Miss Morality, in ‘The Tunnels of Intolerance’- Part Three

Written by: Mark. A. Pritchard
Released on: The Rorshach Rant- 13th March 2015


Screaming and crying from the back of a Police van, a dishevelled, distressed and disturbingly inebriated Miss Morality railed against the injustice, the misogyny and institutional sexism of the Police force.

‘Ya f*****g b******s, I’m gonna f*****g sue every single last one of you c**** *** **** ****, if it’s the last thing you do, you rapist m***********s.’

It was a sad sight indeed as our brave feminist warrior was carted off to the nearest cell to sober up, calm down, and sleep off the half a bottle of vodka and six beers that had reduced her to this sorry state of inebriation.

As she was taken away the watching criminal mastermind known as ‘The Dissenter,’ enthusiastically detailed the next stage of his plans.

‘Good job mate. Keep her locked up for a good ten hours and that should be enough for us to sort her out for good. Her days of social justice campaigning are over forever, ha ha ha ha ha.’

‘Ha ha ha ha ha,good one boss,' replied the pig like arresting officer as he struggled to regain his composure. ‘Ding, dong, the witch is dead, ha ha ha ha ha.’

The hateful patriarchal laughter of the two women hating villains rang sinisterly throughout the early evening traffic. They enthusiastically shook hands, winked the secret wink of patriarchy to each other, and left to complete the remainder of their evil plans. The arresting officer going back to the Police station to make sure that poor Miss Morality spent the night in the cells, and the Dissenter off to cause more mischief and put the next stage of his evil plan into operation.

When social services arrived at the now deserted home of Miss Morality they were alarmed (but not surprised) to hear the distressed cries of a hungry baby girl. Her mother was in jail, but where was her uncle?

Where was the blameless and pure Rufus? Surely he wouldn’t abandon his sister's baby at this most inopportune time? No, of course not, but that’s exactly what it looked like to the social workers. This was not good news for our brave social justice warrior at all.

After a quick call to the police, and a battering ram to the door, baby Sojourner was whisked away, and sent straight into the loving arms of the expert child-care specialists working for the BBC Jimmy Saville care-home for abandoned and vulnerable young girls.

‘Stage two of the operation is complete boss,’ said a hateful manly figure in black as baby Sojourner was delivered to the home. ‘We know what to do from this point on, same routine right?’

‘Oh yes, my conspiratorial colleague,’ replied the Dissenter.

‘Same routine as before, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.’

It was 11am the next morning when a sick as a female parrot Miss Morality woke in her Police cell. Suffering from a stinging headache and no memory of the night-before she banged angrily upon the cell door demanded to know what was happening.

‘Help, help where am I? What is happening here? I demand to see a female solicitor. I'm being held against my will. My female rights are being violated.  Help, help, help, help.’

Her cries for help were answered by a familiar whistling coming from the bottom of the corridor. The whistling got slowly louder, and louder as it’s source walked calmly, slowly, sinisterly towards the trapped feminist social justice warrior.

A trembling, terrified and deeply distressed Miss Morality recognised the whistling immediately. She knew it well. It was a whistle she had learned to fear as a small, innocent frightened and abused little girl.

‘Hello love,’ said a smiling, hairy, ugly brute of a man as he glared menacingly at Miss Morality through the tiny little window of her prison cell.

‘What do you think of my uniform? I look rather masculine in blue, don’t you think?’

‘Oh my mother goddess,’ replied an almost fainting Miss Morality.

‘No, no, no no, no. This can’t be real. This can’t be happening.’

 ‘Daddy, it’s you.’


END OF PART THREE



Miss Morality will return next week (Friday 20th March) in ‘The Tunnels of Intolerance’- Part 4. Is all hope gone for our brave social justice warrior? Where is Rufus? Is baby Sojourner going to be safe in the BBC Jimmy Saville care home? How is Miss Morality going to escape the masculine oppression of her own father? All will be revealed next week. DON’T MISS IT.


* If any artist would like to illustrate this story, then please let me know.

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: Ant-Man #3- Be a Man, not an Ant-Man

Writer: Nick Spencer
Artist: Ramon Rosanas
Cover artist: Mark Brooks
Publisher: Marvel (Disney) Comics
Released: 11th March 2015

I only bought this book for the cool looking front cover. As for the inside story, I already knew what I would be getting.

