Well, not the absolute most annoying, but certain high up there on my list of really annoying things…

I was reading through Time Magazine’s review of the second volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen when I came across this disclaimer at the bottom:

Every time I see something like this is annoys me. You see stuff like this attached to reviews for comics like Sandman or American Splendor and to reviews for animated features like Akira or damn near anything else that comes out of Japan. The first article about Neon Genesis Evangelion I ever read devoted a few whole paragraphs, paragraphs that could have been used in service of actually reviewing the material, to warn parents that Evangelion wasn’t for small children because it was violent and people said “shit.” (And of course, that it’s blasphemous, but that wasn’t really stated explicitly. Instead the writer summed the issue up by saying the series had “mature religious themes.”)

The old cliché (all too true) is that every year a major magazine or newspaper will run an article with the headline: “Bang! Pow! Zap! Comics Aren’t Just For Kids Anymore!” The articles go on to carefully explain that a small group of rogue artists are daring to create a new type of comic book that explores more, and here’s that phrase again, “adult themes.” Nevermind that “adult” comics have been around for decades, it’s always “new” this new phenomenon and it’s always “a small group” of artists and it’s always a big shock that artists who create sequential art aren’t exclusively drawing inarticulate morons in tights.

What bothers me more, though, is when I see graphic novels with stuff like this on the back:

This is, obviously, from the inner flap of volume one of Spiegelman’s Maus but I’ve seen others like it before. The Sandman series that I read had quotes on the covers assuring/warning readers that this was “legitimate literature,” and similar quotes can be seen on American Splendor collections, the collected version of Watchmen, and Ghost in the Shell.

I’ve wondered for a while now if perhaps part of the reason why sequential art has had a hard time finding legitimacy as something other than a “kids’ thing” is because comic fans, artists, and publishers seem to constantly go out of their way to assure people that their adult comics are the exception and not the rule. It may seem strange, but I think that assuring readers that this comic is an “adult” comic does more harm than it does good. By extolling this single comic (say, Maus) as special, one reinforces the notion that comics are for kids.

Consider a shamelessly over-the-top analogy: What idea of African-Americans is reinforced by saying that “this black guy… you know, he’s actually pretty smart.”

I’m not saying that the general public’s refusal to view comics as an all-ages art form is on par with the oppression of minorities but that on a smaller scale the rationale used in my–again, over-the-top–analogy is doing more to trap comics into a box than set it free. The problem of public perception is, I realise, more complex than just this single annoyance, but comic publishers, artists, and reviewers need to stop reminding people that they should view comics in any other way than as a means to an end, a medium.

John Isbell, who regular Alas readers will recognize from the comments, has a blog entry on Open Source Politics which is well worth reading - John’s tour of world religions. Check it out.

In a post earlier today, PinkDreamPoppies asked for comic book recommendations; in particular, he’s looking for comics aside from strips and aside from superheros. As it happens, I have some rather strong opinions on the subject. In an attempt to keep this list of reasonable length, I’m going to limit myself to recommending comics that are available as bound books. Also, my list is deficient because I’m pretty ignorant when it comes to manga and Eurocomics. And the recommendations aren’t given in any particular order.
Read the rest of this entry »

Over the course of the past year or so I’ve become very interested in comics (or graphic novels or sequential art or whatever you want to call them) but have had a hard time finding stories that are along the lines of what I like to read. Or, perhaps to be more honest, I’ve had trouble finding comics that aren’t written for eight-year-old boys; I don’t know what it is, but something about the line “I’ll use psyonic blasts from my fists to stop him!!!” just doesn’t do it for me. (It did when I was eight though–and I have a stack of X-Men to prove it–so I guess they work for some people some of the time.)

So I was thought I would ask the lovely and literate Alas crowd if they had any comic recommendations for me. I’m not especially interested in comic strips (unless they’re genius) or superhero comics, but I’ll give most anything a few pages. I don’t care what country they’re from, what direction they read, or if they’re on the internet, but I want some comics.

Below is a list of what I’ve read recently. It isn’t much, but it might give you an idea of what I’ve read so far.

