Let’s cut straight to the chase: The Boy Behind the Door is a genuinely dark thriller. Harrowingly dark. More than just putting its child protagonists in constant peril, it broaches pedophiliac subject matter that might be too upsetting and off-putting for some. Consider this a trigger warning.
I lived through the end of a civil war. Do you know what it was like for me? Quite normal. I went to work, I went out, I dated. This is what Americans don’t understand. They’re waiting to get personally punched in the face while ash falls from the sky. That’s not how it happens.
This is how it happens. Precisely what you’re feeling now. The numbing litany of bad news. The ever rising outrages. People suffering, dying, and protesting all around you, while you think about dinner.
If you’re trying to carry on while people around you die, your society is not collapsing. It’s already fallen down.
To state the obvious, comic book publishing is in serious trouble, with a business model that almost literally has no future. Yet comic books are a source of intellectual property for exploitation in all sorts of popular media and have never have greater potential.
So, why is this? Why do comics as a storytelling form (superhero and otherwise) have such an enormous impact on popular culture but comic book publishers are struggling to survive? Why are publishers almost universally failing to succeed at actual publishing? My basic answer is— they're pursuing the *wrong market.* And they've been doing so, with increasing desperation, since the late 1970s.
Let's put aside the incredible business stupidity of depending on a single distribution method (direct sales to single-audience comic book stores). The problem is bigger: the defined audience for mainstream comics is an audience that by definition constantly shrinks.
For a variety of self-enforcing reasons, publishers have defined the primary audience for mainstream comics as, in effect, long term fans and potential collectors. Hence, fan-oriented naval gazing continuity, tri-annual "events", reboots, collector-oriented variant covers, etc. Every single one of these marketing ploys is designed *solely* to appeal to existing readers. Even reboots, ostensibly intended to offer "jumping on" points to new readers, actually require familiarity with previous iterations to provide interest. New readers aren't welcomed by the existing creative strategy at the two mainstream publishers— if anything, new readers are actively *discouraged* by the publishers' frantic pursuit of motivated, existing readership. The clubhouse is closed. Stay out.
Publishers, of course, will disagree with this analysis and say they're always trying to provide on-ramps to new readers. But any serious look at what they're offering, in the main, reveals a decided tilt— in fact a massive tilt— toward privileging the existing readership. And this makes sense, in a way, because of a cultural creative shift in the editorial direction of the publishing houses that can be traced back to the era I'm from— the late 1960s, early 1970s.
In the mid 1960s, around 1967, DC Comics offered a weekly tour of their offices during the summer. I went on the tour (and like others, Len Wein and Marv Wolfman among them, became a regular). At one point I had a conversation with then-editor Julie Schwartz. We were talking about a Green Lantern story, and I made some fanboy comment about what I hoped would happen. Julie paused and looked at me. "How old are you?" "Fourteen," I said. He snorted. "Too old. You're not my reader." And he walked off.
I later learned that at DC (and also at Marvel) in the 1960s the commonly accepted view of the comic book readership was a kid (undoubtedly male) between the age of 9 and 13. What today's book publishers would call Middle-Grade Readers. This makes sense. If we're honest about it, the basic, root appeal of superhero stories is to that part of ourselves that lives in a pre-sexualized, pre-adolescent dream state in which anything is possible. It's the world of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." Like "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" (or Philosopher's Stone if you want to be pedantic), young adults and adults can enjoy superhero stories too, and even want those stories to evolve and mature, just as the Potter books evolved and matured. But. But. But Regardless of what appeal the first Potter book might have for older and existing readers…its primary readership was intended to be, and remains, Middle-Grade, 8 to 12. And the same used to be true for comics, particularly superhero comics. Until my generation came along. Yeah, we Boomers f**ked it up, as usual.
When I and my cohorts replaced the creatives who'd given the comic book business massive success in the 1960s, folks like Stan Lee and Julie Schwartz, we brought with us our Boomer self-obsession. We didn't want to create comics for kids. We wanted comics for *us.* That's the origin of comic book superheroes' shift from Middle-Grade readership in the 1960s to Young Adult readership in the 1970s, and Adult readership in the 1990s and beyond— the refusal of Boomer creatives and editors like myself and others to Let It Go. We redefined the readership comics were aimed at— coinciding with a shift in distribution that allowed that redefinition to stick. The result is a dead end for comic book publishing as a business. How would I change this?
