На всякий случай: если я на что-то ссылаюсь или что-то цитирую, это ещё не значит, что я с эим согласна.
БэтменБэтмен:
The Gayness of Batman: A Brief History - статья-ответ на сказанное Грантом Моррисоном про Бэтмена и гомосексуальность.
ВыдержкиВыдержки:
You may ask how one can talk about "gayness" as a concept distinct from sexuality. That's a perfectly good question, but it has a simple answer. Our culture has not always been comfortable presenting the realities of sexuality, but it has always found ways to explore its fascination with manifestations of sexuality. The cultural markers associated with being gay were fair currency for fiction even when talking about gay people was not, and thus gayness, with all its broad strokes and stereotypes, was detached from sexuality, with all its nuance and diversity.
...
In retrospect we can see the alarmist fear-of-otherness in Wertham's condemnations. His patients were not older men trying to prey on ephebic youths; they were youths who idolized and sexualized the older Batman. It was no more deviant behavior than an adolescent male today fantasizing about Adriana Lima or Irina Shayk.
...
The common view of Batman's world presents women as at best a distraction and at worst a threat. That's not to say that he doesn't have female love interests, but he doesn't have a Lois Lane. Characters like Vicki Vale and Silver St. Cloud may help reaffirm his heterosexuality, but they also reaffirm his commitment to his cause, and though Talia al Ghul can give Batman a son, they will never form a family unit. Batman has no time for the conventional heternormativity that he lost when his parents were killed.
...
Though Frank Miller may wish it, sublimation and romantic failure are not the elements of Batman's character that make him heterosexual. Word of God at DC Comics is what makes him heterosexual. His gayness comes from the fact that he's screwed up about it.
...
He is both camp and butch; repressed and sexualized; erotically fetishistic and homoerotically anti-feminine.
Travis Langley: Getting Inside Batman's Head - Трэвис Лэнгли, доктор наук и преподаватель психологии в Henderson State University, рассказывает о том, что же именно сподвигло его на написание книги "Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight", и рассказывает о том, что же именно, по его профессиональному мнению, не так с Брюсом Уэйном и прочими жителями Готэма. Интервью довольно старое, но пусть будет, к тому же книга в любом случае выходит только в июне.
ВыдержкиВыдержки:
He's the superhero with no superpowers. His origin taps into a primal fear that we all understand, but even before that origin, his creators Bob Kane and Bill Finger invested our primal fears in his very look. They created a hero we could all imagine might exist in real life -- no secret formula, magic ring or rocket to Earth required. He's the part of us that wants to scare life's bullies away. Most of his enemies have no superpowers either. They're all defined by their behaviors, their personalities.
...
Even a psychotic person can be sane, contradictory as that might sound. Here's how I put it in my chapter on Arkham: "If your friend tells you to shoot your next door neighbor, you know that it's wrong, you shouldn't do it and you need some better friends. If a hallucinatory elephant tells you to shoot your neighbor, you might still know that it's wrong, you shouldn't do it, and you need some better elephants. Friend or elephant, you're still sane."
One of Batman’s Most Convoluted Plans to Protect His Secret ID Ever - эти странные, странные, странные старые комиксы. Радужный Бэтмен!!!
Чудо-ЖенщинаЧудо-Женщина:
Bound to End: Wonder Woman #28 - круглый стол, посвященный Wonder Woman #28 - последнему комиксу серии, написанному самим Марстоном. Внутри, помо материалов самого круглого стола, ссылки на довольно любопытные старые статьи Ноя Берлатски по Чудо-Женщину.
ВыдержкиВыдержки:
So how do female villains square with the idea that woman are superior — and superior precisely because they are peaceful and loving? What are all these peaceful, loving women doing running around trying to drop rocks on each other?
...
Marston might as well be saying, “Hey, girls, you can do anything — even have torture/rape fantasies! Just like men!
...
Marston villainesses — in skin tight outfits and showing lots of skin — are clearly meant to be sexy. And he’s not adverse to having one or the other of them seduce Steve on occasion. But, unlike Azzarello’s Amazons, Marston’s villains are less likely use sex to gain the upper hand, and more likely to simply outgun, outfight, and outthink their male opponents. They don’t need to be shaped by male fantasies in order to be powerful.
...
The obvious feature that Wonder Woman has in common with Plastic Man and Captain Marvel is that they’re all light-hearted. Certainly, Wonder Woman has a heavy intellectual foundation in Marston’s
...