[Update: This post has generated a plethora of recommendations. I haven't had a chance to read any of them yet (read any of the comics, that is; I've read the comments) because of stuff like work and The Return of the King but have printed up the comment threads and will start hunting. Thanks to everyone who responded!]
Read the rest of this entry »

Do to overwhelming (well, nonexistant) demand, I’ve decided to make some “Alas” merchandise available.

No, really.

Please check out my “storefront” on Cafepress. There’s tee shirts, tree ornaments, mousepads, infant clothing, and some other stuff (my favorites are the coffee mug and especially the wall clock). If you know someone especially unfussy, some of these could make good Christmas gifts, I suppose. Stranger things have happened.

• PinkDreamPoppies wrote earlier this week that “vacuums are from hell.” He didn’t know the half of it. (Via Skippy).

• Echidne of the Snakes celebrates the latest milestone in women’s sports: The Lingerie Bowl.
• Check out Noli Irritare Leones for a good critique of a bad Wendy McElroy article - this time on the father’s rights movement.
  OK, so McElroy has found several hundred different embittered men who believe women are heartless golddiggers. And “it becomes prudent to listen” - in other words, to take these testimonials, not as evidence of some men’s opinions, but as evidence of the way family law right now really is. Well, guess what? There are lots of embittered divorced women out there. There are stories like this one of a woman who traded her daughter’s college education to hang onto her house, and then lost the house anyway. And there are bitter single women to match the bitter single men. It’s not hard to find several hundred divorced people, men or women, prepared to say that they were screwed. Taking the stories of the men alone, even if you have several hundred of them, is not adequate evidence that family courts really are biased against men.
• Dirk Deppey has a long, well-done rant about the state of the current comic book industry. Shorter Dirk Deppey: If superhero fans don’t learn to broaden their tastes, comic book stores won’t be able to survive.
• Last week I linked to an article in Foreign Policy about Japan’s population troubles - basically, many young Japanese women are choosing to remain single and childless rather than subject themselves to the sexist norms of marriage in Japan. Trish Wilson has more commentary about the article, pointing out that women in many cultures could be making the same complaints.
• Blueheron has some interesting thoughts on Christianity and Neo-Pagen Spirituality. Here’s a sample:
  Every pagan I know talks about how we shouldn’t insult Christianity and Christians, and yet almost all of us do so. I was amused at a comment years ago on alt.pagan about how the Wiccan declaration of honoring all gods in practice means honoring all gods except the Christian Trinity. This discomfort that most pagans feel with Christianity is troubling for two reasons. The first reason is obvious and honestly hardly needs to be repeated. Every pagan reading this knows that responding to intolerance with intolerance is useless and actively harmful, especially since there are many Christians who have no trouble with pagans. However, the other reason is somewhat more complex. From a historical and anthropological perspective, Wicca and all of the other neo-pagan faiths, from the OTO to the Church of All Worlds are in large part Christian variants.
• Why wait until election day? ABC News has pulled its reporters from the Kucinich, Sharpton and Moseley Braun campaigns. Via TalkLeft.
• Tod Lindberg discusses gay marriage. What’s interesting is that even a homophobic right-winger like Lindberg can see that the “secular” arguments against gay marriage are exceptionally weak.
• Everything you could want to know about the McDonalds Spilled Coffee Lawsuit - and probably a good deal more - can be found in these well-done posts from The Curmudgeonly Clerk and Blog 702. Oh, and Blog 702 again.
• The Fifty Minute Hour has a good post describing the French government’s attempts to outlaw Muslim women from wearing hijabs.
• Chris at Crooked Timber provides this startling factoid from Amartya Sen:
  In fact, it turns out that men in China and in Kerala decisively outlive African American men in terms of surviving to older age groups. Even African American women end up having a survival pattern for the higher ages similar to that of the much poorer Chinese, and decidedly lower survival rates than then even poorer Indians in Kerala. So it is not only the case that American blacks suffer from relative deprivation in terms of income per head vis-a-vis American whites, they are also absolutely more deprived than low-income Indians in Kerala (for both women and men), and the Chinese (in the case of men), in terms of living to ripe old ages.

Some days being a libertarian would almost make sense. From Bloggity Blog-Blog-Blog:

A more detailed account, written by the comic book store owner, is also on Laura’s blog.

