"From Her Ashes Risen"

While she's been part of the X-Men books from the beginning, she rarely gets stories or treatment in general to match her teammates. She doesn't make an easy metaphor for male adolescent aggression, or struggles with relinquishing a sense of control. In fact, for most of her history she's been relegated to facilitating those metaphors. There's really only one big story she's known for, granted it's one of the two or three most important storylines in the history of the series. Still, Jean Grey, or Marvel Girl, or Phoenix is mostly known for being the rope in a romantic tug of war. Like most Marvel heroines of the Silver Age she was subjected to unfortunate moments like this:

Note that Professor X has his hands in the pimpin' formation. 

"Back to the Batnipples" or "The Neon of Batman"

 If anything or things are remembered about Joel Schumacher's oeuvre in the Bat-movies, they tend to be these.

Thus begins our descent into the underworld.

Magneto, and How He Works.

So we talked about Professor X. I outlined the various reasons I, and others, find the comparisons between  Professor Xavier and Magneto, and Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X problematic. This isn't to say that it is entirely a mistake to evoke historical figures in the construction of the two characters. I linked Professor X to the likes St. Francis Xavier, and people like Carl Sagen who preached a "gospel" of secular humanism and scientific progress. Likewise, I do think there are a number of  historical figures that can be drawn upon to inform Magneto's character.

   

Back to the Batcave Part 2

And we're back.

When we left off, Batman was drugged at the wheel, and Robin's demise seemed eminent.

Now the concluding episode: Smack in the Middle

Act I

Space Medicine: Back to the Batcave

Since 1938 Batman has been adapted to the changing tastes of pop culture. In the thirties and forties he was a pulp detective/vigilante, in the eighties he was the reactionary answer to crime and urban blight, and in the late sixties he adapted to the tastes of that generation as well. In 1966 ABC began airing Batman two nights a week. Unfortunately, for complicated legal reasons, none of the series has been released in a home video format. Fortunately, some guy on YouTube called FanOfBats has a bunch of episodes online. Many people object to the series for not taking Batman seriously or just for being silly. Silly is a matter of taste. As for not taking Batman seriously, I suspect it's really a fairly recent phenomena for fans to take Batman seriously. It probably doesn't go much further back than the mid to late seventies. However, even if we are taking Batman seriously, it's a mistake to try and act like such a significant portion of Batman's cultural history just didn't happen. No matter what box one tries to fit Batman into he's bound to escape sooner or later, and then you find that you've been in his box all along.

Instead of selective amnesia, as if there's been some kind of traumatic Bat-molestation that can't, musn't, be remembered, I propose embracing the thing with all its campy deconstruction of the super hero story and off-putting attempt to be humorous, and seeing if there's actually anything we can learn from the thing.

Thus I present the full pilot episode Hi Diddle Riddle.

Act I

More Thoughts on Thoughts

Just noticed a blog entry by Eddie Campbell from about four months back with some similar thoughts about the dearth of thought balloons in modern comics.

http://eddiecampbell.blogspot.com/2011/07/fter-yesterdays-post-about-upcoming.html

Professor X-savior?

Everyone knows the head, and we do mean head, honcho of the X-Men. Professor X is the ultimate teacher/mentor. We know he's a benevolent tyrant at the head of all X related projects, when he isn't presumed dead or on sabbatical. He has to be a goodie, Patrick Stewart played him for gosh sake. A lot of people, Stan Lee among them, make a natural leap and paint the Professor as a Martin Luther King Jr. stand in. It's a bit problematic, especially when you take into account who his opposite number is supposedly meant to stand in for. It may be more useful to think of Xavier and that other guy (More on him at a later date.) along religious lines, rather than as a stand ins for real historical figures. Xavier representing a gospel of accord, mutual benefit, and belief in the invisible world that links all be they mutant, human, or alien, as for Magneto, well, we'll get to him when we get to him. It's right there in his title, he professes.

Heck Xavier, mutant not saint, already sports a halo of sorts in quite a bit of the promotional art.