I wrote about my friend Tom Spurgeon for the Comics Journal’s collection of eulogies. I miss him very much.

Tom Spurgeon has died. He was my mentor, my model, and my friend. This is a staggering loss for comics; for me, I just know I hate waking up in a world without Tom in it. He made me a better writer, his friendship made me a better person, and his work made comics a better art form—a better industry—a better community. I will miss his boundless curiosity and enthusiasm for the medium, I will miss his savagely funny offline self, and I will miss the chance to tell him how much he meant to me for the 18 years I was privileged enough to know him. I love you, Tom.

Due to a lost credit card, a crowded inbox, a lackadaisical hosting service, and a piece-of-shit squatter, I no longer own boiledleather.com, the address of much of my A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones writing since 2011. Fortunately all the content is actually hosted at boiledleather.tumblr.com, so it’s not a total loss. I sincerely apologize for the linkrot that’s now setting in, though. I’m mortified I let this happen and gutted I can’t afford to buy the domain back from the people who snaked it out from under me.

“They will not fail!”

The deluded denialism of Lord Summerisle and his people is made terrifyingly clear. In the nobleman’s piercing, clarion voice you can all but hear him clinging, white-knuckled, to the edifice of ideology he himself helped construct and enforce. He cannot admit that he’s wrong, can’t even brook the possibility. He’s telling himself the sacrifice will be accepted and the crops will return as much as he’s telling Howie or the assembled islanders. He’ll commit murder, doom his community to collapse and his people to starvation, before admitting the truth.

I think about those four words, and Christopher Lee’s perfect delivery of them, a lot. I hear an entire mindset, the complete conservative worldview, in those four syllables.

I wrote about my favorite line from The Wicker Man and why it’s the key to so much that’s wrong with our world for Polygon.

“…Sam Harris, a neuroscientist; Eric Weinstein, a mathematician and managing director of Thiel Capital; the commentator and comedian Dave Rubin…the evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying; Jordan Peterson, the psychologist and best-selling author; the conservative commentators Ben Shapiro and Douglas Murray; Maajid Nawaz, the former Islamist turned anti-extremist activist; and the feminists Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Christina Hoff Summers.”

– Bari Weiss, “Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web,” The New York Times, May 8, 2018

“I do many, many things. I am a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher … but above all, I am a man. A hopelessly inquisitive man, just like you.”

– Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) in The Master

These quotes introduce a new essay I wrote about The Master in the Intellectual Dark Age of Trump for Polygon. Special thanks to my editor Matt Patches for the inspiration.

That’s another thing that sets The Act apart, maybe more than anything else: It’s a show almost exclusively about women, written mostly by women, directed mostly by women, with a woman co-creator and co-showrunner, who’s also the woman who wrote the article it’s based on.

Dean: It has a slightly different feel. “Intimate” is the word I often hear, like, around our world of executives. [Laughs.] It was a very conscious choice, in part because of the nature of the story.

Antosca: We took it from real life. It’s two women, in a house, for many years — that’s the core of the story. And their neighbors were mostly women — the Chloë Sevigny and AnnaSophia Robb characters are composites of neighbors who lived throughout the community. It was important to have a mother-daughter counterpart to the Dee Dee and Gypsy story.

Dean: The nature of the story is about mothers and daughters, and there’s a specificity to that experience — especially this idea that mothers dress their daughters up as kind of their dolls, which a lot more people than Gypsy would report that as being their experience, right? And also, some things about the tropes of good mothers that trapped Dee Dee.

Antosca: When I read Michelle’s article, I didn’t take away from it, “Oh, this is a lurid true-crime story.” I took away, “This is a powerful story about a young woman discovering who she really is and doing whatever she can, using the only tools she has, to escape the prison of lies she’s been trapped in.” Imagine how unstable your identity would be, how your sense of self would be destroyed and malleable, if you were raised like that and shaped like that — a case of long-term medical child abuse and radical gaslighting.

