* I’m very happy with my interview with Frank Santoro about his Silver Surfer strip for Strange Tales II over at Marvel.com. I think he says some surprising things.
* Some kind of preview for Game of Thrones will air before this Sunday’s True Blood season finale. Keep your eyes peeled.
* Brigid Alverson argues that shoujo manga’s generic tropes, not the gender of its audience or creators, are the reason it’s not taken more seriously. Veterans of the Twilight and Taylor Swift Wars, take note.
* Hahaha, no more Heroes.
* It’s really funny to me that Nerd Nation sees Julie Taymor as the weak link in the Spider-Man musical, and not late-period Bono and the Edge. Maybe this’ll get them to reconsider.
* Martin Scorsese runs down his favorite pre-1970 gangster movies. In addition to the educational value of these choices, I just want to say how comforting I find the way Marty refers to movies as “pictures.”
* Finally, I find the current shitstorm surrounding this dumb fuck in Florida who wants to light a pile of Korans on fire illuminating regarding another, more comics-centric such debacle, the Danish Muhammad cartoons. You might recall that for just about as long as he’s been covering it, the issue’s most indefatigable chronicler Tom Spurgeon has argued that even while he’d always defend the cartoonists’ right to draw whatever they want and the publisher’s right to publish whatever they want, and even while he’d decry the notion that anything they did in that regard justified intimidation, violence, or murder by anyone against them or anyone else, the actual act of publication of the cartoons was less some brave act of artists speaking truth to power than a politically minded provocation cum publicity stunt. This can be a bitter pill to swallow for a free speech absolutist like myself, one who moreover is temperamentally inclined toward supporting the smashing of religious taboos as a public good. (Andres Serrano could urinate for fifty years straight and still not produce enough piss in which to dunk everything about the world’s major religions I’d like to see good and submerged.) And this is to say nothing about my feelings regarding violent Islamic extremists in particular. (My feelings: Let me show you them!)
But by removing the act of provocation from any artistic context, this dumb fuck in Florida clarifies the underlying act a bit. I don’t mean to diminish the fact that there was an artistic component to the Danish cartoons while the would-be Koran burning is just an out-and-out act of religious and race hate, and a classically fascist one to boot, by some shitkicking faith healer. But I think what made it all come together for me the most was this post by antiwar blogger Thoreau:
I’m proud to live in a country where even the most odious speech is protected along with our right to criticize that odious speech. I am dubious that there will be any blood spilled in response to his stunt if he does it (I mean, it’s not like the insurgents in Afghanistan were originally planning to lay down their weapons before some dumbass in Florida decided to pull a stunt), but if there is, well, this is America. Free speech is one American thing that genuinely is worth dying for, as civil rights protestors and revolutionaries and soldiers and numerous other patriots can attest. We spill lots of blood over things that are far less worthy than free speech, so if this jackass’s stunt does cause somebody else to attack us, well, this ink doesn’t run. (And that’s about as jingoistic as I can get.)
The thing that the Danish Muhammad cartoon controversy taught us, though, is that in the main it wasn’t the cartoonists or the editors or the publishers or even just Danish nationals who suffered (admittedly not through lack of trying on the part of bloody-minded fundamentalist fucks around the world), as if any of that would have been okay. No, mostly it was random people caught up in riots and violence, incited by people who not only knew better but actually made things worse by lying about the cartoons and including even more offensive ones in the mix. Like Thoreau, I doubt any Americans really would die if this dumb fuck in Florida burns his Korans, certainly no Americans who wouldn’t have been at grave risk in Afghanistan or Iraq anyway. But some people would die, that I don’t doubt at all. That’s the common thread that links the two situations.
Now, you can’t live your life to please the sorts of people who murder people over a book or a cartoon. Moreover I think there is value in pissing off the right people; the dumb fuck in Florida, being the right sort of person to piss off himself, removes this aspect from the equation as well as the artistic one. But perhaps more importantly than all of that, you also oughtn’t risk the lives of other people simply to express how much something irritates you. I guess after all these years I’m sick of bravely arguing for my rights from behind the safety of my laptop, while people I will never meet die for the argument.
Tags: A Song of Ice and Fire, fantasy, Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin