Some questions for all my readers

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Frequently Asked Question

1:  It used to be said that the three most famous fictional characters in the English speaking world were Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan and Superman. 

I propose an experiment. Go out of your front door, and walk to the Post Office or to your local Burger King. And do a headcount. How many children do you see with Sherlock Holmes backpacks, lunch-boxes or sneakers? How many adults do you see wearing Tarzan of the Apes t-shirts? How many shops or cars or houses do you pass with Superman figurines and mascots in the windows? 

Times change: there is a pretty good chance that you will see a Harry Potter hoodie; a Mickey Mouse romper suit or just possibly a James Bond t-shirt. But I don’t think you’ll get to the end of your walk without seeing some version of the Spider-Man motif. 

Dearly as I love them, Winnie-the-Pooh is not reducible to the twenty perfect short stories A.A Milne wrote about him and his friends. Winnie-the-Pooh is also Disney cartoons and Hallmark greetings cards and dreadful Facebook fan fic about helping your friends through difficult patches. 

What is Spider-Man? Is he  simply a red and blue costume with white slanty eyes? Is he the idea of swinging through New York on web ropes; of putting two fingers on your palms and saying “fwtp, fwtp”? Kids don’t necessarily know about Jack Sparrow or Long John Silver, and they certainly don't know about Anne Bonnet or Captain Kidd or Elcid Barrat; but they sure as heck know that pirates say “Arrrr!”.  

Spider-Man is quite possibly the most famous fictional character in the world — which, incidentally, makes Stan Lee the most influential writer of all time.  Even if he is now more a meme than a story or a character, these are the comics from which that meme emerged. They are worthy of our scrutiny. 

2: Discourse about comic books, like every thing else in the post Twitter world, is toxic and polarised. If you cleave to the old story that Stan Lee was, in the traditional sense, a writer, then you are likely to believe that Ditko and Romita were no more than hired illustrators --and over-rated ones at that — and that anyone who thinks differently is being iconoclastic for bad motives.  But many people who agree with me that Steve Ditko was the primary creative force are inclined to call Stan Lee a swindler and a bullshit-artist and a nepo-baby; and to say that his text should as far as possible be ignored when looking at the comics. And they’ll say that the people who think that Stan was the creator are buying into a corporate myth for bad motives. 

Stan and Steve and John and Jack are no longer alive: but the comics they created are freely available in many formats. Comics, just as much as poems and plays and songs are complex, multi-faceted things; they affect readers in complicated ways. 

Perhaps if we get away from acrimonious arguments about who said what to whom nearly seventy years ago, and look closely at the words and the pictures they left us, we may get a better understanding of their creative talents involved in their creation. 

3: I loved these comics; it is a love which has never left me. 

There are very many very much better books in the world: but I never loved Estragon or Paul Atriedes or Parsifal in the way that I once loved Spider-Man. 

I am no longer eight years old and I cannot read these comics as if I was eight years old, although in some cases I think I can remember what it was like to read them at that age.

Rarely, I think, can I actually remember the first reading of the stories, but I can remember the black and white television, the ringing landline, the neopolitan ice-cream, the first Kentucky Fried Chicken, Hector’s House and the Magic Roundabout, Ed “Stewpot” Stewart and grown-ups talking in hushed voices about a war in a place called Watergate. 

I have never wanted to preserve a first reading or a first viewing of anything in aspic. In fact I am far from sure that I know what aspic even is. I want to keep these stories alive; to read them as I would read them if I had not read them before. It was C.S Lewis who said that a very small child might draw no distinction in his mind between chocolate easter eggs and the resurrection of Jesus; but that if his understanding of Christian theology doesn’t become more sophisticated as he grows up then the eggs will stop seeming special. 

Of course I can’t enter uncritically and imaginatively into the world of these comics any more; and of course I can see their many faults. But studying them them critically and intellectually is a way of re-engaging with them. Of keeping them, in a way, alive. 

4: I have heard that there are Rabbis — I was about to type ‘Jewish Rabbis’ as if there was another kind — who will deliberately make absurd and pedantic arguments about the Torah, in order to demonstrate their knowledge of it, and as a scholarly game. 

But I think that they think that the game is a pious one: that proving from scripture that there is no afterlife and then proving equally convincingly from the same scripture that there is an afterlife demonstrates a kind of wholehearted devotion to the Law. John Sutherland’s questions about Daniel Deronda’s foreskin and what part of the pig Arabella throws at Jude are part of a similar game.  Sometimes it is fun to ask a silly question and come up with a silly answer; but sometimes you uncover something that’s really present in the book which you wouldn’t have noticed if you weren’t deliberately overthinking it.

