21 Important, Undeniable, Inalienable Truths About This Whole "Captain America Is A Nazi" Thing

1. It's just a comic book.
2. But it's also a comic book with symbolic meaning and a high cultural value.
3. People have a right to feel however the hell they want about a thing.
4. People have no right to tell other people to feel or not feel a certain way about a thing.
5. Even though you have that right to be upset about something, that is not an excuse or intrinsic justification for hyperbole, melodrama, or other such absurd overreactive expressions.
6. Not everyone who feels upset is necessarily overreacting.
7. Not everyone who doesn't feel upset is a cold, heartless Nazi.
8. Reactionary thinkpiece culture is out of control.
9. The Manufactured Internet Outrage Machine is a serious problem.
10. But again, to reiterate: individuals are allowed to be upset, or outraged, or experience any other emotion about anything, ever.
11. They also have a right to express those feelings, in person or online.
12. Having or not having certain feelings about an issue does not give anyone a reason to act like a judgmental shithead.
13. Yes, retroactively changing established comic book continuity to make Captain America into a Nazi sleeper agent is absolutely a marketing ploy. (And yes, you fell for it.)
14. Just because something is a marketing plot, does not mean that is inherently good or bad.
15. It's also part 1 of an ongoing storyline — which is part of 75 years of the single, never-ending storyline that is Big Two comic book continuity. Which means that it's not the full story, and in fact was likely written to intentionally deceive and draw readers back in to buy the next issue, because that's what cliffhangers do.
16. It might even end up being a good story? Who knows? (My money's on "probably not," but YMMV)
17. Yes, it will inevitably be undone/erased/re-retconned out of the story.
18. That's neither a defense nor condemnation of this particular piece of storytelling. It's just the nature of corporate superhero comics.
19. Every single Captain America comic book ever written still exists, and will still exist, and can still be enjoyed in isolation, and is not nullified or ruined by this revelation.
20. This is all due in part to the fact that capitalism has enabled corporations to control and profit off of folklore and cultural iconography in the way that would make Hercules and Gilgamesh cry.
21. Perhaps most importantly: the Cosmic Cube, which was responsible for returning Steve Rogers to his youthful appearance, was already being tampered with by the Red Skull, who has previously used the Cube to alter reality and history and, oh yeah, switch bodies with Captain America, which means that Captain America was kind of already a Nazi already, and that's not even counting the time when the Red Skull lived in the cloned body of Steve Rogers for years, or any of the numerous times he infiltrated high-level positions in the U.S. government, or the fact that he currently has incomparable telepathic abilities due to being in possession of Professor X's brain and could have easily implanted a memory or something else BECAUSE COMICS.

"My Life As A Weapon" is your new favorite song about my favorite Avenger.

As anyone who's met me would probably expect, I'm super pumped about CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR. So to celebrate, here's a song I recently wrote about Clint Barton, the powerless, purple-wearing, bow-and-arrow-loving badass known as Hawkeye. (Specifically, it's about the comic book version of Hawkeye, with allusions to his relationship with Kate Bishop and his life growing up in the carnival and his death and resurrection at the hands of Wanda Maximoff but...let's not get so bogged down in continuity, yeah?)

LYRICS

This looks bad
You can blame that on my dear ol' deadbeat dad
But I'm not mad
Until the arrow that I've notched becomes my last

One more shot to break
this carny from his cage
where a low-life can escape
to save the day

So I'll stay on target
Because that's all I know how to do
Just as long as I'm next to you

And I know that this looks bad
But the quivering is all I've ever had
Like some Nomad
Or a Ronin dressed in black to hide the past

Draw the bow back, breathe
One moment of control
Because once it flies
You never know

So I'll stay on target
Because that's all I know how to do
Stay on target
While I'm fighting my way through
Stay on target
Just as long as I'm next to you

"Not like this."
When the silence stings
My sight's my only bliss
But I won't miss
Because I'm going out in style
with my greatest hits

I'm no Giant Man
But I won't give up the fight
Until my violet violence
Takes its flight

My latest comic book, "iCthulhu," is now on sale!

