Back to Australia

Just a couple of weeks ago I flew to Sydney for my sister's wedding. This was my first time visiting her there (the pandemic kinda got in the way), and my second visit to Australia and Sydney, the first being back in 2012. That time I only had a couple of nights in Sydney and didn't get to see much, but this time, apart from family stuff, I had about 10 days to rove around the sights and see what I'd been missing.

Circular Quay at night

As a prelude, I once again sprang for a business class upgrade for the flight over, so I got to travel in style. I reasoned that, with my departure time at 11.50pm and a flight time of 14.5 hours, I really needed to be able to sleep. I'll say my thinking was spot-on - I stayed up long enough for dinner (a caprese and chicken coconut curry with noodles, plus dessert) but ended up dozing for most of the trip. This meant that when I landed at 9am local time, I was reasonably well-rested and able to hang out with my sisters for the rest of the day. Indeed, I'd say that I was blissfully free of jet lag for the rest of the trip, so... result?

Fancy dinner and legroom

The other big difference from my previous trip is where I stayed. In 2012 I was paranoid about catching my onward flight to Cairns, so I ended up staying in an Ibis Hotel near the airport, but this time I stayed in a place near my sister's flat. It turned out to be a great location: about 20 minutes' walk to hers, and five minutes to Green Square train station, which I used to get into town most days. There was also a little shopping precinct nearby, with cafes, restaurants and a supermarket (one of the restaurants was, of all things, a Taco Bell).

With the extra days compared to 2012, I had a lot more time to see the sights and to just walk around. There was some stuff that my sister scheduled, like going to see local A-League side Sydney FC play against Central Coast Mariners, but otherwise I was able to hop trains into town pretty much whenever I wanted.

My first evening at liberty in town was actually Easter Sunday, when I went looking for Chinatown. I don't think I found the "real" Chinatown, i.e. the place with Chinese gates, but I walked along a number of streets that had all the Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Thai restaurants you could ever want. I also spent A$20 in an arcade, where I also got to enjoy a dance battle on Dance Dance Revolution, which is always a treat. I was tempted to try out a karaoke booth, but that felt a little too Aggretsuko (and about 75% of the songs were in Korean anyway).

They seem to be really strict about PDA

I made a couple of stops at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, enjoying the galleries devoted to modern Australian art and the ones for paintings by European artists from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I also took a morning to finally check out the Australian Museum, which I'd missed by minutes 12 years before. It was, as Bill Bryson writes in In a Sunburned Country, delightfully old-school, with room after room of stuffed animals and exhibits relating - sometimes in tangential ways, like the Irish elk skeleton - to Australia.

One morning was also spent at the Rocks, on the opposite side of Circular Quay from the Opera House. I caught the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Rocks Discovery Museum, as well as the Sydney Museum, which sits on the site of the first Government House. I'd have liked to check out the Police and Crime Museum, which is just up from the Quay, but it was closed until 13 April.

The rest of the time I was wandering around, looking for bookstores and nice places to eat. As to the former, Dymock's was reassuringly similar to Waterstone's, and I bought a couple of things there, though my favorite bookstore in Sydney is the Kinokuniya, pretty much for its enormous and well-appointed graphic novel section. I don't know what bookstore culture is like in Sydney generally, though it sounds like there are plenty of literary events and festivals; but the Kinokuniya was marvelous and I regretted not having more space to drag back a cartload of books from there.

As to places to eat, those are also varied and excellent in Sydney. I mentioned Chinatown, which had plenty of good places, but I also had loads of great Japanese, Thai and Chinese throughout my trip. The sushi was pretty much all high-quality - not as life-changing as in Tokyo, but invariably fresh and delicious. I even made it out to the Fish Market one day, where I sampled some tuna nigiri straight from the day's catch.

Another highlight was a family dinner at an RSL (Retired Servicemen's League), which maybe conforms most closely here to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Halls, but was actually quite different. It was like a combination of decent gastropub with casino attached, and the food and beer were nothing flashy but all went down nicely. To get in you need to register as a guest member, but apparently it's all a formality.

