Tag: comic books

#REVIEW: Fantastic Four: First Steps

On By Luther M. SilerIn movies, Reviews2 Comments

What I really ought to do for this review is just copy and paste my Superman review from a couple of weeks ago and then change all the names. Because it’s really kind of ridiculous how similar my feelings on both of the movies are. Which is, if you missed my Superman review, very much a good thing.

My son is sitting behind me, working on something for his summer science class, and he just read that over my shoulder and went “Heh. A good Thing.”

Ben Grimm is magnificent in this film, by the way. There has never been a good Fantastic Four movie, and there’s never been a good Ben Grimm in the bad Fantastic Four movies. This movie somehow manages to be one of the best superhero films I’ve ever seen despite picking up a franchise with an incredibly bad track record on film. I loved it for a lot of the same reasons I loved Superman— namely, that this is a story about heroes, who want to be heroes, and who are expected to be heroes. The whole intro to the film is all about them saving lives. There’s no squirrel rescue scene, or anything like that, but there’s lots and lots of saving people, which is the whole point of this entire genre.

Another thing this movie does right that it has in common with Superman is it knows good and Goddamn well that you’ve been watching superhero movies for twenty years now, and there have been four movies about these guys before this one, and so it dispenses with the origin story in about five minutes. This means that the film doesn’t need to start with Reed and Sue not being married and they don’t need to show them being in love; nay, it can literally start with, in a first for a superhero movie, Sue sitting on the toilet, having just peed on a pregnancy test, which is coming up positive.

Marvel tried to hide the pregnancy angle at first and then stopped, but this movie has no time to waste, so Sue’s pregnant right away, and is actually massively pregnant during the first encounter with Galactus– who, in another first, is also done right. Sue actually gives birth to Franklin Richards on the ship on the way back to Earth, and watching the team deal with her going into labor while trying to not get killed by the Silver Surfer is a hell of a thing.

I’m kind of rambling, so let me cut to the quick, here: this is a great superhero movie, for very much the same reasons that Superman is a great superhero movie: it understands its characters, and it understands why they’ve been in (damn near, in this case) continuous publication since the 1960s, and it doesn’t bother screwing around with them or changing them for the tastes of Modern Audiences, which always, always involves making them more evil and stupid. This Fantastic Four is optimistic and cheery and unapologetically brilliant, and there’s no dark secrets, and no hidden betrayals, and they fucking love each other, and that is so Goddamned refreshing in a 2025 superhero movie that it was really all they needed to get right for me to love the movie.

The boy wants me to mention that Mole Man was cool. He is correct. Mole Man, for the first time in his history as a character, was cool.

The casting was superb across the board, really. I had my doubts about Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards; they were incorrect, and now I can’t really picture anyone else in the role. Sue and Ben are fantastic great. And Johnny …

…

Let’s talk about the Human Torch for a minute here.

Johnny Storm is very frequently, and for good reason, used as the comic relief in Fantastic Four stories, regardless of the medium. He currently literally has a handlebar mustache in the comics for no reason other than that he knows everyone else hates it:

He has an interesting role in this film– and, hell, it’s just now hitting me that this is sort of another parallel to what Superman did with Jimmy Olsen– in that he usually sort of gets the Xander role, as the useless funny guy, and neither movie was interested in that character. This movie remembered that he was on that first flight for a reason, and handles it in a way that I’m still not convinced about.

(Minor spoilers to follow. Not a big deal. I’ll use separators.)

So this universe’s Johnny Storm is apparently a master of linguistics, somehow? Like, on Reed’s level, practically? There have been repeated alien signals coming for months prior to Galactus’s arrival, and Reed is preoccupied with running countless tests on his genetically-altered pregnant wife to make sure that the child is going to be okay, so Johnny takes over looking at the signals. And he figures out that the signals are in the same language that Shalla Bal (Silver Surfer) says to him during a very brief conversation, and he decodes the entire alien language in a couple of months. And then he manages to figure out some other things that I won’t spoil, and it ends up being way more important to the climax of the film than one might expect.

This Johnny Storm also has a streak of nobility to him that isn’t exactly new, but is definitely more pronounced in this film than I’ve ever seen in the past. There are at least two different points where he is more than ready to die so that everyone else can live. He’s completely fearless to the point where it feels unhealthy, to be honest. I like it. He may be the most carefully developed character in the movie, and that’s usually not how these things work.

Minor spoilers end.

