People, I legit expected to start this blog back up and then spend weeks having absolutely nothing to write about but old graphic novels I dug out of storage, photos of Funko Pops, and all-caps reminders for everyone to wash their hands.

But nope, nope, turns out I get to write about an upcoming comic, and I have to tell you it sounds dumb as hell.

In this case, we’re talking about the just-announced “New Warriors” series, written by Daniel Kibblesmith and illustrated by Luciano Vecchio.

The concept doesn’t sound particularly bad. The members of the original New Warriors team, plus a few extra former teen heroes, band together to help train up a new generation of teenaged superheroes. You can find the same general formula in tons of X-Men comics, in Avengers Academy, in Teen Titans, and more.

The problem here is the new characters being introduced.

Trailblazer and B-Negative seem like the closest thing to halfway-decent characters and not-entirely-awful names. But Facetime is a crude caricature of an Extremely Online Memelord, just with higher-tech equipment.

And then there’s Snowflake and Safespace.

So they’re twins. Snowflake is nonbinary. They throw ice shurikens. Safespace is a jock. He creates protective shields. And those are actually, seriously the names they decided to give them.

I am absolutely no Comicsgater. Frankly, I want more non-white characters in comics. We need a heck of a lot more non-binary people, too, since there are almost none right now. But when you mix those names into the whole thing…

This isn’t representation. This is pandering. And it’s unusually clumsy pandering at that. People joke about how awkward the 1960s Teen Titans comics were, with Bob Haney trying — and failing hilariously — at creating hip teenager slang.

But this is worse, because it’s so cynical. These aren’t believable teenagers. They’re not Peter Parker or Miles Morales or Sam Alexander or Kamala Khan. These are caricatures, designed by conservatives to be derided by conservatives and bullies and trolls. These were characters created solely so Nazi fanboys on Twitter will have a new excuse to scream even more abuse and death threats at women and trans kids.

“Here’s what you want, woke teenagers,” sneers Marvel Comics, home of extreme Trump fanboy Ike Perlmutter, home of racist toerag C.B. “Akira Yoshida” Cebulski. “Here’s what you want so buy our shit, lololol, NPC loozers.”

I feel sorry for Kibblesmith and Vecchio, who have always seemed like clued-in creators. Either this is a truly epic screwup on their part, or it’s a mandate from editorial.

But either way, it’s a cruel and stupid mistake, and everyone involved should feel ashamed.

So I’ve started blogging again, and I’m sure you’re wondering (yes indeed lololol) what’s been happening with me over the last four years.

It ain’t been great.

I got fired from my job soon after I quit blogging. I’m still not entirely sure why I got the axe, but they’d been working on getting rid of me for quite a while — vastly increasing my workload, trying to get me to do additional work off-the-clock, etc. I figure either my boss decided I was boring and uncool, and decided to unload me for cooler people, or the division as a whole was working to discard workers with more seniority in favor of recent graduates they thought they could underpay.

After that, I was unemployed for over three years. I was able to move in with the folks and have been more than pleased to help them out here and there. Still, I’m in a far worse place than I was before — I’m making less than half what I was making in Denton, most of my belongings are in storage, likely permanently, and the nearest decent comics and book stores are hours away.

(I’ll probably be salty for the rest of my life about having to leave Denton. I loved the holy howling heck out of Denton. A beautiful city, two excellent comics stores and more within driving distance, the best damn used bookstore in existence, and a vast variety of things I could take photos of. I’ll also be salty at myself for not appreciating where I lived and spending most of my time hiding inside the house. I should have volunteered at the music festivals. I should have tried more weird restaurants and coffee shops. I should have taken even more photos than I did.)

And the blogosphere in general ain’t doing too great either.

At some point, blogs got abandoned because we let Facebook and Twitter convince us that social media was the only thing we needed. Most of the blogs in my sidebar have been abandoned, and many others haven’t been updated in months. Some of them are even more depressing. Comics Alliance was shut down. Brian Snell, host of “Slay, Monstrobot of the Deep,” died just over a year ago. RIP, Snell, I wish we’d appreciated you more.

And even then, considering how bad things got for me, considering the dwindling of the blogosphere — it’s still better than discovering that half the country, including people we thought were our friends, think Nazis are “Very Fine People,” doesn’t it?

