Posts Tagged ‘Dark Age of Comics’
Elite Saturday Links Enter CANAVAN at Checkout for 20% Off
* A version of this xkcd has been running continually in my brain for two years.
* February 26-27 at Duke University: Pleasure and Suspicion: An Interdisciplinary Conference.
* Open access SFFTV! A special issue on The X-Files from 2013.
* Louisiana universities are facing the largest midyear cut in state history, Governor John Bel Edwards said in a televised speech last Thursday. Even if the Legislature can find additional revenue, higher education will need to cut $42 million this year. Louisiana’s total higher education budget is $769 million, and if the Legislature cannot raise more revenue, higher education could face a $200 million cut.
* RIP, Umberto Eco. What Is Harper Lee’s Legacy After Go Set a Watchman?
* The New Inquiry reviews The Witness.
* The Slow Violence of Climate Change.
* At LARoB: How should we periodize comics?
* I’d been talking just yesterday to a student from my Lives of Animals class about the urban legends involving pigs and pig corpses and the war on terror. I said something like “No politician who wanted a national reputation would talk this way, though. Well, maybe Trump.” And lo, it came to pass.
* Steve Martin Performed Stand-Up Last Night for the First Time in 35 Years.
* Chinese travel blogger likes Chicago but loves Milwaukee. Endorsed!
* ‘Black Sludge’ Pours Out Of Texas Town’s Faucets Days After FBI Arrests Nearly Every City Official.
* The Shocking Truth of the Notorious Milgram Obedience Experiments.
The trouble was that this zombie-like, slavish obedience that Milgram described wasn’t what he’d observed.
* Hero K is the Highly Anticipated New Novel by Don DeLillo. I’m in.
* Half The World Will Be Short-Sighted By 2050? Half of America will be freelancers by 2020?
* In an email to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shortly after the U.N. Security Council in March 2011 authorized military intervention in Libya, a former senior State Department official praised her achievement in “turning POTUS around on this.” Meanwhile, America Is Now Fighting a Proxy War with Itself in Syria. So that means we can’t lose, right?
* And elsewhere in smart battles wisely chosen: St. Louis Archbishop Urges Priests To Cut Ties With The Girl Scouts.
* In her new book, Elaine Frantz Parsons re-traces the origins of the 19th-century KKK, which began as a social club before swiftly moving to murder.
* Proposals for new chess pieces.
* Reds in Space: Socialist Science Fiction.
* Beloved: The Best Horror Novel the Horror Genre Has Never Claimed. That’s something I talk about a lot when I teach the novel.
* Seems like a lowball: Husbands create 7 hours of extra housework a week.
* The weirdest, best photos I found in an old Bernie Sanders archive. Arrest photo of young activist Bernie Sanders emerges from Tribune archives. Footage Shows 21-Year-Old Bad Boy Bernie Sanders Being Arrested at a Protest.
* Clay Shirky: social media turned Dems, GOP into host organisms for third party candidates.
* Bloomberg yes! Bloomberg no!
* Also at Boing Boing: Forced arbitration clauses are a form of wealth transfer to the rich.
* The Guardian reports on an accusation by a former Muskegon County, Michigan health official claiming that a Catholic healthcare provider forced five women between August 2009 and December 2010 to undergo dangerous miscarriages by giving them no other option.
* The Singularity’s all right: A 19-year-old made a free robot lawyer that has appealed $3 million in parking tickets.
* We already knew Doc Brown was a monster, but how deep does the rabbit hole go?
* Financialization and the end of journalism.
* “on a scale of luke skywalker to jaime lannister…”
* The universe may have existed forever, according to a new model that applies quantum correction terms to complement Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The model may also account for dark matter and dark energy, resolving multiple problems at once.
* Elsewhere on the deep time beat: What sparked the Cambrian explosion?
* The Warriors’ Odds Of Going 73-9. Written before last night’s loss.
* This one misses me, but it may help some of you feel better: Coffee May Reduce The Damage Alcohol Does To Your Liver.
* This one’s a real emotional roller coaster: Chimp Abandoned On Island Welcomes Rescuers With Open Arms.
* From the SMBC archives: Lucy, the football, and existential dread.
