The Friday Article Roundup
Going on the record with the best pop culture writing of the week.
This week, you will get in the groove with:
Send articles throughout the next week to magpiesmedia [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion and Have a Happy Friday!
Scott Seward gives the lowdown on the coolest records in his shop no one is buying:
This list is not hip. Or happening. It is semi-random. Mostly things I grabbed in the shop that had moved me in some way in the past. Mostly pop and rock and on big labels a la Rumours. A representative mix of stuff that you can find in almost any record store on the Eastern seaboard of the United States. Rare groove nudniks: I see you. I hold space for you. But YOU could also benefit from sampling some of the easily dismissed chud that the internet has trained you to ignore because it isn’t investment-grade or “rare”. ANYONE can benefit from making mistakes or just grabbing something that looks cool that they have never heard/heard of.
At The Verge, Mia Sato plumbs the depths of the “clipper” economy and considers its broader effect on art:
Clipping is nothing new, despite the recent discourse around who uses it and why, and whether paying random accounts to share content promoting something is deceptive or manufacturing fake fandom. The reality is that more and more, the social internet is filled with clips, paid and unpaid, that stand in for the full-length podcast, video, film, album, or piece of writing. As online content increasingly becomes abstracted from the original work, what purpose does making the full version even serve?
Sean Burns looks at Obsesssion’s comedy roots in the horror landscape for WBUR:
Hollywood executives stupidly banish most comedies to streaming these days, so if you’re a funny filmmaker who wants to play in theaters you’d better find another genre. Scary movies are a logical choice because they similarly rely on staging and the element of surprise to elicit an involuntary reaction from the audience. Like comedy sketches, horror films often stem from the literalization of absurd concepts. As Peele is fond of saying, the only difference between comedy and horror is the music. “Obsession” has scary music, but it’s awfully funny. And I say awfully because it’s sick and disgusting and I cackled like a maniac.
For The Small Bow, Lindsay Adler writes about Amy Wallace and her complicated relationship as a keeper of her brother David’s legacy:
“I remember that when Kurt Cobain died, people started going back for hints and clues in his songs,” Amy says. “When people started to do that with David, I was infuriated and grossed out. His whole life wasn’t an allusion to ‘I will off myself when people least expect it.’” The letters he wrote to his sister—which she keeps private—were playful and absurd. In the company of the people who knew him best, his brightness was memorable alongside his darkness. He was still, in all the ways that a sibling can be a friend and a foe, Amy’s cartoon-obsessed big brother.
And Vincent Albarano sings the praises of Stacy Keach and the underseeen The Dion Brothers at Split Tooth Media:
Seventies cinema, and even Keach’s own filmography, is filled with dreamers butting against the crushing realities of American life. His performances during that decade are some of the most knowing and biting representations of life pushed to the margins. Unlike Billy Tully of Fat City (1972), his most celebrated role, Calvin Dion is not hobbled by his pride and his demons. Keach recognizes that, unsavory as his actions may be, Calvin is the key to our engagement with the film’s most outlandish moments. He recognizes that his underdog is still the most sane person in the film.
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The Friday Article Roundup
A cowardly and superstitious lot? No, the best pop culture writing of the week.
The Friday Article Roundup
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The Friday Article Roundup
Out of the mists of history, the best pop culture writing of the week.
The Friday Article Roundup
Hold the phone for the best pop culture writing of the week.
A reference outside the expected frame of reference that stares you in the face, demanding you deal with it
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season Four, Episode Seventeen, “The Face of the Enemy”
Oh man, the problems I have with the Garibaldi vs Sheridan plot are almost worth it for the way this has turned out. The basic political movement here, of the business guy being dismissive of Clark and specifically concerned about the larger politics of telepaths being handed enormous power, is fantastic and oddly mature for the genre; normally, it’s more concerned with the movement of individuals, but this is a concern with the very structures of power in a meaningful way. It’s like, I can’t be too concerned with whatever happens to Elon Musk – there’s no way to top him streaming himself playing a game poorly while spammed with messages telling him to kill himself – I’m more concerned with the fact that his position exists at all.
