The real Jesse James

Your Dust to Dust-related news of the week:

I can't believe I live this close to Northfield and have never been to Defeat of Jesse James Days. It was last weekend though and I needed a break after spending the previous two weekends at the Minnesota State Fair and the Renaissance Festival. At least Rough Draft has the report on DJJD to console me. I'll have to plan better for next year though.

Related to that, Travel & Leisure has a list of other places you can go visit in the footsteps of Jesse James.

A couple of other articles on Jesse went up this week thanks to the movie. Since the movie premiered Brad Pitt's been talking about the link between the events of Jesse's life and the celebrity-worship that still goes on today. The Assassination of Jesse James is mostly about that and how the phenomenon turned deadly for Jesse. The Washington Post covers that part of the story pretty well and also talks about how Jesse's legend -- even during his lifetime -- was exaggerated by the dime novels of the day. Not only was he made famous; his exploits were glamorized to the point that he became known as a Robin Hood figure. I mean, he was played by Roy freakin' Rogers, for crying out loud.

But, as U.S. News and World Report points out, "James himself would have considered this notion a great joke. He more likely would have agreed with a famous bandit of a later generation, Willie Sutton. When someone asked Sutton why he robbed banks, he supposedly replied: 'Because that's where the money is.'"

The article goes on to analyze Jesse's motives in depth and connects them to the Civil War: "These guerrillas were anything but the poor farmers of folklore. Many of them (like James) came from families that were three times more likely to own slaves and possessed twice as much wealth as the average Missouri family. James fought during the war against emancipation and after the war against the Republican Party that freed and enfranchised the slaves. Many of the banks and express companies struck by the James gang were owned by individuals or groups associated with the Republican Party. Like the Ku Klux Klan in former Confederate states, the James gang did its best to undermine the new order ushered in by Northern victory in the Civil War."

That's something that Alex Ness and I latched onto in the backstory for Dust to Dust. Our Jesse is no hero. He's not even an anti-hero. He's a ruthless bigot who's grown more dangerous with age. He may be old, but he's more than a match for poor Machine Gun Kelly (another man whose legend was distorted by the media of his day) who makes the mistake of wandering into Jesse's town to set up a still with a Black man in his gang.

Anyway, Jesse's celebrity is interesting and all, but more than anything else, it's this idea of him as a Southern patriot that I'm most curious to see if the movie portrays.

Thoughts on Black Canary's Wedding so far

I meant to talk about this yesterday, but forgot. The Black Canary Wedding Planner was mostly a harmless piece of fluff. I totally don't get Black Canary's dismissal of the Internet to help her plan, but whatever. It was a fun book, though I can see how some folks might be a bit miffed that Dinah was mostly unable to plan the wedding and needed Ollie's help for just about everything. Although, as someone who was very interested in planning the details of his wedding, my personal feeling is that Dinah should've included Ollie from the beginning anyway.

Although it highlights the disfunction of their relationship that he obviously had opinions in the matter, but apparently didn't voice them until Dinah started running into trouble.

My only complaint about the issue is the art. Ollie's beard is all wrong, his hair color fluctuates between blonde and red, and the anatomy on everyone is just weird. They even manage to make Wonder Woman in lingerie look unattractive.

In contrast to how low-key the Planner is, the JLA Wedding Special feels big and portentious. There's some fun wedding stuff, mostly concerning Ollie's bachelor party (and there's another telling moment here when Hal Jordon has to cancel the strippers due to Ollie's request), but there's also a lot of tension-building as Lex Luthor, Joker, and Cheetah put together a new Injustice League and make plans to destroy the JLA.

I love how the JLA in the title isn't just there to sell the comic; it's actually descriptive of what the comic is: a prequel to Dwayne McDuffie's upcoming run on Justice League. And from the looks of this, it's going to be a fantastic run. Not being well versed in the Green Lantern mythos, I've always been kind of "whatever" about John Stewart, but because of this comic I'm now excited about him and can't wait to see what McDuffie has in store for him. I also loved how McDuffie handled the Firestorm part of the comic, and how Lex Luthor has now officially put behind him his days as corporate villain and fully embraced the role of world-conquering lunatic. It's about time, Lex. And the Injustice League's new headquarters is absolutely nerdarific. The Green Arrow/Black Canary wedding promises to be good, but Justice League of America is going to be even better.