So yeah, the country is falling to pieces, fascist governments are on the rise worldwide, a global coalition of Russians, Nazis, dumbfucks, and trolls got together and worked very hard to kill off video games, comics, and the Hugo Awards — all to win the favor of a Nazi-loving has-been comics artist and a creeptastic anime voice actor, and a worryingly large percentage of our national population is champing at the bit to start going door-to-door machine-gunning their neighbors.

Nihilism is wrecking the country, the environment, democracy, and the economy — ’cause if you can’t own everything, why not just let the world burn to punish everyone else? — but we’re told that the problem is we’re not being civil and polite enough to the maniacs running our lives.

I don’t know how to fix any of this, but I can tell you I have strong desires to trim down the planet’s supply of sociopaths. It might not work, but I could at least have some fun with my duffel bag full of crowbars, right?

So, in summary, the last four years have sucked. Any way to fix it all? Hell if I know. May as well write some blog posts, right?

Truth: Red, White & Black

I’ve had a mind to review this one for ages, and African American History Month seems like a great time to do it. This was a seven-issue series published by Marvel back in 2003. It was written by the late Robert Morales and illustrated by Kyle Baker. It made a lot of racist douchegoblins really mad back in the day, so I figure it’s certainly worth reading.

Our setup here is that, after Steve Rogers becomes Captain America and Professor Erskine, the secretive creator of the Super-Soldier formula, is killed, the military is desperate to recreate the formula. And since they have almost no idea what was in the formula, they have to experiment with a lot of different concoctions, and they have to experiment on people they don’t give a damn about. So a bunch of black soldiers get recruited into the program, injected with variations of the formula, and die by the score.

“Why, that’s ridiculous! Black people would never be experimented on like that! All lives matter!”

To which, all you really have to say is Tuskegee. Which went on for 40 years, primarily for the sake of plain ol’ meanness.

Anyway, of the 300 men inducted into the new Super-Soldier program, only six survive, and are gifted with increased strength, stamina — and often, significant disfiguring mutations. They’re sent on dangerous missions against the Nazis, and over time, a combination of battlefield casualties and deaths from the unstable Super-Soldier formulas whittles their number down to just one — Isaiah Bradley. Frustrated by the military’s racist treatment and the inconsequential and foolish missions he’s been sent on, Bradley steals a spare Captain America uniform and takes the fight to the Nazis by himself — and he gets captured.

The story doesn’t take place entirely in the past — in the present day, Steve Rogers learns about the alternate Super-Soldier program for the first time and begins his own investigation of what happened to Isaiah Bradley. While he shuts down a number of racists who’d profited from exploiting black soldiers decades ago, he also discovers that Bradley’s ultimate legacy was perhaps even more amazing than his wartime career.

Verdict: Thumbs up. It’s a great story, with outstanding action, characterization, empathy, and unpredictability. There are several points where you think the story is going to go one way, but it completely surprises you and goes the other.

It’s an intensely emotional book, too — not merely because the lead characters have strong emotions, but because the emotions are so realistic and raw. Early in the Super-Soldier testing process, the families of all the inductees are told that they’ve been killed — and many other black soldiers are actually murdered to cover up the crimes — and the toll on the families is covered extensively. The anguish that comes from these unexpected deaths is rendered amazingly well, and their pain is felt by the reader, too. It’s not just the writing here — Kyle Baker’s art really brings it home. Sometimes the sorrow is visible and unmistakable, and sometimes it’s hidden below the surface, but it all feels real.

Baker’s art is often very cartoony, which is initially a shock when you start reading. It’s very far from the Marvel standard, but for the most part, it’s something you get used to quickly. Baker is a cartoonist’s cartoonist, and it’s a thrill to see him work. His vision here is intensely important, too — you can tell the characters mean a lot to him, and he works hard to make everyone unique and interesting. His work is, like I said before, emotionally resonant, from the faces to the eyes to the body language.

The comic is obviously fiction, but Morales’ appendix at the end of the book is definitely worth reading. He details some of his research and outlines how some of the scenes in the story were inspired. For history buffs, it’s a good read and includes suggestions for other books worth checking out.

It’s a sad comic in a lot of ways. But it’s got its unique glories, too, in moments both crashing and quiet. It’s also not at all easy to find — you can’t get it from Amazon without paying $50 or more. But I found my copy a couple years ago in one of the local comic shops for a normal price, so do some digging around. You should also be able to find it digitally. If you can find it, you’ll be very glad you got the opportunity to read it, so go pick it up.