I am quite sure that Stan Lee did not have a time line in mind when he wrote these stories; but I still think that it is worth looking at all those “Meanwhile…” and “The Next Morning…” captions, and pondering how it is that Norman Osborn gets from New York to the coast and back in a single morning, and how it manages to be simultaneously  night in one part of New York and day in another. Because it makes us pay attention to things that perhaps no-one else in seventy years has paid any attention to. And because it is a way of describing, to ourselves and to others, what reading these comics actually feels like. 

5: John Betjeman kept, even as an old man, his childhood teddy bear Archibald on a shelf in his home, and occasionally went to check on him for comfort. This seems perfectly healthy: provided, of course, you also care about adult things like gels and old churches and silk slippers. I am aware of people who put all their childhood interests in a box when they turn sixteen and never think about them again. Christopher Milne, who also had a bear he was particularly fond of, maintained he had no interest as an adult of returning to his childhood loves (or even of visiting his parents).  Critically engaging with old comic books is like patting a beloved bear on the ear. It is a way of maintaining the connection. 

6: I am not, in fact, writing about Spider-Man. I am in fact screaming into the void about my awful terrible English childhood and in particular my awful terrible English primary school. I should have thought that was perfectly obvious. 

My study of Stan Lee and John Romita's first Spider-Man comics are currently available on www.patreon.com/rilstone. 

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Stan's Version: Amazing Spider-Man 1966

 

How did Stan Lee’s partnership with John Romita differ from his earlier, famously fraught collaboration with Steve Ditko?

And how does that shift play out on the comic book page?

Following his acclaimed series on the formative Ditko years, Rilstone turns his scholarly eye—and fannish heart—to the next era of The Amazing Spider-Man: the 1966 run, where John Romita gave Spidey a new face and Stan Lee gave him a new voice.

This new series offers close readings of each issue, with equal parts critical insight and Watsonian speculation. (When is Peter Parker’s birthday? Why is he always broke? And seriously—what is wrong with Aunt May?)

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Spider-Man Phase 2: Stan's Version 

How Stan Lee and John Romita Created Spider-Man

Amazing Spider-Man 41: The Horns of the Rhino

Commentary

Annotations 

Amazing Spider-Man 42: Birth of a Superhero

Commentary

Annotation

Amazing Spider-Man 43: Rhino on the Rampage

Commentary

Annotations

Amazing Spider-Man Annual #3: To Become an Avenger

Commentary

Annotations 

Amazing Spider-Man 44 and 45: Where Crawls the Lizard / Spidey Smashes Out

Commentary

Annotations

Amazing Spider-Man 46: The Sinister Shocker

Commentary

Annotations

Amazing Spider-Man #47: In the Hands of the Hunter

Commentary

Chronology/Continuity

Annotations

Amazing Spider-Man #48 and 49: The Wings of the Vulture / From the Depths of Defeat

Commentary

Annotations

Amazing Spider-Man #50: Spider-Man No More

Commentary 

Annotations

Amazing Spider-Man #50: Spider-Man No More

1: Iconography
2: Responsibility and Power 
3: Spider-Man Goes Mad
4: Peter Parker beats people up for a living
5: Peter Parker has no sense of proportion
6: Peter Parker has a co-dependent relationship with his foster-mother
7: Peter Parker projects normal social problems onto his spider-man costume.
8: JJJ’s accusations appear to trigger a nervous breakdown
9: Peter Parker has repressed the most traumatic memory of his life
10: Crystal Clarity
11: Unreliable narrators 
12: Death of the Author

“Spider-Man No More” is Stan Lee’s riposte to “The Final Chapter”, and arguably to the first thirty three issues of Amazing Spider-Man….It is an act of patricidal erasure. Steve Ditko’s Spider-man no longer exists. There is only Stan’s version. 