It struck me as I walked around the place that Australia is one of those countries that's made a place for itself in my heart, much like the US, the UK, Italy and Germany. I've never lived there, as I have in those others, but I could entirely see myself moving there... or I could, if it wasn't so damn far from everything else. Still, apart from the high house prices, it seems like a great, comfortable place to live, and I'd love to spend more time there. Indeed, in my last post about it in 2013, I talked about how great it would be to rent a flat there for a month and just enjoy it, and damn if that doesn't still sound like an amazing idea.

Now that my sister is married and settled on her partner visa, I was asking if I could use her as a reference to move there myself, but apparently my other sister has dibs on that. In any case, watch this space - maybe I'll meet an attractive Australian lady and get to move there with her?

Spoiler Filled Thoughts on X-Men 97

I wasn't going to watch X-Men 97 on Disney Plus, or not quite yet, for a number of reasons. The big one was that I didn't want to get sucked into a new TV show, and I reasoned that I needed to watch the previous five seasons before I tackled this new one. I get my Disney Plus from a friend and Disney is getting ready to crack down on password sharing, so I didn't want to find myself cut off mid-season (this is why, when I heard about the imminent crackdown, I binged Daredevil and The Punisher on Disney, and series 1 of Line of Duty and Modok and Justified: City Primeval on Hulu).

The other, slightly more fundamental reason, is that I don't actually have that much regard for the X-Men animated show. It came out at about the right time for me to appreciate it, when I was at the height of my first obsession with the X-Men, but I seem to remember being put off that it played fast and loose with the lore (this was important to me when I was 13), and it didn't have a lot of my favorite characters. The animation style wasn't that great either, as I recalled - it looked and sounded cheap, like the worst of the Ninja Turtles show or other contemporary cartoons, whereas something like Batman: The Animated Series might have variable-quality animation, but it looked interestingly stylized.

What happened, as ever, is that my social media feeds exploded with X-Men 97, and the YouTube algorithm, in its wisdom, also knew that I'd want to see a bunch of videos related to it. So I got served up a bunch of this stuff, and then, on Friday night, I cracked and watched the first episode.

Well, it was a lot better than I expected, in various ways. First off, the animation is miles ahead of the original show. I know, because immediately after watching the first new episode, I watched the first episode from way back in 1992 (this is the exciting life I lead on Friday nights). I'd gotten an inkling of this in some video clips I'd seen, but it was confirmed in the entire first episode. Standout scenes are Jubilee dancing in the nightclub when the X-Men go looking for Sunspot, and then the bit where Cyclops uses his optic blast to cushion his fall.

The sound was cleaned up nicely, too. Some cartoons from the 80s and 90s had this weird distortion, which I always associated with VHS tapes, but it was present in the first couple episodes of X-92, whereas X-97 was free of such artifacts. The voice acting was also generally better, though a couple of voices (mostly Rogue) sounded a little more aged than the characters warrant, though as one YouTuber put it, that's what happens when you hire the original cast 30 years later.

As far as the X-lore, there were some super interesting Easter eggs and teasers here. I don't know all the internal lore of X-92 because I don't think I watched anything beyond the first season, but the stuff I saw that was intriguing was a series of storylines and deep cuts from the books, specifically the 80s and early 90s era that I know best. The Trial of Magneto, in the second episode, was extremely well done, both in terms of visuals (the bit where he rips whole chunks of the UN building and flies them into space) and storytelling (specifically the X-Cutioner, who's presented as the reason Storm loses her powers here, as she did in the 80s). 

The second episode also ends with a great cliffhanger, as Jean Grey has just given birth to her and Cyclops's son, but there's a knock at the door and when they open up it's another Jean. Everyone looks surprised, but Jean (the one in the house) looks aggrieved. I guess this is them setting up Madelyne Prior, but I wonder how the Phoenix arc from previous X-92 seasons will be involved.

There's also all the cultural baggage to contend with, because of course there is. First off is the supposed wokeness, which many, many, many commentators have noted is the EXACT FUCKING POINT of the X-Men. Of course Gambit's going to dress... not entirely straight, and folks are going to drool in unseemly ways over the shipping potential of various characters whose sexualities in the comics have always been subject to discussion. If you're not prepared for someone to float the idea of a Magneto/Gambit/Rogue throuple, then I hate to be a gatekeeper, but wtf are you even doing watching X-Men?