Let’s see, what else? I loved H.E.R.B.I.E., and I loved that the movie didn’t bother explaining him and that he was just there. I love the retro-future 1960s look of the movie. Love it. I love that, and this is going to be dodging a spoiler again, the movie managed to surprise me with the way it ended, which has never happened in anything featuring Galactus before. I had some ideas about how this movie was going to connect with the wider Marvel universe(*), and let’s just say I was completely wrong. I don’t think I’ve speculated about that here, so we’re probably good. I liked that they remembered that Ben was Jewish. I liked that they kept him dressed for most of the movie. The Ben Grimm in the comics wears clothes! All the time! And so does this one.

There are some great insights into Reed Richards’ character, too, and some conflicts he gets into with Sue, that really felt true to the characters. Again, the main thing this movie did right was understand the people it was about.

The standard caveats! I am super enthusiastic about stuff I like, and I really liked this movie. To be honest, were I not substantially more invested in Superman as a character than I am the Fantastic Four, I might be willing to call this a better movie, and I think I have fewer complaints about it than I do the Superman movie. It’s crazy that two superhero movies this good in such similar ways came out in the same month. It’s even crazier that we’re basically done with superhero movies and TV shows until next summer, too. I don’t know right now if I’m back on board for Avengers: Doomsday or not. We’ll see. But between now and then, you should definitely make time to see this one.

(*) The movie starts off with a title card stating it’s on Earth-828, a number I thought about for a minute and couldn’t come up with any particular significance for. It ends with a quote from Jack Kirby, who was born on August 28th, 1917. Nice touch. Also, apparently there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of Jack and Stan Lee together in a montage at the beginning of the film. I missed it.

I am in so much trouble

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocyLeave a comment

I put myself on an RSVP list for this enormous bastard today, which just means that they’ll let me know when it’s for sale, which will be good, because it’ll take a while to sell the house so that I can afford it.

Be sure to note the tiny FF members and the Silver Surfer, for scale.

#REVIEW: Superman (2025)

On By Luther M. SilerIn movies, Reviews3 Comments

I’m just gonna say it: James Gunn’s Superman is the best superhero movie I’ve ever seen. Please take that with whatever amount of salt you like; my opinions are subject to change and enthusiasm can take me on a ride from time to time, so it’s possible that in six months I’ll have cooled down a bit for whatever reason. The only movies, though, that are even close to this one are the original Christopher Reeve Superman, the first Iron Man movie, and the first Avengers movie. And if I’m being honest, Superman ’78 hasn’t aged as well as I might have wanted it to, and I think this version is much better as a movie although I’m not quite willing to put David Corenswet above Christopher Reeve just yet. It doesn’t have the emotional baggage those movies have; I’d been waiting for Iron Man and Avengers for decades when they finally came out, and I grew up watching Superman ’78 over and over and over again.

It’s difficult to overstate how shocked I am to be saying this. In retrospect, I should have put more stock in the tagline they chose for this movie: Look up. It’s fucking brilliant on a whole bunch of levels, but the most important thing about it is that it speaks directly to this movie’s sense of aspiration, the idea that Superman is, first and foremost, a hero, someone who wants nothing more than to do good and to leave the world better than he found it. Superman has not been an aspirational figure for some time, and I’m not even willing to admit he was in the last three movies that had a dude with an S on his chest in them. Hell, two of Reeve’s movies weren’t great, and one of those two was genuinely hot garbage. I’ve really only genuinely liked two movies with this character in them before last Saturday. I am immensely, irrationally protective of Superman, and this movie simply gets him right. Finally. Finally.

I have been waiting for a very long time to watch another Superman movie that understands the character. Going in, I figured that at best I wouldn’t be trying to get the sun to explode on the way out of the theater, and I might have just decided to lay down in traffic if it had been genuinely bad. 2025 has been a terrible enough year without Superman getting fucked over again.

But let’s get into some details. Buckle in; I’ve got a lot to say about this movie, although I don’t think this is going to reach the epic length of some of my Star Wars reviews. Then again, there have been a couple of those that I didn’t think were going to end up being very long that ended up over 10K words, so …

(This won’t be completely spoiler-free, by the way, but I’ll try not to mention anything that wasn’t made obvious by the trailers.)