(I had a weird thought though as I was reading this and thinking about the speculation that something awful is going to happen to Ollie. What if that's not the case at all, but DC's just screwing around with us by not putting Ollie on the covers of his own comic and hinting vaguely about "what's happened to Green Arrow." Like I said, just a weird thought.)

Warrior Women Wednesday!

The illustration du jour is by the muy talented Victor Santos, who's been drawing lots of jungle girls lately.

Wonder Woman

pHilippos adds to the "Who is Wonder Woman?" discussion with a link to... the DC Message Board? Holy Crap. I'd given up on that place as a source of intelligent thought a long time ago, but damn if jv2000 didn't come up with something smart to say:

WW should NOT be a title about a woman who feels bad about herself or her mother or her upbringing. She should not have to go around apologizing ad naseum. Nor should she be looked upon as the pariah of DCU. Its time for someone to put the COMIC back in this comic book. And while they are at it, please remind the rest of the writers at DC that good writing doesn't equal depressing writing or killing off a character every third issue or scripting the bloodiest fight scene ever.

I would challenge the writers to write GOOD stories where our heroes feel GOOD about themselves. Or is that beyond the ability of the caliber of writer who writes for the serial form? Or is it some sick form of dealing with their own inferiority complexes? "Look, how great I am. I can make Superman and Wonder Woman feel bad. I can bring them down a notch." Or is it just a bad formula? "Issue 1- Superhero feels good. Issues 2 through 5 - Make superhero feel bad. Issue 6 - Superhero wins, but somebody close to him/her dies. Superhero feels bad."

When was the last time that WW actually used her mind to figure out a solution to a problem? When was the last time she actually outsmarted an opponent? As opposed to just beating them up.

There's more smart stuff in the linked post, but those are the parts that struck me as being important to who Wonder Woman is: smart and not at all angsty.

Oh, well. Gail's coming.

On writing women

Speaking of Wonder Woman, one of the writers who seemed to really get her, Greg Rucka, talked on his LJ about accusations that he's sexist because he makes bad things happen to female characters:

Seems there's a tirade over my treatment of Sasha on scans_daily coming out of the "CheckOut" storyline, and including her behavior in Checkmate 16. Apparently I've turned into a sexist bastard and didn't get the memo. "This would never happen to Batman." No shit. Batman isn't infested by nanobots and being examined by a madman vivisectionist. Doctor Mid-Nite asks if she was sexually assaulted, and that's a problem? Why, because it acknowledges that rape is a crime that happens? Would it have been more honest to simply pretend it wasn't a possibility, rather than treat the scene with maturity, and have Sasha answer and confirm that, no, she wasn't? Or is the problem that I dared broach it at all, that "there's no room in comics for that kind of thing"? Or is it because the fact that women are the victims of rape far more often than men are is something that we'd rather just all ignore? People read for what they want to read, I guess, rather than reading what was written.

David Welsh responds:

Super-heroic fantasy is at least partly about portraying a better world than the one we live in. There are lots of societal trends, positive and negative, that aren’t proportionately represented in comics, and arguing that you’re just being honest by folding in some of the fouler ones strikes me as specious.

I've unfairly boiled their arguments down to a paragraph each, so if you're interested you should definitely click through and read the rest of their thoughts. Because I like both of these guys and believe that each of them has given their opinion plenty of thought, I'm inclined to think that they're both right. Rucka has always pursued honesty in the comics of his that I've read and hasn't been shy about including some brutal stuff if that's what he thought the story called for. On the other hand, David is exactly right that those kinds of comics stories aren't for everyone. Some folks want lighter, escapist tales and there's nothing wrong with that. Rucka's comics aren't for those folks though, as Rucka himself points out in his post.

Still, I can't fault David for seeing Rucka's work in the broader context of the way women heroes have traditionally been portrayed in superhero books.

Couple of quick writer links

I've promised myself not to self-publish or start my own small press, but dang it if Amazon's CreateSpace doesn't make it look like fun. Once I've explored some, I might have to play around with it a bit. I can see using it for convention giveaways and whatnot.