Grayhaven Comics' latest anthology issue, The Gathering: Sci-Fi Volume 3 is now on sale, and features a short sci-fi action comic by me and my good friend Dave Ganjamie!

Dave and I were bouncing ideas around when he made the intentionally-absurd suggestion of doing a "Futuristic Lovecraftian steampunk horror story." I decided to take this challenge literally...and thus, iCthulhu was born!

Our story is just one part of a 48-page anthology featuring tons of great creators, and the whole thing will only cost you $3.50, so what are you waiting for? Buy it before it becomes a rare and valuable collector's item!

A little sneak peek at Dave's awesome artwork...

Make-Your-Own Superhero Movie, MAD LIBS-style

It's only funny 'cause it's true. Welcome back to the MCU, Spider-Man!

REVIEW: The Manhattan Projects, Vol. 1: Science Bad by Jonathan Hickman & Nick Pitarra

I'm just going to say it: Jonathan Hickman pisses me off. Everything he writes uses the exact same pseudoscience and cryptic philosophical posturing, with cipher characters defined by one Irresistibly Charming Quirk or Twist whose actions are motivated entirely by Hickman's Next Cool Plot Twist rather than, ya know, actual human desires or anything.

And yet...he does all of that REALLY well. So well, in fact, that you hardly notice unless you are specifically aiming to scrutinize (such as I am). It probably helps that he's also a tremendous art director who gets paired with talented artists and that his books demonstrate such impeccable design sense. But in the process of reading his stories, you get so wrapped up in the big ideas and crazy twists that you don't notice how soulless it is.

The Manhattan Projects is certainly no exception to this. When you break it down, you're like "WTF? This is how a sociopath imitates storytelling." But when you're reading it, you're absolutely carried away and enamored by the strange, surreal, and epic world he's created (with tremendous assistance from Nick Pitarra's creepy-weird artwork).

Damn you, Hickman.

REVIEW: Alex + Ada Vol. 1, by Jonathan Luna & Sarah Vaughn

It's hard to break new ground on the "artificial intelligence turns sentient" story. And yet, Alex + Ada somehow manages to feel fresh even while treading somewhat common tropes. It could be the crisp, clean artwork, or the simple, straightforward dialogue that still strikes a chord in your heart, or maybe the way that the technology feels more like jailbreaking an iPhone than awakening humanity within a person, but that similarity still draws some interesting connections in your mind. Either way, this was a delightful read, and I'm looking forward to the next one.

THIS BOOK WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE (or, How I Became Invisible)

In other news: my friends at Quirk Books asked me to write a little Thanksgiving post celebrating a book that I'm grateful for. And that's how I ended up standing in my kitchen with a Bluetooth keyboard in my hand, walking in circles drunk on double IPA and writing this wonderful ode to The Invisibles, which turned 20 years old this year.

But seriously. This book will change your life. If it were a food, it would be a Cthurkey.

Good News For True Believers! (the play, I mean. I guess the people, too)

Two, count 'em, TWO  big announcements about everyone's favorite geek culture serio-comedy theatrical romp (that being True Believers, which I wrote): 

• I have officially signed a digital publishing contract with the wonderful people at Indie Theater Now, an online extension service of the New York Theatre Experience, Inc. that presents, promotes, and preserves new American plays in script form. The full script will be up soon (possibly along with some of my other plays?), but for now, you can check out my playwright profile, anyway.
   
• True Believers will be receiving another public play reading in New York City, this time with the fine folks at Animus Theatre. It's the season kick-off for their 2014-2015 New Play Reading Series, so if you're in or around the New York area, please come check it out! The reading will place this coming Monday, October 27 at Bunga's Den on W 14th Street in Manhattan beginning at 7:30pm. So BE THERE, or make your own Hipster Slave Leia or Steampunk Jesus costume for Halloween.

