Comic review: Green Lantern Corps #40- Chipping away at the wall

Writer: Van Jensen
Artist: Bernard Chang
Publisher: DC Comics
Released: 11th March 2015


The core narrative ideology in this book was a strangely American amalgamation of new age nonsense, a belief in the intrinsic moral goodness of those in (the right sort of) military uniform and US foreign policy exceptionalism.

It was very weird, simplistic and unconvincing, and dressed up in light versus darkness new age religion stuff that doesn’t really empower anybody other than those already in positions of socio-economic superiority. Do you know what it reminded me of? It reminded me of the Barack Obama 2008 election campaign. A sleek, and award winning, marketing campaign where slogans and clichés replaced any actual concrete ideas that were going to change the structural foundations of the system that he was supposedly fighting against.

The subsequent, and so-called ‘disappointing’ presidency of Barack Obama came as no surprise to anybody actually paying attention and digging a bit deeper than his surface appeal. From the very beginning you could see through his rhetoric as the sleek advertising campaign that it actually was. People didn’t see it, not because it wasn’t there, but because they refused to see what was starring at them in the face all along.

This is not hindsight speaking, it’s taking words like ‘Hope’ and ‘Change’ and actually dissecting the reality behind them. A cursory look at Obama’s voting record before he became President (Supporting wars, supporting banks and corporations over people) would tell you that there was nothing to his words at all. The only thing you were buying if you invested in him was the illusion of change, not actual change itself. Perhaps that’s what people want? Real change is difficult. It means taking personal responsibility, and to actually do things for yourself rather than relying on the nice looking black man on your television set.

Change is possible, but it’s going to take a lot more effort on your behalf than lazily giving away your power to some bloke in a suit. Perhaps people don’t really want change? Perhaps they just want nice words over substance? Most people are not fooled because they are fools. They are fooled because they want to be fooled.

That’s how I felt after reading Green Lantern Corps #40. It was talking about ‘light and darkness,’ talking about ‘love’ talking about ‘morals’ but when you actually dissected it, when you got past the nice words, what did you actually have?

You had a group of US military personal (The Green Lanterns Corps) interfering in the affairs of other countries (planets) to protect civilians from a bunch of cartoon villains called ‘The Shadow Empire.’ The US military personal (Green Lanterns) were the good guys, and the Shadow Empire (a confused mash-up of what could loosely be called ‘terrorists’) were two-dimensional black-hat baddies who didn’t even pretend to care about the civilians at all.

How does that work in the real world? I’ve never seen any real life villain going around calling himself a villain, have you? What kind of villain wants to enslave the people and make them suffer, because that appeared to be the goal of the villains in this book?

I’ll tell you what kind of villain does that. It’s a villain in a uniform who is working for an Empire, but this ‘villain’ will be propagandised so much by the Empire he is serving that he won’t even see himself as a villain at all. How would he see himself then? He would see himself as a Green Lantern, a brave moral hero who is doing his job in order to protect poor innocent civilians from the mythical ‘forces of darkness’ that he has been told are the villains, yet doesn’t properly understand. That is real evil. It is evil dressed up as good. That’s how it works in the world, it’s how it always works, but not in contemporary mainstream comic books.

The evil in this comic is childish evil, it’s evil for a child’s cartoon on a Saturday morning, and it fails to fully comprehend how evil actually manifests itself in the real world. It’s dressed up with Obama/ New age Bull-crap public relations buzz words and slogans, then packaged as meaningful, as spiritually enlightened when in reality it’s a shin deep paddling pool for toddlers.

Green Lantern Corps #40 is a highly illustrative and useful text, not because it’s being purposefully deceptive, but because it believes in it’s own lies and shallowness. The only deception going on here is at a cultural level. Writer Van Jensen is not a disinformation agent, but a victim of the disinformation himself.

The lies, the wilful acceptance of them and an acceptance of new age/neo-liberal public relations nothingness has become the dominant cultural wall of our times. The wall is immense, but cracks are starting to appear. I do these reviews not to criticise the narrative structural techniques, art, panel-layout or character portrayals presented in contemporary comic books, but to slowly chip away at that wall.