March, Book Two

We’ve already reviewed Book One — check out the review over here.

I trust you know the general background of this one — it’s the autobiography of civil rights leader and Congressman John Lewis, told as a graphic novel. It’s cowritten by one of his staffers, a comics fan named Andrew Aydin, with art by Nate Powell.

This second chapter of the series gets us deeper into the weeds of the civil rights movement, just as it begins to get a lot more violent for the participants. They’re attacked at movie theaters, someone locks them in a diner, then fills it full of poison bug spray, their buses are run off the road and set on fire, they’re beaten by local thugs, the Klan, and the police, they’re attacked at churches, they’re thrown in jail.

But all of this is getting a lot of interest from the public all across the nation and the world. Some of the people who are also being attacked are members of the press, and members of President Kennedy’s staff. The violence of the segregated South was getting more and more attention and attracting more and more people who felt it was time for everyone to be equal. Thugs like Bull Connor were making things even worse for the status quo, upping the savagery of his attacks on innocent people until just about everyone in the country was disgusted.

The last quarter of the book focuses on the March on Washington — not just the videos you’ve seen on YouTube, but the behind-the-scenes negotiations that made it possible. One of the organizers was gay and was outed by Strom Thurmond in an attempt to discredit the march. Lewis’s speech had to go through extensive rewrites to keep it from sounding like an outright call for revolution. It’s a triumphant note — but the struggle was far from over. Less than a month after the march, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama was bombed, killing four little girls.

Verdict: Thumbs up. This book is going to make you unbelievably furious. It has good reason to do so, and we should all be furious about the massive injustices of this period in our national history. Yes, the March on Washington is genuinely inspiring, but most of the book is a recounting of injustice after injustice after injustice, and anyone who doesn’t get mad about that just isn’t paying attention. And people who want us to forget this should be ashamed of themselves.

There’s another reason I get angry when I read this book. You already know there are a lot of people who want to restrict voting rights and invent barriers to keep non-white people from voting. They always tell you they’re not racist, they’re just worried about illegal voting. That’s bull. These people are racist scum, and that’s all there is to it.

Y’all have heard me rant before about liberals who’ve decided the only way to solve the problem of racism in the South is to expel the South from the United States. The thing these supposedly good liberals don’t realize is that when they say things like that, they’re also spitting in the faces of the great civil rights leaders and openly siding with the Bull Connors.

Liberals who want to expel the South would be giving Southern racists free rein to turn the clock back as far as they wanted, essentially abandoning millions of African Americans, Hispanics, women, gays, trans people, atheists, and even other liberals to people who would gleefully enslave, imprison, oppress, and execute them. Liberals who want to expel the South are signaling their willingness to do the KKK’s bidding, to give the wingnuts the victory they’ve always dreamed of. They’re siding with Jefferson Davis over Abraham Lincoln. They’re looking at the hard work and sacrifices of John Lewis, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and thousands of others, and declaring they don’t care, it was all a failure, and let’s just let injustice rule again.

That’s a lot of the reason this book makes me angry. We’ve come so far — but still not far enough — and too many people are willing to abandon all that progress because they’re bored. And because they know they won’t suffer any of the consequences.

March, Book Two is a great book. You should definitely go pick it up.

Manifest Destiny #11

Lewis has a plan to harpoon the giant frog monster in the river to get the boat towed free from the arch it’s beached on. The problem is that when they throw it bait, its leaps into the air to catch it aren’t predictable enough for harpooners to hit. So a different solution is hit upon — dangle bait from a tree, then harpoon the monster when it leaps up to take the bait. And they’re going to use the rapist Hardy as the bait. The operation is mostly successful — the beast is harpooned, and Hardy only loses a leg — but now that it’s been struck, the monster is diving and pulling the boat underwater. Is there any way to save the boat and crew?

Verdict: Thumbs up. Outstanding, tense story, with great character work, beautiful artwork (yes, even of the monsters), and unexpectedly great action.