And the brutal ownage that ends the episode is worth the price of admission alone. Revealing that a character has been subverted for quite some time is dodgy from a storytelling perspective; having that character not only be brutally owned but used to commit even greater ownage is brilliant. Sheridan getting caught by the enemy is great – staged in a way that must have been cutting edge at the time, though a) it’s lifting from Se7en a bit and more importantly b) tonally unbalances the show in a way I don’t like – where the fact that Sheridan is totally, completely correct about everything he does is ‘balanced’ a bit by him getting the shit kicked out of him. And of course, Garibaldi screaming into oblivion is cool as fuck.
This isn’t so much Koenig’s best work as it is the result of a lot of work paying off – he’s no different from normal, but there’s an intense level of menace. I love him insisting there’s no cruelty here; I don’t believe that for a second (to quote River Tam, “You took the job because it hurts people.”), but it adds an extra layer of malice to the proceedings. He’s calm, he’s collected, and he’s going to hurt you badly because he needs to.
Knock At The Cabin
As expected, this was great outside of the changes Shyamalan made – not what he excised, but what he changed. The ending is significantly more conventional and sentimental, but less emotionally gripping. The one exception is Bautista, who delivers something more interesting than either whilst capturing the spirit of the character in the book – someone who shocks himself with the ability to do what he has to do because he loves humanity more than any individual human (and he loves individual humans a lot). His costume in particular was genius, conveying toughness and softness at the same time. At the same time, I accept the ending does capture the idea of family and the queer/PoC version of that.
Bautista must be the best wrestler-turned-actor, right? The guy has this capacity for tenderness and honesty that is really unexpected.
John Cena is my favourite. His performance in Peacemaker is so good.
You are in the gooooood shit of Season 4, but this — “Revealing that a character has been subverted for quite some time is dodgy from a storytelling perspective” — is true on a general level and especially goofy in an environment where this particular kind of subversion is extremely well-known and yet not once brought up as a possibility to this point. Unbalances a lot, but fortunately other things are there to pick up the slack — as you note, our businessman here is obviously bad news but he’s also obviously right about the telepaths (in the way that every “evil” politician is right about the X-Men) and that is great stuff. Because Koenig is here and what else do you need to prove him right.
Tales from the Crypt, S2E3 “Counting Cards” – miller AND Ruck alert, this is a terrific Walter Hill-directed episode with Lance Henriksen as a gambler locked in a feud with Kevin Tighe that escalates further and further in bets – including LITERAL chop poker – in ways I would otherwise not dream of spoiling. They’d call this toxic masculinity now but that’d almost ruin the hilarity of these guys’ absurd need to outdo each other and rely on lady luck in the process. Something continuing to be crucial here is the comic book quality of the direction and casting, actors here have to suit the material in the same way CCH Pounder does The Shield.
Oh shit, what a pair! I will check this out.
Taskmaster, “An Even Bigger Spoon”
“Would love to have the confidence to be a comedian. This pen is great.”
“The candidate was able to hold the melody at the second attempt.”
“It’s so leggy.”
“You all right in there?”
“We’re okay, thank you.”
—“So Joanna’s attempt at being brave resulted in a golfer thinking that Alex had murdered her.”
I love that I got to see Armando Iannucci do the Worm.
“And I resolve when I hit 60, which I did last year, that I will just tell them not to touch me, and I will phone the police.”
“Last seven days I’ve been in a hotel room with my wife, so it’s actually fairly…”
“It didn’t stop you.”
“I’m genuinely speechless. I was shocked enough that you’re still doing Wordle.”
“Porn. Self-Googling. Cricket stats. Back to the porn.”
“That’s why his arms are so big!”
“Fucked myself with the chicken. It was too big.”
“Did you see that? I held it in my mouth! I held a chair in my mouth!”
“I would’ve carried on going! That’s shit!”
“You know what he said to me in private? ‘I don’t like Welsh people.’”
“Yes, got the house in my mouth. Can’t go higher than house.”
Task ownage: Kumail’s fakeout by starting the “be brave” task with some tepid faux-public speaking only to pivot hardcore into revealing his unedited internet history on the air, complete with his porn habits (“free mature women”) and self-Googling. Truly the bravest of the bunch. What a well-deserved win.
Endearing moments: Amy’s final pose for the camera. Joanna being chuffed about her coconker holding up. Kumail going over to give Armando a hug after repeatedly beanbagging him in the live task. Everyone melting into their chairs in the prize task as Joanna tells her toilet snake story.
MST3K, “Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders” – Another OG episode I hadn’t seen yet. And sadly, this was not good. The “movie” – a short film, pieces of another film chopped for this, and a framing sequence with Ernest Borgnine – has nothing going for it at all, and there is almost nothing that Mike and the Bots could do with it. Oh, a few funny bits, but not really much here. I have no idea how the person at Paste Magazine ranked this in the top ten MST3Ks, or what the Rifftrax gang could have possibly done with this a second time round.
Elementary, “We Are Everyone”/”Poison Pen” – In the former, an analogue for Edward Snowden, only murderous and maybe an incel, is on the run and Holmes and Watson ar first want to find him before his former employees do, and then he kills someone and and also arranges it so if he’s arrested, the names of 14 deep cover agents will be put online. I guess the writers of the show, while no friend of Big Tech, didn’t care for Snowden. This one introduces the titular Everyone, a hacker collective that is basically Anonymous, which will work with Holmes every so often without trusting him one bit. In the latter, a man is found dead of nitroglycerin poisoning, and all evidence points to his kids’ nanny, who Holmes realizes was arrested as a teen for killing her abusive father. And whom Holmes was pen pals with. This story doesn’t quite hold up, but it’s nice to have a glimpse into Holmes as a misunderstood and unhappy teen.
Frasier, “A Man, a Plan and a Gal: Julia” – Frasier and Julia sleep together, and he thinks this might be getting serious, but her constant shooting from the hip at the dinner where Niles and Daphne reveal she is expecting kills the romance. And not a second too soon. I think I blotted out the entire Julia arc from my memory on purpose. This is Felicity Huffman’s last appearance, suggesting Julia must have quit her job at the station? Also, because Jane Leeves is expecting, Daphne is far more visibly pregnant than any woman in her first trimester ever would be.
Ah, the era of “we’re not American propaganda, we just depict the guy who revealed America is wiretapping the shit out of our citizens is inherently evil”
It’s really weird sometimes. Holmes clearly does not trust governments (minus “good cops”) or big business, but the writers clearly want to find a way to stay true to the character they created while writing a show on the network that gave us NCIS and Blue Bloods. IIRC, we saw something similar on White Collar from Mozzie, who was openly hostile to the FBI in a way Sherlock would never be, and still worked with the FBI all the time.
Aw, I have fond memories of Merlin, it’s not a top 10 episode but has some great gags and “It’s the monkey’s audition tape!” has lived in my head for years (to be repurposed in similar situations).
Homicide: Life on the Street — life in the sticks! Melissa Leo goes back home to oyster country and of course is roped into investigating a murder involving her family and friends after that damn scientist telling people not to overfish winds up dead, will she have the fortitude to arrest obvious killer Graham Platner? Leo is very good as usual and yet I feel like the writers still don’t have a handle on her the way they do Belzer or Braugher or the departed Polito, she seems to have more romantic-adjacent plots than they do for some reason. But as a you-can’t-go-home-again story it works well.
Live music — second straight Tuesday show, how hip am I. Last week I was the old dude at the show, this time I was at the low end of the age scale for Come and Silkworm, whose members have to be pushing if not in their 60s, and who brought the fucking noise. Come is always great but they sounded even better than usual here, Arthur Johnson’s drums in particular snapped hard and heavy (those toms!). Thalia Zedek sounded great and Chris Brokaw once again just fucking destroyed in on guitar, one of these days I will really try to give his quiet stuff (Coedine etc) a fair shake but how can I knowing he has this in him all the time. And Silkworm managed to follow that assault — they are a band I’ve never really listened to, contemporaries of Come in the indie world but more on the Pavement side of things in terms of sound. But their songs are stronger and meatier, and live they were fantastic — Tim Midgett’s nimble bass in particular was the bedrock and the emphasize was on rock. Super receptive crowd and a great show with a very poignant end of guitarist Joel R.L. Phelps helping Midgett with the final acoustic song. I ran into some friends and had too many beers and was shit at work the next day, hell yeah. (and for a very good write-up of the bands’ show in Philadelphia with some live footage, check this out: https://newwaveorthetruth.substack.com/p/live-review-silkworm-and-come-at)
Woo, live music! Sounds like a good time.
While I think H:LOTS did a decent job overall with its female characters, I think it was still very much a 90s cop show, so ‘ahead of its time’ meant “Melissa Leo fought and won the battle to wear pants onscreen.”
What did we read?
The Iliad, Homer (translated by Emily Wilson)
I jumped back to this after reading Plato and Aristotle, figuring they referenced it so much that it might as well be seen as the origin point of Western civilisation. This is a work of brutal, hysterical, raw ownage; violence and domination begins the story, and it ultimately comes back on everyone. All of this is happening simply because Greece wants Troy; this makes sense as an origin to my world. But I see exactly what Aristotle saw in it, as the chain of ownage explodes.
One thing that struck me was that what’s played as a joke in Austin Powers is deadly serious here, as we’re given names and backstories to random dudes slaughtered in the action sequences; it works in the context of the poem and its needs and structure, beating the idea so hard it just becomes sad.
I was also amused by how heavily the gods feature in this story; comparable to being able to actually see God raging at Walter White, even down to the idea that what’s happening to the mortal characters is up to the gods rather than their own skill. I find myself wondering how much healthier that is than fully taking on responsibility for one’s own actions; it at least frees you up to make decisions and accept the outcome.
Wilson’s translation is interesting; she sets it to iambic pentameter to make it easier and more gripping to read.
Do you think Shakespeare took Achilles in his tent towards the end and made the whole of Hamlet out of that?
8 Bit Theater, Strips 1010-1040, Brian Clevinger
“Just once I’d like to go somewhere without killing everyone in the world.”
“Our only hope is that Black Mage catches up to us soon! And that he hasn’t somehow improbably squandered all his fire magic on completely frivolous targets.”
[cut to BM burning things]
“Dah! More bats! Burn! Arrgh, a fly! Some dirt!”
This picks up considerably; Black Mage has a funny little sequence where he (unknowingly) runs into a hero that can give him all the answers to defeating the bad guys but has been turned into a bats, only to unknowingly kill him, and Red Mage locks the team in ice as a way to avoid an ice dragon, leading BM to join the Dark Warriors.
“Bikke. Two times two.”
“Cantaloupe.”
“Wait! That is not how we do things, buddy! First, we have to argue incessantly over semantics. Then one of us has to hurt one or all of us. Also, you’re a villain.”
Being so close to the end, there’s a few lines now that basically summarize the comic, which is always great.
“Why is Drizz’l armed?”
“Well, I’m not an expert, but I’d say arms were evolutionary advantages in his ancestors. They can be used for tool-making and hugs.”
“Let’s start this again.”
“We’ve moved from the semantics stage to the inflicting violence stage.”
“Aw, that was Black Mage’s favorite stage.”
“Excuse me. Drizz’l, is it?”
“Uh, you know it is.”
“He died as he lived. Completely hated.”
“Hey, quick question. Do you believe anything you say?”
“All of it! Without qualification!”
“This is why my people are revolting.”
“See, I’m so classy that I’m not going to touch that one.”
“Two words: Animal. Husbandry.”