Each review is a swing of hammer on chisel, my strange and solitary attempt to damage that wall. Often times I swing and miss, other times I get a good old wallop on it. Hopefully I managed to do some damage here.

Rating: 4/10 (A useful example of the neo-liberal/faux spiritual orthodoxy that is the dominant culturally programmed mind-set of these post 9/11 times)

Comic review: BUMF VOL. 1- Reality bomb

Writer and artist: Joe Sacco
Publisher: Random House
Released: November 2nd 2014


With bags on their heads the compromised servants of the new world order deliberately ignore reality, caring only about their own career opportunities whilst the world around them burns.

Statist mothers betray their pacifist sons. A woman uses paper money to buy milk. She is kidnapped by the state, not because she has done anything wrong, but because the state is worried that she is not posting enough information about herself on facebook and twitter and that her paper money transactions cannot be logged and traced.

A portal is opened to a parallel dimension. A dimension where there is no law, no morality, no repercussions for your actions and where torture is permitted. The milk purchasing woman is tortured until eventually she learns to love her torturer, thanking him for abusing her.

Richard Nixon is reincarnated as Barack Obama. Once again he is President of the US, but in 2014 he is allowed to get away with all of his actions. He spends his time in bed, eating potato chips and piloting a drone where he can kill whomever he wants, whenever he wants. He doesn’t have to justify his actions. He has the time of his life, and can’t quite believe that he’s allowed to get away with it.

Enemies of the state are chopped up and fed to a grateful public. Citizens are referred to as ‘Citizen-Suspects.’ Nixon uses executive orders to justify his absurdity. Lawyers are consulted, then fired if they do not agree with him.

Meanwhile, cartoonist Joe Sacco is invited into the communal mainstream media Jacuzzi. He is lavished with praise, just as long as he wears the same hood as everybody else and reports what he is told to report. Joe is happy to do this. He wears his hood, pick up awards, and write an ostensibly funny, throwaway, silly little comic about naked hood wearing servants of evil, a daft talking chicken character and Richard Nixon.

So, is this comic book any good?

No, it’s a billion times better than ‘good.’

What this comic book does is expose the utter lunacy that we have come to accept as normalcy in the world today.

BUMF VOL. 1 is an absurdist, comedic masterpiece of sociopolitical satire that shoves our faces into our own filth. It accuses us of complicity in everything that is happening in the world TODAY. It accuses us of wilful ignorance, of going along with evil for selfish, careerist reasons.

Writer Joe Sacco accuses himself, and he finds himself as guilty as everybody else.

This book answers the question, ‘Who is responsible?’ The uncomfortable answer being, YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE.

You put up with insanity, so insanity is what you get. You get a world run by Satan, because that is what you deserve to get. You support Satan through your actions, not your words. Your words are meaningless. It’s your actions that count. You are naked. You wear a bag over your head. You chose to wear the bag. It shields you from reality, and you have made a conscious decision to wear that bag. You are responsible. The world is burning because of you. You are to blame. It is your fault.

Rating: 10/10 (must buy book)

Comic book review: Evil Empire #4- Say hello to the bad guys

Writer: Max Bemis
Artist: Andrea Mutti
Publisher: Boom Studios
Released: 27th August 2014


I know this review is a bit late, but I’ve just got around to reading the book, and I have to say something about it, late or not. If you read my review of Evil Empire #3 you’ll know that I absolutely loved the conclusion to that issue. It promised something more than I was expecting, something that is continued in Issue #4 where our punk rock heroine realises that she’s been played for a sucker by a devious politician. This issue introduces a creepy comic book style villain, and has the newly elected President of the USA giving a very crazy acceptance speech, a speech that is probably a bit too crazy:

‘We will be their Nazi’s, their Al Qaeda, their Sith, their Hydra.’