Let’s start with the casting. There’s not a single weak spot in the main cast. Not one. David Corenswet is amazing, although I’d have liked to see more of his Clark– even during one of his “Clark scenes,” the interview with Lois in her apartment, he’s actually playing Superman wearing Clark’s clothes. We never get anything approaching the epic Reeve transformation scene I linked the other day, but the characters are differentiated enough that it works. Rachel Brosnahan and Nicholas Hoult are both phenomenal, and Hoult’s Lex in particular manages to make scene-chewing monologuing scary. Skyler Gisondo’s Jimmy Olsen is the most useful Jimmy Olsen I’ve ever seen on screen. I liked the Justice Gang enough that I want a movie just for the three of them– Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner and Edi Gathegi’s Mr. Terrific are both outstanding, and I’m gonna have to be careful that I’m not overusing my superlatives, but they take a character I’ve never liked and a character I know nothing about and make me want to see movies about them. Isabela Merced doesn’t have as much to do as Hawkgirl, but I enjoyed her nonetheless. Pruitt Taylor Vance and Neva Howell as Jon and Martha Kent are flawless. And María Gabriela de Faría brings a twitchy vulnerability to her Engineer, another character that I don’t know much about and want to see more of.

My wife commented that this did sort of feel like a sequel to a movie that they hadn’t made, which I can see, and there are a handful of characters who feel like they’re there just to be there– you need Perry White, of course, and I liked Wendell Pierce’s casting even though I’m not a hundred percent certain they ever actually said Perry’s name. Mikaela Hoover and Beck Bennett as Cat Grant and Steve Lombard are just sorta there. Anthony Carrigan’s Metamorpho is scary and sad and creepy, which … again, I don’t know a ton about Metamorpho, but from what I do, that’s about right. The worst thing I can say about the casting– and, hell, one of the worst things I can say about the movie— is that I don’t quite get Eve Teschmacher as a character, but that’s not Sara Sampaio’s fault.

This is one of the best-shot action films I’ve seen in a long time, and even scenes in relative darkness are clear. You can actually tell what’s going on during the fights, and it’s amazing that a movie that features a kaiju the size of a skyscraper never manages to disappear into smearing CGI all over everything. Every punch that gets thrown has weight. I’ve seen a few people say that Mr. Terrific’s solo fight about halfway through the film is the best scene in the entire movie, and … I don’t quite agree (the best scene in the movie is between Clark and his dad, at the farm) but it’s up there with Yondu and his arrow as far as Gunn’s action scenes go.

The score uses John Williams’ iconic original music to its benefit without feeling enslaved to it, and while I can’t hum any of the other themes without seeing the movie again, it definitely puts its own spin on things. They could have copy-and-pasted half of Williams’ score and been just fine, so the idea that they added to it and changed it and it worked is an impressive achievement.

Let’s talk about the Star Wars movies for a minute, though. I’ve completely turned on two of three of the new trilogy movies, and while I loved The Last Jedi I will probably never watch it again. The Force Awakens was made retroactively worse by Rise of Skywalker in a way that I’m not going to explain right now. But part of what annoyed me about the discourse around Rise is the people who were insisting that it was a repudiation of The Last Jedi. This was mostly people who didn’t like Last Jedi saying this, and those folks are, in general, not to be trusted– but it went from simple shit like he smashed his helmet in the second movie, and has a new helmet in the third! to slightly more serious if still wrong critiques like insisting that Kylo Ren telling Rey that her parents were nobodies who left her to die in a ditch was absolutely 100% meant to be canonical truth and not Ren deliberately making shit up to fuck with her, which was obviously the case to anyone with a smidge of media literacy. I didn’t like the idea that she was a Palpatine, but it wasn’t a repudiation of anything at all.

James Gunn’s Superman, on the other hand, is a direct thumb in the eye of the Angry Murder Alien movies, and I couldn’t be any happier about it.

Over and over again during this movie, you see Superman stop fighting in order to save people. The kaiju wrecks a floor of a skyscraper and he stops to make sure everyone is OK before rejoining the fight. He protects people, throwing his body in between civilians and danger over and over again. He literally saves a squirrel at one point. And while the climactic fight in Metropolis at the end of the movie probably did as much property damage as the climax to Angry Murder Alien 1, the movie takes it time to make sure everyone understands that they are evacuating Metropolis while the fight is going on. Is it completely logical and reasonable to believe they knocked over a couple dozen huge skyscrapers and no one got killed? Eh, probably not. But you don’t care, because by this point in the movie it’s been made clear over and over again that Superman is there to save people, that people believe that Superman’s job is to protect them, and you’re willing to believe that if Superman says Metropolis has been evacuated, then it’s damn well been evacuated.