I read issue #1 of Ant-man, so I knew that the story was going to be about an emasculated loser getting bossed around by his ex-wife. I knew that the dialogue was going to be soft, cosy, and full of quips with self-deprecating interior monologues from the titular dork. I knew that everything would be treated like a joke, that nothing would feel real, and that there would be no dealing with any of the issues that I always talk about on my blog.

I knew all of this before buying the book, so I’m not going to complain about it here, well not very much. Ant-Man, as written by Nick Spencer, is a very modern feminist liberal apology of a man. He exists to be bossed around by alpha females, and is domesticated, pathetic, desperate, lonely and weak. In other words, he's the perfect embodiment of the modern man in 2015, as programmed by the new world order friendly corporate whore mainstream media. Hey comic book fans; here's a depressing truth-

THIS GUY IS SUPPOSED TO BE YOU. 

Don’t be Ant-Man kids. Self deprecating jokes and getting bossed around by women doesn’t make you a nice guy. It makes you a loser, the kind of guy who women secretly despise. Ant-Man is the kind of guy who cries himself to sleep (alone) every night as he ties himself in feminist liberal knots trying to understand why all of the ‘jerks’ get the girls, and all he gets for his ‘niceness’ is friendship zoned.

Don’t be that guy. Be a man, not an Ant-Man.

I didn’t like the artwork in this book. It was flat, the colours were dull and it lacked detail. The narrative structure was very good, but the story didn’t interest me, and it wasn’t saying anything about the world that I live in.

Ant-Man #3 has a great front cover by Mark Brooks, but the story inside ‘features’ an emasculated comic book reader type as the protagonist. The story is about him trying to keep out of trouble with his ex-wife, lest she takes his daughter away from him for good. That’s a bit depressing really, seeing a ‘superhero’ going through the same crap that men have to put up with in the real world, dominated as it is with female friendly courts and a man-hating culture that is deliberately trying to emasculate men.

I bought this book only for the cover, so I’m not angry about it. That cover is great, and it’s going up on my wall, but the rest of the comic is pretty useless to me, other than to use it as an example of mainstream anti-male propaganda that unfortunately contaminates contemporary comic books today.

Rating: 4/10 (Great cover, interior story is well structured, but Ant-Man is no hero to me)

Comic review: Bill & Ted’s Most Triumphant Return #1- Nostalgia for the bearded generation

Writer: Brian Lynch
Artist: Jerry Gaylord
Publisher: Boom! Studios
Released: 11th March 2015


The last Bill & Ted movie (Bogus Journey) was released in 1991, and when my young niece watched it last week on Netflix she called it, ‘The most boring movie that I’ve ever seen.’ 

So, in regards to this 2015 Bill & Ted comic I’m guessing that the potential audience will consist of old people like myself whom lived through those dark days before the Internet, mobile phones and Edward Snowdon.

Who exactly is reading comic books in 2015? You know, sometimes when I look at all of the pointless alternative covers on new books I suspect that it’s bearded forty-year old losers like myself. My friends, I have seen the future. It’s a bit sad, and it needs a shave

Bill & Ted’s Most Triumphant Return #1 is fluffy, inoffensive, cute and friendly. The art is nice and colourful and everything about it scream ‘nostalgia’ for the 40 year old bearded bloke crowd. I’m a part of that crowd. I’m the guy that the comic book is aimed at. So, did it hit?

Yeah, it did what you would expect it to do. It offered a five-minute jolt down memory lane, but I can’t see it winning over any younger converts. The comic book is still set in the early 1990’s (the safest place for comic books to exist in today) so it’s not really doing, or saying anything. It reminded me of the silly movie, but I was a different person back then, heck, the world was a different place back then, and things have changed whilst Bill & Ted have remained the same.

I don’t want to go back in time to the early 1990’s. I was there, and they weren’t that great the first time around. In fact, times were so stiflingly dull that Nirvana had to come along just to kick some life into the party. Okay, so they told people that they sucked, but at least they said something, and that was the problem with the early 1990’s, people were going through the motions, nothing was being said and nothing was really happening.