The stupidest cultural baggage is the thing where some dummy got mad that they made Rogue's ass smaller because of "wokeness", because this is the darkest timeline and somehow people take you seriously when you argue that libs hate women with hourglass figures. This is just another manifestation of the alt-right mind virus that spilled a lot of ink when Sydney Sweeney was on Saturday Night Live a few weeks ago, and rightwing idiots made this argument that by having a figure she was triggering us. It's a different kind of triggering, I guess? By which I mean, appreciating Sweeney's acting chops and work ethic, because showbiz is harsh, y'all.

More serious is the firing, on the eve of the premiere, of X-97 show runner Beau de Mayo. When last I checked neither party had given a reason, so I won't speculate, but I'm curious what it will mean for any subsequent seasons. De Mayo is credited as the writer for both episodes so far, and he hasn't turned X-97 as fucky as Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa did with Riverdale, but, y'know, he might have if given the chance. I don't know if I'd like to see X-Men turn into a big gay melodrama like Riverdale, but I also hope that this firing isn't the result of some weird struggle for control that sees Marvel water the show down and make it less interesting.

Though for the record, turning X-Men into a big gay melodrama a la Riverdale would at least honor the source material from Chris Claremont, and it would be my second most desired treatment. My absolute greatest wish would be for someone to turn Patrick Willems' video of "What if Wes Anderson Directed the X-Men" into an actual movie, but again, darkest timeline.

Anyway. My verdict on X-97 is "cautiously optimistic", as well as "resigned to eventually having to add another damn streaming subscription". They've teased Jean's Clone Saga, Storm's search for herself post losing powers (and presumably hanging out in a hot tub with Callisto), and Morph's weird situationship with Mr Sinister. We've also seen cameos from some favorites like Colossus and Psylocke (though both were played by Morph). I'm hoping de Mayo worked in some references to Grant Morrison's run and the recent Krakoan Age, but we'll see. At any rate, it's a fun show and better than I was expecting.

And yes, it still has the absolutely iconic theme song. Go watch it.

All of the Marvels, by Douglas Wolk

I've written a fair amount here about Marvel Unlimited and the sheer amount of Marvel stories that have been suddenly at my fingertips since I signed up for it in November. I'm still focusing mostly on X-Men books, but I've been considering what else I might go deep on when I finish with those books.

And then I discovered a copy of All of the Marvels, by Douglas Wolk, at my local bookstore. He read pretty much the whole corpus of Marvel books published between 1961 (the debut of the Fantastic Four) and 2019 or so, for a grand total of about 27,000 comic books. In the book he lists his criteria for including a book (e.g. whether it can reasonably feature an appearance from the "main timeline" version of Spider-Man), and having done so, considers the story that emerges from what he calls the longest-lasting continually evolving ongoing story in... well, ever.

As someone who adores going to the root of a thing and exploring it from start to finish, with as many weird and unexpected digressions as possible, this premise was absolute catnip to me. It didn't hurt that I was embarking on my own version of the project - when I said I was considering what else to read after the X-universe, my list consisted of, conservatively:

• Spider-Man and his other related books, but not necessarily the Spider-Woman, Spider-Girl, Spider-Gwen or Venom/Carnage stuff
• The Avengers, plus certain important individual members' books, specifically Captain America and the Armor Wars storyline of Iron Man
• The Fantastic Four
• Daredevil
• Important runs of books that I otherwise don't care about, like Walt Simonson's Thor and Peter David's Hulk

Wolk's book is a good guide for navigating this idea, even if he doesn't cover all of these. Hulk and Daredevil don't get the in-depth treatment, and his chapter on the Avengers focuses on the deconstruction job that Jonathan Hickman performed in 2014-15 or so. For the characters and books he does cover, he gives a survey of notable issues, but instead of just presenting them in order and without context, he places them squarely in the context of the story of their individual characters.