I never understood why any of the Murderverse characters wanted to be heroes. Calling their little group the Justice League made no damn sense– can you name any time in any of the main DC movies that anyone other than Wonder Woman cared about justice? That’s a real question! And you can’t do it! Lex Luthor would still be an evil, murderous bastard if Superman had never shown up. Nothing in Angry Murder Alien 1 or Angry Murder Alien Vs. Bat-Themed Ninja Killer would have happened if Superman had never come to earth!

Corenswet’s Superman wants, before anything else, to do good and to save people. His desire to keep people from getting hurt sets the entire story of the film in motion. When he’s fighting the two physical villains of the film, Ultraman and the Engineer, he tries to talk them out of fighting.

Superman’s greatest power as a character isn’t his heat vision, or his strength, or his ability to fly. It’s that he refuses to accept that there’s ever nothing he can do. That if put in an impossible situation where the only way out is to kill or to let someone die, he does the impossible thing anyway. They effectively put him in that exact situation in this film, where there’s a dimensional anomaly eating Metropolis at the exact same time as a nation on the other side of the world is being invaded by a technologically superior force and the citizens are literally crying out his name to come and save them. The movie wants you to think that he’s going to have to choose, that he’ll either have to let people die in Metropolis or let people die in Jarhanpur.

No. He’s fucking Superman. That’s not how it works. He’s going to save everybody. That’s what makes him Superman. And he does.

(There is also a brilliant, if maybe a little overly snarky, scene where Lex Luthor reveals that he has a literal army of genetically enhanced monkeys manipulating the internet into hating Superman. It’s … maybe a little too on the nose. But I loved it anyway.)

Little spoiler coming. It’s not going to be anything that surprises you if you’ve thought much about the movie and it’s absolutely not going to ruin anything, but still.

This actually ties into the only thing I can think of that I really didn’t like about this movie. The film has three bad guys: Luthor, Ultraman, who is a black-suited Strong Silent Guy for 90% of the movie, and the Engineer, whose bloodstream Lex has filled with nanites so that she can create weapons out of her body and interface with computers. You’re meant to believe (although this is a comic book movie) that Ultraman doesn’t survive the movie, and while the Engineer’s fate isn’t quite as clear, she gets knocked unconscious in a really dangerous place late in the movie and you never see her again after that. She could very well still be alive; her status is more ambiguous than Ultraman’s.

I’m not going to get into why, but I would really have liked to see Superman work harder to save both of these characters. He’s kind of got his hands full with other shit when Ultraman goes down, but he tries to talk both of them off of the ledge and away from Luthor during their final battle, and you get the feeling that the Engineer, at least, is listening. Again, she’s kind of fascinating– she’s twitchy and broken and walks with a limp when she isn’t doing metahuman shit and, while I might change my mind after a second viewing, you get the feeling that her enhancement wasn’t entirely her decision. I can do without more Ultraman, and Superman doesn’t directly kill him, but I feel like he should have shown more concern for him, for reasons I’m not going to talk about– this is a guy who lectures Guy Gardner when the kaiju dies, for crying out loud– but I want to see María Gabriela de Faría again. I’ll be paying the closest attention to the last parts of this fight when I inevitably see this movie again.

Okay, that’s it for the spoilers.

You should see this movie. You should see this movie if you love superhero movies, and you should see this movie if you’re tired of superhero movies, and you should see this movie if you don’t usually see movies at all. This movie deserves to be extraordinarily successful. 2025 has been a miserable fucking year for anyone with a trace of a human soul, and it’s probably going to get much, much worse before it gets better. This movie foregrounds hope, and truth, and justice, and a better tomorrow, better than anything I’ve seen in years. It’s a movie that I really feel like America needs right now. And it’s really hard to imagine how I could have loved it any more than I did.

Look up.

On Clark Kent

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, movies2 Comments

We just got back from Superman, the first movie I’ve seen in theaters in a good long while and the first superhero movie I’ve seen in theaters in longer than that. If I write a review of this movie right now it’s going to come off as completely unhinged, because I don’t remember the last time I loved a movie as much as I loved this one. Y’all know what I’m like about this stuff. I need to give it a day or two to cool off before I try to write a review. That’s assuming I don’t see it again tomorrow, which isn’t off the table, and which might reset the clock.

