controversy?
ReplyDeleteBoth! (I don't know what I'm saying.)
ReplyDeleteHere or when we're recording the podcast? (OH!)
ReplyDeleteAwesome as always, and i wouldnt blame it all on the kids, people in general are pretty stupid.
ReplyDeleteDK
Hey Chad and Tim.
ReplyDeleteEnjoying the podcasts a lot.
Two things: I think it was Tim who was talking about "Where the Wild Things Are" and his take was that the movie was about leadership.
When friends and I saw it during its theatrical release, we all had slightly different views of the movie. And I think that's what made the movie magical.
For myself, the movie was about Max accepting all the sad, angry and sometimes bad aspects of himself.
I saw each wild thing as an aspect of Max (or of his life) that he had to learn to embrace: his mother/sister who goes away and has a strange relationship he can't understand; the child who wants it all and is quick to anger; the lonely boy who just wants to be loved.
What I loved about the film: it took me inside a little boy's mind and showed me all the worries and hope that can exist there.
So for me it wasn't so much about leadership and growing up as it was a story about a boy's journey as he learns to recognize and accept himself and the people around him.
And, because the first comment was so dang lengthy...
ReplyDeleteIn 7.2 you guys talked about sports and comics, the analogy of the "Big Game" and the gathering of a team as it prepares for its big game in what I would call a Super (Bowl) Confrontation.
The example I came up was this...
And it's almost like Olympics hockey: lots of smaller battles have to take place in order to be ready for the final war...
Seven Soldiers by Grant Morrison.
The heroes meet in #0 and get wiped out by their enemy (a la "Any Given Sunday").
The team is re-built (although in 7S the players never realize they are part of a team) over 28 issues -- which be like the team being gathered in "The Longest Yard" and most sports movies.
Each potential player has to train, develop and learn about themselves before they are accepted and ready (can I go out of my way and say "Bull Durham" and "Dodgeball"?)
But they don't know who the enemy really is, much like "Eight Men Out".
And in the final issue -- which, of course (and with lots of irony) is issue #1 -- the new team is finally prepared to take to the field and defeat the enemy in a battle that has been brewing for 29 issues.
Seven Soldiers: the ultimate sports movie of comic books.
Kevin:
ReplyDelete(a) you are wrong! Where the Wild Things Are is about what I say it's about! Period. I mean, exclamation point!
(b) I may be wrong when I said you were wrong.
(c) Seven Soldiers IS the ultimate sports movie in comics. It's a story about the New York Mets, who never seem to realize they are not individuals, but, rather, part of a
team.
(d) I wonder if Morrison ever watches any sports. I've never seen him mention it, though there is that football (soccer) reference in Club of Heroes that JHW3 drew as a rugby reference, which means one of them doesn't know sports very well.
I would read a Morrison curling comic.
ReplyDeleteScott Pilgrim has that sorta "sports" theme. Each volume the protagonist has to face a new enemy or two, and he knows the total number of these confrontations he'll have to overcome in order to reach a goal.
ReplyDeleteI also feel I should mention the X-Men baseball scenes. It seems to me that most of those only lasted a few pages and, consequently, only one or two plays. Seems like most of what we ever got to see was how someone cheated or whatever. I also remember Wolverine puncturing a basketball thrown by Gambit at some point.
Great discussion on what you guys learned from comics. Tim's was kind of a cop-out answer, though (not that I don't agree with him). I mean, I think most careful readers have learned a LOT about the nature of reality and/or literature and/or fiction and/or existence. But that's not really the sort of "life lessons" that I think the question was aiming at.
To answer the question myself, I think I learned a lot about the bad effects of prejudice and intolerance from many of Chris Claremont's X-Men and New Mutants stories.
And from Morrison's X-Men, in a way, I've also learned about comic readers' own unacknowledged prejudices. By that I'm referring to how a lot of supposed X-Men fans dislike certain characters in Morrison's run, like Beak or the female Angel, basically because they're physically ugly and emotionally frail characters. This is hypocrisy, though, because acceptance and tolerance of people who are different is the whole point of the X-Men. Morrison finally gave Xavier's school an adequate amount of mutants who didn't look like rich supermodels (Matt Fraction could learn from this). I certainly felt a lot of empathy for these characters, but it's sad for me to note that many other readers didn't, for no good reason.
"Tim's was kind of a cop-out answer, though (not that I don't agree with him). I mean, I think most careful readers have learned a LOT about the nature of reality and/or literature and/or fiction and/or existence. But that's not really the sort of "life lessons" that I think the question was aiming at."
ReplyDeleteThe nature of reality and/or existence is a cop-out answer???? It's the ONLY answer, my friend.
(4 days later, I still don't have a better one, either.)
Tim, were there ever moments in your family life where you thought or even said something like "That's like that time in Spider-Man, when..." or "Wolverine was right, ...".
ReplyDeleteAnd by the way, you mentioned that you cut out several talks about movies and stuff. I guess in this special case it was just stuff that wasn't meant to be broadcast either way, but I wouldn't mind if you'd talk about other media like books, movies, TV (but not music). Especially in that situation where you said that you don't have many learned life lessons from comics but from movies and books, I'd be really interested what books, movies etc that was.
What's wrong with discussing music? Other than, I assume, Tim's horrible taste in it... wait, what music DOES Tim like? Thanks for a topic we'll be sure to discuss on Friday!
ReplyDelete