Evil Empire #6

We learn how President Sam Duggins got so messed up, and how he goes about consolidating his power — mainly by killing his Congressional opponents, rewriting the Constitution to make sociopathy the law of the land, and lots and lots of marketing. The new resistance, led by Reese and Theo, start making plans to overthrow Duggins, and their first act is to use some sort of hypertech CD to hack the DJ’s setup at a presidential drugs-and-sex party by the Washington Monument to make fun of Duggins. The Duggins administration reacts by shooting a few lowlifes, turning Disneyland into a pornographic park, revealing his incestuous relationship with his sister, and making her his vice president. Right now, the only benefit the resistance has is a mole on the inside of the administration.

Verdict: Thumbs down. I’m done with this book. It was sold as a semi-realistic vision of how the U.S. could end up going fascist, but it’s turned into a cartoon. The ease that Duggins flips most of the country into quasi-nazis is just beyond my ability to even kinda believe. In reality, pretty much everyone in Congress would be in Duggins’ opposition — the Republicans wouldn’t trust him because he’d run as a Democrat, and the Democrats would hate him for lying about everything in his campaign. Yes, Duggins would probably be able to get a lot of America’s cops to do his dirty work — but not near all of them. Maybe half, if he was lucky. And the military wouldn’t go for him, either — a guy banging his sister and running cocaine orgies on the National Mall just doesn’t have any kind of respectable discipline.

And again, there’s the fascism thing. There’s the incest-with-his-sister thing. There’s the let’s-make-America-legally-psychopathic thing. I don’t care how good your PR is — you’re not going to get enough people to go along with that. You might be able to get the fringe-of-the-fringe of either political party to go along with mass assassinations and turning Disneyland into an orgy camp, but 90% of the country would want your head on a stick.

And how stupid is the resistance? They’re somehow able to sneak into a presidential hedonism party, with one of the most famous pop stars in the country — and a known opponent of the crazy evil president — looming in the shadows just inside the treeline — nice work, Secret Service — and they go with sneaking a magic-tech CD that lets them use the DJ’s equipment to make fun of Duggins? Instead of taking advantage of the lax security and coked-up partygoers to put a bullet in Duggins’ head?

This is a crappy comic book, with badly thought-out ideas. I ain’t reading this no more.

Today’s Cool Links:

• I am not kidding: this is the greatest thing in television history. Someone give John Oliver a medal.
• A college professor examines how studying comics, mass media, and popular culture help make students better people and citizens.
• Holy cheese, that’s a big spider!

All Star Western #34

I’d stopped reading this one a long time back, but that was less about disliking the character or the creators and more about my usual general malaise. But this is the last issue — and Darwyn Cooke is doing the art. And I’ll always buy a comic that’s got Darwyn Cooke doing Jonah Hex art.

There’s a lot of this that I missed out on, but at some point, Jonah Hex traveled to the present day, met some superheroes, and got plastic surgery to fix his face. But he’s back in the Old West where he belongs now, and he’s just met up with his fellow bounty hunter and sometime lover Tallulah Black. They’ve heard that there’s an outlaw impersonating him holed up in the next town over, and Jonah wants to see what this is all about. At the same time, traveling to the future meant that he also learned how he’d die, and he’s been dreading how it’s going to happen. Is there a future for Jonah Hex beyond getting murdered and sold to a taxidermist?

Verdict: Thumbs up. A big chunk of the appeal is Darwyn Cooke’s art — but it’s also great to watch Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti bid farewell to some characters they obviously care deeply about. I do love the fact that Jonah Hex is still very definitely Jonah Hex, even without his famous scars — and even more than that, I love the fact that Jonah’s all purty now, and he still loves the terribly scarred Tallulah. And most of all, I love the fact that we get a gloriously violent and crude Jonah Hex adventure mixed in with the perfect hope-for-the-future ending that you’d never expect Jonah Hex to actually get. And it all works perfectly.

Evil Empire #4

I’m gonna spoil the heck out of this comic, ’cause otherwise, I can’t tell you why I thought it was not good.

Rebellious pop star Reese Greenwood and her bodyguard Theo have just watched Kenneth Laramy, jailed presidential candidate and unofficial leader of the pro-fascism movement, admit he’d just been along for the ride, desperate to get away from all the crazy nuts proclaiming him their new messiah — and then he got shot dead by his own supporters. Luckily, the feds tear in and save Reese and Theo. This leaves single liberal Sam Duggins as the only real candidate for the presidency. And then, after the election results are announced, and Sam is about to make his acceptance speech, Reese learns that Sam’s sister Julia was sleeping with and manipulating Laramy. And then Reese and Theo both learn that Sam and Julia are having an incestuous relationship. And then Sam gives an acceptance speech claiming that he agreed with Laramy and believes that it’s time the country abandons all pretense of morality to become a nation fully dedicated to evil.