Apologists try to gloss over this with a range of euphemisms. These comics are “lively”, “boisterous”, “crudely energetic”, “charming”, “rough and tumble”. Behold the soft bigotry of low expectations. To euphemize thus is to insult the genuine comic artistry that you could find in the funny pages at that time, or the decades beforehand. The 30s and 40s, after all, were a genuine golden age for comic strips; even if we limit ourselves to adventure continuities, there’s Terry and the Pirates followed by Steve Canyon, Thimble Theatre, Prince Valiant, Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy followed by Buz Sawyer, Mickey Mouse, Alley Oop, Dick Tracy, Li’l Abner, The Spirit and probably others that I’m forgetting. Show me a single page from Action or Detective Comics that is equal to anything in any of those strips and I’ll eat my words. Hell, I’ll eat every single word in this goddamn post.
...
My thought here — and, as I say, I offer it very tentatively — is that it’s no coincidence that the better superhero comics from the 30s and 40s have had generally shitty afterlives with later artists, but that the most influential and long-lasting comics — viz. Batman and Superman — had shitty beginnings. Whatever it was that made Batman and Superman popular, it was absolutely, utterly, definitely, assuredly, etceterally in no way whatsoever the artistic or narrative skills of their creators. Those guys couldn’t write or draw for shit.
Why I Shouldn’t Be Allowed To Write Wonder Woman - про то, как можно сделать амазонок Темискирии, а с ними и Диану, заметно интереснее и актуальнее, никого при этом не убивая.
ВыдержкиВыдержки:
See, the thing about Diana is that people keep giving her angst (for lack of a better term) that’s wrong for her character. And she could use a little darkness. A lot of characters have benefited from it.
...
Amazons being perfect feminist angels works from a thematic standpoint, but speaking from a dramatic point of view, if they’re going to be a continuing presence in Wondy’s life, they need to be more complex—i.e. flawed.
...
What I’m getting at is that whatever Diana’s preaching to “Man’s World,” if it has any basis in Amazonian society, then it’s either as workable as Captain Picard telling us all to just feed the poor with food from our replicator, or as simplistic as saying “Can’t we all just get along?” (Well, no.) Diana is basically a woman of unbelievable privilege, going to a third world country and ‘fixing things’ by making it more like her own, superior society. There are words for that. They don’t tend to be “incredibly brave and beneficial to everyone.”
Комиксы в сетиКомиксы в сети:
Thrillbent - онлайн-комиксы от Марка Уэйда. Ну, знаете, человека восемь лет писавшего про приключения Флэша, сценариста "Kingdom Come", текущего сценариста "Daredevil", этого парня. Иными словами, его новый проект - по умолчанию Событие. В настоящее время на сайте представлено два новых проекта: "Insufferable" - супергероическая комедийная драма, созданная в соавторстве с Питером Краузе, художником "Irredeemable", и "Luther" - историей про последствия зомби-апокалипсиса. Обещаны еженедельные обновления.
Just the First Frame - ссылка для ищущих новые интересные вебкомиксы. Первые кадры недавно обновившихся вебкомиксов, привлёкших внимание хозяина сайта.
Прочее интересноеПрочее интересное:
Jack Kirby: Hand of Fire Roundtable - организованный в связи с выходом книги Чарльза Хэтфилда "Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby" круглый стол, посвящённый творчеству Джэка Кирби (проще, право слово, перечислить тех из классических супергероев, к созданию которых он не имеет отношения). Крайне интересно и очень рекомендуется. Пока опубликованы две части, ожидается третья. Во второй части участники... ушли в дебри.
ВыдержкиВыдержки:
A key argument that Hatfield makes is that Kirby was a cartoonist, that almost all his drawings were done with narrative intent and need to be seen as storytelling rather than illustration. “The guiding idea behind Hand of Fire is that Kirby’s drawing is storytelling and that, conversely, his storytelling almost always used drawing, not scriptwriting, as its vehicle; the narrative and the drawing were coextensive, mutually animating and reinforcing, and inseparable. Kirby was a cartoonist (a word whose glory we have sacrificed in our haste to give respect to ‘comics creators’ and ‘graphic novelists’). Cartooning, as I define it, is emphatically not the same as illustrating a prior text; Kirby generated stories through drawing.”
...
Again, this approach seems like common sense but I’m wondering seeing Kirby through the prism of the superhero genre doesn’t diminish his originality as a genre mixer. Here’s another way of seeing Kirby: during the long apprenticeship of the Simon and Kirby years, he mastered the rules for the many genres he worked in and then in the 1960s he confidently started to splice these genres together to create a new meta-genre that was nominally superhero comics but actually had a much wider scope.
...
Kirby shot and stabbed Nazis for about six months in 1943 and 1944, and I would argue that experience didn’t just change his life but shaped his work from that moment forward, in that an underlying PTSD worldview took him places he wouldn’t have gone otherwise.
...
There’s an argument to be made that late-period Kirby is closer in spirit to Gary Panter and Lynda Barry than he is to Foster and Raymond — that is to say he’s a cartoonist interested more in abundant, florid mark-making and jungle-thick visual saturation than he is in representational accuracy.
...