It’s fucking fantastic. Go see it. But let’s set that aside, and talk about TikTok for a minute.

This is KJ and Trinity Blair. They’re TikTokers. They’re also identical twins. KJ has about a quarter million followers and Trinity has 1.6 million. Before I say another word, I wanna be real clear that I have no intention of saying anything negative about either of them and since both of them are way more famous than I will ever be it’s not like they have a reason to give a shit what I think anyway.

Trinity Blair’s main account is here and KJ’s is here. Trinity also runs a podcast, I think, but I don’t really know anything about it. Go ahead and look at any of their videos. I guarantee you will see a comment where someone asks if they know about each other, and anything where both of them show up you will have someone who will ask if they are twins. I only know they exist because they ran a little … joke, if you’re being generous, publicity stunt if you’re slightly less generous, or “scam” if you’re not generous, where they pretended to not know each other existed a while and actually brought their parents into it where each of them confronted a parent about her “secret” twin sister.

Now, through this whole thing, there were people posting comments and linking to videos of the two of them together, because it’s not like they purged their accounts before they did it. But one way or another they probably realized that they’d be able to convince a whole lot of people that they hadn’t previously known about each other, since every single time one of them posts they get a dozen comments about it anyway.

You know what you don’t ever see in their comments? “Hey, are you two secretly the same person?”

And maybe you see where I’m going with this, and what the connection to Superman is.

I have long been willing to die on the hill that everyone in the world not knowing that Superman and Clark Kent are the same person is not remotely the high bar to suspension of disbelief that people think it is. Clark Kent and Superman have been seen together. They live in a world with shapeshifters, for God’s sake, and there are photographs of the two with each other. Clark Kent, while an influential journalist, is just a journalist, and a print journalist at that, and unless you think most of the world can pick Josh Marshall or Jamelle Bouie out of a lineup he isn’t close to being famous enough that most people know his face. And you know what people would do if they thought the two of them looked alike?

They’d say “Man, you and Superman really look alike,” not “Man, you and Superman are clearly the same guy!” Trinity and KJ Blair are literally identical and people regularly question whether they’re twins. That’s the reaction– people looking at twins and questioning what they’re seeing. Every set of identicals on the planet has the experience of someone seeing them with their twin and asking if they’re identical twins, and I suspect most same-gender fraternals have been asked the same thing.

Superman shows his face. There’s no reason for any random person to ever have the idea that he had a secret identity in the first place. And I’m sorry, it’s a hell of a leap to just randomly decide that he is this other dude who’s busy with a journalism job even if he does get to interview Superman a lot. You would absolutely have people using the interviews as proof they’re not the same person.

There was a great comic where Lex Luthor programmed a computer to figure out who Superman was, and the computer told him the truth– that Superman was Clark Kent. And Lex completely ignored it, as the idea that anyone with that much power might masquerade as a normal person was so completely unimaginable to him.

Corenswet’s Clark doesn’t get as much screen time as I might have hoped, so you don’t get a ton of data about what his Clark acts like– although the scenes with his parents are absolutely stellar. There’s no moment like this, though:

So yeah. This character gets superpowers from Earth’s yellow sun, can shoot fire out of his eyes, and regularly lifts skyscrapers when he isn’t busy flying over them. The idea that the whole world doesn’t just automatically know that he’s some other random human out of eight billion who sort of looks like him is far from the most unbelievable thing about this story.

Okay, look, Marvel …

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, moviesLeave a comment

You’ve got me, you bastards. I’m in. The last of your fucking movies I saw in a theater was I don’t even remember but it might have been Endgame, weeks after it came out. I also don’t remember which of your movies was the last I saw at all. Maybe Black Widow.

I am going to see Fantastic Four: First Steps in a theater. I am not back and I have no plans to see any other forthcoming Marvel movies. I’m gonna see Superman, but that’s not you. That’s two superhero movies in a month which will be more than I’ve seen in the last several years.

Please don’t fuck this up.

Anybody know anything about flies? We have a mystery infestation in about a room and a half in the house. Our dining room has a big glass sliding door leading to a screened-in back porch. I have killed, and I swear I’m not shitting you, well over a hundred house flies crawling around on that screen door in the last two days. Well over a hundred of them. I have absolutely no idea where they’re coming from. There is no obvious source of flies in my dining room. There is a vent right in front of the sliding door; I have pulled the grille out of it and vacuumed inside it extensively, and it’s not big enough to be hiding a dead animal or something, plus if there was something in there we’d be able to smell it. Plus, if they were coming from the vents, they’d be in every room in the house, not concentrated by the back porch.