And if for some reason you found your way to this website / blogpost and have no idea what I'm talking about, well, you're in luck, because I've got a whole section of my website dedicated to True Believers, complete with script samples, production photos, reviews, and more.

For the Cyborg Head of Stan Lee!

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Zach Winston as Billy cosplaying Galactus.

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Rachel Katherine Alexander as Chloe cosplaying Slave Leia with a hoodie, 'cause it's cold.

On Superheroes, Death, and the Cycle of Eternal Return

There was a great piece on NPR the other day where Glen Weldon tried to explain to a curious friend the convoluted insanity of superhero comic book continuity — how the intrinsic nature of the genre's cyclical storytelling patterns is both endlessly frustrating but also part of its charm.

Or, as the saying goes — Comics, Everybody!

This weird cynicism towards death even seeps into the stories themselves. I recall a great issue of X-Factor where Siryn learned about the death of her father, the X-Man Banshee. She just laughed and laughed and laughed, which everyone around her found, well, pretty insensitive. "Come on, you guys," she explained. "We're superheroes! He's dead for now, sure, but he'll be back. I'm not worried about it." It made the rest of the team uncomfortable and concerned for mental well-being, but personally, I thought it was a pretty shockingly accurate depiction of mourning and the different ways that people learn to cope — particularly in a world where no one stays dead (except for Uncle Ben...so far).

There have been some great superhero death stories over the years (Ed Brubaker's Captain America comes to mind), and there have also been some great stories deconstructing the cyclical nature of superhero deaths (Grant Morrison's runs on both Batman and New X-Men...and also Flex Mentallo, and to a certain degree All-Star Superman and...yeah Grant's really into that, huh?). Weldon is correct to use the Asgardian "Ragnarok" to describe this phenomenon, and not just because of Thor. There's a longstanding tradition of death and resurrection in Western storytelling — Jesus being the obvious example, but really, nearly every major epic hero throughout history has had to undergo some kind of death or Underworld trial, and of course, the cycle of death and return also reflects the ever-changing seasons, and the orbit of the Earth, and so on. If we're running on the belief that superheroes are modern (corporate-owned) mythology, well, then the ubiquity of death makes perfect sense. 

That being said, it's a particularly weird thing when it comes to narrative devices — death ups the stakes in any story, but at the same time, the promise of resurrection (no matter how much the company insists that this one will stick) robs the story of those stakes, and it turns death into a rote plot device, just another stage in the story. Death in comics is never "The End," which is either incredibly screwed-up, or a touching perspective on how our loved ones might live on in real life. But when death is just another phase in your story, I think that makes it harder to approach with the appropriate gravitas.

Meanwhile, "Death of [Superhero]" comics continue to sell incredibly well, and as long as people keep buyin' 'em, publishers will keep on killin' 'em and bringin' 'em back. Which, on a meta-reading level, means that comic book readers are trapped in the same endless cycle as the characters they read about, alternating between disillusionment and infatuation with the genre they grew up with. And we're stuck in it just the same.

Dear Star-Lord: Who Is Your Daddy And What Does He Do?

Continuing my apparently never-ending coverage of Guardians of the Galaxy for Tor.com, this week's article suggests some theories about the identity of Star-Lord's mysterious absent father, as alluded to at the end of the film (oops, sorry, spoilers). Check it out, and share your thoughts in the comments below!

Oh, and also, there's this:

You're welcome.

Review: TRANSHUMAN by Jonathan Hickman

In Transhuman, writer Jonathan Hickman uses JM Ringuet's gorgeous artwork to tell an original story about the rise of Transhumanism as a corporate pissing match, and it embodies everything that is wrong with Hickman as a writer.