Verdict: Thumbs down. I was enjoying the heck out of this until the ending of this issue, because it makes no freakin’ sense. In the real world, if a Democrat was elected president and then gave a speech just after the results were announced saying that, nope, he was actually in full agreement with his Republican opponent about everything, he’d be lucky to get anything done in office at all. The Democrats would be furious and would refuse to support him at all. The Republicans might be glad to have a surprise Republican in the White House, but they also wouldn’t trust the guy who’d spent years telling everyone he was a liberal. (And, by the way, the same would hold true if a Republican had suddenly switched parties after the election.)

You know what you definitely wouldn’t get? You definitely wouldn’t get everyone in the country to just go “Oh, hey, the president wants us to be evil now, come on, everyone!” I could sorta believe it when Laramy was pushing the whole thing as letting angry people push back as hard as they want when people irritate or offend them. I mean, we’ve all seen what the NRA looks like nowadays, right? But you know who wakes up and decides to embrace cartoon-evil just because the president says so? Ain’t nobody.

This series just faceplanted hard, and they are really going to have to work to make me keep reading.

Evil Empire #2

So how did the future fascist America come about? We rewind 25 years to the present day, where presidential candidate Kenneth Laramy has just used his eulogy at his wife’s funeral to confess to her murder and to declare that it should be legal to kill anyone who you think really deserves it. While controversial and rebellious rapper Reese Greenwood starts a romance with Sam Duggins, the other presidential candidate, Laramy is quickly convicted and jailed, but he uses his trial to preach his psychotic gospel of absolute, unrestrained freedom and if-it-feels-good-do-it bloodshed — and as a result, a wave of violence sweeps the nation. And even worse, the police and prison guards are largely on Laramy’s side, and they allow him to leave prison so he can continue to encourage people to embrace violence and anarchy.

Verdict: Thumbs up. I was plenty doubtful last issue that the creators would be able to build a believable history that brought about a serious fascist dictatorship. But everything about Laramy’s pro-violence platform feels somewhat ripped from the headlines. We do actually have pro-sedition militia loons who want to kill lots of people, and they’re being egged on by big media pundits, partly for the ratings, partly because they know they’ll never get punished for inciting riots, murders and terrorist attacks. We got Florida, which basically legalized murder. We got Georgia, which wants people to carry guns in bars, schools, churches, and airports. We got legislators and billionaires waging illogical wars on homeless people, on the poor, on women and minorities, on solar energy, of all things, on the very concepts of human empathy and compassion.

We can turn on the TV and see sociopaths hosting news shows and appearing as honored guests, doing everything they can to encourage more sociopathy, more violence, more racism. About the only thing keeping the comic book from looking too much like real life is the spectacular lack of charisma or forethought going on among the political and media leaders on the rightward side of the aisle. In the real world, thank goodness, the percentage of psychotics in the population is much, much lower.

Ghosted #9

Jackson Winters is in huge trouble. He’s successfully rescued Nina Blood Crow from the Brotherhood of the Closed Book, but now they’re both trapped in a jungle haunted by hundreds of dead, angry animals. And the only people who can rescue them are, unfortunately, the Brotherhood of the Closed Book. And even worse, the Brotherhood is working with Nina’s mother, Wenona Blood Crow, an organized crime kingpin who helped get Nina possessed by the vengeful spirit of the Skadegamutc. Plus we also get a flashback of Jackson’s last big casino heist and why it went so disastrously, terrifyingly wrong.

Verdict: Thumbs up. It’s a gloriously creepy, bloody story, and it was spectacular fun to read. If y’all love good horror comics, you should be reading this series.

Today’s Cool Links:

• Don’t ever get Greg Rucka mad at you, especially if you’re a Fake Geek Guy, ’cause he will murderize you with words.
• How science fiction has shaped and is shaping the future.
• Y’all elect me president, and I’ll guarantee all this anti-Net Neutrality crap is going to get reversed hard.

I got a whole big bucket of stuff I wanna talk about today, and comics reviews ain’t even a one of ’em.