I was watching the president of the United States suggest to a mostly maskless crowd that a Democratic congresswoman had married her brother when the news broke that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died.....Many of us are coping with that lacerating redefinition by knowingly rolling our eyes. Ginsburg’s death hurts, but more than one strain of political grief is operative. This is why so many political reactions at present seem to orbit around the question of whether an unwanted outcome was unexpected. “And you’re surprised?” is a frequent response to some new instance of Trumpian corruption. This brand of cynicism has spread, quite understandably: It’s an outlook that provides some cognitive shelter in a situation that—having historically been at least somewhat rule-bound—has one side shredding the rules and cheering at how much they’re winning. Folks who at one point gave Republican declarations of principle the benefit of the doubt (I include myself) feel like chumps now. Conversely, the cynical prognosticators who used to seem crabbed and paranoid just keep getting proven right. Whatever the worst thing you imagine McConnell doing might be, he can usually trump it.
One can sympathize with the eye-rollers—of course hypocrisy doesn’t matter. But that’s mostly because hypocrisy isn’t the word for what this is. Hypocrisy is a mild failing. It applies to parents smoking when they advise their kids not to for their own good; it does not apply to parents lighting the family home on fire for the insurance money while high-fiving each other over how stupid their fleeing children were for thinking anything they told them was true...Raging against the indecent replacement effort feels wrong, because raging before it happens can feel like implicitly conceding. Treating the matter dispassionately, on the other hand, sensibly pointing out that McConnell has stated clearly what should happen, means granting him a good-faith reading he does not deserve. Thanks to the swiftness with which he declared his intentions, we are no longer under any obligation to attempt the latter. All that remains is to let honest anger do what it must.
"I came across this square package, wrapped in aluminum foil, and around it, it had a pink rubber band. Curiosity got to me, so I popped it open and it looked like a chicken breast -- kind of. It took a little bit for it to really (register) of what was going on; it was a brain.”
“You are constantly being nudged, steered, and manipulated into acquiescing further. The more attention each of us gives the internet, the more our capacity to reflect on nuance is eroded. As we begin to think in more binary terms, we are further socialised into a system designed for machine efficiency and economic extraction by a handful of corporations.”
Forget fighting machines of glittering metal. AI is taking over the world through social media.
“If that sounds like we are being nudged to become more like machines it’s because we are,” Mr Rogers says. “Machines see humans as noise. Noise is inefficient. When humans acquiesce machines seem smarter, but they are nothing of the sort. It’s humans who have been diminished.”
The video of Ronnie McNutt’s suicide traumatised kids who saw it on their social media feeds - but how it got there is also disturbing.
"We’ve questioned among ourselves, like, goodness, he's taking everybody’s stuff out," said a former nurse at the facility. "That's his specialty, he’s the uterus collector."
At the time, McInnes was all about a kind of weird pastiche of punk rock resistance and anarcho-contrariness, leaving me no doubt that at least he and the other guy tried to fight. But the McInnes stories kept accruing, my favorite being the time he allegedly defecated in the middle of an intersection. Just … because. When asked later whether the incident actually took place, he said: “Who can remember?”
Eventually McInnes was nudged out from Vice, the magazine he co-founded, after attending a far-right rally and writing a piece about the event in which he said that he found himself agreeing with what he heard more than disagreeing. The scuttlebutt was that about half a million dollars of advertising was threatening to walk unless something was done.
So McInnes was invited out and then went on to start Street Carnage, an online-only deal that never really found its footing.
And then the Proud Boys happened.