Caleb Monroe proves once and for all that he's the Coolest Guy on the Planet. His thoughts on comics writing and marketing are always worth listening to, and the incredible legwork he's done on behalf of writers everywhere has yielded an indispensable set of links on craft. If you're a writer, you're gonna want to bookmark this one.

Comics/horror odds-and-ends

Top Shelf is sharing the covers from the next couple of volumes of Korgi. My five-year-old and I loved the first volume, so I'm very excited about getting these.

Don't know how I missed the first Igor book (especially since it was from SLG whom I keep a close eye on), but there's another one coming and I'm going to have to check them both out now.

Crap. By the time I heard about these cool, knitted Hellboy dolls, they were sold out. Maybe they'll make some more.

Hm. Not comics, but I'll mention it here anyway. A while back I wrote about wanting to read Ray Garton's Live Girls. I haven't gotten around to it yet, but Garton stopped by in the comments yesterday to mention that he's just sold the film rights to Live Girls. So congratulations M. Garton!

Toby Maguire's Robotech

All the Internet's buzzing about it. Transformers instigated it and Voltron seconded the motion.

Giant Robot movies are the Next Big Thing.

Warren Ellis scores Jesse James movie

No, not that Warren Ellis. This one. And Nick Cave. The Assassination of Jesse James just got even better.

And in case you don't believe me about the quality -- since I haven't seen it yet and all -- howsabout the opinions of 80% of the Rotten Tomatoes critics? (Okay, only five people have reviewed it so far, but four of 'em liked it!)

Speaking of Jesse James, I'm thinking that the name Jezebel James from FOX's mid-season sitcom The Return of Jezebel James isn't just coincidentally similar. It refers to the childhood imaginary friend of one of the characters, who used to use Jezebel as a scapegoat for her mischief. ''It wasn't me, it was Jezebel James.''

Okay, that's a pretty tenuous connection to this post, but I'm using it because I'm really just excited that Jezebel James is the new show from Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino. And that there will be more of "that trademark Gilmore banter."

Yes. I'm a girl.

Warrior Women Wednes-- um, Thursday

Can you tell that Labor Day threw me off a day?

Wonder Woman

First things first: the illustration that accompanies this post is by the fabtabulous Katie Cook. If you didn't know Katie's stuff before now, you're welcome.

This cool Wonder Woman jumper has been making the Internet rounds, but I first saw it thanks to Ragnell.

Scipio has some interesting thoughts on Wonder Woman, particularly about how important her sense of humor is. I hadn't thought of that aspect in particular when I went on and on about her, but I agree that it's an important quality. If her self-confidence is Wonder Woman's defining quality, that should naturally manifest itself in an ability to joke. Overly serious people are compensating for something and I don't think Wonder Woman has anything to compensate for. Not that she should be Spider-Man; chronic jokesters are compensating too. But there should be a balance and Wonder Woman certainly ought not to be dour.

In the same link, Scipio also criticizes Amazons Attack for getting completely wrong the message that the Amazons are supposed to be conveying to the rest of the world. And I agree with him.

"In the Golden Age, the Amazons (and their emissary to Man's World) brought Americans promise of peace and the hope of a better way of doing things. In the Modern Age, they bring Americans Amazons Attack and good guys fighting good
guys, like in a Marvel comic. They are no longer positive examples, but negative ones. They are dupes, who allow themselves to be misled by an addled and irrational leader under the sway of evil influences into a war on foreign soil, for no apparent gain and with little apparent provocation. Amazons, go home; Americans can provide that example themselves, thank you very much."

He also rightly decides to regard Amazons Attack as a fatally flawed concept, but to lend it no more power than that. Instead he looks forward to DC's hopefully correcting all this with Gail Simone's upcoming run on Wonder Woman. I wish more people could do that instead of ranting about the "damage" it's done to Wonder Woman as if this was the last story that was ever going to be told.

DC is apparently aware of the problem, so I'm just looking forward to what's coming next.