For example, Spider-Man's publishing history is examined in terms of great cycles in the character's life, with each main era representing a stage in his growth as a man. There are discussions of his search for a father-figure, with his rogue's gallery representing a succession of potential father figures who represent different ways for him to go astray (Doctor Octopus is one, but Kraven the Hunter represents a sort of inverse father, who's physical rather than brainy, like most Spider-baddies).

The X-Men, meanwhile, are examined through the lenses of their two greatest stories: The Phoenix Saga and Days of Future Past. Wolk argues that every major X-event since then has been a response to or an inversion of one or both of those stories (which, it should be noted, took place very close to one another in publishing time, with Phoenix ending in issue #137 and Future Past coming in #141-142). Even Grant Morrison's run on New X-Men, which I considered to be the first significant step past Chris Claremont's legacy on the title, ends with a storyline that takes on both at once. And every big X-moment since then has also reckoned with them, to varying degrees of success.

The meat of the book is examining these books or runs for themes and how they play out throughout the life of a book or in subsequent creators' runs. Wolk then uses these insights to tease out what the Marvel books say about either the overall Marvel story or about real-world events. His chapter on Dark Reign says that story, where Norman Osborn (the former Green Goblin) effectively becomes the most important man in the world, is Marvel's reckoning with life under a very Trump-like regime, though interestingly it runs through 2009, long before Trump came anywhere near the presidency.

This is all interesting enough on its own, but the other thing I want to highlight in discussing this book is how it fits into the wider scene of cultural criticism that looks at American superhero comics. Wolk refers to The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics, which argues that the visions of mutants and "others" and how Marvel invites us to treat difference form an important part of radical politics now. Wolk himself also fits into a constellation of commentators on comics who tackle the topic seriously and interestingly, such as Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men (a podcast I started listening to when I started my big X-read).

I find this fascinating, because when I started reading Marvel comics in 1991, there was no cultural discussion of them. Maybe there was in certain academic journals or circles that I didn't have access to as a 12-year-old middle schooler, but in my daily life the idea that you could pick out cultural themes or messages from superhero comics would have been laughable, and I was encouraged to keep my interest in the books to myself (and to a small group of friends who also cared about what these books had to tell us).

More than 30 years on, I have a better frame of reference to tell how much of what I was reading back then was immature crap and what was interesting or worthwhile. I also have access to the internet, so I can see what other people are saying about Marvel books (or DC's superhero books, though Wolk dismisses the idea of doing a similar version for their superhero universe). Some of them are kinda big deal people - on his old podcast, Wolk had as a guest none other than Jeet Heer, a literary critic and journalist who I'm only now learning has also spent a large part of his career discussing comics.

This maturing of the discourse around comics (I had the misfortune of discovering them right at the dawn of the speculative boom of the 90s) has come because a lot of serious people started writing them around the 1970s and 80s, to appeal to other serious people, many of whom in turn started writing comics themselves. Wolk also describes how Marvel, and comics in general, has reckoned with the fact of most of its early creators were white men, and how this reckoning has let the company cater to demographics beyond that very narrow one. That widening is a big part of why serious people can talk about comics seriously, even despite the backdrop of the Marvel Cinematic Universe effectively eating all of pop culture for the past decade and a half.

All of the Marvels is a fun tour through the story of the Marvel Universe, both in-universe and as a discussion of how it was created. I appreciate that it uses certain notable issues and storylines as entry points to consider what such a long-running single piece of fiction (as Wolk treats it) reveals about what our culture thinks is important. He doesn't uncritically enjoy it all - the Punisher is clearly not a favorite character of his - but he's able to tease out something interesting about a great many parts of it, including certain stories that I hadn't considered before, notably Master of Kung Fu and the Black Panther books that started with Christopher Priest's take in the late 90s.

It's a good book for making sense of the meta-story, and it makes me wish there was something similar for DC Comics, or even just parts of Marvel like the X-Men (I could have read a whole book-length treatment of them in this vein). It came out in 2021 but effectively ends in 2019, so certain aspects feel a tiny bit dated, just because publishing thousands of pages of content every year means the story evolves fast. But of course, that's the point, isn't it?