* And they said my work was useless.
“Heroes and Villains” Event Tomorrow at Duke!
Very sorry for the late notice, but I wanted to mention I’ll be speaking at Duke tomorrow as part of a comics series Perkins Library is hosting. I’ll be talking about the evolution of the superhero. Perhaps I’ll see you…
Heroes, Villains, and the Dark Age of Comics
Presented by Gerry Canavan, Ph.D. Candidate in Literature
Tuesday, February 14
4:30pm
Perkins 217
Heroes and Villains in Comic Book History, and Heroes of Comic Book Collecting
Presented by Will Hansen, Assistant Curator of Collections (Rubenstein Library) and Edwin Murray, Collection Donor
Tuesday, February 21
4:00pm
Perkins 217
Do-It-Yourself Comics—Concepts & Techniques (WORKSHOP)
Presented by Bill Fick, Visiting Professor in Art, Art History, & Visual Studies
Wednesday, February 22
7:00pm
Perkins 218
Mark your calendar to attend the big event itself!
Heroes and Villains: The Library Party
Friday, February 24
9:00pm to Midnight
Perkins Library
The Dark Knight
If The Dark Knight is the greatest superhero movie of all time—and I think it probably is—it is entirely on the back of Heath Ledger’s immaculate turn as the Joker. Ledger is utterly, utterly, utterly perfect in this role—so perfect in fact that it is impossible to imagine either anyone else ever playing the Joker or any other villain stepping in to carry a sequel.
(Who’s even still on the bench at this point? The Penguin? Riddler? King Tut? Catwoman can’t carry a movie all by herself. The best bet, it seems to me, would be to go forward with the long-teased Batman vs. Superman project; it’d be something of a genre mismatch for the Christian Bale franchise, but at least it’d spare us all another round of movie nonsense with the highly overrated Riddler.)
There’s no question about it: Ledger’s performance is simply stunning. His sociopathic Joker is so good that it’s hard to say that the movie is actually enjoyable to watch—I feel exhausted after seeing it, disturbed and just a little bit broken. In this sense The Dark Knight isn’t really a superhero movie at all, but a horror movie, a slasher flick, and really—with Ledger so famously dead by suicide* just after shooting—a snuff film. As David Denby put the point in the New Yorker:
When Ledger wields a knife, he is thoroughly terrifying (do not, despite the PG-13 rating, bring the children), and, as you’re watching him, you can’t help wondering—in a response that admittedly lies outside film criticism—how badly he messed himself up in order to play the role this way. His performance is a heroic, unsettling final act: this young actor looked into the abyss.
This is in all respects an astoundingly dark movie that’s hardly suitable for adults, much less children. And if The Dark Knight doesn’t quite possess the necessary sense of self-awareness to be the Watchmen of superhero film, it may well be its Dark Knight Returns (wiki)—or, perhaps more directly, the story from which it draws its most direct inspiration, Alan Moore’s definitive Joker story, The Killing Joke (wiki).
What Moore gets, of course, is what the film is only able to hint at: the extent to which Batman and the Joker (to mix my supervillain metaphors) are two sides of the same coin. It is not just that they are both insane, but that they are both equally insane and insane in exactly the same way—just in opposite directions.
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* Abe rightly points out in the comments that Ledger’s death by overdose probably wasn’t a suicide. Obviously I’m not watching enough entertainment television.
Batman, Superman of Planet X
This pair of scans_daily posts are by themselves a nearly complete lesson in just what superhero comics have become in the so-called Dark Age—incredibly dark, yes, but also deeply layered and remarkably postmodern. Grant Morrison’s current story on the Batbooks requires at least a passing familiarity with the entire sixty-nine-year history of the franchise to make much sense, including long-abandoned plot points like the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh and Bat-Mite and a rather advanced understanding of meta-concepts like continuity and canonicity.
These features, to varying degrees, dominate the major creative output of both DC and Marvel, and have for at least a decade, though Grant Morrison’s comics are certainly near the top of the curve.
Personally I think this sort of labyrinthine narrative complexity is always unequivocably wonderful, but opinions on this point definitely vary.
Gerry Canavan 