ITEM 1:

They’ve announced the cast for the rebooted Fantastic Four movie. And for the most part, my lone reaction is a colossal shrug — I’m not very good at mass-media consumption anymore, and I didn’t recognize the names of any of the actors. But what’s really got certain members of the racist douchebucket fanboy brigade up in arms is that Johnny Storm is going to be played by Michael B. Jordan, a black actor.

There are two proper reactions to this: braying mockery or really excellent commentary examining race in the comics.

Ultimately, this is about smart casting — Jordan is a well-respected actor, it gets the movie a quick pop of controversy, thanks to the never-shutting-up racist population, and it gives comic book movies the opportunity to grow out of the These-Are-Only-For-White-People niche they’ve been locked into for too long.

ITEM 2:

A bunch of bigots in the South Carolina legislature actually want to cut funds from a university for suggesting students read Alison Bechdel’s brilliant “Fun Home” graphic novel.

One of the legislators, a Republican from Greenville, SC named Garry Smith said, “One of the things I learned over the years is that if you want to make a point, you have to make it hurt.”

And one of the things I’ve learned over the years is that if you find a moralizing Republican lawmaker in South Carolina, you’re pretty damn certain to find out that he spends his free time having sex with barnyard animals. All it takes is enough patient research into Rep. Smith’s background.

ITEM 3:

I’m looking forward to the next week or so here in Denton — it’s the beginning of GeeKon, a celebration of all things geeky and awesome. It’s mostly geared toward college students, but I hope I can enjoy some of the events without anyone complaining too much about the middle-aged fat guy in the crowd.

I’ll probably end up missing out on a lot of events — some of the film screenings will be taking place during work hours, and some of the other events are really geared so strongly toward geeks in their 20s that I think I’d feel much too awkward being in the audience — but I’m really looking forward to the UNT Comics Studies Conference, which focuses on academic approaches to comics.

And finally…

Greg Abbott is a dillweed.

A racist, sexist, homophobic, cowardly dillweed.

When I take over this state, Greg Abbott is going to get escorted to the nearest state line and told to get out and not come back.

And when it comes to the nearest state line, I intend to start measuring from Galveston.

March: Book One

When I heard about this one, I knew I’d have to get it.

It’s basically the autobiography of civil rights leader and Congressman John Lewis, in graphic-novel format. The project came about because some of his staff were making jokes about staffer Andrew Aydin, who was a comics fan, but Lewis pointed out that a comic book about Martin Luther King, Jr. helped inspire him to get involved in the civil rights movement. Soon, Aydin was co-writing this book with Lewis, while Nate Powell put the art together.

Though the book starts out with what’s probably the most horrifying incident of Lewis’ life — when state troopers attacked peaceful marchers and fractured his skull on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama — we soon settle into a more straightforward biography. We visit Lewis as a child, obsessed with being a preacher and delivering passionate sermons to the family’s chickens as practice. We watch him growing up, going to college, becoming more socially aware, meeting Martin Luther King, becoming an activist…

Approximately the last half of the book focuses on the lunch counter sit-ins in Nashville, following them from the organizing and planning stages through the actual sit-ins and through the trials and aftermath. It’s simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying.

Verdict: Thumbs up. It’s an amazing work of art, exciting, scary, beautiful, inspiring, and informative all at once. Part memoir, part history.

Like I said, a big chunk of the book is devoted to the sit-ins, and they’re probably the most interesting parts of the story, especially for those of us who were too young to have heard about these while they were happening.

I never knew that participants had to go through training sessions to make sure they were really willing to abide by the principles of non-violence — there was a lot of roleplaying involved, with everyone calling each other names, heaping abuse on each other, blowing cigarette smoke in their faces and dousing them with water — because that’s what they knew would happen at protests, and they had to make sure that everyone could handle the pressure without snapping and punching some Nashville cop in the neck.

And the specifics of the sit-ins were pretty interesting, too — all the detail and planning that went into them, what actually happened during the sit-ins, how people reacted, they’re all extremely informative. All of this got glazed over in school, so we never learned any of this. The history makes it worth reading.

Is there rude language? Yes, there is — racial epithets are used, just as they were used in real life. Is it still kid-friendly? I think it is. Again, this is historical info, and it’s important for kids and adults to know what happened. There’s nothing explicit — there’s no gore, no sex, no over-the-top swearing — but the difficulty of life in the South for African-Americans, and what it was like to attend protests and marches — none of this is sugar-coated, and none of it should be.