“I don’t know what he means.”
“God, how I envy you.”
“If his treachery would ever hurt anyone more than himself, I’d have to stop him.”
There’s a joke where Red Mage turns himself into a monster, and as the others discuss what to do about this, Fighter ends up talking himself into killing ‘it’. This is what Fighter brings to the comedy; an ability to suddenly and violently push the story forward when it gets stuck due to his overwhelming stupidity.
“I think I proved my point. Whatever it was.”
“I will regret every moment of this, but I demand to know how you did that.”
I do tend to find the ancient approach to fate and the Gods healthier than the Christian one, but I’m speaking from some ignorance here.
Post-Captain by Patrick O’Brien – Near the end and Maturin and Aubrey have my favorite kind of friendship in fiction, two men not in dissonance but counterpoint as with their music. However, Diana Villiers has created a schism between them, and what’s smart is how Maturin, while jealous, can forgive Aubrey enough and understand sex enough to warn him about her – and what his debts could do to her reputation – while Aubrey is too instinctive to see Maturin’s brodom coming through. Dudes Rock but not always.
Brand New Cherry Flavor – Not many thoughts actually, I was just kind of exhausted with it and how much Grimson’s prose veers into pornography, not just in the prose. The main character has sex every ten to twenty pages and this does get boring in the same way porn can. There’s also a climax a hundred pages beforehand and another after; Stainless, his vampire novel after, is a masterpiece and feels like Grimson synthesizing his plot with his detail and sense of LA ennui.
Started Edmund Burke’s essay on the Sublime, early days yet so more next week.
“Maturin and Aubrey have my favorite kind of friendship in fiction, two men not in dissonance but counterpoint as with their music” — hell yeah, dude. This is literalized beautifully in the movie and at various points in the books but it also runs on deeper thematic level. Just like how Aubrey is at home on a boat/out of place on land and Maturin is generally vice versa, while one man is up emotionally the other is often down over the course of the books. But they pull from each other. The Villiers issue is something that could have been destructive or worse, extended for too long, O’Brian handles it just right. Massive ownage in HMS Surprise incoming!
Also O’Brien’s prose is simply magnificent, was reading a passage out loud to a friend because even a half paragraph is so beautiful and has such poetry.
Ugh stop it, I am already Kay-pilled, I simply cannot get O’Brian-pilled again. There are new books to read!
I read the Burke essay in preparation for the Ellroycast “BLACK DAHLIA” episode a few years back, and I think how that book plays into the “dark sublime” clearly displays a Burkian influence.
This totally tracks given their unique position as genuinely insightful conservative cranks.
Finished The Secret Hours. Despite being called a standalone, if you don’t know some of these characters from the Slough House series or the TV show, you are missing something. Generally well written, and as seems to be the case often, Herron tries to split the difference between “all bureaucracies exist to perpetuate themselves” and “we need some form of spy service for the greater good.” And as with watching the TV show, I am not sure how much of this I need on a regular basis.
Started Pox Americana, about the smallpox epidemic that ran concurrent with the American Revolution. This was written 20 years before COVID, but the lessons of a past outbreak that could have been mitigated by a known medical technique will always apply.
Yellow fever depleting the Philadelphia population is why we’re not the US capital as was previous planned.
Slayground, by Richard Stark
The setting here is impeccable: cinematic as hell, to the point where it feels like a cross between Die Hard and the zany commitment of a slasher movie. It’s just so much damn fun to watch Parker Home Alone the shit out of a second-rate amusement park. I feel like you can tell how much fun Stark–or Westlake, really, because I feel like he’s peeking through a bit here–had imagining this place and all its themed blacklight rides. And the specific details keep coming up in meaningful ways, like when Parker gets drenched and chilled and needs to replace his clothes, but all he can do is layer up with gift shop gear that’s all meant for the summer.