Gypsy is such a complicated character. She’s deceiving the world along with her mom, but she’s deceiving herself too. Ultimately, she’s using the skills of deception that her mom taught her, which are the only thing she knows at that point, against her mom. She had access to countless drugs, so she could have poisoned her mom. Or she could have stabbed her herself. But she couldn’t do it, because she loved her mom. So she had to use the skills that her mom gave her to reach into the outside world and bring somebody else in to kill her.

Dean: When I interviewed her she would always say, “My mom was my best friend.” Which is really sad. The protective impulse that is still in her, and the ways in which it trapped her, is something I think about a lot.

I interviews showrunners Nick Antosca and Michelle Dean about their extraordinary show The Act for Vulture.

If the Man gave Marvel its persona, he also created his own. Born Stanley Martin Lieber in 1922, he adopted his pen name in part because he held out hope of becoming a serious writer under his real name. Meanwhile, he was cranking out comics of every kind for his uncle Martin Goodman’s publishing company, which eventually evolved into Marvel. That name and everything that came with it — the jocular personality, the never-changing look, the vague but unmistakable air of creative wizardry — was as grand an identity as any superhero’s.

Of course, he had a secret identity too. He was a hopelessly devoted husband to his wife Joan, a British ex-pat whose death in 2017 seemed impossible for Lee to ever truly wrap his mind around. And as recent exposés and interviews have illustrated, he was subject to the same depredations of age as any other person — confusing legal disputes with business partners, elder-abuse allegations — a sad coda to a life lived large.

And he was Stan the Company Man as well. Ask the late Jack Kirby, the creative dynamo (he helped invent both Captain America and romance comics with writer Joe Simon, long before he and Lee teamed up), who by all accounts did much of the heavy lifting not just as artist but as co-writer during their fruitful collaboration, despite Lee earning the lion’s share of the credit and compensation. Kirby’s legacy as “The King of Comics” includes a lengthy legal war against Marvel for rights, royalties, and even the physical pages he drew on. Though Lee assiduously pointed out the role his collaborators played in the formation of the company and its characters during interviews later in his life, he usually took Marvel’s side in these battles when they occurred. To many within comics, “The Man” has the same pejorative connotations it does when used to describe politicians or police.

But whatever his faults (many) and autumn-years misfortunes (also many), Lee’s ambition, imagination, and ability to combine high melodrama, high-octane action and playful, personable banter on the comics page was the foundation upon which the entire Marvel empire was built. And most importantly, long before his characters ruled the box office, they populated the back pockets and bedroom floors of countless kids, thirsty for adventure and desperate for connection. Peter Parker, Tony Stark, T’Challa, Natasha and the rest of the gang brought incalculable hours of enjoyment to their readers, and eventually their viewers. All of it based on Lee’s basic premise, reflected in his own life in so many ways, that radioactive spider bites or not, heroes are only human.

Without Stan Lee, it would be a poorer, lonelier, drearier life, in which picked-on kids would dream fewer dreams. Forget the Marvel Universe. Stan the Man reimagined our own.

After his death, I wrote about Stan Lee for Rolling Stone. I tried to be specific and fair about his faults and achievements.

Dril and the boys wallow in the same miasma from which all our era’s reactionary movements have emerged — the MAGAs and Pepes, MRAs and incels, GamerGaters and ComicsGaters, Sad Puppies and Proud Boys and all the other doofuses with unwittingly infantilizing sobriquets.

With “the boys,” the humorist behind dril has tapped into the overall vibe in this country that there exists, somewhere out there ― perhaps in a TJ Maxx ― a lost masculine ideal. No one agrees on what it is, least of all dril, whose psyche is as piecemeal as his punctuation. It could be yelling at NFL protesters to stand for the national anthem or screaming at Disney for committing white genocide in the “Star Wars” films. It could be having sex all the time or having no sex at all. It could be respecting the majesty of the law or flouting it or both, depending on whom the law is meant to penalize. It’s the nightmare superego-id hybrid, 10 pounds of Blue Lives Matter shit in a five-pound “Live free or die” bag.

