brothers

August 16, 2010 1:53 pm

@BornIn1142 How is it not noteworthy at all in context? Yes, there's a certain level of sexism in a lot of shonen, but not all shonen manga have crap women. There's absolutely no reason why the sexism and crap portrayals aren't worth pointing out when they happen. In this case, "awful" and "terrible" aren't hyperbole at all, they're perfectly acceptable value judgments, no different from "good," "bad," and "mediocre."

 No one is saying that Death Note is "famous" (why the scare-quotes?) for being sexist. It's famous for being a pretty enjoyable and ridiculous story. However, when people talk about Death Note (and by "people" I'm meaning "people on the internet and in real life that I have discussed Death Note with"), they tend to also talk about how odious the treatment and portrayal of women is in the series. It's no different than how Dragon Ball Z has famously long fight scenes or how The Matrix Reloaded has that famously awful exposition toward the end.

I'm not really sure why you're nitpicking my (perfectly valid) word choice, when it seems like you agree with me, more or less?

August 16, 2010 12:24 pm

@BornIn1142 Having (or discussing) gender politics isn't necessarily delivering a polemic on Venus vs Mars. All texts have some level of gender politics in them, because all of them take a position on preconceptions, attitudes, whatever whatever whatever. Death Note has famously awful female characters and terrible sexism. Bakuman includes a several pages long conversation about the worth of certain types of women, and while it maybe doesn't reflect the values or opinions of the author, it does set up something worth talking in the book itself. That counts as gender politics. Your definition is needlessly narrow.

 @muddi900 Oh, yeah, I hadn't even thought about that in a while. The thing that creeped me out the most in the first game was the little see-thru children who'd crawl around your feet. In game 2... I'm not sure, but probably the quote I used for the link--"There was a hole here. It's gone now." It was in a bar around halfway through the game, I think. Something about it just creeps me right out.

August 2, 2010 1:34 pm That doesn't even make any sense, either as a sentence or an opinion.

July 19, 2010 2:46 pm Comics fans can be the worst sometimes, man.

July 19, 2010 11:38 am Superman didn't actually come out that week. 701 was last week, 700 was late June, but Waid posted his bit ten days ago. Superman 701 made ME want to quit comics, but I don't think it was Waid's trigger.

June 28, 2010 2:12 pm

At the same time, for context, the JLA is in a small rural village in a fake country in Africa. Superheroes don't come around there much, or hit up Africa in general really at all, so it's not that odd that one thing the people there would wonder is "What is up with those wacked out clothes?"

 And some swimming trunks look a whole lot like underwear to me. They're just colored differently (if you're lucky).

June 28, 2010 1:19 pm Superman and Batman definitely do.

June 14, 2010 12:48 pm

@muddi900 Amazon's got a collection of the first three volumes in one set for 15 bucks. Here's a series of posts I've written about the series if you need more motivation:

http://www.4thletter.net/2009/12/one-piece-id-be-east-blue-without-you/
http://www.4thletter.net/2010/03/unforgiven-one-piece-and-suspended-expectations/
http://www.4thletter.net/2010/05/when-a-bullet-blows-by-hell-probably-feel-a-little-breeze/

 

May 24, 2010 3:42 pm @froggulper: I don't buy that people only want surface-level entertainment at all, in part of the reasons I talk about in the post. People still watch and discuss and enjoy Die Hard/Heat/The Killer, but no one cares about Blue Streak/Passenger 57. The same goes for Kraven's Last Hunt/God Loves, Man Kills/Dark Knight Returns vs Maximum Carnage/X-cutioner's Song/Batman: Contagion. People liked all six of those. Three of them actually had something to say. The other three didn't.

People enjoy surface-level, empty entertainment. I don't think anyone is denying that. But, the stuff that stands the test of time, the stuff people love, rather than watch on TNT at 3 in the morning, tends to be the things that have a point. It says something other than "this guy with two guns has a funny one-liner forty-six minutes in."

@ScorpionMasada: No one is asking that everything be intelligent or that Superman begin delivering treatises on the difference between Heidegger and Plato. No one here is a "zealot," either. I just think that having a little more depth in the average comic would make comics more interesting and more fun to talk about, to boot. Empty entertainment only goes so far. Things that have some merit have legs. Scrubs look at blaxploitation as violent stories about guys who talk funny, pimps, and pushers, but there is a depth to the good blaxploitation films that made the genre an American classic. Those movies are about struggle, being marginalized but still finding justice, empowerment, and what it means to be black in America.

Depth counts. There's nothing about comics, even superhero comics, that makes it a poor delivery system for strong stories. I'd argue that comics are perfect for that. Even in your music point--Jay-Z is far from being empty entertainment. If he was empty, he would've gone the way of all the other Biggie clones. He'd be washing cars with Guerilla Black right now if he didn't have that depth of subject matter that made his career.

May 21, 2010 3:26 pm If you're looking for good samurai books, either Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo or Takehiko Inoue's Vagabond are the books to go for.