People tell me I'm white, and I believe them, because I own a lot of Jimmy Buffet albums

As most anyone who follows comics knows, a major area of debate and speculation is the issues-vs.-collected trade/graphic novel issue. What's better for sales? How does each format affect the creators' approach? Can a series be fairly evaluated in individual issues when the reader has limited information? What's most fun to read? Would the culture of Wednesdays die if pamphlets did? And wocka wocka, etc. In general I can go either and/or both ways, as I love reading whole stories at once as much as I love the suspense and anticipation of new stuff every week. But this week, a few measly panels in Wolverine #67 convinced me of why, while some stories may lose some of their momentum and cohesion in individual issue form (coughgrantmorrisoncough), we can never let monthlies die:




If you're reading this series, you know that this is the second issue in an arc that takes place 50 years in the future--in some catastrophic event around our current time, the supervillains kicked the crap out of the heroes for good and now rule the U.S., which has regressed to some kind of Wild Westish scenario. Something terrible happened to Wolverine in that old conflict, so terrible that he hasn't popped his claws since and is now an avowed pacifist with a family in Sacramento. He's also dead broke and can't make rent, so his old buddy, a now ancient and blind Hawkeye, hires him to accompany him on a delivery road trip of as-yet-unknown purposes. Along the way, we learn in the panels above that Hawkeye has been married at least three times, and that his third ex-wife is Peter Parker's youngest daughter. And we meet her. And she's black.

This is the second to last page of the issue, and the concern is for Clint and Tonya's runaway daughter, and Tonya's race is not addressed nor would it make any sense if it were. The fact alone that she's black doesn't make a tit of difference, of course, but that one visual decision is sort of a stroke of storytelling genius on Mark Millar's part. By making Spider-Man's future daughter half African American, Millar isn't just saying "Peter slept with a black chick"-- he's saying "You think you know what happens in the Marvel Universe? You don't know shit, and I'm building a universe that you can and should have big questions about."

Now of course I'm not saying that it's some kind of crazy shocking idea that Peter Parker would have fathered a child with a black woman, after all the answer could be as simple as revealing that he manages to get together with the current object of his secret lust in Amazing Spider-Man (Harry Osborn's girlfriend Lily Hollister). And maybe there is no answer--maybe Millar will leave it open as a non-issue. But no matter how progressive or "color-blind" readers may claim or hope to be, there's no way Tonya doesn't register as a "hrr?" And Millar knows that, whether he chooses to make a story of it or not. Part of me hopes he doesn't, because then it's like "oh did you think that was going to be important? Why the hell do you care?"

But the truth is, if Tonya had been white, I probably would have assumed that her mother was Mary Jane or some other random Peter Parker girlfriend, or I wouldn't have cared or thought about it at all. Now, because I can't help thinking about it, I'm nudged to think about other things--who survived the epic battled and who died? Peter obviously didn't die at that point, where is he now? Were he and other heroes fundamentally changed like Logan? This future society seems to have regressed to an earlier time physically and economically--have social attitudes rolled back as well?

And this, to me, is where the value of releasing 22 pages at a time comes in (in case you thought I forgot what I started talking about). If written poorly, an individual issue of a series doesn't stand well out of context and needs the books on either side of it to work. If written competently, an issue in a series makes sense on its own while fostering anticipation for the next installment. And if written brilliantly, an individual issue will leave you satisfied and surprised and up to speed, while also letting you know that you potentially have a whole lot to learn--maybe everything is as it seems, maybe it isn't, but you have a nice long time to take it all in. And if you wanted to take it all in tonight before you go to bed, tough shit, you have to wait. But you'll appreciate it more when you do.

Top 20!

So I made a hypothetical comment below about "if I were to compile a list of my 20 favorite runs."

And within seconds of my fingers lifting off the keys, my brain kicked into gear, as the brain of a comic fan always does when presented with such an idea, and I decided to compile a list of my 20 favorite runs.

This list is not even remotely final or complete or even correct. (I probably have a few creators wrong.) But working off the top of my head at 2 in the morning last night, here's what I came up with.

New Warriors V1 Nicieza/Robinson
Avengers V2 Busiek/Perez
Ex Machina BKV/Harris
Runaways BKV/others
Y The Last Man BKV/Guerra
Daredevil Bendis/Maleev?
Ult. Spider Man Bendis/Bagley
Planetary Ellis/Cassaday
Warlock Starlin
Defenders Gerber/???
Ult FF Ellis/Immonnen, (Ellis/Kubert?)
Animal Man Morrison/???
New X-Men Morrison/Quitely
52 Morrison, etc.
Sentinel McKeever
Ultimates 1&2 Millar/Hitch
Fables Willingham/Buckingham
Ult. Galactus Trilogy - Ellis
Marvels Busiek Ross
Birds of Prey Simone

I figured I'd post the list here in its outline/barebones/incorrect form, and do a little series of posts tracking the changes until I get to my final list. Obviously there's a lot more modern stuff in here, because I've read a lot more modern stuff.

And besides. Why the hell not? I've got a comic blog. This is what comic blogs are for.

Cultural Anthropology 101, Spring 2078

Good morning class, I trust you all had a nice semester break, particularly those of you who went on the senior trip to the sun and sand of Northern Michigan--it's nice there are some places temperate enough to expose the skin to outdoor air, eh? Hope you stayed sober enough to remember to put on the ol' SPF 1200! Hur hur.

