The other day, my husband and I caught a trailer for The Expendables, which is the cinematic result of a mad scientist’s attempt to mix the mitochondrial DNA of every American action star from the 1980’s into a sweaty, tattooed, bulging-veined chimera. We first saw this trailer during Kick-Ass, and my comment at the time (aside from my ceaseless laughter, which I think unnerved a few of my fellow theatre-goers) was: “Wow! It’s like the ’80’s mated!” As usual, my husband had a more measured reaction: “No action movie can claim to be complete unless it has Sygourney Weaver.”
Which got me wondering: if someone made a movie like The Expendables with a cast of female action stars, what would it look like? Read the rest of this entry »
Note: My husband typed this during his usual comics-consumption time. If it was important enough to interrupt that, you should definitely read it.
This is Not a Digital Revolution
or
You Won’t Believe What Watching The Runaways Taught Me About the Fight Over Manga and DRM
In my last year of high school, I wrote an essay that used the French Revolution as a model to describe the fall of communism in the U.S.S.R. as a revolution. The realisation that all revolutions follow such a similar, and relatively simple basic pattern was one of those mind-opening moments that has stuck with me ever since. What does this have to do with anything? Maybe nothing, but I’m going somewhere with this, so stick with me for a few pages and see what happens.
Warning: the following contains spoilers for the endings of Cowboy Bebop, Fullmetal Alchemist, Neon Genesis: Evangelion, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Battlestar Galactica, LOST, Supernatural (current) and The Prisoner.
I’ve noticed an alarming trend in television finales, lately: God.
It didn’t give me the rush of pure awesome that Kick-Ass did, but it fell prey to exactly none of the problems I once imagined it would. Charlie Jane Anders is correct when she says that the greatest villain of the story is Tony Stark himself, but while for her this was a betrayal of the first film’s promise to Tony’s growth as a character, I found it a further development of that character. At an early point in the film, Tony refers to the suit as a “prosthetic,” and what rapidly becomes clear is that he is using it as such in his relationships. This movie is about the consequences of that behaviour.
There was a huge amount to accomplish in this glimpse of the Marvel cinema-verse, and Justin Theroux ticks off every box. The pacing suffers a little as a result, and it can be easy to lose track of what the stakes are, but if you keep in mind that it’s all about Tony, you’ll do fine. While the former film was about the redemption of Stark Industries and the possible future of the military-industrial complex, this one reminds us that changing one’s company does not equate changing oneself. Prosthetics only get us so far.
But you see, those people are wrong. Charlie Jane Anders brings up the important point that superhero films create a context for acceptable violence, but I think her argument, that this narrative frame is similar to the frame surrounding consensual harm in BDSM, needs refining and clarification. Moreover, the Silver Ager bemoaning of a seeming lack of moral centre in this film and other self-aware superhero films is, well, a whole lot of moaning and groaning and little else. Kick-Ass is almost painfully self-aware, yes. But it’s not morally bankrupt. The story makes a compelling statement about cowardice and fantasy, and the danger of both. And that statement is that fantasy can occasionally help us overcome cowardice, but that past a certain point it only serves to enable it. The film is full of cowards: not just the bystanders who see crimes unfolding and do nothing to stop them, but the men who send their children to fight their battles for them. And down to the last man, they all suffer for that act. It’s a neat, tidy statement to make in the context of two continuing wars. It just happens to come in the form of a really fun, bloody film.
I’m slowly figuring out the Tor.com backend. It may sound strange, but at this point I think I’ve worked with just about every major blogging platform there is at one time or another. (I should put that on a CV somewhere, now that I think of it.) Even so, I find that I write most of my posts (for everyone, not just Tor) in HTML. It’s just easier, once you know the tags. Not that I can do anything fancy, but for my purposes it suits.
One thing that’s really surprised me about my posting at Tor is the enthusiasm of the response. When I started, I was a little worried that no one would care. But no — people are commenting, and hauling out their DVD’s, and watching right along with me. Then again, this is Cowboy Bebop, a show everyone loves. (I know there are people out there who don’t get it — those people are psychopaths incapable of empathy.) The real test might come when I write about a show that doesn’t have such a firmly-established audience. Luckily, I have over twenty episodes between then and now to hone my skills.
Speaking of which, I’m really enjoying how re-watching each episode forces me to dissect the plot. I noticed it especially this time, but I hope it continues as a trend. One of the things my own stories get criticized for sometimes is their lack of apparent logic. The plot is clear to me, but not to other people. So hopefully this will prove a useful exercise for me in understanding the gestures of plot and how to clarify the links between events.
I’ve been fighting a cold all week, so there isn’t much more to say. I feel like I’ve spent the latter half of the week wrapped up in a fog, and I spent yesterday afternoon in class coughing and sneezing. I fell asleep last night at 9:30. 9:30. That didn’t even happen when I was a child. Clearly, there’s something wrong. I think it’s in everyone’s best interest if I just go back to bed and try to read until I can go to sleep.
