Looks like the greatest Hollywood movie director had a similar idea
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i kind of feel like the polarity of movies that have conspiracy theorists as sympathetic characters has shifted over the past couple years, don’t think this is going to go over well
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otoh that’s basically come full circle since the 90s and I think it’s probably the single most consequential shift in the political culture that’s typically overlooked by materialists, that is, how sympathetic we’re naturally inclined to be towards people who carry deep institutional distrust, what ends up getting framed as aspirational as a result, and how easy is it for people who are naturally conspiracy minded to nevertheless act in a pro-social way under their individual circumstances.
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I guess, I’m only bringing it up BC iirc more than a few reviews of Kong V Godzilla took issue with the hollow earth conspiracy character, when it seemed like it was just recycling a trope that was really prevalent in post x files blockbuster genre stuff. Although, no one brought it up w mib 4 and it’s even more central to the plot in that case. I guess it was either BC the movie sucked as a whole or BC it at least took the time to demonstrate why she was obsessed with proving the vast secret alien ICE agency was real
I’m blown away by Beastars. The action scenes are really intense but it’s the cozy, dreamlike spaces that linger
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I think I ought to qualify my mention of Beastars above with a content warning, it’s a story about characters dealing with a traumatic event in their community, so be sure you’re prepared to face difficult material if you choose to read it. If you do read it, I would also recommend stopping around Vol 4 (I could draw the line at a few different places, but I think right after the cute short story about the hen would be a good marker).
reviewed an obscure bilingual indie manga from the late 90s here
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jojolion’s done (kind of a rushed endgame honestly), never looking at a posh japanese fruit rack the same way again
i cannot begin to picture what sweet utter nonsense we might get in a part 9
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This is a secondary point to that article, but its always frustrated me how webcomics essentially cratered and virtually went extinct around the early/mid-2010s. Webcomics were overall improving during that period - they had broken free of centering around immature “gamer comics”, they were no longer crawling up their own rear end with Scott McCloud-esque “infinite canvas” experiments, and webcartoonists were smartly using livejournal’s public “Friends” feed to smoothly build up one another’s audience. Kate Beaton, Pictures for Sad Children, most of the popular webcomics took off via livejournal. This was a time that you could actually have a small feeling of “overnight success” that could be sustained, just by having someone like Nedroid or Dinosaur Comics add you to their “Friends” feed.
Webcomics were getting really exciting between the late 2000s to early 2010s, I was expecting them to basically supplant the dying (now on life support) print indie comics scene.
It was probably several factors that cut off that timeline. Livejournal got less popular and the popular cartoonists moved to their own websites, closing off opportunities for them to regularly and easily share new webcartoonists. Tumblr took over Livejournals role, and while Tumblr made sharing others’ art easy it also made building your own community difficult: no real comment section, the website was more oriented to individual pieces of art rather than a long running comic story, less control over the size and shape of your comic. Kickstarter became popular and many cartoonists were fed into the maw of “stretch goals” and the high expectations of backers. Patreon is a little better, but I still sometimes check in on cartoonists like Meredith Gran from Octopus Pie - she’s apparently is still working on an adventure game for like 5 years, last update was 1.5 years ago.
I think Adventure Time comics existed/exists (are they still running?) to financially support webcartoonists from that era.
This is a big ramble, but as someone who starting reading webcomics around Y2K, someone who started enjoying webcomics around the late-00s, and someone who once made webcomics, I hate how that corner of the medium is basically dead. At the end of the day, I blame facebook and instagram and reddit, as banal as that sounds. Tumblr was worse than livejournal, but it was 10x better than the social media options to share comics for a young cartoonist today.
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Google Reader’s demise also feels like it helped in killing a lot of that stuff, the platform had such power as a free RSS reader that I know myself and several friends were using to stay up to date with our webcomics
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being an old internet pedant it kinda irks me seeing that article call encycolpedia dramatica the child of 4chan when it predated the chan by a year as an offshoot of ljdrama after something awful linked them and the site crashed the first time
I kind of hate that I know that btw
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ed is really just the spiritual forefather of kf
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X-Force Killshot is what I needed after Liefeld’s The Shield felt so half baked. It was right in the vein of where he left off waay back when (about the same time I jumped ship on the X books).
Not feeling Cable’s Oliver North do, though. Where’s that widow’s peak?
What’s weird is he wasn’t on X-force THAT long. 12 issues. By the time anything came to a head he was gone and better talent was carrying things forward.
X-ecutioner’s Song was their effort at wrapping up what he started. Did they actually have anyone better on X-Force until Mike Allred years later?
i was talking right before that even.
But Cappullo is in there. IDK any talent is better than Leifeld.
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Aw he was a breath of fresh air when he started out. If anything I was bummed that this new comic is a bit more restrained.
And yeah I looked up the list of what happened between those inital couple issues and Allred, and there’s a couple interesting names. Whilce Portacio seems like he’d be at home. I always liked his X-Men stuff.
I had no idea Warren Ellis wrote some really late issues.
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Storywise, it sounds like they stripped the characters back to the original New Mutants crew. I gotta believe that was a rights deal? I was paying limited attention to comics again when Deadpool and Cable got replaced by knock offs in the early 2000s.