In Praise of Batman: the Brave and the Bold

Just finished Batman: the Brave and the Bold yesterday, so I wanted to get some thoughts down on how it took me a while to warm to the show, but as I did, it also got more interesting. It's not part of the wonderful DCAU that started with Batman: The Animated Series, but it shares a lot of similarities, even though it's consciously aimed at a different aesthetic.

The first thing to say is that it took me a long time to finish the show. I first discovered it when I was poking around Netflix after finishing Justice League Unlimited, and at first glance it seemed aimed at a much younger audience than the DCAU shows. It mined both classic DC characters, which I knew well, but also newer versions of them (like the Jaime Reyes Blue Beetle), which I didn't know, so it was hard to get a sense at first of whether I liked it. That said, whenever I'd go down some Wikipedia rabbit hole about an obscure DC character (something that happens quite often, I'll admit), more often than not I'd see that the character had appeared in BTBATB. Not only that, but it also implied some relatively more mature storylines than I'd seen in the few episodes I'd watched.

Fast forward a couple of years, and we're in the pandemic. I'm at my then-girlfriend's house, we've merged our streaming apps, and there's nothing to do but watch TV with all our free time. So I started BTBATB again on her version of HBO Max, watching bits here and there during my lunch breaks from work or when she was doing something else.

Then we broke up, and I had to get access to HBO Max (subsequently Max) on my own. Somewhere in that time I got into the habit of watching cartoons while eating lunch on Saturdays, so I started splitting my Saturday lunchtimes between Gravity Falls on Disney Plus and BTBATB. This meant that I was watching one episode a week, so it took a while - indeed, I finally finished the first season in January of 2023. Between holidays and Saturdays when I wasn't home to watch my usual shows, it's taken me this long to finish up the rest of the show.

By this time, I was pretty onboard with the substance of the show. Like the comic book series it's named after, BTBATB featured different team-ups every week, sometimes doing different ones in the cold open than in the episode's main story. Where Batman TAS started off as an homage to 1930s serials, this show was more indebted to the Silver Age of 1950s and 60s comics, where Batman was more of an adventurer with gadgets than the brooding crimefighter we normally associate him with, and the guest stars reflected this. There were a lot of guest appearances from Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth (an old Jack Kirby feature from the time in the 70s when he was feuding with Marvel), as well as from Blue Beetle, Aquaman Green Arrow and others.

The interesting thing was that it had few other trappings of Batman that we commonly think of. There wasn't any reference to Bruce Wayne until the second season (we didn't even see Batman out of costume until then). We also didn't see the Joker for the entire first half of the first season, and his first appearance was as an alternate-universe hero version, the Red Hood; even then, we didn't hear the name Joker for a while. The show's creators were similarly reticent about big-name guest stars: we don't see Superman or Wonder Woman until the third season, and other big names were replaced by Golden Age versions or other alternates - for example, Guy Gardner was the main Green Lantern in this show.

For the guests they did have, they typically went very deep. The episode featuring the Doom Patrol has Batman teaming up with the original 1960s version, but there are references in the background to Grant Morrison's seminal run on the team, such as Dorothy Spinner and the Russian doll motif that dominated Morrison's issues. There's even a poster of Shasta, the Living Mountain, a throwaway character from Doom Force, the parody of X-Force/Rob Liefeld/90s mutant books that capped off Morrison's run. Talk about your deep cuts.

Another similarity with TAS is that it benefited from some great voice talent, in part because both shows had the voice director Andrea Romano casting them. Diedrich Bader is maybe not as iconic a Batman as Kevin Conroy, but he did a good job with the less brooding version of the character; also Conroy appeared a few times as an alternate Batman (in an episode that also brought back Dana Delany as a version of Lois Lane) and as the Phantom Stranger. Joe Dimaggio had a recurring role as Aquaman, but a version that was gleefully oblivious and loudmouthed. And Peter Reubens played Bat-Mite a few times, always in episodes that wreaked meta-havoc on the show's continuity.

The best example of the show's devotion to deep cuts, clever casting and meta commentary is the final episode, Mitefall, where Bat-Mite decides to shake up the show to get it cancelled and bring back the brooding version of Batman. He adds in merchandising tie-in vehicles and costumes, gives Batman a wife and daughter, and recasts Aquaman as Ted McGinley, all in an attempt to make the show jump the shark (listing off all the elements that make shows jump the shark, he lists casting Ted McGinley as one of the important factors in any show's cancellation).