Even outside the ultra-fun and -specific setting, there’s a lot going on here that I love: Parker’s conversation with the aging heister who sells him the job has a sliver of bittersweet pathos to it (this is also what taught me about “the elevens”), the realization that he’s not being pursued into the park but penned up there for later is a great turn, the Mafia-adjacent goons screw themselves by being too devoted to the kind of unwieldy fussing-about Parker would never tolerate (they wait so long for their pet cops to come back that they give Parker time to booby trap everything), and on and on. Some good supporting characters here, especially the cop who briefly reimagines the whole book in a more Agatha Christie-esque light and the second-in-command mobster with a bright future who gets an unceremonious death (but one with a genuine impact on the plot).
Plunder Squad, by Richard Stark
The last book kicked off a streak of bad luck for Parker, and this continues it on an epic scale. It’s fascinating to see Parker in an almost Dortmunder-like situation, though of course he’s never going to have Dortmunder’s comic (sometimes even tragicomic) exasperation and gloominess. But almost nothing in this book works out, and the one thing that does–killing a returned Uhl, in a beautifully handled sequence–is deliberately low-key, a cleaned-up mess rather than a climactic display of ownage.
Lots of excellent stuff here, from a growing understanding of how difficult it’s getting to do a pure cash heist (Stan Devers reflects that the payroll job he met Parker on wouldn’t be possible now, and of course it will only get less possible as time moves on) to the easygoing relationship between Brenda and Mackey (a necessary counterpart to the earlier, much more toxic relationship between the habitual driver and his restless wife, which does have a misogynistic tinge to it). In fact, despite that last parenthetical, Beaghler gets one of my favorite scenes in the book, becoming a richer, more poignant character as his awareness of his own doom sets in, and then leading to that quick, bitter punchline at the end (“That’s the mistake I made with Uhl”).
I started reading this the Saturday before Mother’s Day, and it opens with Parker helping plan a department store heist for the Saturday before Mother’s Day. I’ll never experience this kind of synchronicity again.
The Bravest Voices, by Ida Cook
Memoir. Cook was a prolific Mills & Boon romance novelist from the ’30s all the way through the ’80s, and right as her career was first taking off, she became extremely active in getting Jewish refugees out of Germany. Also smuggling a lot of their money out for them, usually in the form of jewelry: Britain would accept Jewish refugees provided they had British citizens hosting and “guaranteeing” them financially, but most of the prospective hosts Cook and her sister found couldn’t afford to do this on their own; meanwhile, Germany was refusing to allow its fleeing Jewish population to take their money with them. Cook and her sister got the money out, framing their frequent trips as visits to the opera (which they were both genuinely passionate about), and Cook also subsidized a lot of people with her own funds. At one point, she finally gets the apartment she’d wanted for years, but continues to live with her parents while using it as a refugee waystation.
This is an odd and fascinating read. Cook is an interesting person–I mean, obviously–and one of the fascinating threads here is how the different threads of her life supported each other, with arguable faults bolstering her ability to achieve significant good. I think someone could easily have a problem with the fact that ’30s Cook was invested in these efforts partly because they offered the potential for romanticized adventure, but at the same time, having this mental story pattern of grand, heroic risk did help, encourage, and empower her to actually do things, some of them involving considerable risk and sacrifice. She wants her life to be operatic and romantic, and she makes it that way in a meaningful, useful sense. (As Conor and Tristan have talked about before, there’s a power in conceiving of your life as a story.) She saves lives. She gets snippy about the decline of operatic performances. She name-drops. She gives up an immense amount of money because she’d only just started making it, so, as she says, it’s easy to give up something you’re not used to having anyway, and after the war made her refugee work impossible, she worked in air raid shelters, and after the war ended, she went back to working with refugees again, all while having a successful career as a romance novelist. (The romances often involved the opera, naturally.)