The Evil Empire has revealed itself, with the newly elected President of the United States telling America that it’s sick, and that he is going to cure that sickness whether they like it or not. How is that going to go down with the statist suckers that voted for him? My guess is that they’ll do what Barrack (Hope and Change) Obama’s supporters are doing now. They’ll be wilfully ignorant or try to blame somebody else for their cult leader’s lying ways. That’s how it usually works in cult mind control situations like political puppet worship. The followers cannot accept that they have been lied to, so they go into denial and make excuses for their beloved leader rather than look at the cold hard facts of what he has actually done.

I can envision some reviewers complaining about the nature of the speech made by the new president in this issue, as it’s so completely unlike the bullshit and platitudes nonsense you usually get from the professional liar scum politicians. I agree, it is highly unlikely that any politician, let alone a President would speak in this manner. That doesn’t stop me from enjoying this book though. The story is something that you don’t often get to read about in comic books, so I appreciate it as a refreshing change from the norm.

Evil Empire #4 is a full stop to the first stage of the story arc. Our punk rock protagonist has been played for a fool and the Evil Empire has been established. This issue feels like an end, so it will be interesting to see how it starts to kick into gear again. That’s a problem with this issue, that it feels like a full-stop and as we already know how the story ends (due to the frequent flash-forwards in time) it doesn’t really offer much hope for a happy conclusion.

The entire series so far has been exploring how America slipped into totalitarianism and became a moral vacuum, but now it has been explained there doesn’t appear to be any more story to tell. Is this a mistake by writer Max Bemis, or does he have something else up his sleeve? I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt here as I’ve really enjoyed his book so far, and I’ll be picking up the next issue just to see if he can inject some new life into a story that already appears to have been told.

Rating: 7.5/10

Comic book review: The Multiversity #1- Oh crap, this was no fun at all

Writer: Grant Morrison
Artist: Ivan Reis
Publisher: DC Comics
Released: 20th August 2014

Reading comic books shouldn’t be a chore, it should be fun, but this book was a convoluted, tiresome, joyless chore from beginning to end. I had a quick chat with John, the owner of my local comic book shop (https://www.facebook.com/TheIncredibleComicShop), before I bought this book, and he warned me that it was no good, and by God was he right.

The book begins with a focus on an insular loser living in a little bedroom with a pile of comic books, sadly discarded childhood toys and a couple of packets of prescription drugs for depressive illnesses. Is this kind of person that writer Grant Morrison sees as buying his comic books? Sadly, it looks that way. There’s a brief mention of a comic book that curses it’s readers, just like the video tapes in that Japanese horror movie (The Ring) that was a big deal over a decade ago, but this really shouldn’t be the creative basis for a new DC comic-book event in 2014. Is this all they have? Geesh, I hope not.

This is another comic set in a no-time zone that could be anywhere between 1980 and 2014. There’s the usual comic book nod to our times with a computer console and what looks like a web-chat on a Internet forum, but make no mistake about it, this is a comic that reads very much like something that would have bored and confused me in the early 1980’s. There is nothing of our times here, and no attempt to even deal with any of the issues and concerns in a contemporary setting. It’s just another silly comic, and that’s not enough for me now.

The needlessly confusing narrative follows the comic book fan as he turns into a laughable superhero, who is more comedy figure than serious protagonist, and he’s joined in his adventures by his toy monkey in a pirate outfit. I’m not joking; this is what actually happens in the book. What the Hell is going on here? Is the guy hallucinating due to a combination of loneliness and over indulgence in his prescription meds? Probably, but I don’t really care. The character is paper-thin. There’s nothing here for me to relate to, no reason whatsoever for me to care.

As the book progresses it begins to read like the latest Sandman Overture book in that it’s about collapsing universes, but it’s nowhere near as interesting and the art is vastly inferior to the excellent work being done by J.H Williams III. It’s not bad art, it’s just blah, uninspired, exactly like the script of the book.

The different characters that are introduced in these collapsing universes come across as the sort of piss take that you would see on an episode of South Park. I couldn’t take any of them seriously, and I couldn’t force myself to care about any of them either.

