A few years ago the pop culture and sports website Grantland (RIP) posted a highly controversial article about why Gambit sucks. There were a lot of solid points made in that article: why would a thief wear a fuschia outfit, why wasn’t he ever developed more than having cool-guy ticks (answer: Chris Claremont left X-Men before he fully fleshed out Gambit), etc. I fell into the other camp – of course Gambit is cool hero. He has a cool outfit (that makes no sense, admittedly), he […]
Gets me thinking
This graphic novel does a good job of dealing with a fundamental question I always have in nearly every fantasy novel, movie, cartoon, video game, or anything else. It deals with it, but doesn’t fix it, but still it’s something. It’s a common issue with the genre for me and something I am not sure I will ever figure out so long as I persist in reading (etc) fantasy. That fundamental issue is: how does the world function? What I often understand about fantasy worlds […]
What If #BlackLivesMatter Was About a White Girl?
Bendis and Maleev’s Scarlet is about a young woman, named Scarlet Rue, who sees her boyfriend murdered by a corrupt cop, and is herself shot by that cop. She gets out of the hospital intent on revenge. She’s going to take down the cop who murdered her boyfriend and the system that rewards cops for being corrupt. She’s not a masked vigilante, she lets the police and the public know who she is and why she’s killing cops. She becomes a rallying point for people […]
Poor Marilyn
I won the book, Unfinished…, from fellow Cannonballer Elizabeth Periale (also known as xoxoxoe) and I was excited to read it because Marilyn’s fame has always been interesting to me. I’ve never obsessed over her like some, but it’s interesting to me how many people do, still, to this day, obsess over Marilyn Monroe. Or, at least the image of Marilyn Monroe. Periale uses many of those images, along with quotes, by and about Marilyn, in this graphic novel. And she does so to great […]