Opposing him is Ambush Bug, the Keith Giffen creation who essentially played that same meta-role in a couple of mini-series in the 80s, generally making fun of the weird and forgettable characters that popped up in the less-known corners of the DC Universe in the 60s. The best part is that Ambush Bug is voiced by the man who gave us the phrase "jumping the shark", Henry Winkler.

Not that the silly, meta stories were the only ones with relatively sophisticated storytelling. Chill of the Night featured a retelling of the Batman origin (and featured Adam West as Batman's father), while the Doom Patrol episode had the team giving their lives to save an island of hostages from the Brotherhood of Evil. B'Wana Beast also died heroically in an episode after having been mocked for being a Z-list character. In its way, this show had more death and heartbreak than the mainline DCAU shows, like JLU.

It took me a while to warm to, as I mentioned, but once I did, I was all-in. I don't really miss the 60s Batman, which was generally silly and unsophisticated, but BTBATB was a good, modern way of tackling it, making the references smarter for adults and long-time fans, while also being suitable for kids. It stands alone in its corner of DC's universe of animated shows, but in the end, it's a worthy addition and well-worth watching.

The Inchoate Rage of All the Fandoms

The other day a friend of mine showed me the newest South Park special, Joining the Panderverse, which takes on the internet trolls who complain about diverse casting and the studios that are accused of pandering with their diverse casting (specifically Disney for this special). I didn't watch the full special, because we went to see a movie (the Zone of Interest, which is... quite a watch), but I've had it percolating in my mind since then.

I went looking for some reviews and recaps, and the best one I found was this one from Den of Geek. Unlike the subreddit that was my first stop, the Den of Geek piece nailed that the special's primary target is not the diverse casting but the people who are butthurt by it. It also suggests that Trey Parker and Matt Stone's natural posture of "both sides suck" is a little too pat.

The fact is, there's not that much recasting of roles for "diversity". Certainly nobody's recast Tony Stark or Steve Rogers as a "diverse woman", and the cases where you have a non-white version of a character are still taken from the comics. One is Miles Morales as Spider Man, which the South Park special calls out as being a cool concept, and the other is Sam Wilson as Captain America. Of course, a lot of supposed fans got mad about those characters in the comics too.

It's fair to say that these people get mad about all of this stuff, even when it's legit to the comics or whatever source material. Brie Larsen is a particular target of alt right fans, despite the Carol Danvers version of Captain Marvel/Ms Marvel having been a character in Marvel comics for about 40 years (and the Monica Rambeau version has been around almost as long). So when you dare to recast Ariel from the Little Mermaid as a black woman, look out.

Are there points where the diverse casting goes far? I suppose it depends on how granular you want to get. There are moments in some shows and movies that feel like box-ticking rather than legitimate explorations of story: Halo coming out as non-binary in season 4 of Young Justice could have been an interesting story, but it's used just as a way to show everyone being okay with it. 

And they should be okay with it! But I feel like the idea of a dead girl's body being reanimated by a genderless alien and the resulting entity trying to make their way in the world deserves more exploration than just, "Great! You're learning who you are! Next."

Similarly, the reveal of Enfys Nest at the end of Solo: A Star Wars Story lands with a bit of a clunk (to me, at least). It's not so much that she's revealed to be a young woman of color, but rather that it comes out of nowhere - we haven't seen Erin Kellyman in the film up to this point, so I was left with the sense of confusion at the reveal. The intent was to show that the future of the Rebellion would be led by people other than white guys, which is fair enough, apart from the fact that the main heroes of the original movies are, of course, white guys. But it might have been more powerful if we'd seen her without the mask earlier in the movie, before identifying her as the dread pirate Enfys Nest.

But I've now had to unfollow so many Twitter accounts for harping on "girl power = bad" in the context of Marvel and Star Wars. It's lame - the characters are being played by the same types of people who have always played them, and the fact that some of the latest movies are dumb is just because of poor scripting and the hubris that overtakes all successful studios. I dislike The Last Jedi, not because it's too "woke", but because the story makes little sense, since they decided to have different directors work on each movie of the sequel trilogy, meaning Rian Johnson and JJ Abrams then spent each subsequent film canceling out what the other had done. That's not a diversity problem, that's stupidity problem.