Amazing Spider-Man #50: Extended Commentary

Amazing Spider-Man #50: Annotations

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Tony Harrison

I saw the Oresteia during  its original run at the National Theatre when I was in the Sixth Form. I don’t think I knew any thing about it, except that it was a play everyone was talking about and students could get cheap tickets midweek. Everyone knows that Greek tragedy is difficult and stodgy; but the translation made it accessible and exciting — to the point, in fact, where I couldn't quite see why it was such an Important Literary Work. The translation seemed to create its own vernacular: ancient Greek rendered into metrical modern English, but with a huge stock of invented composite words where the Greek had no direct English equivalent.  So that the line about not killing a bird because (in the standard Penguin version) “the sky is heaven’s protectorate” had become “Birds! Guest-strangers in god-spaces”; and the comment that Athena had access to Zeus’s lightning became “the mighty high he-god’s munitions of thunder”. It seemed to bring the ancient world close while showing how distant it was from us. 

I saw The Mysteries as an undergraduate. The Oresteia had been three shortish plays making up one longish evening. The Mysteries were three full length plays performed over a whole day — The Nativity (from the Creation to the birth of Jesus); the Passion (Jesus’ life and death); and most excitingly Doomsday, which begins with the harrowing of Hell and takes in the Resurrection and the day of judgement. The nasty gym teacher from Kes (Brian Glover) was God, riding around the stage in a fork-lift truck. The tomb of Jesus was a conjuror’s cabinet from which the actor playing Christ vanished, only to reappear on the other side of the sage. (I assume that the Bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, was well aware of this conceit.) The text was mostly taken from the Wakefield and York mystery cycles, rendered into an earthy, alliterative poetry with much dialect but no anachronisms. 

“I am maker unmade and most hight in might” says God before the creation “and aye shall be endless, and nowt is but I”, rubbing his hands together with glee. The “knights” crucifying Jesus grumble about the weight of the cross: “Workers worthier than we / you’ll find them few enough” “This bargain buggers me/ I’m proper out of puff”. And Judas, deciding to make his bad bargain, admits “The poor’s plight pricked me not to play no pretence / what pricked me and pined me was t’loss of my pence.” I didn’t know I liked folk music at the time, but the music was provided by John Tams and Bill Caddick. 

I heard Tony Harrison do at least two poetry readings, once at college and once at a Bath literary festival. The college one was I think a retirement present for one of the English lecturers. I felt I was listening, not to a modern poet whose work I hadn’t previously encountered, but to someone doing whole new thing with words. I like all the difficult modern poems well enough, your Howls and your Wastelands your roosting hawks. This didn’t feel like “poetry” in quite the same way. I can almost understand why stupid people have always thought it clever to say that he is like Pam Ayers with added politics. (Not that comic verse is necessarily easy to write, or that our Pam is anything other than a skilled craftsperson.) 

Very often, when I try to read an anthology by some modern poet who has won the award for modern poetry I find myself thinking that

This

Seems like a perfectly valid thinkpiece

(Piece think; think of peace; pink pease)

That has for some unfathomable

Reason

Been broken up arbitrarily into lines of unequal

Length.

Harrison writes sonnets (the kind of sonnet that has sixteen lines) and blank verse and rhyming couplets. He writes in actual English sentences. But you are never in any doubt that Poetry is what you are in the presence of. 

Complaining about the English teachers who wouldn’t let him speak in his natural accent, he writes

all poetry (even Cockney Keats?) you see’

s been dubbed by [^S] into RP

received pronunciation, please believe [^S]

your speech is in the hands of the receivers

The rendering of “you see, has” as “you see’s” and the splitting of it over two lines is typical. He uses the phonetic alphabet to distinguish the northern pronunciation “uz” from the southern, “uss”, which he thinks is a marker for the division between “them and [uz]”. The same sonnet contains a couple of words in Greek, to compare the wailing of a Greek chorus "αἰαῖ" with the typically Leeds greeting “Ay-ay!" (He doesn’t go out of his way to make it easy for his reader!) 

He has a great eye for metaphor, and often runs with them for pages at a time, as in his great mediation on first tasting a kumquat in Florida; 

You’ll find that one parts sweet and one part’s tart

Say where the sweetness and the sourness start. 

I find I can’t as if one couldn’t say

Exactly where the night becomes the day

Which is makes for me the kumquat taken whole

Best food and metaphor to fit the soul 

Of one in Florida, at 42, with Keats,

Crunching Kumquats, thinkign as he eats

The flesh, the juice, the pips, the pith, the peel

That this is how a full life ought to feel…

But he is perhaps too inclined to tell the reader what the symbols mean. Remembering his father’s cremation, he imagines him greeting his late wife

Light streaming from his mouth to shape her name

Not Florence and not Flo but always Florrie

I thought how his cold tongue burst into flame

But only literally, which makes me sorry…. 