It’s been really hard to sit on this news. I’ve only told a handful of people, so it feels really good to show this post off to everyone. For a post regarding a series I’ve watched over and over, it took a surprisingly long amount of time. Frequently, I found myself wanting to cram in another detail or observation, feeling frustrated that I couldn’t talk about everything that makes Bebop as wonderful with anything resembling efficiency or eloquence. Luckily, I have twenty-five more episodes and an OVA to continue commenting on, so hopefully my skills will improve.
Okay, so you want to read some manga online. Good on you. It’s a rewarding pursuit, engaged in by millions of readers globally, of all types. You’re sure to find something that suits you: manga about flying, manga about fighting, manga about fucking. Different brushstrokes for different folks. You’ll love it.
Wait. What’s that you say? You want to read licensed manga online? From commercial distributors?
Well, that’s very noble of you. Let’s give that a shot. Let’s pick a proven winner, a manga-ka who has always managed to sell despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that she returns to the same themes, over and over, with increasingly delicate and ornate artwork and equally precise worldbuilding: Yuu Watase. Viz has recently begun publishing her latest, a shounen title called Arata: The Legend. Before you buy the paperback edition, you probably want to sample it online. Come with me, to the Viz Online Manga Viewer.
…What do you mean, the print is too small? What do you mean, the screen is absurdly sensitive? What do you mean, the zoom—>grab function works better on your iPhone than it does on the publisher’s website? I thought you wanted to do the right thing, here! Don’t you know that doing the right thing is always harder? Viz has to make it difficult for you. Otherwise you might not feel self-righteous enough, each time you visit their website.
Please excuse the blurry, stalker-esque photo. And yes, I know, today is not Friday. But I’ve been in love with chana dal since attending a Hindu wedding last summer. I first tried the dish during the mendhi celebration, when the groom’s mother prepared it for the women in his family. Instantly, I realized I would have to learn how to make it for myself. Although I had come to enjoy Indian cuisine since moving to Toronto (where the influence of our significant South Asian population has trickled into the grocery store freezer aisle, home of the tandoori chicken fingers), I had never until this moment wanted to try it for myself. I had looked at the recipes. I knew how complicated they were. I knew there was no way I would buy a separate spice grinder, or start pan-frying whole cumin seeds in the final five minutes of cooking, or culturing my own paneer. But this dish, with its soft bursts of mellow flavour punctuating a sweet, silky, spicy stew — I had to have that, over and over. (With naan. I’m a sucker for naan.)
This dish makes no claim to authenticity. I did not learn it from the woman who first served it to me. It has no ghee, the clarified butter that helps the dish achieve that Oh God more please now sensation that it should have. It also has no chickpeas, because I had no desire to a) soak chickpeas, or b) render canned ones into mush with my slow-cooker. I chose real chana dal instead: the dried yellow split peas that gave the dish its name. In place of clarified butter, I used light coconut milk. Ordinarily, I would have gone with the full-fat variety, but this week I endured the Cronenbergian body horror that is trying on new jeans, so low-calorie it is.
Pro-tip: if you plagiarize (jackass), make sure you go after small fry, and not, say, one of the top-selling manga in Japan and North America. And not copy the design of, say, one of the most popular cosplay characters ever. Seriously. I know Bleach is awesome and everything, and we’d all love if we could draw half that well and write characters that compelling and build worlds that complex. We’d all love to have Kenpachi Zoraki — that spiky-haired fellow laughing insanely, in the panels linked above — wandering around inside our heads. After all, he’s an indestructible badass who bears a striking resemblance to Ian McShane, and his best friend is a cute pink-haired girl who rides around on his shoulder, occasionally steering him toward “play dates” that involve obscene amounts of blood and pain. Evidence:
Unfortunately, Nick Simmons didn’t come up with Kenpachi himself. And while there is an argument to be made for the long history of pose grabs and tracing in comics (you can read about it in the comments thread at this Comic Book Resources post), the truth is that if Simmons were half as talented as the manga-ka he lifted those poses from, he’d have come up with something that could stand on its own merit. I’d have no problem if Simmons were at Comikket, selling Zoraki doujins for the cost of printing just like everyone else. Then he’d be a fan artist. Then his position in the creative ecosystem would be perfectly obvious and, strangely, more secure. In fact, he could forge an apprenticeship out of his fan works, and move on to commercial material if and when he was ready. He’s just not ready, yet, and the editor who approved these drawings should have recognized that.
Because really, what self-respecting comics editor doesn’t know at least a little something about manga, these days? What, there’s this whole wave of material out there that’s devouring the youth market and the female market and Simmons’ editor didn’t know about it? Really? Really? Well, maybe. Radical, Simmons’ publisher, is no stranger to copyright suits. Maybe it should come as no surprise that someone waved these drawings through. But it means that if, on the vanishingly small chance that Simmons did this unwittingly, his comics career will have been tarnished from the very beginning by accusations of plagiarism. And not just plagiarism, but stupid plagiarism.
...is a science fiction writer, grad student, おたく, and immigrant. She has lived on the outskirts of Los Angeles, Seattle, and Toronto, where she is now a member of the Cecil Street Irregulars and a contributor to both Tor.com and WorldChanging Canada. Her fiction has been published in Tesseracts, FLURB, and Nature.