When men fail to live up to the puritanical amorality of the boys, they’re less than men, which is to say — as women have a lifetime to learn — they’re less than human. Such men earn sexualized insults like “betas” and “cucks.” They’re reduced to contemptuous acronyms like “SJWs” and “NPCs.” They make the soy face. They listen to dad rock. This blend of macho aggression and childlike vulnerability cannot be resolved in the real world, where it results in a racist, revanchist, minority party controlling all branches of government and installing sexual predators in every available position of power yet still acting like the David to the Goliath of Me Too, female gamers and the theoretical casting of Idris Elba as James Bond.

Dril and the boys reside in this all-American astral plane where the Large Son–Libtard civil war rages, where misandry is real and must be guarded against with magic spells. We recognize our own reality in their incoherent but nevertheless militant search for reasons to hoot and holler. As such, their romance presents us with an opportunity to convert the problematic into the pleasurable, just as surely as antihero dramas or even halfway decent kink.

I wrote about Dril, the funniest writer alive, and “the boys,” his best recurring characters, for HuffPost.

I spent yesterday collecting dozens and dozens tweets describing the difficulties faced by people attempting to vote in the Democratic primary here in New York. Many of those people appear to have been purged from the rolls altogether.

I started this thread after first noticing reports of people running into trouble at the polls yesterday morning, hours and hours before the polls closed and we knew who won. It’s not about “making excuses” for Nixon’s defeat. It’s about chronicling voter suppression. Did these incidents decide the election in Cuomo’s favor? Unlikely, given the numbers. Nor were the Watergate break-in or ratfucking the Democratic primary responsible for Nixon’s landslide win in 1972. That doesn’t mean those crimes didn’t happen, or that they didn’t matter.

New York has one of the highest numbers of registered voters and is consistently near the bottom in electoral turnout. The absurd rules for registering and voting in the primaries are part of that. So is the culture of chaos around what can happen to you when you *try* to vote. “People who want to vote should be able to vote” ought to be the least controversial statement it’s possible for people in a democracy to make. Yet the official position of New York State—and based on yesterday, the passion project of its now-reelected governor—is to ensure otherwise.

Side note: I see a quote going around in smug centrist circles about Nixon’s campaign “complaining” about turnout. If you can find an actual complaint about turnout in that quote, which is about Cuomo’s money funneling overall anti-Trump fervor to the polls, be my guest.

You can’t mock that statement *at the same time* that you mock people saying they couldn’t vote because of funny business at the polls or ridicule the whole idea that New York’s primary system constitutes voter suppression, as centrist/liberal pundits have done for years now. The harder it is for people to vote in the primary, the less likely they’ll be to try again. It’s a vicious cycle, by design.

People who want to vote should be able to vote.

Well, it looks like it’s gonna be a slow news day, so I might as well announce that I’m taking a break from the Boiled Leather Audio Hour podcast. I’m leaving it in the capable hands of My Illustrious Cohost @StefanSasse, who’s already got some killer guest hosts from the ASoIaF/GoT world lined up. We have a backlog of Boiled Leather Audio Moments for our patreon subscribers (http://patreon.com/boiledleatheraudiohour BAY-BAY) that I hope to roll out this month as well, and I will CERTAINLY return to talk about Fire and Blood in a couple months. For now I need to recharge and free up some time to work on long-delayed projects, so that when I return, which I hope to do, I can give this beloved thing of ours the attention it deserves. I’ve loved recording every episode and I’m so grateful for everyone’s support.

Gather ’round, friends, and I’ll tell you a scary story. It’s a tale of political intrigue, in which right-wing politicians in a Western nation (culturally, if not geographically) conspire with the intelligence apparatus of authoritarians abroad to undermine democratic institutions and maneuver themselves into power. This story has it all: International hackers, compromising video of illicit liaisons between politicians and secret foreign spies, deep-state chicanery, romantic relationships between reporters and intelligence agents, false-flag terrorist attacks, a trans woman risking her life to expose abuses by the military-intelligence apparatus of which she’s a part, honeytraps, rampant xenophobia and racism, indefinite detention, allegations of fake news, attacks on the press, oppression of dissent…

Wait, you say you’ve heard this one before? And you haven’t watched Secret City, the Australian political thriller from Summer 2016 now playing in Summer 2018 in an American Netflix account near you?