I guess in that sense we are living through a period much like the early 1990’s once again in 2015. There is a cultural vacuum that is becoming increasingly more apparent as the days pass. Who is going to fill it? Is it going to be a self destructive, nihilistic rejection of everything as represented by the band ‘Nirvana?’ Or is it going to be something more positive? Something that looks at the corporate/government tyranny of our time (like Nirvana did) but rather than turning inward and self-destructive, instead turns outwards and looks for solutions to the problems that face us all today? My money is on the later.

Bill & Ted are not going to help, but by going back to what they represented in 1991 we are being reminded that it’s time again for another shake-up.

2015 is the new 1991. It’s time for something genuinely new, genuinely revolutionary and genuinely determined to shake this joint up again.

There’s an open space, people are sleeping again, and the most exciting thing about living in 2015 is to have that sense of anticipation that feeling that something is lurking, planning, scheming, creeping, ready to pounce and ready to get this party going again.

Rating: 6/10 (Not bad, but it's just a nostalgia book)

Comic review: Wolverines #10- Dead Wolverine, deader book

Writer: Ray Fawkes
Artist: Jonathan Marks
Publisher: DC Comics
Release date: 11th March 2015


Why bother writing, or illustrating anything nearing a decent standard in a ‘Wolverine’ book? I mean, what’s the point in putting any effort in when you know that people are going to buy it just because of the ‘Wolverine’ name anyway?

That was the ONLY impression that Marvel comic’s Wolverine title left on me a year or so ago, the last time that I read one of the books. Now I’m back (for one week only) to see if anything has changed, to see if Marvel comics are putting any effort into the title in March 2015. Here’s the short answer to that question- NO.

I don’t blame them really. If people are daft enough to buy junk then keep on giving them junk. Wolverines #10 is smelly, rotten, stale junk, a bad comic from top to bottom, from beginning to end.

The art is horrible. Vague blurry scribbles are thrown haphazardly onto the page, sometimes a shape resembles a human being, or was that a ship, or a space alien, or something? It was something, but I guess it doesn’t really matter, does it?

The narrative involves Sabretooth and some inquisitor psychopath bloke called Fang. It is dull, aliens die, nothing really matters, end of book. Next month it will be the turn of X-23 to take a pointless ride on Fang’s merry-go-around of dullness.

Yawn...............................................................................................................................................................................snoooooooozeee………….......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

…………………………………………………………………………………………….Snore………….................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
……………………....Snore……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….Oh, sorry………….Hang on………………………............................

Oh, that’s better, got my coffee now, and I’m ready to continue the review. Please accept my apologies. This review was boring me so much that I actually passed out halfway through a paragraph. Hang on, (sips coffee), now I’m ready to finish this boring bugger off.

Wolverine is (temporarily) dead, and so is his comic. Writer Ray Fawkes is going through the motions, and the art-team don’t give a crap either, so why should you? It’s a very dull, perfunctory title. It’s worth neither your time or money, and is just another example of Marvel comic’s sticking two fingers up to their slavishly loyal fan-base, taking a big Disney dump, putting it between the pages of one of their toy box unit shifters and selling it to their loyal fanboys. It’s a very bad comic, but you already knew that, right?

Rating: 0/10 (If a book offers nothing, it gets a 0 rating from now on)

Theatre review: Shady Business (Swindon Arts centre)- A jaw achingly funny show

Theatre Company: The Western Players
Writer: Robin Hawdon
Location: The Arts Centre, Old Town, Swindon, Wilts
Date of Performance: Wednesday 11th March 2015
Future performances: Thursday 12th March, Friday 13th March and Saturday 14th March 2015
Click link for ticket information:
https://swindontheatres.co.uk/Online/default.asp?doWork::WScontent::loadArticle=Load&BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::article_id=E4AAB139-C653-4641-A2BC-5CF400E410A4


Shady Business was so funny, so silly, so daft and so bewilderingly ridiculous that it left me with severe jaw ache by the end of the show.

I can’t even remember the last time that something made me laugh so much that my jaw hurt, but that’s what happened to me tonight. I wasn’t expecting this play to be so funny, so I guess it caught me unawares, and my poor old jaw still hasn’t quite recovered.