This is a frightening case. I’ve been around comic book shops enough to know that virtually no comic book shop is taxed this way by the IRS - and if they were, virtually no comic book store would still exist. There may be more information which makes the IRS’ position look reasonable, but as far as I can tell, this is genuinely a case of the IRS driving a small businesswoman into bankruptcy for no reason.

Dirk Deppey has more information. He also requests that Washington residents drop a quick, polite note to their senators asking that they intervene - check out his post for more info.

From Matthew Yglesias:

I’m not sure why the quote should take into account the anti-porn faction of feminism. That faction has been more-or-less led by Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, both of whom would, I think, passionately deny being liberal. In her writings, MacKinnon is as bitterly anti-liberal as any conservative.

MacKinnon and Dworkin’s leadership was unfortunate, in my view. As brilliant as both women are, they nonetheless led radical feminism into a futile fight for anti-porn legislation that split feminism. The result was to sabatoge what had been, up to that point, an effective radical feminist movement with many great accomplishments. (Susan Brownmiller makes a similar argument in her memoir In Our Time). I don’t think radical feminism has yet recovered from the wrong turn it took in the 80s.

On marijuiana decriminalization, that is.

You can read the entire thing on Kucinich’s official website.

It depresses me, because Kucinich’s position - which I consider common sense, and which is supported by 40% of Americans, according to a Time/CNN poll - could only be taken by an outsider with no chance of winning the election. For most of the American public, decriminalizing pot is a policy option that reasonable people can disagree on; but for our political system, it’s the equivilent of proposing legislation requiring everyone to constuct and wear tin-foil hats to defend America from the forthcoming invasion from Alpha Centori.

(Said in “stoner” voice:) Our system is soooo fucked up.

Okay, it’s time for the second annual Koufax awards! These are the awards for “left-wing blogs” in particular (last year, I won the award for best blog design).

My favorite thing about these awards is that - hopefully - it’s a chance for folks to highlight great posts from 2003 that we’ve all forgotten about. There’s a tendency for the blogoverse to have a very short memory….

Anyhow, head on over there to make nominations, if you want to (note that we’re not voting yet - just making nominations - but not every nomination will make it to the voting ballot, so if you like something that’s already been nominated, re-nominate it yourself). You’re allowed to nominate more than one thing per catagory, if you want to. And if you’re a blogger, you’re encouraged to nominate yourself - in particular, for the “best post,” “best series,” and “best new blog” catagories.

Here are my nominations. I really suggest following the links, if you have time - these posts are really great reads, imo.

Best Blog: Nathan Newman.
Body and Soul

Best Writing: Body and Soul.
Pedantry

Best Single Post (I’ve emphasized posts that are over a few months old here, since I think people may have forgotten about some of these)

Gabriel Rosenberg’s response to the “gay marriage will make it impossible to outlaw group marriage” argument, from MarriageDebate.com, deserves to be widely read:

Jack Bog has come up with the coolest “trolling for hits” scheme ever. For every click he gets today - up to 1,000 hits - he’ll donate a buck to the Oregon Food Bank.

Now, as it happens Alas usually gets 1,000 visitors here on Wednesdays. So if everyone who reads this post would also try out Jack’s blog (which is, by the way, a top-notch blog - it’s been on my blogroll, in the “Oregon” section, for ages) that would send $1000 to the Oregon Food Bank. Would that be cool or what?

Ted Rall does a pretty good job of rounding up the facts of what’s going on with the Selective Service System these days in addition to speculating about whether or not the draft will be reinstated and when.

The draft has been on my mind a lot since just before the United States invaded Iraq because I’m in that 18-26 age bracket that the draft applies to and happen to think that the war in Iraq is pointless and morally reprehensible.

I’ve always thought that not having a draft was a good way to keep a nation’s imperial ambitions in check because before they invaded another country it would be necessary to figure out if they have enough troops to make it happen. Apparently that check didn’t work out so well this time, though. Now the U.S. is in a situation in which I think it’s pretty obvious that it doesn’t have the boots on the ground needed to accomplish its objectives, so if things heat up more (or if we invade another country) I don’t think it’s unrealistic to believe that the draft could be reinstated.

There is, undoubtedly, sexual and economic factors that play into the draft. Only men are drafted, and those men tend to be from lower classes because men of higher economic classes can afford the easiest way to get a deferment: college enrollment. This economic underpinning has an inevitable racial impact as minorities generally make less money than whites.

