Energy-Puking Boy (and others): Community Alignment Chart?
I’m not going to do what somebody else already did perfectly well just for the sake of doing it with my particular chart design. You can quibble if Abed and the Dean should be switched or if Britta and Troy should be, but it’s reasonably accurate. (If you want to see an awful Community alignment chart that rips off my design, here you go.)
Unstoppable Gravy Express: So is that Brad Paisley / LL Cool J song racist or not?
Ta-Nehisi Coates answered that better than I ever could.
Rbx5: re there any Big Two/Image titles you are, in fact, following, and why?
A fair amount of Marvel, actually. Avengers, New Avengers, Uncanny Avengers, Wolverine and the X-Men, All New X-Men and Uncanny X-Men. The current F4 stuff isn’t bad at all but it doesn’t really grab me, mostly because after the Jonathan Hickman run on that franchise it just sort of pales in comparison, and Hickman is the reason I’m reading his two Avengers books – he’s currently my “I will read any comic he writes” writer, much in the way that Grant Morrison was such ten years ago.
I’m not buying anything DC prints new; given their current treatment of creators (this is not to say that Marvel is great shakes, they aren’t, but DC these days seems determined to actively fuck creators over in every possible respect) I try to avoid giving them money. I bought a copy of The New Deadwardians used and it was really good, and I am glad DC didn’t get any of my money for it.
Image… I picked up Sex, which is Joe Casey’s book about a Batman analogue post-Bat-life sort of a thing. It was okay-to-decent but the lettering was so distracting I gave up on it after two issues. I’m reading Saga in trades (it is very good) and The Manhattan Projects because Hickman, and I tried out Prophet which fell into the “it’s good, but not my thing” category.
switchnode: How long do you expect/intend Al’Rashad to run? Are we a significant way into a fast, hard-hitting story about a particular flashpoint, or still in the setup phase of something much longer and more sprawling? On a related note, do you think of it more as a webcomic, or as a comic book that happens to be on the web?
It’s going to run eight “issues,” with issue eight planned to be oversized (e.g. more than 28 pages, less than a full ninth issue). Currently we’re midway through book six, so you do the math.
And it’s a comic book that happens to be on the web. The fact that people keep complaining about things which get revealed 1-2 pages later probably should have been a big tip-off there. Davinder and I wanted to do a comic, and I don’t actually like the episodic/strip format of many webcomics for the purpose of a larger narrative. So there you go.
Murc: Any chance of maps at any point for Al-Rashad?
They’re definitely in the queue, although they might end up being bonuses for the print edition.
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I wouldn’t say I’ve been “complaining.”
I would say I’ve been “irresponsibly speculating.”
When can we give you money for this?
Seriously. When. How do you not already have a kickstarter or a table at TCAF or something? Could we subsidize Davinder in a way that might get us, say, three pages a week instead of just the one?
Wait, so the/a problem with the song (which I haven’t heard, did catch LL talking about it on Leno..I think it was Leno) is that LL Cool J isn’t …what..a serious enough rapper to be the one to do it?
Every Joe Casey book should have a “By the co-creator of Ben 10” on the cover.
The problem with the song is that it makes light of a heavy issue and shifts responsibility away from people (like Paisley) who are genuinely responsible for perpetuating a racist culture, and LL Cool J, who ought to know better, seems completely oblivious to that fact.
Also, while the idea of mixing country and rap is a novel one, the song executes it poorly, and I find the end result rather mediocre.
We don’t have a Kickstarter or a table or a thing because the book is not done yet. I work full-time in a very demanding profession and Davinder is finishing teacher’s college, and neither of us wants to Kickstart something that, worst-case scenario, has to go on hiatus. Right now we’re trying to find time to assemble proper “comics” for sale on Comixology and that will be an interim step.
(Right now we’re trying to get stuff done in advance of Davinder’s long practicum later in the year so we don’t have to go on hiatus this year. There may end up being Glossary pages for a few weeks or maybe if some other artist wants to do a fill-in story with me, that might be an option too.)
Fair enough.
Just remember that there are those of us willing to subsidize your art.
Why aren’t you reading Young Avengers?
No. The problem with LL Cool J being involved is that he’s not someone who’s built up a history, in rap, of tackling this topic. It’s as tone deaf as asking Britany Spears to speak on feminism simply because she’s a woman. Sure, she has a perspective, I’m sure, but it’s probably going to be more interesting and instructional to ask someone who’s made that a primary topic of their work and art. I’m not saying pop art along the lines of “Mama Said Knock You Out” is wrong or invalid.
