Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

And Sometimes Superman Went Crazy and Became King of the World: Action Comics 311

Oh, comics.

I first saw this cover years ago, and only recently obtained a copy of Action Comics #311, the one where Superman becomes a despotic tyrant over all the Earth.  Only, you know, in the kind of goofy way Superman would have become a despotic tyrant during the Silver Age in comics aimed at kids.

I like that he added the fleecing to his cape.  You got to class it up as king.
Key to making sure you're king?  Demanding trays full of jewels.  I will need to remember that.

Superman does nothing by half-measures, so you should expect none of that here.  The story in brief: Superman gets exposed to Red Kryptonite, which splits him into two sides, one bad and one good.  The bad side remains Superman, but the other becomes human-strength Clark Kent. Bad Superman decides there's no good reason to help people, and so he decides to just lord it over them.

No, no it doesn't make any sense.  But where have we seen this good/ bad split before?  Well, not exactly before...  you saw it in the Star Trek episode The Enemy Within. Also, we see good/ bad Superman as Superman/ Clark in...  SUPERMAN 3 where Red-K was also to blame!

So, yeah.  Red K.  Its a real problem. Avoid it.

I'm going to editorialize like crazy here, but there's also an ad run in the front cover of the comic, featuring Bob Hope teaching kids about loving their neighbor, religious tolerance, wrestling with singular world viewpoints, etc... all in 5 panels!  And it is seemingly sponsored by the US Govt.

clearly, Bob Hope was a sleeper agent for Al Qaeda
Quite a few of these pop up in these Kennedy-era comics.  It's oddly kind of stunning.  These days, this sort of hopeful, "it's a small world" talk would get you a 24 hour news cycle on Fox accusing you of hating the troops.

Also:  apparently kids were still into Bob Hope in the mid-60's.

But it's not that, nor the suggestion the comic makes that China built an entire replica of New York City (to scale, btw) just to blow it up for atomic bomb tests that I want to point to.  No, its exactly the manner in which Superman demands the nations of the world crown him Head Cheese.

He heads to the United Nations general assembly, takes the podium, and...

I invite you to click for full-sized madness
 Right on.

For those of you who didn't look...

We will SUPER bury you!
Pretty good stuff.

Of course, the actual pounding of shoe to podium associated with Krushchev may be Cold War myth, but it was taught to me as fact. I am betting that was one of the more fun panels these guys put together.  No idea what readers, their parents, or the CCA said about this one.

And I particularly love that Superman is still going to town, menacing the General Assembly with a bright, red boot as the cameras roll.

at this point, I imagine Superman has broken out into song

This, by the way, is a two-parter!

And if you missed it:

You can drop the "tator" part, Olsen

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Yes to Egyptian Democracy!

I really liked this video linked by Kanye West off his Twitter account.

Its footage from Egypt cut to a Kanye West track.



I haven't talked all that much about Egypt or the calls for democracy and fair representation occurring right now in the Middle East, but as we at Signal Watch stand for Truth and Justice, we can only hope for the best for the citizens of nations signaling peacefully and reasonably for change to a government for the people and by the people.

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Liu Xiaobo

Editor's note:  This post is a repost from Steve Harms' website, published with permission by the author.

We talk about comics, TV and movies a lot here, and in those media, the term "hero" is thrown around as if it means something.  Xiaobo is a reminder of what true heroism can look like, an image that bears all too little relation to dreams of revenge and glory that we usually use as our common image of "hero".

Like most Americans, prior to last week's Nobel Prize ceremony, I was unaware of Liu Xiaobo.  Like most Americans, as China has blazed a path into a position as a power player in the 21st Century, I often forget about the endemic human rights violations and extreme censorship that the Chinese government employs on a routine basis.

Below is Steven's post and Xiaobo's acceptance statement.


Liu Xiaobo, Chinese dissident and anti-party activist received the Nobel Peace Prize on the 10th of this month.

In his acceptance address, Liu espouses the usual high-minded views that one would associate with a Nobel-winning dissident: free expression is a right of all men, democratic reform is coming to China, social diversity is better than a master-planned autocracy, etc.

What was most surprising to me was the poetic description of his love for his wife:
I am serving my sentence in a tangible prison, while you wait in the intangible prison of the heart. Your love is the sunlight that leaps over high walls and penetrates the iron bars of my prison window, stroking every inch of my skin, warming every cell of my body, allowing me to always keep peace, openness, and brightness in my heart, and filling every minute of my time in prison with meaning. My love for you, on the other hand, is so full of remorse and regret that it at times makes me stagger under its weight. I am an insensate stone in the wilderness, whipped by fierce wind and torrential rain, so cold that no one dares touch me. But my love is solid and sharp, capable of piercing through any obstacle. Even if I were crushed into powder, I would still use my ashes to embrace you.





ed.  You can read the full transcript here.