...comics are a medium of stopped-and-framed narrative moments, of punctuated equilibria, to borrow a term from evolutionary science. And an art equally made, it can’t be emphasized enough, of the gaps or silences, abyssal vacancies, between. Film smooths, surrounds, and interpenetrates our sensorium — comics rupture it and force us to make constant on-the-spot repairs.
...
In a sense, Kirby and Spiegelman represent two opposite reactions to the Holocaust: Spiegelman’s instinct is to make make the Holocaust something that can be plausibly narrated by scaling it down into an animal fable (i.e. going down from a human level to the level of mice and cats) whereas Kirby achieved the difficult feat of making the Nazis even more grandiose and over-the-top than they were in real life (i.e. the Red Skull, Hydra and all the other totalitarian bullies Kirby created). But that’s what Kirby did: take all the bits and pieces of the world around him — historical events, personal experiences as well as the visual environment — and translate it into comic book terms.
...
It’s less a matter of what he or I think as “What would the Goyim think?” Thomas M. Disch once wrote an essay called “The Embarrassments of Science Fiction” about how the discomfort the childish aspects of the genre cause its more artistically ambitious practitioners. The embarrassments of comic books are the same thing with gold stars and oak leaf clusters.
...
The operatic emotions expressed in Jack Kirby’s comics apply only to the godlike creatures who have them. They are in the final analysis stories about characters with attributes that are impossible battling menaces that don’t exist.
...
The adults who initially come to produce this art might be craftsmen, or they might be technicians, or they might be hacks, but for some of them the material engages their creativity.
...
There are all sorts of reasons to question the superhero – not just for aesthetic reasons but also on political, emotional, and gender grounds.
Has "Before Watchmen" Controversy Affected Interest in the Prequels - результаты опроса на CBR: 56% ответили, что из-за скандала вокруг приквелов, покупать их хочется уже не так сильно.
20th Century Danny Boy - блог, где выложены документы, касающиеся юридических приключений в нашей любимой индустрии. Из свежего: банкротство Тодда МакФарлейна (и то, насколько именно к нему имеет отношение Нил Гейман) и Марвел против Кирби (кстати о).
Direct Message 02: Sleeper: Part One, Direct Message 02: Sleeper Part Two - Алек Берри и Чед Неветт беседуют о серии "Sleeper", в процессе создания которой Эда Брубэкер и Шон Филлипс окончательно стали командой, которой они являются сейчас.
ВыдержкиВыдержки:
Sleeper, because of its nature, slips into a very episodic structure that Point Blank avoids. There’s a throughline in Sleeper, sure, and it’s one that reminds me of TV. Point Blank is more a movie or novella, while Sleeper is a TV show. Ultimately, for telling a large story, I find that the former lends itself to a stronger structure than the latter, if only because the needs of telling semi-self-contained chunks of story isn’t there as much. I love that Brubaker made an effort for most issues of Sleeper to tell a complete story in every issue in some way, I just think that, when looking at the whole, that detracts in a way that Point Blank’s issue-by-issue structuring and pacing doesn’t.
...
love the way Sean Phillips approaches page compositions in Sleeper. I think that’s what I love most about the comic. The way he stacks panels on top of a page-large shot. That’s not a hard and fast rule, of course; he switches to straight linear compositions for the ‘origins game’ and some flashbacks. But, that approach to layouts is so different, such a unique way to build the visual look of the series. A bunch of small details that obscure the big picture. You can see glimpses of what lays beyond, just not the whole thing.
...
His pages here almost resemble the visual of a dossier - like someone threw a manila envelope full of shit onto a table and the possessions inside of it landed randomly in a pile. Which would back up the idea you mentioned … random bits of info lying beneath the surface.
...
‘Pulp’ does refer to a long, lost form of publishing and really doesn’t make up a genre, per say, but I think someone could make a case that the idea of pulps have transcended shitty magazines and moved on up to something similar to a state of mind or general aesthetic or vibe. Sleeper possesses that vibe of exploitation and melodrama, and there’s something about that feeding Sleeper this, I don’t know, almost cartoonish tone, in some ways.
И чистые развлеченияИ чистые развлечения:
The 6 Creepiest Sexual Encounters in Comic Book History - Крэээкд. Думаю, большинству уже название сайта говорит более чем достаточно. Для новичков: это (часто довольно условный) юмор в форме списка. На io9 в общем-то о том же самом написали заметно менее остроумно.
ВыдержкиВыдержки:
...comic books have mastered the art of finding new and creative ways of making sex bizarrely unappealing, even to people who read comic books.
...
It kind of makes you wonder if Superboy's last living act wasn't to place a wish for a threesome with a particularly cruel genie.
...
"Man, I sure am glad this obvious rapey sociopath knows my real identity."
Covered - художники "перерисовывают" старые обложки.
Quotes On Comics - Нажми ссылку - получишь цитату. Про комиксы.