They are not on the outside of the sliding doors. Plus, again, there’s no source of flies out there and it’s screened in. They have to be coming from inside the house and they also have to be coming from somewhere very close to that sliding door, and there just isn’t anything. Flies don’t just spontaneously generate! That would mean that there’s something in my dining room that is rotting and was covered in maggots and zero of the four humans and three cats in the house noticed it?

I’ve sat and watched and waited to see if I could spot them crawling from somewhere, and of course, because they’re flies and flies have turning invisible as a class ability, I’ve had no luck on that. If I leave the room for half an hour there will be between five and seventeen (the current record) on the sliding door when I come back. I’ve been using the vacuum cleaner to kill them because it’s faster and more effective than a Goddamn flyswatter.

Somebody help me out, this is gross and I’m tired of it.

(Oh, and I made a flytrap with a Sprite bottle, some apple cider vinegar and a few drops of dish soap because the Internet told me it was an effective cheap flytrap. Pff. It has not caught a single fucking fly. There’s an indoor zapper coming Friday.)

This, goddammit

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, moviesLeave a comment

This. This. This is Right and Correct and if I go see this movie and it disappoints me I am done with DC movies for the rest of my life. I talked some shit about the costume when we got our first look at it and I’m still not a hundred percent on board with some of the decisions they made there, but it looks like Gunn has gotten the core of the character right after decades of on-screen misrepresentation, and if that’s actually Superman on the screen they can put him in a French maid’s outfit for all I care.

I had like four different posts planned for tonight and seeing the trailer knocked all of them clean out of my head.

You’ve got me back in theaters for a superhero movie, DC. Don’t fuck this up.

Make it make sense

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I was behind this … person … for a bit on the way home from work today, and the cognitive dissonance hurt so badly that I had to get a picture. You can, no doubt, see the “TEACH PEACE” sticker on the left there; that’s fine. The problem is the decal on the right, which, just in case you can’t quite parse it, is a Punisher skull, with an American flag overlaid on it, with the words “FUCK AROUND AND FIND OUT” around it. This image in red vinyl, basically. As an open endorsement of American fascism it’s not quite as overt as, say, a thin blue line cross, but it’s pretty fucked up! In general, any time you see someone idolizing the Punisher, that’s a bad person, and they are to be avoided (I’ve said this before: any police organization in particular that uses that logo needs to be dissolved, immediately) but combining it with “teach peace” is just fucking unhinged. The fact that it’s on a pickup truck is even weirder; that may be the only pickup truck on the planet with a “teach peace” sticker on it.

I can see someone already fixing their fingers to suggest that a married couple owns this truck and one of them picked one sticker and one picked the other; these people should not be married and they should also own separate cars. It’s unfair that they managed to cause me pain when all I was trying to do was get my ass home from work. I mean, the one who is married to the Punisher asshole is probably in pain every day, but I want them both to suffer.

Anyway, it’s April so I hate my job; there is no place in the world that is worse than a middle school in the spring, except that there is, and it’s a middle school during standardized testing during the spring. Unfortunately I have to go to that place every day, and tomorrow I get to be there from 7:30 in the morning until 8:00 at night, and then I have to go back on Friday morning for some fucking reason, so don’t expect much out of me tomorrow and whatever you get on Friday is going to be through a veil of barely repressed rage. It’s gonna be awesome for everybody, is what I’m saying.

…okay, Marvel? Let’s not.

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, PoliticsLeave a comment

I am fully fucking aware that, lead times being what they are on comic books, this was definitely written, if perhaps not completely drawn, before the Current Unpleasantness actually began. But once we realized we were going to publish it during the Current Unpleasantness, and that it scans as really fucking unsubtle given the Current Unpleasantness, maybe we reconsider the entire fucking thing? Because I don’t need this shit in my life at all, much less in a medium that’s supposed to be fucking escapism:

And fuck me dead if this very same Fantastic Four comic book doesn’t use vampires as a persecuted minority that Doom is scapegoating later on in the damn issue. Using Doom as a stand-in for the shitgibbon is one thing. Using vampires as a stand-in for trans people is deeply fucked up.

I recognize that there is literally no way that Marvel is gonna reconsider or reschedule any of this, but I wanted to register my protest anyway.