So you’re 0 for 1, big deal! I’m, like, 6 for 93 and two of those I had to settle out of court.
The most convincing pep talk ever, from this week’s Trophy Wife.
Brought on by a conversation with the ever-lovin’ Jeff Lester this afternoon, I’ve been wondering about the current Comic Internet Tastemakers, and who they are these days.
Actually, what I’m really wondering is, are there Comic Internet Tastemakers these days? Are there sites that set the conversation and can break creators/series on a reliable basis? Are there writers whose recommendations the masses can’t pass up?
CBR tends to set the news agenda, if only because of scale and access. But in terms of actually tastemaking, is it Comics Alliance? Someone/somewhere else? Is ComicsInternet 2014 too decentralized for the idea to even make sense?
Intention is a whopper, because here in North America, at least, we live in a society that prizes and rewards self-reported virtue over witness-reported honor. That means that you can move through the world believing yourself to be a good and decent person even with heaps of evidence to the contrary piling up against you. “Look, I mean well,” you might say. And that’s probably true. What we know about creating good fictional villains is equally applicable in real life: almost nobody believes that they are doing the wrong thing. And indeed, intention does count for something, just not very much of the thing. I talk to my six-year-old about intention a lot, because he has friends who are also six, and six-year-olds, generally lacking in refined agility, have a tendency to plow into, knock over, and otherwise pulverize each other at alarming rates. I want him to understand that he doesn’t have to assume that he and little Timmy aren’t friends anymore just because Timmy accidentally knocked him over. The fact that the action was an accident warrants acknowledgment. But then—and this is the important part—I ask Timmy to apologize anyway, because whether intentionally or not, he has hurt his playmate, and needs to take responsibility for the consequences of his actions. In my six-year-old’s school, first graders do this by straight-up apologizing and then asking what they can do to help the person who got hurt feel better. Can you imagine how quickly we could start moving things along if adults took a similar approach?
Devin Grayson takes on intention, offense and other difficult issues.
Hey Graeme, that Mel Brooks quote you put up made me wonder — I don’t know, aside from like geek culture-y comics-related stuff that you have to write about/talk about with Jeff on the p-cast, what kind of movies you like. So what are some big movies for you?
Off the top of my head: Head. Three Colors Red and Blue – but not White, which I remember watching and finding painfully, cringe-inducingly unfunny. If… and O, Lucky Man, which were movies that just blew my mind when I was in art school, which I realize as I type is a terrible sentence to write. Oh! Stanley Donen’s Charade, which remains the greatest example of a Hitchcock film for me, despite not being a Hitchcock movie at all.
As you can see, I’m appallingly movie illiterate.
Also, Carlos Valdes (currently on Broadway in Once) has been landed the series regular role of Cisco Ramon, an engineering genius and the youngest member of the team of scientists at S.T.A.R. Labs. Per some DC lore, this handy lad may be fated to become the Justice Leaguer known as Vibe.
Yes, that’s right: Vibe is going to be a character in the CW’s projected Flash series. I am worryingly on board with this decision.