Month: January 2014

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Wait, What? Ep. 143: The Score | Savage Critics

Wait, What? Ep. 143: The Score | Savage Critics

Simpsons Alan Moore: Knows it; wishes to settle it. Happy New Year, fellow Whatnauts! 

Even though Jeff is sick, he still manages to get a new podcast up – and one that was extremely problematic to record, thanks to the Internet/Skype deciding to fuck us over on a regular basis last Thursday.

I find myself regretting a bunch of things I said from this one, mostly around the Alan Moore interview. I re-read the interview that night and realized that putting Moore’s paranoid down to senility was (a) facile and (b) arguably too nice to Moore. If we’d recorded it the next day, I would’ve been far grumpier/meaner about the whole thing. Maybe it’s better that we didn’t, in that case?

Nonetheless – Jeff has a bunch of interesting things to say. So go listen!

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Pass, Flunk or Incomplete? WIRED Gives 10 Fall Shows A Midterm Exam

Pass, Flunk or Incomplete? WIRED Gives 10 Fall Shows A Midterm Exam

From Brooklyn Nine Nine to Agents of SHIELD, which of last fall’s new shows have held up since their pilot episodes? We give 10 shows a midterm examination.

Catching up from last week, here’s something I write up for Wired that ran last Friday. Surprise of the 10 shows I revisited? Probably Trophy Wife, which turned out to be better than I’d expected. That or Dads, which inexplicably was even worse than the pilot.

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The issue with the picture isn’t that Image Comics is against diversity. The problem is the picture makes it look like they don’t care about it. And I know that isn’t true. I also know a number of the creative teams DO have gender parity AND are racially diverse. But here’s the big but…

Those men and women weren’t up on stage and possibly not even in San Francisco for the event.

The whole event is essentially a giant ad for Image, spotlighting the people who make the books to help sell them and promote the Image brand. Shouldn’t we see a more realistic snapshot of what that Image family looks like? And shouldn’t that family look like ALL of us? Shouldn’t it be that way at every publisher?

Allison Baker, putting her finger on the real problem from Image Expo over here.
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The path from The Boys on the Bus to Playbook is not a straight line. The evolution must obviously account for the anarchic environment of the Internet, the perpetual nature of today’s news cycle, and the rise of ideological journalism, all of which [Mike] Allen incorporates into his daily e-mail. The “pack” still exists, in other words, it’s just bigger and more diverse.

But the one-world notion of the “pack” remains unchanged. Whether journalists are gathered on a physical bus or reading a virtual document, it is a shared space. They are encountering the same names and characters and, after a while, acquiring a shared language and sensibility. “If there was a consensus,” Crouse wrote, “it was simply because all the national political reporters lived in Washington, saw the same people, used the same sources, belonged to the same background groups, and swore by the same omens.”

From Mark Lebovitch’s This Town, about Washington DC and those who work there. I read this and something pinged in my head about the ComicsInternet, though.
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Woke up this morning, my website was gone.

Well, that’s the worst blues song ever.

Nonetheless, it’s true – I woke up to a barrage if emails from the host of TheWorldThatsComing.com telling me that my account had been suspended, suspended and then suspended again due to a high level of attacks from malicious IPs overnight.

Right now, it’s still down as they try to work out what can be done, and ask me if I know why it’s under such attack. Beyond the “Well, I work on the Internet so maybe karma?” nature of things, I couldn’t answer that. Instead, I hope there’s an answer out there and contemplate just moving to Tumblr full time, instead.

Anyway: Sorry to anyone/everyone who might have tried to go to the site. Normal service may be resumed at some point…?

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Knows The Score

Knows The Score

tomewing:

It’s like if the Beatles had come along in 1963 and seen that surf music was dying out, and had made their name by giving surf music a massive revivifying shot in the arm and making albums full of clever cover versions of surf music with reworked lyrics and darker themes and more intricate…

See? What was I just saying about Tom Ewing being good?

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As I understand the course of events unfolding after the launch, there had been someone in the audience, whose name escapes me but who is evidently pleased to identify himself as a Batman scholar, who had been offended by Act of Faith and, as people in this branch of scholarship presumably do, he had advertised this fact on social media. In a message that I was shown, his objections to the film became more obvious when he described and summarised it as film about a woman who dresses in ‘slutty clothes’ and then commits suicide. Without wishing to labour the obvious, I fear that this gentleman may have understood the film too quickly. Quite why he should have done this is a question that I have more trouble over, but of that more presently.

Re-reading the Moore interview again, and finding more to be annoyed with*. But this bit above is quite wonderful, albeit potentially unintentionally. I kind of want Overly Polite Passive-Aggressive Alan Moore to have a regular column somewhere where he belittles those in everyday life.

(* A large part of what upsets me so is Moore’s seeming inability to accept criticism, never mind address it; instead, he prefers to deflect it or outright dismiss it out of hand. That, added to a tendency towards exaggeration and obviously faux humility leaves him as a frustrating subject for all but the already converted. I saw someone compare him to latter-day Morrissey today; it’s a worryingly apt choice.)