In one of the most remarkable cases of art not imitating life but anticipating it, Secret City‘s short, sweet six-episode first season plays like a prophecy about the next two years of life in these United States, issued by a Canberra Cassandra who won’t be heard until it’s too late. And after the events that unfolded between America and Russia this week, it feels more relevant than ever — just swap a few proper nouns and serve hot.

I wrote a few pieces I’m proud of last week. First up, a few words on Secret City, the new-to-Netflix Australian political thriller from 2016…that just so happens to be basically America in 2018.

On twitter this morning I saw one of the cleverest trolls I’ve seen in a while: a normal (i.e. non–New Atheist bigot) atheist admirer of atheist Stephen Hawking, speaking like a Christian, telling Christians welcoming atheist Stephen Hawking into Heaven that he won’t get in because he was a sinner who didn’t believe. Fighting passive aggression disguised as Christian charity with fire.

There’s something truly disgusting to me about the smugness with which dead atheists are subjected to ideas they spent their lives thinking about and had good reasons for rejecting now that they’re dead and can’t answer back. It’s incredibly disrespectful, especially since it comes from people who theoretically respect them.

I personally have never liked saying “rest in peace” or “rest in power.” Dead is dead, and no one’s “resting” after they die, any more than the parrot in the Dead Parrot Sketch was resting. But it would be insane to get in people’s face about this when they’re grieving. Drawing cartoons in which Saint Peter installs a handicapped parking spot in front of the pearly gates so that Stephen Hawking, a dead man who didn’t believe in Saint Peter and the pearly gates, will feel welcomed – do these people not see that’s like crashing a funeral?

The Impact of Ice and Fire

For our very special 70th episode of the podcast, and our lucky 13th installment of 2017, BLAH is going big! In this freewheeling, wide-ranging episode, Sean & Stefan trace the effects of A Song of Ice and Fire (and Game of Thrones) on our lives, our minds, and our world. How has ASoIaF shaped your illustrious co-hosts’ thinking on art and literature? How can it help us understand the simultaneous rise of the New Golden Age of Television and nerd culture, including nerd culture’s toxic elements as well as its positive ones? Where would each of us be without it? The answers to all these questions and many more await you in the grand finale of our three-part holiday special!

DOWNLOAD EPISODE 70

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When 2017 lies dead and buried in the ground, “Separate the art from the artist” will be chiseled on its tombstone. But what will we find in the grave?

If it’s the idea that creators are shielded from scrutiny by the strength of their creations, then goodbye and good riddance. For too long, sexual predators in entertainment and media triple-axled their way across the thin ice of “open secrets,” their safety ensured by power. (Why, one of these men even became president!) The crack, the splash and the final desperate glug-glug-glugs were long overdue.

If we’re lucky, though, this year of revelation and reckoning will force a deeper reexamination of our desire to see artists and their art as identical, because that dull blade of interpretation cuts both ways. Like a bizarro Louis C.K., whose professional accolades protected his personal reputation, Lena Dunham is a multi-hyphenate auteur whose detractors see her history of poor attempts to address urgent issues offscreen and take it that her art is similarly inept. The best way to argue against this clumsy conflation is by example – and “American Bitch” is as good an example as it gets. The third episode of Girls‘ sixth and final season, what’s arguably the series’ finest (half-)hour attacks the creator/creation dichotomy with funny, frightening ferocity. This parable about abusive artists doubles as case for its own artist’s singular skill as an observer of moral failure … including her own.

I wrote an essay about Girls’ “American Bitch” for Rolling Stone. This is just the first in a series of deep dives by the usual murderers’ row of RS writers. Stay tuned!

Like, for real. I haven’t deleted my account because I don’t want to contribute to the plague of linkrot, but I have used arcane methods to make it impossible for me to even log in anymore. You can find me here or at boiledleather.com for the duration; my email address is easy enough to find in both locations. Thank you for your support.