That said, I also appreciate that Johnson was trying to do something different with Star Wars, even if I think that factors beyond his control made the movie not live up to expectations.

Anyway, I'd love to see this freakout about diverse casting die a death, but that's a long way off: the latest controversy riling nerds is that an announcement of Anya Taylor-Joy being cast as a herald of Galactus is being taken as proof that they're going to cast her as a female Silver Surfer. Never mind that the actual announcement doesn't say who - there will always be people sowing this kind of mischief, either because they're legitimately dumb or because they're actively looking to stir shit up.

Maybe that South Park special should have focused more on people stirring up assholes like Cartman, rather than jokes about the Panderstone? Whatever - I despair either way, but if Taylor-Joy does play Norrin Radd, I'll probably still be there at the theater to see her do it.

Super Bowl 2024: No Joy in Mudville. Also Deadpool!

Quite apart from my own thoughts on the Super Bowl and the NFL in particular, I've managed to string together over a decade of watching the damn thing. I was about to say I've also strung together a decade of writing about it here, but it turns out that's not true: the last time I blogged about the Super Bowl was 2021, when I considered the year of pandemic awfulness that had just transpired, and 2017, when emotions still ran high over the election of Donald Trump and the fact that Tom Brady is buddies with him.

This is a relief, because unlike the Champions League final, I don't have much to say on stats. Although that said, it was interesting to see not only that last night's game was a repeat of 2020, with pretty much the same end result (the 49ers losing), but that Kansas City got to the 2021 edition as well, so my limited NFL statto-ness is twitching at the idea that Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs are probably the best QB and team of the last few years, since they always seem to get to the Super Bowl. And indeed, a quick check on Wikipedia turns up that 2022 was the only year since 2020 in which the Chiefs didn't feature in the Super Bowl.

So, good for them, I suppose.

Less good for the 49ers, whom I still have yet to see win the Super Bowl, at least since 1988 when they beat the Bengals. They haven't won since 1995, but I'd stopped paying attention by then, and wouldn't start watching the Super Bowl again until 2005, when I was at journalism school and doing a sports journalism course.

It was a little disappointing to see this streak of not winning the Super Bowl continue last night, especially when considering that the 49ers were in the lead for most of the game. But c'est la vie, I guess.

The other big point of interest for me last night was the debut of the Deadpool 3 trailer, but that was also a bit of a disappointment: they just directed us back to the internet to watch the full trailer there. The full trailer had its moments, but I was hoping for a bit more info on what the movie's going to be like - though the references to the Time Variance Authority were interesting.

I'm getting a little leery of that sort of thing, because I've noticed Marvel relying on it a bit too much: specifically, using characters and settings and plot elements from the Disney Plus TV shows to inform the plots of MCU movies. It was one of the problems with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and I think it didn't help the Marvels much either, which is particularly disappointing when you consider that the Disney Plus shows those movies referenced were really good.

Loki was also quite good, so that should bode well for Deadpool and Wolverine, but as I say, I'd have liked to see more about what the movie was going to feel like. Thinking back to 2017, trailers for both Thor: Ragnarok and Logan made good use of music (Immigrant Song and Hurt, respectively) set against key footage from the movies to give us enough broad strokes of the story to get excited.

On the other hand, Deadpool movies have always done a nice job of mining X-Men lore, which I'm particularly susceptible to at the moment, so that should be promising. I'm also hoping to see more of Wolverine's part in the movie in any subsequent trailers, since it marks the (hopefully) triumphant return of Hugh Jackman to the role.

Anyway, let's close by paying tribute to the fact that I closed off a blog ostensibly about the Super Bowl with a discussion of comic book movies. It's not often that I get to marry my sports nerdiness with my comics and movies nerdiness, so I feel like this deserves some kind of trophy of its own.

Whatever. I'll report back on Deadpool and Wolverine in July, when it comes out, and I may or may not write about the 2025 Super Bowl, if there are good superhero movie trailers then too.

