Comic Consideration

  My Sub Over Dub Preferences Prepared Me For This Day Let the record show that I went to go see Godzilla Minus One the month that it hit theaters and it was my favorite movie I saw last year. This week, we discussed Japan: specifically, what happened socially, environmentally, and culturally after the US bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki during WWII. We went over how the devastation of those events influenced the way that Japan created media involving the future; what such a large-scale tragedy inflicted by foreign intervention does to the psyche of a nation. This era of anime, manga, and film covered themes of rebirth, of hope after loss, of putting faith in children to deliver the future into one of technological revolution and— perhaps most pervasively— the limits to which the imagination can cook up creations and ramifications of powerful radiation.  The creator of Astro Boy, Osamu Tezuka, conceptualized a hero to all in the form of a young robot in a concrete example of thos...

Our Most Nostalgic Module Yet The Silver Age of Comics from the mid-fifties to the early seventies marked a time of popularity, growth, and commercial success for comic book companies like Marvel and DC. At this time, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby have joined the ranks at Marvel and are producing a lot of the characters— heroes, villains, and more— that many of us know today, like the Hulk, Iron Man, the members of the Fantastic Four, and the Silver Surfer. These figures specifically are some of the first I ever encountered on television growing up. I vividly remember holding my breath when Edward Norton's Hulk accidentally spilled a drop of blood into a bottle of orange soda at a factory he worked at; I remember seeing Michael Chiklis' Thing wear a tie and offer flowers to his partner; my mind began to layer together both the written and cinematic scenes of Robert Downey Jr. in the dark cave with Yinsen after being kidnapped by the Ten Rings (originally Wong-Chu, lol), toiling away ...

  The Formula of Heroes This week we explored two kinds of heroes— ones made and ones born. Spider-Man and the various and sundry Multiverse iterations of him are made; they had to be bitten and transformed in order to fall into their arc and eventually respond to a call to action. Their mantle as hero is borne of a sense of duty brought on by unforeseeable circumstances, and because of that, the dilemmas they face revolve around the different lives they must always juggle. Superman, on the other hand, was born with his abilities because he's an alien. He has had a lifetime to grapple with the differences between himself and the humans around him. The issues that early Superman deals with are often Promethean in nature— his superhuman abilities make him able to save humanity over and over from itself (and, typical of the 30s, certain nuclear disaster). It's interesting to think about the different ways heroes and built, made, and explored within the identities of the ordinary (...