From Jude Fawley to DH Lawrence, literature is full of working class lads who have got an education and felt alienated from their roots. His mother used to say that he and his dad were “like bookends” and he extends the metaphor: “for all the Scotch we drink what’s still between us/’s not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books”. When his Da storms out and tells him to write his mother’s epitaph on his own, he writes: 

I’ve got the envelope that he’s been scrawling

Misspelt, mawkish, stylistically appalling, 

But I can’t squeeze more love into their stone.

In 1985 there was a concocted media furore about the film poem called (lower case) ‘v’, which described his reaction when that same gravestone was vandalised by a football thug. In the end he decides that the word “united” is quite appropriate and doesn’t clear it off. But not before he has imagined a dialogue with the skinhead who daubed the graffiti, asking him if the vandalism was about frustrated aspirations: 

Our aspirations, cunt? Folk on fuckin’ dole

‘ave got about as much scope to aspire

above the shit they’re dumped in, cunt as coal

aspires to be thrown on t’fuckin’ fire

Obviously, the British media went into meltdown. It didn’t help that the “v” of the title referred to a divided society, “us v them” (again) “personified in 1985 by Coal Board McGreggo and the NUM”. SCARGILL POEM IS THE PITS! explained the Sun. The still extant Mary Whitehouse opined that the f-word, intrinsically, by its shape and sound “negates and destroys the nature of love, sensitivity and commitment” which should be at the heart of sexual intercourse. Auberon Waugh, who had been running a rather silly campaign for “real” poetry which scanned, rhymed, and made sense, to his credit admitted that v did all of those things, even if it sometimes meandered from the point. 

I never completely bought into the genre of poetry/documentary he tried to create for the BBC: it always seemed just that little bit contrived. His long poem in defence of Salman Rushdie included scenes in which he purchased a bust of Voltaire in an auction while thinking about censorship. I didn’t quite buy it. But some of the stanzas hit home: 

The Koran denounces unbelievers who

quote ‘love this fleeting life’ unquote. I do.

I’m an unbeliever. I love this life.

I don’t believe their paradise is true.

And, looking at young girl

It won’t be long before she knows

That everything will vanish with the rost

And then she’ll either love life more because its fleeting

Or hate the flower and life because it goes

The Guardian had the idea of sending him off to war-zones to write poetic dispatches. His meditation on a photograph of a dead Iraqi soldier tries (typically, again) to put words into the mouth of the corpse. 

It’s easier to find such words 

For this dumb mask like baked dog-turds

So lie and say the charred man smiled

To see the soldier hug his child.

The ending of the poem admits that soldier is dead and can't say anything:

I went. I pushed rewind and play 

And I heard the charred man say:

I heard him recite that in a lecture room with a ticking clock, which he said put him right off his metre. 

Some Boffins once worked out a scientific method of measuring how sad a particular poem was. It involved asking volunteers to read poems out loud with a gadget attached to their throat. The gadget was able to record exactly how often the reader’s voice cracked during the performance. On which metric, Harrison’s poem Long Distance is the most moving poem ever written. 

You can find it here: try for yourself.

https://poets.org/poem/long-distance-ii 

Fantastic Four: First Steps

I’ve just seen The Fantastic Four: First Steps for the second time. I’m happy to confirm that it doesn’t put a single foot wrong. It could be taken as a masterclass in how to translate revered properties from one media to another.

Perhaps surprisingly, I was more emotionally taken-in by the schmaltz, melodrama and sentiment the second time through, when I knew what was going to happen, than the first time, when I didn’t. Or perhaps that isn’t surprising: perhaps comics are by definition twice-told tales and you can only be properly sad about the death of Snow White once you know that she is going to get better. (It’s probably not giving too much away to say that, yes, a major character dies, yes, I was sad, and yes, they do get better.) Sue’s speech to the angry crowd about how all the people of the world are one big happy family; and Reed’s confrontation with Galactus (“You will not take my planet and you will never take my son”) are corny as heck and succeed for just that reason. 

The film has, of course, a lot of visual and narrative call-outs to the comic book; but the film works fine if you don’t spot them. Sofa-buddy, who despite stringent efforts on my part has never read an FF comic, thoroughly enjoyed herself. But that’s the wrong way to think about an adaptation. We don’t watch a dramatisation of Middlemarch and wonder if Nicholas Bulstrode is an easter egg for sad George Eliot fan-girls. Mark Shakman has used an extensive repository of characters and concepts and forged them into a stand-alone work.