One thing I’ve noticed since I stopped using Twitter regularly is that the compulsion to tweet is most often associated with complaint. I think all of the times I’ve actually broken my self-imposed embargo since it began and tweeted something other than promoting work by me, my friends, or people I admire have been to say something negative. I complained about commenters who don’t understand how criticism works. I complained about “grade inflation” among critics who overvalue heartwarming work. I complained about an article that outed an anonymous tumblr weirdo just because this person may possibly be a little too weird. I complained about Chuck Schumer praising George W. Bush for “bringing the country together” after 9/11. I complained about the billionaire fuck who shut down a whole raft of journalism sites he’d purchased a few months ago because the employees voted to unionize.

All of these touch on my career, my politics, or both, and these things are important to me. But it’s noteworthy, I think, to isolate the emotion Twitter seems to count on to drive you back to that empty white box. Yesterday, for example, it took all I had to stop myself from kvetching about people saying Mad Max: Fury Road is the greatest action movie ever made when it’s, maybe, the third-best Mad Max movie ever made. (Now I’m doing that here where you suckers have to see it instead.) Again: career-related, sure. But my desire to use Twitter is directly correlated to how much I think my career fucking sucks at any given moment. Can you think of any other business or activity that functions in this way?

In my time on twitter during early October, an anonymous account responded to a photo of my six-year-old daughter by calling her a bitch and a cunt, adding “I hope nothing bad happens to her.” Despite multiple reports, the account was not banned. When I responded to the first wave of accounts of Harvey Weinstein’s sex crimes by saying I felt special solidarity with Asia Argento as a fellow horror person (to get very specific, Troma Studios distributed her film The Stendahl Syndrome the summer I interned for them), a handful of accounts opted to interpret this as me saying I didn’t care about other victims. A similar thing happened when I expressed horror about the climate of fear Weinstein must have established if figures as powerful as Angelina Jolie and Gwyneth Paltrow still felt unable to speak out; I was told I only cared when it happened to powerful people, while on the flip side I also received many responses saying they were cowards at best and complicit at worst for not speaking out. Such responses continued even after I said that I was a victim of childhood sexual abuse myself, and my responses were shaped by that shared experience. Effectively, I was told I was being a victim wrong, an experience that triggered traumatic memories of the abuse itself that cost me two solid days of work. This had never happened to me before. Finally, anime Nazis, who’ve dogged me on and off since G*merG8te and flared up during pile-ons orchestrated by right-wing media figures after comments I made about Trump’s election and inauguration and the health-care debacle, told me they were glad I was sexually abused as a childhood, because I deserved it.

After that I decided to drastically curtail my use of the site. I’ve limited my interactions, I’ve tweeted almost but not quite completely just to promote my own work and that of friends and heroes of mine, and I’ve cut back really hard on reading time, favoriting, retweeting, replying, and so on. While I’m still on there more than many people who’ve simply established a less extreme usage pattern and are continuing as normal, for me it represents a radical reduction.  It’s improved my life for sure, but that’s not the point of this post.

The point is this: After that final incident spurred me to start detaching myself from Twitter, I realized that I’d fallen victim to its business model, which is nothing more or less than to (theoretically) profit from inducing me and everyone else to write up as many of our thoughts and feelings as possible, without pay, on a website where racist fascists up to and including literal Nazis and the President of the United States of America can and do attack other users and spread their filth with impunity. I can’t think of any real-life circumstance where I would voluntarily subject myself to that kind of labor exploitation and emotional abuse. I’m going to start applying that standard to what I do online, and to where I do it.

Wanna see something really scary? I’ll be giving a talk about Clive Barker as part of “Monsters,” the latest in the Drunk Ed lecture series. It’s happening this Wednesday, October 11th, from 8-10p at Littlefield, 635 Sackett Street, Brooklyn. The other speakers include Meredith Graves, Arabelle Sicardi, and Eric Thurm (I think merritt k had to bail but who knows), so come on by!

Because I’m a moron I forgot to promote the ToyFare Magazine 20th Anniversary panel I hosted at the New York Comic Con today on my blogs. Ah well, dozens of people showed up to hear about a magazine that hasn’t been published in years. I got to see old friends and meet guys like Matt Senreich and Tom Root from Robot Chicken who worked there before I did. Rad. (How had I never heard the story about the suicide prank before?)