Anyhoo, now that you're safe back here in the University Dome, I thought we'd pick up where we left off in our discussion of turn-of-the-century literature and what it can tell us about the culture of the time. All literature is best understood in the context of its moment in history, of course, although some works, for example Ulysses, Wuthering Heights, Bridget Jones's Diary, The Da Vinci Code, etc. have a timelessness that establishes them in Western canon. It can be harder, however, to interpret and appreciate the everyday fiction that is steeped in immediate cultural references, references that would have been perfectly clear to readers at the time but which are now dated and obscure.

For example, we will look today at the graphic periodical Kick-Ass by Mark Millar and artist John Romita, Jr., which debuted in February 2008 with an issue absolutely filled with up-to-the-minute pop cultural references that undoubtedly made for knowing humor, albeit for no more than a few years after its publication. Comic books (what you know today as "sequential screens") of that age were not all culturally cryptic--some going back as far as 150 years are dominated by straightforward action sequences that, despite quaint language and an awkward-to-read physical paper format, are relatively comprehensible to the modern reader. But while the references in Kick-Ass gave it a remarkably short shelf-life of relevance, investigating them can help us explore the tastes and interests of society at that particular instant.

Kick-Ass, as I'm sure you know because I assigned it for the break, snicker, takes place in "our world" of the time--that is to say a world with superhero stories but without actual super-powered beings, as our earth was before the genome advances of the 2030s. The protagonist, an average teenager and comic book fan, takes it upon himself to emulate his fictional heroes and fight crime in a costume. Throughout, we encounter the cultural references that would pervade the mind of an adolescent boy of his time, upon which I will now shed the light of my years of historical and anthropological research:

"That wasn't me, by the way. That was just some Armenian guy with a history of mental health problems who read about me in the New York Post."
Founded in 1801, the Post was what was known as "the paper of record," defined as the pinnacle of American journalistic standards until the print newspaper industry shuttered under the Google Acts of 2017. The Post was particularly known for its concise headlines, lauded for summarizing breaking news with an accuracy that often precluded the need to read the actual text.

"I liked Scrubs, Stereophonics, the Goo Goo Dolls and Entourage. Snow Patrol, Heroes and the movies of Ryan Reynolds."
Scrubs: A critically acclaimed television (non-web broadcast) show about the medical and personal drama of a hospital staff--again, before the genome advances. It starred popular actors George Clooney and Zac Effron.

Stereophonics: "Phonics" was an educational program that focused on teaching children to read through sound association with letters. This program, when delivered via stereo headphones (iBuds) was known as Stereophonics.

Goo Goo Dolls: An acclaimed rock band formed in 1971 in New York City, associated with the early punk rock era. Members included David Johansen and Sylvain Sylvain, and a major hit was 1982's "Hot Hot Hot."

Entourage: An electronic mail program developed for Macintosh personal computers to mirror Microsoft's Outlook.

Snow Patrol: A 2002 family film starring Cuba Gooding, Jr. and a team of trained Siberian Huskies.

Heroes: Long sandwiches, sometimes also known at the time as "Subs" or "Hoagies." You know them as "Toyotas."

Ryan Reynolds: The director of Snow Patrol.

"Kick in my bedroom door and you would probably have found me downloading my favorite television show or jerking off to my biology teacher."
In the late 20th and early 21st century, content on the internet was stored in a separate location from someone's personal computer or device--the OmniServer was not yet in place. "Downloading" was the method by which content was transfered for use. "Jerking off" was a slang term for "being overly complementary to for personal gain."

"Galactus as a dust cloud? C'mon man, that costume's a classic. People would have pissed themselves if they'd seen him on the Baxter Building in that big purple helmet."
A reference to Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, a film adaptation of the Fantastic Four comic book series. The character Galactus was an ultra-powerful mutant, able to control metal with his mind, and known for wearing a large purple helmet.

"Man, I still can't believe how good Whedon's X-Men is. This stuff makes Buffy look like shit... and I say that as the world's numero uno Buffy maniac."
Wil Whedon was a child actor, known first for his role in the 1986 film Stand By Me, who later starred in the X-Men film franchise as well as the television show Buffy the Teenage Witch. Before the Spanish language was outlawed, "numero uno" was the equivalent of the slang term "who wants pizza?" meaning "absolute".

"Does everything have to be about money? Jesus man, why do people want to be Paris Hilton and nobody wants to be Spider-Man?"
Paris Hilton was an accomplished singer who worked her way from poverty to pop superstardom, writing her first hit song on a napkin in a coffee shop as a divorced single mother on UK public assistance. Spider-Man, of course, was the fictional superhero character who inspired the current real Spider-Man to splice his DNA with a spider's as part of the second wave of genome experiments.

"I didn't do a lot of crime-fighting in those first few weeks. But there was a lot of posing on the roof and balancing on walls as I got used to the wet suit I picked up on eBay."
eBay was an online clearinghouse for paraphernalia from the films Bad Boys, Armageddon and Transformers one through eight, among others. This protagonist may have been inspired by a character from one of those films, and took pains to procure an appropriate costume.

"I was feeling so good about myself I hadn't even looked at internet porn for close to seven weeks."
Yes, this is a bit like saying "apple apple juice"--but there used to be other avenues for obtaining porn.

So as you can see, despite the tediousness of such research, close investigation of historical cultural references can greatly aid not only in understanding a text, but in understanding the world from which our own society developed. If there are any questions, please feel free to fly to the front of the class. Don't be shy now.