I’m not even going to discuss the plot, the acting, the scenery or anything else about this play. All I’m going to do is offer a warning.

That warning is for anybody who intends to see the show in the next three days, and here it is. Before the show begins you need to do some serious jaw exercises in preparation for what you are going to see.

I’m not messing around here. This is a serious warning. If you are going to see this show then you need to properly prepare yourself. Much like the beginning of strenuous exercise you need to prepare your body properly for the experience, but rather than stretching your calves and hamstrings it’s your jaw muscles that need to be properly prepared.

Here’s my expert advice- Open your mouth as wide as it can go, then relax, open again, and repeat. Then scrunch to the left, scrunch to the right and relax. By repeating these exercises shortly before the beginning of the show your jaw should be properly warmed up and ready for action. Do this (and don’t forget to repeat the exercises during the mid-show interval as well) and you should be okay, but ignore my warning and expect severe jaw ache by the end of the show.

You might be thinking that this is a bit of a strange review, and you would be absolutely correct in thinking that way because this isn’t a review at all. No, this is actually a public service warning to anybody who intends to see Shady Business in the Swindon Arts Centre over the next three days. I feel it’s my duty to put out this warning, because boy my jaw hurts now, and I’d hate to see anybody else make the same mistake that I made.


Rating: 10/10 (A very funny, very enjoyable show)

Review: Sheltered #15 (THE FINAL ISSUE)- Formulaic book, horrible ending

Writer: Ed Brisson
Artist: Johnnie Christmas
Publisher: Image Comics
Released: 11th March 2015


It was all random, and meaningless. The story was about the personalities involved, nothing else. The authorities were blameless. Any questioning of official narratives is being disrespectful of the dead. ‘Closure’ is all that matters. Let’s move on. Nothing to see here. End of story.

Does all of that sound familiar to you? It does to me. It’s the usual pattern that you see repeated in the mainstream media when anything involving the Police occurs. The message is clear. Trust in authority, don’t look, and don’t ask questions.

That’s the ending of Sheltered, well it should have been, but keep on reading to the final panel and you’ll get a twist that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.  It comes across very badly, and I know that it’s going to upset a lot of readers.

So what happened? Why did writer Ed Brisson go with the final panel twist that negated everything else that he had previously written?

My guess is that he looked at the ending to his formulaic cult leader story, thought it was a bit dull, so went for the obvious twist in order to spice things up a bit. It didn’t work.

It failed because it was cheap, easy and unconvincing. It failed because it wasn’t properly thought out and was lacking in creativity. It failed because it was the kind of twist that you would expect to read in a child’s first story in a creative writing class.

So, what should he have done? Should he have gone with the dull ending? No, he should have written a better story that had more depth and more ideas, but he didn’t do that, so he was left with only two choices: 1- End it with the surviving characters looking sad. 2- End it with the predictable (yet unconvincing) twist.

He opted for the later, but it was his lack of creativity that forced him into this corner in the first place.

Ed Brisson can put a narrative together. He’s shown that in this book, but you have to ask yourself this question- Does the man have anything to say? My answer, after reading fifteen issues of Sheltered is NO. That sounds harsh, but that’s how I feel after investing all of my time and money in Sheltered.

I won’t be reading anything else from the pen of Ed Brisson. I gave him a chance, and he didn’t deliver. I’ll continue to look for new writers who have something to say, and I’ll continue to keep on writing for myself.

Sheltered turned out to be a very ordinary cult leader book with a desperately sad, tacked on ending. There was nothing new here, and after finishing it I'm left with the feeling that I put too much faith into something that never really delivered.

As I was reading the earlier issues of this book my mind was racing with the endless possibilities where the story could have gone. In the end it went nowhere. I assumed intelligence and creativity, and what I got in return was mainstream compliance, a lack of ideas, a painfully amateur ‘twist’ ending and a book that had absolutely nothing to say. I shouldn’t have wasted my time on this one. Oh well. You live, you learn, and you move on.

Rating for issue #15: 0/10
Rating for entire series: 2/10 (Interesting start, but gets very formulaic, and ends badly)