I’ve noticed that there seem to be three schools of thought when it comes to the draft:

• Those who think that the draft is always wrong because nations should not be fighting wars that do not have popular support and a war with true popular support would not, theoretically, need a draft.
• Those who think that a draft is wrong in an “unjust” war–Vietnam is the most common example–but is acceptable in a “just” war–World War II being the most common example.
• Those who think that the draft is always acceptable because if you live in the United States you should be willing to defend the United States in all of its endevors.

If you indulge your fear and pessimism for a moment, it’s not hard to imagine a situation in which the war in Iraq (or potential conflicts in the other places where the United States is at tense odds with another country, like North Korea) could become a “just” war. For example, I think most people would support invading North Korea if they nuked Portland (in which case, come to think of it, many of you wouldn’t have to worry about the draft any more) or letting slip the dogs of war on Syria if a Syrian terrorist let loose some nasty chemical or biological weapons in, say, Washington D.C.

But what if Syria attacked Israel, or North Korea attacked South Korea or Japan? I think more people would call the subsequent invasion a “just” war and wouldn’t have a problem reinstating the draft.

I can’t help but think, though, bitterly, that the people who would most vocally support reinstating the draft (even for the current situation in Iraq, but certainly in the case of a “just” war) are people too old to serve or well-off enough that they, or their children, are safely tucked away in college.

So, Alas readers, male and female, left and right, what do you think of the draft? If it comes up, what will you do? Would a change in the situation in the Middle East or elsewhere in the world change your reaction?

Ted Rall article found via Raznor’s Rants.

While sick I also had time to kill on the internet, that great eater of time.

• Scott McCloud gave birth to this gem of a comic, But No One Ever Noticed the Walrus (in two parts, here and here) which, I must confess, confirms to me that Mr. McCloud is entirely worthy of the crush I have on him.

• Kevin Moore’s Blarg Blog has a good post up about the contrasting image tactics of the Dean and Kucinich campaigns and why the campaigns selected the images they have.

• You know, I think that I like this more than I’ve ever liked an actual Cathy strip. (at Badly Drawn Comics)
• There’s a really great article from Bitch Magazine about the self-contradictory nature of so-called alternaporn sites like Suicide Girls and FrictionUSA.
• Does the Canadian flag offend you? Apparently it really bothers some people. (via Pandagon)
• And don’t forget: Vacuums are from hell.
  

And that’s about it for tonight. It seems like all of the blogs in my bookmarks are talking about Gore endorsing Dean, and none of the magazines had anything interesting to say.

So for the last two weeks I’ve been sick with something that resembles a cold but is actually the unfortunate side effect of having accidentally eaten multidimensional strawberries with the wrong sort of sugar. Being trapped at home with snot either dripping out of my nose or refusing to be dislodged from my sinuses, and so causing me pain, I’ve had a lot of time to contemplate the joys and drawbacks of being sick. So, for your blog-reading pleasure, a list…

Joy: If you don’t feel like shaving, or if you’ve decided that your bed was designed especially for you by the God of Comfy, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do because you, frankly, don’t have the energy to do more than a few things in the day.

Drawback: Somehow the combination of tussin and even a low-grade fever can make movies completely incomprehensible. I, as luck would have it, had rented a couple movies before falling ill… Unfortunately, they were both in Japanese and reading subtitles became a charming exercise in squint.

Here’s the thing, though: I can’t trust my judgement of the movies. They were: Millenium Actress, from the director of Perfect Blue but of an entirely different breed, which is now one of my favourite movies; and Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, a samurai epic based on King Lear which I thought was fantastic but a bit too scorched-earth for someone who’s sick. So I loved Millenium Actress and was quite fond of Ran but am not comfortable with recommending them to people because there were times when I was pretty out of it. Not when I was watching those movies, I don’t think, but… I don’t think, if you see what I mean.

I can comfort myself with the knowledge that the books I read the last time I had this cold (it comes once a year) haven’t lost or gained in my esteem since I read them. Stephen King’s The Stand still has a brilliant first half and a second half that, while good, doesn’t quite live up to the deliciously apocalyptic beginning. (Note: If you’re prone to anxiety, as I am, don’t read The Stand when you have the flu. Bad Idea.) Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash still could have been one of the best novels I’ve ever read, except that someone forgot to print the last chapter, or the author was making a statement, or something but it has a terrible ending. You can call it ironic or post-modern or “literary” or whatever, but I say that when you don’t finish your story (on any level, be it thematic or plot-wise or otherwise) that’s just bad writing.