Don't get me wrong, Hickman is incredibly creative and kind of a mad genius — he's just a terrible storyteller. I've come to accept this fact. Transhuman is told as a "documentary" about the rise of the 3 largest Transhumanist corporations, which I guess is a clever conceit, except (1) why make a fictional documentary as a graphic novel? Why not, ya know, write a screenplay? and (2) the nature of those 60 Minutes-style factual reporting documentary is, by nature, a summary, and therefore not a story. The story is told through interviews with a narrator and the people involved in the story, but they are literally just TELLING the reader what happened. It's almost remarkable that a graphic novel — a medium which is visual by nature — could rely so much on telling and not showing, and therefore breaks one of the cardinal rules of fiction writing.

Sure, there are some interesting characters, and probably some cool dramatic, personal moments between them — namely, the divorced couple who end up working together on the Transhumanist project despite their mutual hatred for one another, who ultimately backstab each other again — but frankly, it's not very interesting to just see someone tell you that. It doesn't matter how witty or clever the commentary and writing is, I want to see it happen, I want to witness their interpersonal relations. If this were a real-life documentary from 50 years from now, and it aired on 60 Minutes or whatever, it would probably be great, because investigative journalism can get away with digging deep and just reciting facts (although I'd argue that most award-winning works of investigative journalism still manage to find a compelling human angle, something for the audience to emotionally engage with that makes them follow the story through to the end). In Transhuman, we just get a bunch of talking heads telling us what already happened, and a narrator / director to steer us away from any unreliable sources. There is literally nothing compelling or human to pull you through the story. There's a clever (albeit overwhelmingly cynical) twist at the end, which I guess is fun. But you can't build a story off a twist.

When Hickman first broke out onto the comics scene, I thought he was fantastic, but the truth is, he's good at creating the ILLUSION of good story telling. Everything he writes is done in summary, with a few cool moments in between to make it feel human. A friend of mine summed it up well as citing the difference between The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion — one is a story about characters that we care about, the other is a play-by-play history book, and Hickman writes the latter. I think Hickman would be better off as an idea man, leaving other people to actually execute these epic stories of his. Because the worlds he creates are always unique and fascinating, full of complex politics and otherworldly visions. But saying "HERE'S THIS CRAZY WORLD I CREATED AND THERE ARE THESE GUYS AND THEN THESE TWO FOUGHT AND THEN THIS GUY BETRAYED THIS GIRL AND THEN THIS PERSON WON, THE END" is really not a fun story to read.

I mean, okay, this was a fun moment. But not worth the wait.

Holy Adam West 60s Batman Jokes and Puppies, Batman!

Back when I was like 13, and just getting invested in the CT ska scene, there was this band called Flip Ya For Real that I saw, which at the time was fronted by a guy named Travis Holyfield (or, ya know, "Flip Ya Trav" at the time, because ska nicknames). At some point I started chatting with Travis over AIM (since his AOL email address was listed on their CD liner notes for booking), and for what reason, he actually tolerated and put up with me.

Flash-forward 15-or-so years, and Travis and I still stay in touch, even though FYFR and his other (even better) band SaveFace are now defunct. But with our musical pasts behind us, Travis and I and have actually reconnected over comic books. He's had a few short pieces out in various anthologies from GrayHaven Comics (who also published my first short comic book story in The Fifth Dimension, which I pitched on Travis's recommendation), and the company recently published his first full-length one-shot, DOBER-MAN, which is now available digitally at ComiXology for the low, low price of $0.99!