Thoughts on the 2024 Primaries So Far

Just a quick one this week, because we're still early in the primary cycle, but I've had some thoughts on what some of the results mean, and what they might yet portend. It seems odd to have anything to say about a primary cycle that features one incumbent president and one competitor who seems destined for a procession to the nomination, but there are things to say about both the Democrats and the Republicans.

With regard to Trump, my thoughts are that he shouldn't even be on the ballot. Colorado tossed him off the primary ballot, invoking the 14th Amendment, and Maine did the same thing. There are arguments, advanced by people who really ought to know better (e.g. moderate Democrats, among others), that we don't know if the relevant clauses apply to the president, or that it should be up to voters, or even that he needs to be convicted of insurrection.

Bullshit, all of it. Read this piece at Vox, because I don't need to go into it all. The piece has some things I disagree with, but it's all pretty well-argued. The only point where I agree that it might be good for Trump to get to the general election and lose is, it would then show him up as a two-time loser and probably finish his quest to regain the White House.

Only problem with that is that if he loses, his supporters riot and he tries to steal the election again. My argument is that they'll riot and try to steal the election whatever happens, so we might as well get it all out of our system now.

What I think will happen is, the Supreme Court rules narrowly that Colorado, and only Colorado, is justified in barring Trump from the ballot, so that he only wins 49 primaries, and in the general, doesn't appear on a ballot that he wouldn't win anyway.

As for Biden, he's also won two primaries, New Hampshire (which was unofficial) and South Carolina. New Hampshire took place first, and Biden wasn't even on the ballot because the Granite State is annoyed that he moved South Carolina to the front of the schedule, but he won as a write-in candidate with more than half of the votes. This is a bit heartening.

He also won South Carolina pretty handily, and in an officially recognized primary. However, my cause for concern here (and in New Hampshire) is that turnout was much lower than four years ago. Not only did Biden win with around 100,000 fewer votes this year than in 2020, but back then Bernie Sanders and other Democratic hopefuls picked up loads of votes too, whereas this time Biden's challengers picked up less than 4% of the total votes, which means that fewer voters turned up overall.

The reason I'm concerned is that 2016 was another year marked by voter apathy in the primaries. Comparing them to 2008, the previous time a Democratic incumbent president hadn't been on the ballot, 2016's turnout was super low, showing a lack of enthusiasm for the frontrunner, Hillary Clinton (and, it must be said, for Sanders, who may have galvanized the left wing of the Democratic Party but not enough of them). This year is different from 2016 because there is a Democratic incumbent, and the low turnout may reflect the fact that people just figure Biden will win the nomination at a canter. But I'm still concerned.

As far as the arguments about Biden's age, I do think it would be nice to have a younger nominee (or two, rather - one for each party), but I just can't see who could run in his place, and who could run with a chance of beating Trump. Sanders could conceivably beat Trump, though I'm unconvinced by arguments that he'd win over loads of people who'd otherwise support Trump - I think that a larger than usual subsection of moderates and swing voters would vote Republican if Sanders won the nomination.

Now, Sanders has ruled himself out, so the question remains of who on the Democratic side has the national profile to challenge Trump. None of the Dem hopefuls from 2020 has had much impact in the last four years, or in the case of Pete Buttigieg, hasn't exactly endeared himself to the base. Or to put it another way, nobody voted for any of those candidates in 2020, so what's changed in the last four years to make Democratic primary voters want to vote for them now?

Part of the issue is also that many Democratic voters aren't comfortable with the Biden Administration's seemingly unquestioning support of Israel at the moment. This is reflective of how different age groups view Israel (rightly or wrongly), and it doesn't seem to be doing Biden any favors right now. It probably won't do him any favors in November, either.

Whatever, this is all speculative for the time being. Each side has held only two primaries, and while the winners of the nominations seem pretty clear, all kinds of interesting things can happen between now and November. I'm just worried some of them (Trump's court cases) won't be resolved before then.

Given that Trump has talked about suspending the Constitution and about pardoning himself, this is an election with extremely high stakes. I'll be interested to see how everything shakes out before the two parties' conventions.