Several years ago I began asking my friends and family to tell me their passwords. I had come to believe that these tiny personalized codes get a bum rap. Yes, I understand why passwords are universally despised: the strains they put on our memory, the endless demand to update them, their sheer number. I hate them, too. But there is more to passwords than their annoyance. In our authorship of them, in the fact that we construct them so that we (and only we) will remember them, they take on secret lives. Many of our passwords are suffused with pathos, mischief, sometimes even poetry. Often they have rich back stories. A motivational mantra, a swipe at the boss, a hidden shrine to a lost love, an inside joke with ourselves, a defining emotional scar — these keepsake passwords, as I came to call them, are like tchotchkes of our inner lives. They derive from anything: Scripture, horoscopes, nicknames, lyrics, book passages. Like a tattoo on a private part of the body, they tend to be intimate, compact and expressive.
There’s no point in us asking for and then celebrating the release of female ongoings if we’re going to sit silently as sales fall and we don’t buy them. I mean, if we can’t make Storm succeed, then why should Marvel announce more?
I’m torn about this (It’s from the CBR message boards), because I get the point the poster is trying to make, but at the same time, I find myself wanting to dismiss the argument and thinking that the answer to “Why should Marvel announce more?” is as simple as “Why shouldn’t they?” Even just the question implies that white male leads are a default setting, which shows a limited/limiting idea of the potential audience out there.
4thLetter
I did want to take a moment here to mention that this week David Brothers closed down his long-running site 4thLetter. I wanted to say in public: The work David has done at 4thLetter is probably the best argument for writing on the internet as a learning process. David’s best writing was always…
i’ve basically just hit the threshold where i’m legitimately contemplating adding carol danvers to tumblr saviour because i’m just so disgusted with how desperate her fanbase is getting in attempting to bury Monica Rambeau’s existence.
It’s not like Marvel…
After re-reading the Roger Stern Avengers run lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about Monica Rambeau and her invisibility in regards to the Captain Marvel legacy, so this was an interesting read to me.
Rachel and Miles X-Plain the X-Men, Episode 31 – Chekhov’s Raygun
Rachel and Miles X-Plain the X-Men, Episode 31 – Chekhov’s Raygun
In which there is a whole, whole lot going on; we continue to have no use for Michael Rossi; Wolverine should be an advice columnist; Forge makes bold fashion choices; the health of a timeline is directly tied to the awesomeness of Storm’s hair; and the X-Men get their first dark-future refugee.
X-Plained:
- Dire Wraiths
- ROM
- Tailoring
- Uncanny X-Men #182-188
- Just much story can be shoehorned into seven issues
- A dubious Silent Hill metaphor
- The people in Rogue’s head
- Inexorable momentum
- Several profoundly uncomfortable conversations
- Parallel narrative in comics
- Being friends with Wolverine
- Casual enmity
- Forge
- Miles’s X-doppelganger
- Tiny shorts
- Chekhov’s Raygun
- Rachel Summers (again)
- Timeline disambiguation
- Rachel disambiguation
- “Lifedeath: A Love Story”
- Feelings
- Storm, powers, and identity
- X-Men Mad-Libs
- Hound marks
- X-Men: The End
Next Week: THE DEMON BEAR SAGA!
You can find a visual companion to the episode – as well as links to recommended reading and the winners of the stealth / plainclothes cosplay contest – on our blog.
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X-Plain the X-Men has now reached the point where I was reading these issues as they came out. This is a strange, wonderful nostalgia point for me.