Black Canary

Thanks to reprints and archive collections, I've got pretty much every Black Canary appearance up to the point where she joined the JLA. While I wait for the Justice League Archives to catch up to me, M.O.B.L.O.G. is doing a fine job of summarizing what happened in those issues (starting here).

Supergirl

Smallville's Supergirl has her costume all picked out. And contrary to some opinions, it doesn't make her look "exactly like one of Michael Turner's characters."

Self-indulgent comics blogging

One of the first comics I ever read as a kid was Master of Kung Fu #17. A couple of years ago, I started tracking down other Shang Chi comics and bought Special Marvel Edition #16, which was the issue right before the one I'd read (the title having changed with #17).

It's a cool comic and I especially liked how Steve Englehart and Jim Starlin created a real threat for Shang Chi. His real nemesis was still going to be Fu Manchu, but no one ever thought that Shang Chi and Fu Manchu were going to duke it out once and for all. So, we got Midnight, Shang Chi's adopted brother who was still loyal to Fu Manchu and almost as good as Shang Chi was.

He and Shang Chi liked and respected each other, so Midnight would've made a great recurring villain in the series as each fighter tried to bring the other over to his point-of-view. Unfortunately, he died in the same issue he first appeared in.

Except not really. Apparently, Ron Marz brought him back briefly in Silver Surfer as sort of a Kree-created zombie and left him hanging out with the Inhumans on the Moon. Where he still is, waiting for his guest-appearance in Heroes for Hire where Shang Chi's currently hanging out.

What do you say, Zeb Wells?

Mostly unrelated (except that this is also about comics characters no one cares about but me), Alpha Flight #6 (from John Byrne's run) was one of those wacky Assistant Editor Month books that used to try some daring things, often to humorous results. In this particular comic, Snowbird fought a weather-controlling Great Beast who called in a blizzard to help unbalance the fight in his favor. You've heard the old gag about leaving a blank piece of paper and calling it a picture of a polar bear in a snow storm. That's pretty much what Byrne did with this issue, so the whole fight is nothing but blank panels with some word balloons and sound effects. It was nuts, but it was fun too and I never felt cheated.

I tell you all that to tell you that someone's come up with a dang clever way of using that book to collect convention sketches (you gotta scroll down a bit to see). I'd love to see scans of the whole thing when it's done.

Jesse James Day

I won't have time to post for real today, but it's Jesse James' birthday and I couldn't let that go without mentioning.

Happy 160th Birthday, you old coot.

Monster-Killing Monday -- er, Tuesday

Your Kill All Monsters!-related (that is, giant monsters and giant robots) links for the week:

Monsters

Giant Monsters Attack! has the skinny on Dreamworks' upcoming animated giant-monster flick: Monsters vs. Aliens. (Yet more validation that Robots vs. Monsters wasn't the right title for Kill All Monsters!)

When I was at San Diego Comic-Con last year, Jason Copland and I met Chris Wisnia, the guy behind Tabloia.com. I'd forgotten it since then, but was recently reminded that Tabloia has a cool gallery of giant-monster fan art.

Lady, That's My Skull has created some Land of the Lost postage stamps that I wish were real.

A friend of mine sent me this link about a giant, creepy spider web in a Texas state park. I'm slightly arachnophobic, so every time I see something like this it gives me the heebie-jeebies. Especially when there's no spider in the web. It gets me looking around and wondering where the hell the spider is that could create something so monstrous.

I must've been really busy and distracted by other things not to have talked at all about the Beasts! book when it came out. That's the only explanation for why I didn't mention it. Anyway, I just learned that there's a blog.

MTV.com has some images of various monsters from the upcoming Dragon Wars movie. This feels like a cheesy movie to me, but the designs are pretty cool, so I'm actually getting kind of anxious to see this one.

Toho plans to do some more Godzilla movies eventually. Just not right now.

Robots

Full-scale Iron Scopedog woos women while invading Japan. It's both scary and thrilling how much that image looks like a live-action shot of something from Kill All Monsters! #2.

Chizumatic thinks way too hard about giant robots in order to explain why they wouldn't really work, but it's interesting reading.

Oddball Comics wants to remind us about Tomahawk #70, featuring everyone's favorite, Native American giant-robot: Iron Chief.