“I call myself a recovering CIA officer,” Shipp wrote to The Daily Beast, with a smiling-face emoji (he did not respond to further requests for an interview). And he did work at the CIA, nearly 20 years ago. The “government illegal activity” he exposed was the presence of toxic mold in his Army-owned house at Camp Stanley in Texas, which he blamed for somehow destroying his marriage. Shipp quit the agency in 2002 after being accused of using a government credit card for personal expenses, according to The New York Times. (Shipp claimed a supervisor had approved the purchases and that he repaid the money). These days, buoyed in part by an appearance in the viral/completely bonkers QAnon conspiracy movie Out of Shadows, Shipp peddles baseless conspiracies about his former workplace—overlooking many legitimate ones, like orchestrating torture by proxy or backing right-wing coups in Latin America—while dining out on its credentials.
Featuring drone footage, suspenseful music and even fake blood, the video, titled “The Gotaway,” a Border Patrol term used to describe illegal border crossers who evade apprehension, shows the agents in dramatic pursuit of a car full of migrants. From the front seat, a menacing Hispanic man with a full sleeve of tattoos (presumably the “coyote” who brought them across the border) orders his passengers in Spanish to “get down,” yelling, “We’re not getting caught today!” The smugglers’ car pulls over and the agents, now with backup, chase the migrants on foot, catching all of them but one. The camera then cuts to a shot of silhouetted man in dark clothing running into what looks like a suburban strip mall, where he skulks in the darkness behind a man talking on a cellphone. Revealing his tattoo-covered arm as he emerges from the shadows, the so-called gotaway asks the other man for money, then pulls out a knife and stabs him in the chest, running off into the darkness as the man lies in the street, fake blood running down his white shirt.
The screen fades to black, displaying the words “every apprehension matters...” and then “Do you know who got away?”
When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.
Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.
What makes the Rittenhouse incident so interesting is that virtually every expletive-laden opinion surrounding his actions and the actions of the involved parties has an objective truth at its hate-filled heart. That is a rare thing, and it baked my noodle pretty good when I noticed this ridiculous coincidence. Whatever your opinion of what happened in Kenosha, there is probably a solid factual foundation justifying it. I stewed on that for a while before a potential reason for this formed in my head. Are you ready?
Whatever it is that pisses you off about the whole sad circus is supposed to piss you off. YOU ARE NOT WRONG, and I don’t even know what it is specifically that has you smashing the keys on your social media abattoir of choice. I’m not kidding. Pick your poison. I get it and I agree with you. Now to the part you won’t like…
Any discussion of this incident that does not acknowledge the dozens of poor decisions it took to make this catastrophe possible is disingenuous at best and deliberately misleading at worst. That we cannot abide. You can be angry about virtually any aspect of the events, but if you think that gives you permission to ignore this horrific Rube-Goldberg machine of incompetence, delusion, and felonious stupidity, then you have clicked on the wrong goddamn article.
stand-out viewing for the month of August (which felt especially like 2020 just kept dive-bombing blood/piss/shit/puke cocktails right into my face)
(July)
WHERE THE WIND BLOWS (1986, dir. Jimmy T. Murakami)
THIS IS FINE: THE MOVIE. a frustratingly tender reexamination of the "last persons on earth" narrative, eschewing the mutant-fighting "humanity will go on" heroics and hitting at something much closer to what the reality of that situation would be; numbing yourself with near-aggressive reassurance that banal activities and structured routines will return once "this all blows over".
WE SUMMON THE DARKNESS (2019, dir. Marc Meyers)
a sharp, subversive Satanic Panic period piece that thankfully understands who the real monsters are.
NIGHT ANGEL (1990, dir. Dominque Othenin-Girard)
like if Danzig's Verotika had been made thirty years earlier and with a budget... and film... and a camera. a gloriously incomprehensible piecemeal collage of innumerable fever-stroking late 1980s after hours cable fixtures.
MIKEY (1992, dir. Dennis Dimster)
part gritty reboot of Problem Child, part made-for-TV remake of Benny's Video, part infuriatingly idiotic nth-tier slasher... the kind with one-liners that would make post Dream Warriors Robert Englund blush with audience-sympathetic embarrassment... the kind where you're screaming at the television "HE'S THE SIZE OF SANDWICH COOKIE JUST FUCKING BONK HIS HEAD WITH A NERF FOOTBALL AND ATOMIC DROP HIS FETAL ASS ON THE TOILET SEAT GAHHHHL".