Joy: I got to miss work.

Drawback: I had to miss work.

Joy: Since this comes once a year, I was pretty prepared. Or, rather, I knew what to do to get better as quickly and comfortably as possible. It’s the little things, like smearing lip balm on your nose so that it doesn’t become raw from the kleenex, that are invaluable to know.

Drawback: Guaifenesin is the most horrid concoction.

Joy: Admit it, being sick gives you license to be cranky and whinge as much as you want to, and you like that.

Drawback: … … … I’m out. I mean, short of telling you about the joys of waking up in the night choking on snot and acid reflux, which is a bit explicit, I’m out of drawbacks.

Anyway, I’m happy to be back in good health. Just in time for Trilogy Tuesday which, if you don’t know, is the day they show all three Lord of the Rings movies in the theatres in a row. Ten-plus hours packt like sardines in a crushd tin theatre … Yay. I can’t wait.

Ages ago, I mentioned that I’d like to see a far more radical copyright reform than any I’ve seen proposed. One of Alas’ readers asked me how I’d design a copyright system.

Well, I’d start with a few principles in mind…

1. Everyone owns their own mind, and should be free to make use of whatever is poured into that mind. This means that if I want to write my own “Harry Potter” novel, I should be free to do so.

2. Everyone has a right to profit from their own creations, assuming the market is willing to pay for them.
3. Corporations are not people and are incapable of being creators.
4. It should not be legal for publishers – or creators - to keep once-published creative works out of print and unavailable to consumers indefinitely.

So what kind of copyright law would I enact, if I were elected despot someday?

1) No more work-for-hire laws, period. The creator or creator(s) are the ones who actually created the work (whatever that work is); their ownership of their own work cannot be sold or even given away. (I’ve blogged about the ways work-for-hire harms creators here and here).

What about currently existing work-for-hire creations? If possible, ownership of those works should be returned to their true creators. If that’s not possible (if the original creators have died, for instance), then the work becomes public domain.

2) Compulsory licensing should be the law of the land, allowing anyone to publish any work at will.

What is compulsory licensing? Just what it sounds like - “A compulsory license forces a copyright (or patent) owner to permit someone else to use the work for a predetermined fee. Accordingly, it precludes the owner of the copyright (or patent) from refusing to license her work to other people…”

Say, for instance, I wanted to publish a proper edition of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone - one in which the original British language is retained. I wouldn’t need permission to do that; I’d just need to start sending the royality checks to J.K. Rowling’s representatives.

3) Derivative works also benefit from compulsory licensing.

Current “fair use” laws would still apply. Authors would be free to use brief quotes from J.K. Rowling without permission in certain contexts (for an epigram, say, or as part of a scholarly book discussing Harry Potter).

But what if I write my own Harry Potter novel (”Harry Potter and the overly restrictive copyright law“). Again, compulsory licensing would apply. I can write as many Harry Potter books as I want - but if they start turning a profit, I (or my publisher) must send royalty checks to J.K. Rowling. (Rowling’s percentage would be lower for this than for a straight-out reprinting, however.)

4) Open book policy. To keep corporations from falsely claiming that there are no profits to share, publication of a work - or a derivative work - legally obliges the publisher (distributor, label, studio, whatever) to completely open their books and financial records to the creator’s legal and financial representatives.

5) In collaborative works, each creator is a co-owner of the final creative product. Everyone gets a share of the profits. The default (if no contract says otherwise) is for all creators’ profits to be divided equally between all creators; however, creators can write agreements to divide profits in a different manner.

6) In collaborative works, each creator is the full owner of their own contribution to the degree that their contribution can be separated from the creative work.

To see why this is needed, remember the old ABC sit-com Three’s Company. When the show’s co-star Suzanne Sommers, who played “Chrissy,” left the show, she was arguably the most popular TV actress in the USA; yet no other TV network was willing to hire her for over five years. Why not? Because ABC, bitter over losing Sommers, threatened to sue any network that hired Sommers, on the grounds that ABC owned “Chrissy’s” distinctive likeness.