The Incredibles, which was until now the best Fantastic Four movie, began in media res with the family as established heroes, and made extensive reference to previous adventures and bad guys that the audience knew nothing about. Underminer and Bomb Voyage have no existence outside of the movie script, where every true fan knows that the Mole Man, the Red Ghost and the Mad Thinker appeared in Fantastic Four #1, #13 and #15. There is a flashback to the Fantastic Four fighting one of Mole Man’s monsters, which is a pretty explicit call-back to the very very first Fantastic Four cover. Arguably those of us who can identify the Super-apes and know who the Puppet Master is are getting a worse aesthetic experience compared with the general audience who just feel themselves being bombarded with an excess of creative brainstorming.

(Granted, I am assuming that Joe Public’s prior knowledge of the Fantastic Four derives from the not-as-bad-as-people-make-out 2005 movie. A Batman franchise would be on much safer ground assuming that J.P knows who the Joker and the Riddler and even Commissioner Gordon and Dick Grayson are. But perhaps I am wrong: geek culture has been substantially mainstreamed in the last twenty years.)

From the opening caption, the movie positions itself as a tribute to Jack Kirby’s vision of the FF. If Stan Lee’s main contribution were the (extremely good) words in the speech bubbles and caption boxes, then we would have to say that Stan has been substantially erased from this re-imagining. None of the team really sound as they do in the comics. HERBIE the robot, introduced in a 1977 cartoon and the last contribution Jack made to the Marvel Universe is a taken-for-granted fixture. He has a role somewhere between R2D2 and a high-tech vacuum cleaner, but manages to hardly ever be annoying.

There is nothing wrong with a Fantastic Four fan hoping that a Fantastic Four movie will stay true to the Fantastic Four comic. No-one has forgiven 2007’s Rise of the Silver Surfer for depicting Galactus as a cloud of purple space gas (of the kind V’Ger probes generally hang out in the middle of). One can follow the studio's train of thought: having persuaded us to believe that the angel of death is a naked guy on a flying surfboard, you can’t also convince us that the Deity is a big purple guy with a funny hat. But fandom let out a collective sigh when the answer to the question “How are they going to do Galactus?” turned out to be “They aren’t even going to try”. The franchise died on the spot.

The desire for “Comic-Book Accuracy” is almost always focussed on superficials: if Galactus is not purple then he is #not-my-galactus. But very frequently the films which dispense with surface detail are the ones which have best understood their source material. The Stallone Judge Dredd looked a lot like a 1980s issue of 2000AD but had bugger-all to do with the character and wasn’t even that good an action movie. The 2012 Karl Urban version made no attempt to emulate the look and feel of the comic, or indeed the details of the backstory, but basically seemed to “get” Dredd. [1]

With the exception of Ben none of the characters in this movie really look or sound a great deal like the comic book characters do. I couldn’t think of Pedro Pascal as “Reed” or Joseph Quinn as “Johnny”. But what the movie unquestionably takes from the comic is the team dynamic. Reed and Sue are Mum and Dad, Ben and Johnny are the quarrelling younger brothers who are nevertheless devoted to each other. There is the smart, emotionally reticent one; the older, taciturn one prone to bouts of temper; the younger, hot-headed one; and the sensible motherly one. Superpowers are consistently less important than personalities. Granted, Galactus is in the end defeated with flame, force-field and clobbering; but not before Reed has come up with an extremely far-fetched scientific deus ex machina, which, after a huge build-up, completely fails.

Galactus is not a cloud of purple gas. He is huge and speaks with a deep voice. His armour has a purple tinge. He is darker than his comic book counterpart, with a gothic undertone. Perhaps he knows that his onlie begetter also begat Darkseid. Something about his ship recalled HR Giger’s Alien. He also  emulates the Borg: a huge, impersonal, force that lumbers through space assimilating worlds. He is plugged into the ship with a gigantic cable, but when he reaches New York he pushes over skyscrapers and glowers down at the Statue of Liberty. This rather reduces the Cosmic God to the status of Godzilla or the Staypuft Marshmallow Man, but it looks tremendous.

In Jack Kirby’s original conception, the Silver Surfer was an alien being, presumably created by Galactus, with no human emotions until the Thing’s blind girlfriend Alicia shows him that humans are OK. Stan Lee’s inept retcon (now irreducibly part of the character) was that he had once been Norrin Radd, a dissident hippy on the planet Zenn-La. Norrin Radd made a devil’s bargain that if Galactus spared Zenn-La he would find him alternative sources of food. Lee also decided that Galactus used to be a human called Galen, the sole survivor of the planet Taa: to his great credit, John Byrne salvaged this terrible idea by placing Taa in the universe before the Big Bang. Kirby seems originally to have envisaged Galactus and the Watcher as having a common origin. 