Some great anecdotes here, not only from Cook but from the people she meets. The half-Jewish milliner who tells Frau Ribbentrop–who’s offered to let her keep her shop if she divorces her (fully Jewish) husband–“Thank you very much. But I think perhaps it is better I keep my husband and lose my shop.” The British woman who loses an eye and her mother in the Blitz, and nearly loses her arm as well, and tells Cook that she still doesn’t feel as awful, after all that, as she did the day England signed the Munich Pact, because then she was so ashamed, and it’s better to go through all this while fighting Germany than be safe while letting Hitler win.
It boggles my mind the Slayground movie is apparently terrible — how, HOW do you fuck this up. And I think the other POV section comes earlier than usual here, which is great for setting up these other characters (and helping to explain why and how Parker can get his Home Aloneing on) and in particular setting up that guy who gets iced much sooner than the reader expects. Parker is actively vicious here in a way he generally is not — “unstoppable killing machine picks people off in a weird setting” is a slasher flick, as you note — and it is a great twist on the Most Dangerous Game aspect of the story. And then Plunder Squad is so different, Lucy Sante calls it “almost sadistically frustrating” and you’re dead on with the Dortmunder comparison (and I think even the crew here is more Westlakian than usual). The way the side characters — Uhl, the art dealer — are also chumps and failures adds to the bleak vibe. But this is setting up Butcher’s Moon and to echo what I told Conor above: MASSIVE OWNAGE INCOMING
Slayground is the ultimate roadmap! Absolutely incomprehensible that someone managed to bungle it.
I knew a little in advance about Butcher’s Moon and have been actively excited to get to it in particular, so I look forward to reporting back next week.
Old comics — decided to reread The Boys and so far it is pretty much as I remembered, Ennis at his crudest and in a genre (superhero) that he fundamentally doesn’t like, with Darrick Robertson’s art still very solid. An arc with Legally Not Nightwing that draws from his then-status (in the real world market, I believe) as a gay-friendly comic hero has its heart in a not-bad place but also boils down to a certain 00s “it’s how you act that counts” that never considers language as action. But there are glimmers of the dynamic outlined here — https://www.reddit.com/r/GarthEnnis/comments/x5pgle/teen_titans_herpes_ennis_viral_tweet/ — that is still the most accurate read on Ennis ever set down and what sets him apart from his cohort. (That and his extremely crass but jubilant humor — there is a Fake Batman here who fucks a comet to death in an Armageddon riff and it is even loopier and dumber than that sounds and it is hilarious). And speaking of, I flipped through the issues of Ellis and Quitely’s The Authority where the team takes on Legally Not The Avengers (in which LN Captain America and LN Thor rape LN Superman) and Ellis has just aged like sour milk to me, his dialogue is all the same Whedon-y fauxnage and his superiority complex obnoxious. Ennis would occasionally guest on the series with a very Boys-like character who would either fuck the Authority up or get them out of a jam and these are far better than the main stuff.
The Last Light Of The Sun, by Guy Gavriel Kay — Kay started out a Tolkein scholar, then began writing epic fantasy before moving into pseudo-historical fantasy, stories based in fact and legend that take place in an alternate world clearly inspired by our own. This is one of the latter, revolving around pseudo-Vikings’ incursions into pseudo-Britain, which is still split into multiple kingdoms and trying to unify (so it’s roughly 800s our time). Kay writes about shifts, not just inflection points but the way events move outside of individual control and the way power ebbs and flows into new areas, leaving old ones behind (Tolkein scholar!). This initially seems smaller-scale but Kay’s coup is to bring fantasy into his history in a way he usually does not, with the untamed pseudo-Britain still containing access to Faerie stuff, and this is where the passing out of history stuff really sings. But he’s also just ridiculously good with multiple characters and how they have their own goals, a secondary person here turns powerlessness into ownage when they see an opportunity and it is gnarly as hell but Kay does not judge. Anyway, this snuck up on me even though it should not have and now I am unfortunately Kay-pilled and revisiting Under Heaven, his great book about pseudo-Tang Dynasty China, which is just as good as I remember.
This is exactly what The Boys sounded like to me, actual edgelord shit where sometimes the material called this is getting a bad rap when it’s instead provocative.