The problem is that LL Cool J being involved, when there are other artists whose work speaks to this topic, suggests that Brad Paisley picked, what appears in his mind to be, one of several interchangeable black guys, to give him some cover to say, “I just want to wear this shirt with a flag that, from a historical perspective, symbolizes that white guys around here were willing to bleed and die to keep other people as property. What’s wrong with that?”
If he’d asked a rapper who had put a little more thought into the topic than LL, then he might have gotten a better answer to that question before he made what was a probably well-intentioned, but stupid, song.
Wow. Sorry for the comma splices all over that. Need more coffee.
So again, breaking down all the BS about “time served” on the issue and such…
LL Cool J isn’t black enough is what I’m hearing.
I don’t know the song’s origin…I don’t know if Paisly went and recruited LL or if LL recruited Paisly, if they’re pals who decided to write a song, if some executive at a shared music company said “I have a great idea!”, I haven’t heard the song, but I did hear LL Cool J say that what he/they were getting at is that we’ll never solve the big problems if people keep getting offended over all the little, unintended ones.
See, you say “I just want to wear this shirt with a flag that, from a historical perspective, symbolizes that white guys around here were willing to bleed and die to keep other people as property. What’s wrong with that?”
Except, that’s not what everyone wearing a confederate flag is saying, is meaning, or even realize it’s meaning. When they say it stand for pride in where they came from, sometimes that all it is. It takes time, learning and empathy to realize it may mean more and you need to put your own feelings aside for the sake of others.
Accusing someone of being racist or pro-slavery off the bat just makes them defensive, and doesn’t lead to understanding of WHY. I say this as someone who had their own very gradual realization of the inflammatory nature of the confederate flag, as someone who is Jewish, who’s been active in civil rights both from a historical and activist stand point since high school, and pretty much mainly associated the confederate flag with the Dukes of Hazard, who were not racist characters despite using the flag as their symbol. And despite knowing all about slavery, the true stories of the civil war, being extremely well educated, and tries to be very considerate of others feelings, it never occurred to me that something like a shirt (or in my case, a bandanna worn by my dog) would offend someone.
But I think the point LL Cool J made is right…See, there’s been LOTS of talk about this in the press and blogs and twitter and what have you…yet VERY little about 1/3 to 1/2 of black people in Michigan having the power of their vote taken away.
Between Brad Paisly’s shirt and Michigan and the voting discrimination laws being pushed out left and right, or NBC keeping head birther Trump on the payroll…which is the real problem?
Absolutely, that is all more important. I’ve been interested in the vote suppression that’s been systematically happening here in the U.S. since 2000 at least. That doesn’t mean that this isn’t something worth looking at, though.
This is why this is a problem, though. After Reconstruction, there was a systematic effort to obscure pretty much everything about what the Civil War was really about. That’s why you get people trying to make a case that the Civil War was about State’s rights. It wasn’t. It was about slavery. It’s why there’s a narrative that gets taught that Reconstruction was a failure because it was this imposition of carpetbagging northern scalawags. It wasn’t. It was because there was a systematic counter-revolution in the south of white supremacists who worked to threaten and undermine black public figures, to disenfranchise black voters, and to segregate black citizens.
All the “regional pride” that the Confederate flag supposedly represents is pride in a system that was intentionally trying to discriminate and target people based on race. It’s a clever marketing campaign that tries to whitewash the baggage of that symbol, the war that it flew over, and why those soldiers were fighting. Look at it this way: how many people reveling in the southern pride that the Confederate flag represents would equate that pride with Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., or Harriet Tubman?
Then consider this, if innocent, well-meaning, well-educated, empathetic people like you recognized how divisive, ugly and racist that symbol is, and if they could put themselves into the shoes of the people for whom it is so clearly a symbol of racially motivated oppression, would they quietly stand by while 1/3 to 1/2 of the black citizens of Michigan are being disenfranchised?
Hey, MGK? I know it’s a little late and all, but considering that Injustice: Gods Among Us has just released, I was hoping you’d do a follow up post. You know, to see if you actually like beating up Superman as the Joker?
The best part of the “Accidental Racist” saga is that Brad Paisley is from northern West Virginia, which was aligned with the Union during the Civil War.
I’m sure her ancestors would be ecstatic that he was whinging about wanting to wear the traitor’s flag on a t-shirt without a black servant questioning him.
*his ancestors, rather