Norrin Radd/The Silver Surfer is permanently in mourning for Shalla Bal, the girl he left at home, particularly when Galactus exiles him to earth for siding with the human race. The “Comic Book Accuracy” obsessives have, of course, wet their pants because in this movie it is Shalla Bal who sacrifices herself and becomes the Silver Surphress. I am afraid that all too often “Comic Book Accuracy” is a coded way of complaining about diversity and inclusion in movies [2]. But in the context of the movie, the change of gender makes excellent sense. The Surferette is still a silver skinned alien on a flying surfboard. The sequences in which she chases the Human Torch to the edge of the atmosphere, pursues the FF’s spacecraft into a neutron star, and zips round the world blowing up Reed’s science installations, do a very good job at transferring the physics of Californian wave-riders to outer space. She is still the angel of death, announcing to the human race that the Devourer is coming from them: and she still, at the last possible moment, develops a moral conscience. The idea of the Surfer and the dynamism of Kirby (and Buscema’s) artwork has been "accurately" translated to the cinema. 

The fact that she doesn’t look exactly like the comic book character plays to the films’ advantage: in all of her scenes I felt that I was encountering a new, unfamiliar character: I was uncertain what this Silver Surferina would do next. (By contrast, I was completely unable to connect Tenoch Huerta’s Namor in Wakanda Forever! with the Submariner of the comic books: I don’t say that I wanted to or needed to, but I couldn’t. It seemed comedically incongruous when he shouted out “Imperius Rex!”) 

In the original Galactus trilogy, on which this movie is partly a riff, the Silver Surfer changes his mind about the human race after encountering the Thing’s blind girl-friend Alicia Masters. In this version, the Thing has an implicit lady-friend, a Yancy Street school-teacher named Rachel, but she’s only a minor part of the plot. It makes excellent narrative sense for it to be one of the team to have a quasi-romantic interlude with the Surfer. In the original story, it was Johnny who saved the universe, ascending to Galactus’s spaceship and stealing the Ultimate Nullifier from under his nose. Johnny’s diplomatic encounter with the Savage She-Surfer arguably retains aspects of both ploy elements.

There are a lot of other things I could say about the movie. It is interesting that it majors so heavily on Franklin, given that director Matt Shakman was also behind Wandavision. (Agatha Harkness originally entered the Marvel Universe as Franklin’s nanny.) I have said for many years that the Fantastic Four is an old-fashioned story rooted in its time-period and any movie version needed to be set in the 1960s or even earlier; [3]: but the Jetsons retro-future was an inspired solution to the difficulty. It is full of visual in-jokes and asides: the Future Foundation flag flying on the moon; the brief view of an un-named writer and an un-named artist drawing monsters for “Timely” comics; the footprint in the dust on Galactus's base the running-gag about the in-universe Fantastic Four cartoon. 

The first hundred issues of the Fantastic Four, and the first Galactus/Surfer story in particular, represent a kind of sacred scripture for comic book fans. This movie doesn’t simply transcribe them to the screen (what would be the point of that?): it is a fresh, new thing by someone who loves Reed and Sue and Ben and Johnny— but especially Jack — almost as much as we do.

[1] Similarly, gender-swapped all Black naturist productions of Hamlet are frequently faithful to Shakespeare in a way that aging Englishmen in hose with posh accents simply aren’t. 

[2] You see, that guy was right: 100% of everything I write about movies is not about anything apart from the culture wars, ever.  I do not mean to imply that the person who says “I didn’t think it worked for Doctor Manhattan’s plan to involve a nuclear explosion; I wish they had stayed with the giant squid” or “I don’t think the Joker ought to be the one who kills Batman’s parents: it really has to be a nameless thug for the story to work” is necessarily a culture warrior: only that the phrase "comic book accurate" is frequently found in sentences along side "woke garbage", "Disney shill" and "liberal groomer". This is also true of the unqualified phrase "bad writing". When someone says “It’s not about race or gender, it’s about bad writing” it’s about race and gender.

[3] I would also like to see a Golden Age Superman movie, in which the hero leaps over buildings, punches slum landlords and sends gangsters to the electric chair. 

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