Dober-Man is fun, clever homage to the old 1960s Batman show, and Travis makes absolutely no secret of that. The allusions are clear to even a casual fan (The alter egos of Dober-Man and his sidekick Beagle, for example, are Burt West and Ward Adams, after Adam West and Burt Ward), but the book is also jam-packed with little silver-age gems scattered throughout the background. The puns are punderful — I mean, a Stage Irish T-Rex named Tyrant O'Saurus? C'mon! That's amazing! And even in 24 short pages, Travis and artist Edward Whatley manage to cram some clever concepts in between the homage campiness, such as a fully legal and legitimate staffing company that hires out henchmen for supervillains (many of him are thinly-veiled but gleefully silly allegories of established Bat-villains). This wacky bit of economic world-building plays out in remarkably interesting ways, and while Travis is wise not to spend too much time exploring the inner political workings of his superhero universe, he teases enough on the surface to get your brain working just enough beyond the surface enjoyment of it all. In the end, it's a wholesome, classic superhero romp that's appropriate for all ages — and it only costs $1 right now, so what are you waiting for? Pick it up, and support independent comic book creators! NOW!

Or, if you don't want to take my word for it (because let's face it, I might be biased and/or Travis may or may not be holding one of those "Bang!" guns to my head right now as I type this, forcing me to pimp his book), you can check out the review at IGN, which gave Dober-Man an A+.

Here are a few preview pages to further whet your whistle:

REVIEW: Polarity by Max Bemis and Jorge Coelho

As much as I enjoy Say Anything (the band fronted by writer Max Bemis), I was hesitant to pick up this comic because, well, the premise sounds exactly like the pseudo-autobiographical premise of their first album "...Is A Real Boy," which kindofsortamaybe chronicled Bemis's descent into super-powered bi-polar disorder -- except that, while recording said album, Max Bemis was actually diagnosed with bi-polar disorder and locked himself up for a while. But, the book was on sale for $4 on ComiXology, so I figured hey, why not.

While I tend to be the kind of person who connects with comic books more the writing than the art (although I do love a good collaboration), I'd first look to say that the artwork on this book is PHENOMENAL. It's slightly cartoonish, but not a childish way, and accurately portrays hyperviolence, superhero action, internal mindscape struggles, and hipster culture. As for the story itself, it didn't shy away from the fact that it was a slight variation on the story that Bemis has told several times already. The basic premise is that Tim is an artist and self-loathing hipster who suffers from bi-polar disorder, and after he's institutionalized and begins taking pills, he can't create his art. So he goes off his medication, and soon discovers that his untreated condition literally gives him superpowers. But maybe he's too dangerous, and maybe there's a Shadowy Government Organization trying to create an army of Bi-Polar Super Soldiers? Meanwhile, his art is getting better, and he meets a girl.

Overall, it's a pretty enjoyable story, and while applying science fictional concepts to mental illness is nothing new, I actually think that Bemis does it in a pretty fresh way -- by essentially saying that yes, mental illness IS a superpower, but the same way that traditional superheroes suffer from their extra-human abilities, maybe it's still better if you take your pills and try to function like a normal person. That being said, I'm not sure how this book would read to someone who was unfamiliar with "hipster" culture. The main character spends a lot of the book criticizing everyone around him for being hypocrites and poseurs, and ultimately realizes that he's just the same as the rest of them. If you're familiar with Say Anything's music, Tim's rants are all basically pulled straight out of the song "Admit it!" As far as cultural critique is concerned, it is an interesting analysis of hipsterdom that I mostly agree with, even if it is a bit misanthropic (which works well in a loud rock song, but feels different as internal monologue).

That being said, I wonder how someone who was outside of or unfamiliar with "hipster culture" would feel about this book. It's very insular, and some might even say that hipsters criticizing hipsters for being hipsters is THE most hipster thing possible, and while the story does acknowledge that irony (while also criticizing irony as the cheapest form of hipster self-defense), it never quite transcends it. I suspect that if you weren't already aware of and/or immersed in that post-art-school-Williamsburg-landscape, you'd think, "Okay, so these are a bunch of Urban Outfitters asshole who are too cool for Urban Outfitters and this main character is kind of an unlikeable dick who judges everyone around him for being fake judgmental assholes -- why should I care?" And if that's you, I might suggest that you're better served by listening to "Woe" and "Admit it!" by Say Anything, which pretty much sum up the book.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

POLARITY TP VOL 01 on Amazon