The main man, apart from the drugged up comic book loser, is a black Superman. He’s also the president in his particular reality, and he looks suspiciously like Barack Obama. That’s a really dated thing to do in comic books now. Perhaps when Obama first came into power it would have worked, but not now. The real life Obama has been exposed as a globalist puppet and lying war criminal piece of crap, so having him portrayed as a comic book hero in August 2014 looks completely ridiculous.

I’m really struggling to say anything else about this book as it has a very noticeable hollowness at its core. There’s nothing there; there’s really nothing there at all. It’s just silly, and boring, and not that interesting and it has one joke about ‘cartoon physics’ that comes across as an awkward attempt at injecting some fun into it, but it’s really desperate because it really isn’t any fun at all.

John warned me about this book, telling me that it would be confusing, but I told him that I was okay with that as I only had three other books to read this week, and that I’d take my time and read it over a couple of times. That’s not going to happen. No way am I going to be reading this joyless book a second time over. One read was a chore, and if I have to read it again I’m going to suddenly fall out of love with comics and never want to read another one of them ever again.

I think I should listen a bit more to the wise words of John the next time I go into the shop, because he was absolutely right about this book. He told me that it was a confusing mess, and that’s exactly what it is.

Avoid this book. Don’t waste your time and cash on it. I hate to be so mean about it, but you’d think that a writer of Grant Morrison’s tenure, experience and reputation would know how to put together an enjoyable book in his sleep by now. I really enjoyed his work on Batman & Robin, but this Multiversity book is no fun at all. What he has done here is throw up a generic 1980’s child-lite confusing multi-universe bore-fest that is lacking in inspiration, completely unappealing and near enough unreadable. I'm really surprised that it's as bad as it is. What a bloody shame, Grant Morrison is usually a lot better than this.

Rating: 2/10

Obama the Gym Warrior: Public Relations Fail

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2648339/Who-sneaked-camera-Obamas-hotel-gym-Security-questions-Polish-tabloid-runs-photos-President-working-out.html#comments

I don’t usually pay much attention to the mainstream media and their silly little political games. If you give too much of your time and attention to them you will inevitably find yourself being drawn into their disinformation paradigms like the Millennium Falcon being drawn into the Death Star by it’s tractor beam. If you get too close they’ll get you, and they’ll end up twisting your mind so much that you’ll no longer be able to see the bigger picture of what is really going on. You’ll eventually end up adopting one of their sides (left/right, but the same side really) and when you take one of those pre-determined sides you’re already lost. They have you in the tractor beam, and there’s no turning back.

This brings me to the latest ‘news’ propaganda piece of the day, the puff piece of public relation’s nonsense that was President Obama working out at the gym. This ‘secretly shot’ footage was obviously authorised and leaked with official blessing. You think not? If you could shoot video footage of the president of the US working out, you could shoot him with something more dangerous than a video camera as well, couldn’t you? So let’s be clear about this footage. It was ‘leaked’ for a purpose, and what would that purpose be?

It’s not too difficult to speculate about really is it? I know, let’s show a man who has recently developed a reputation as somewhat of a lightweight, an easily cowered liberal drip (see how this fits on my blog?) and show him lifting weights in a manly way. That will change his public image, won’t it?

Sadly (for him personally anyway) no it won’t. Look at all of the comments under the article I’ve linked to. You have to remember that everybody on the Internet is a 300lb bench-pressing beast of manliness, muscle and testosterone. Well, that’s what they tell you anyway. So to see the president lifting what amounts to ‘weights for girls’ all this footage does is further his image of being an emasculated weakling.

And that’s all I want to say about this latest PR stunt really. It failed because it wasn’t thought out well enough. If he was lifting something impressive then it would have worked, but seeing him doing aerobic exercises for the elderly and enfeebled is not really going to impress all of the anonymous gym warriors on the net. So, nice try mainstream media, but if you’re going to convince the sleeping masses that Barry the corporate yes man is anything other than a feminised liberal drip you’re going to have to come up with something a bit better next time.