This is what inevitably happens when large corporations are permitted to own copyrights; rather than using them to encourage creativity, which should be the purpose of copyright, corporations use copyright to prevent other creators from creating.

Under my system, Sommers would have been free to continue to perform, without threat of a copyright lawsuit.

In other examples, Joss Whedan should be free to shop around his script to Aliens 4 around to other movie studios, since he was reportedly displeased with how the first script came out. Steve Gerber, who created Howard the Duck in an issue of The Incredible Hulk (published by Marvel Comics), would fully own Howard, and be free to publish more Howard the Duck as he pleases. (Of course, Marvel can also publish their own version of Howard the Duck - but they’d have to pay Gerber royalties for publishing a derivative of his work).

That about covers it, I think… suggestions? Comments?

What the heck - do me a favor and head on over to Wizbang and vote for Alas as the “Best Playful Primate” blog. Of course, I’m over a hundred votes short of the winning total currently (which shouldn’t be THAT big a hurdle to overcome, since there are 800 or so folks reading this blog daily, but I guess not all of you will vote for me… sigh.). However, I’m currently only 14 votes short of beating out all the other lefty blogs on the list. :-p

If you really want to help me out, let me point out that you can legally vote for Alas twice a day every day through the 14th.

Vote early! Vote often!

If I win, I promise to buy Bean and myself lunch as our prize.

You know, I really was planning to post something substantial today. And yet, somehow, it’s nearly time for me to go to work and I haven’t posted much of anything. Sigh…

• Matt Yglesias on Maggie Galagher’s case against gay marriage:
  It’s interesting to see that Maggie Galagher is not longer even attempting to offer arguments that allowing gay marriage will have bad consequences. Instead, she argues at length that it would be bad if people ceased to get married and takes as an unstated assumption that gay marriage will lead to this result. The most natural thought might be that expanding the class of people permitted to marry would increase the proportion of people who are married, but, you know, whatever.
• The UK National Health Service has some tips on staying safe this holiday season. Very funny (if you’ve got an immature sense of humor, which, happily, I do), but probably not safe for workplace listening. Via Crooked Timber.
• Australian Feminist Michael Flood thinks that there are more important priorities in encouraging fatherhood than reforming divorce laws.
• Laura of Apt. 11D argues that - the “choice” to have kids isn’t really a choice for some people, the desire to become a parent is as intractable as, say, sexual orientation. It’s an interesting point, and I might agree with it. (If the permalink doesn’t work, look for the entry on December 1st).
• An article on Bill Watterson’s current, mysterious life in Ohio.
• A good article in today’s Washington Post discusses ways to improve the lives of girls and women in prostitution. Via MarriageMovement.org.
• The situation in Iraq moves from bad to terrible to incomprehensible. From a New York Times article:
  As the guerrilla war against Iraqi insurgents intensifies, American soldiers have begun wrapping entire villages in barbed wire. In selective cases, American soldiers are demolishing buildings thought to be used by Iraqi attackers. They have begun imprisoning the relatives of suspected guerrillas, in hopes of pressing the insurgents to turn themselves in. …

  Via Crooked Timber, which has more quotes from the article.

• And it just keeps on getting worse… A good Lying Media Bastards post about the continuing abuse of justice at Guantanamo Bay.
• This Tom the Dancing Bug cartoon kicks serious behind (George W. Bush’s, specifically). Via Lying Media Bastards.
• An article on the economic penalties of parenthood, including some specific budget numbers.
• Sometimes I wish I lived in a different world… from The New York Times:
  With vanity always in fashion and shoes reaching iconic cultural status, women are having parts of their toes lopped off to fit into the latest Manolo Blahniks or Jimmy Choos. Cheerful how-to stories about these operations have appeared in women’s magazines and major newspapers and on television news programs. … But the stories rarely note the perils of the procedures. For the sake of better “toe cleavage,” as it is known to the fashion-conscious, women are risking permanent disability, according to many orthopedists and podiatrists.

  Sure, some of them give up the ability to walk barefoot without pain, but at least their feet will look good in stilettos….

Elizabeth Marquardt, of the Family Scholars Blog, responds to two posts of mine, here and here. I’ll respond in turn to at least one of these sometime later this week.