It’s a great story, it’s all true, and it’s the first graphic novel written by a member of Congress! I’d consider that a must-read. Go pick it up.

So, it looks like it’s time to talk politics again.

See, there’s this video from the crazy guy who plans to go out and shoot people, possibly randomly, possibly not, if there’s anything at all done about gun control. He started thinking all the talk on the news about him shooting his mouth off was just plain awesome publicity, ’cause he was somehow building an army of supporters who would help him wage war against the government and defeat tyranny. He probably has changed his opinion about all that publicity since then, ’cause his home state of Tennessee said, “Whoops, man, you’re completely crazy and a likely danger to other people, so we’re revoking your gun licenses.”

Here’s how I feel about gun control issues. I’m generally okay with folks owning guns. I know folks who live in the country or in the mountains — they own guns because they sometimes have dangerous wild animals come on their property, and because it takes a half-hour for the cops to come if they call. I know folks who hunt, and folks who like to shoot at the range, and folks who own a gun for protection (though I kinda suspect they’d be more likely to shoot themselves in a crisis). And I’m okay with them owning that stuff.

I don’t see any reason for people to own machine guns or armor-piercing ammo. And I don’t have a single solitary problem with banning those. It’s called a “well-regulated militia,” and “well-regulated” doesn’t mean “not regulated.”

But aaaaanyway, back to the crazy in the video. These guys actually amuse me a bit. The guys who talk about raising an army of gun fanatics to go out to fight the tyranny of the duly-elected black guy in the White House. ‘Cause real life is not a Stallone or Bronson movie. It’s not a John Wayne Western. It’s not “Red Dawn.”

Real life would, if he was lucky, see this twit shot down by the cops in about 30 seconds. If he was unlucky, he’d shoot a few cops, and then he’d get mowed down by the SWAT team and his family might spend a few years in jail for aiding and abetting. If he’s really unlucky, his War Against Tyranny would go bad wrong, and he’d accidentally shoot a mailman, or a housewife, or a preschooler, or a bunch of preschoolers, and he’d get mowed down AND he’d hit front page news and convince even more people to support gun control.

And if he’s really, really, really unlucky, he or some nimrod he or the NRA are encouraging will shoot at some politician. Then the feds will stick every gun-humping wingnut in the pen or Gitmo, investigate every NRA member down to the lint in their bellybuttons, shut down the NRA in a heartbeat… and they’d do it with the support of an overwhelming majority of the American people, too. ‘Cause Americans enjoy a little smacktalk, they like violent movies and games, they enjoy fantasizing about being the hero with the giant high-caliber hand-cannons defeating the bad guys. But they don’t actually like non-pretend violence. It freaks ’em out, and probably justifiably so. Pretend violence is fun in movies. Real violence leads to real people getting real dead. And people who run around inflicting violence on other people tend to become very unpopular and go to prison for a long time.

Ask the once-popular militias in the ’90s how they liked it when McVeigh blew up the Murrah building in Oklahoma City. The atmosphere got pretty damn chilly, and most of the militias closed up shop quick.

So yeah, the dude’s crazy, but he’s almost funny. He thinks he’s gonna overthrow the government with a half-dozen hicks carrying sawed-offs. You almost wanna watch him try — hillbilly with an AK vs. a bunker buster, place yer bets — if only it weren’t for the chance that he’d put a bullet in someone who didn’t deserve it.

Seriously, we comic geeks love heroic storytelling. We love stories about heroes, both super and otherwise. We read books and comics about superheroes, we play games about superheroes, we watch movies and TV shows about superheroes. But we generally have enough of a grasp on reality that we don’t try to fly off a building or bounce bullets off our chests. ‘Cause fantasy is fine… but you just don’t want to get it confused with reality.

And it strikes me that some of these gun fanatics think the real world plays by the same rules as “The Expendables” or “The Matrix.”

Again, I’m fine with probably 90% of the guns in the U.S. staying right where they are. I would, however, be much happier if the loons who think they can whup the biggest army in the world with a half-dozen pea-shooters, would siddown, have a spoon full of peanut butter, and start thinking of the world a little more realistically. It’s not good for the world when the comic fans are the ones with their heads screwed on straight when it comes to fantasy vs. reality…