American Politics Has Too Much Tolerance for Nonsense

My brain is about 80 to 85% comic books these days, but I kinda missed the boat on posting about Episode 5 of X-Men '97, and now I'm stuck waiting until the end of the season. I could have written about The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl series by Ryan North and Erica Henderson, but decided it might be better to write about something else (although I'll get to Squirrel Girl at some point soon).

So you're getting a post about politics instead. Specifically the amount of foolishness that pervades electoral politics in our current age. I hinted at my thesis in a post I wrote last year, in which I wondered what the heck was up with Britain, but the main point for today is that American voters are oddly forgiving of absolute nonsense.

I should qualify that I'm mostly referring to, erm, one side of the aisle, though I do think that most establishment Democrats also fall for their own brands of, dare I say, malarkey. It's kind of built into the whole exceptionalism thing, which is why Britain seems to suffer from this malaise too.

But what do I classify as guff, nonsense and malarkey? It goes beyond structural disagreements about economics. I do think that most conservative/libertarian economic ideals are built on fantasy, at best, as when the UK pushes through a bunch of unfunded tax cuts (as Liz Truss tried to do last year), or when entire financial sectors are given carte blanche to gamble with everyone else's money (as we saw with the savings and loan collapse of the 80s, or the subprime mortgage credit crunch in 2008).

Rather, I'm talking about some of the more outre behavior of the West's populist leaders. I've seen a number of variations on the idea that "I never thought the apocalypse would be this stupid", and it's hit home for me. I'm talking about conspiracy theories that Sandy Hook was a false flag operation, or that the Uvalde shooter was a trans person, or that when Barack Obama told the people of Britain that Brexit was a bad idea, some dummies thought it was a set-up because he said leaving the EU would put Britain "at the back of the queue" for trade deals, and Americans don't say "queue", so he must have been coached by Remoaners, ergo and QED.

I could also go into the fact that people were setting fire to 5G masts during the pandemic, or that they were listening to some roided up idiot agree with his podcast guests that they should be taking an anti parasitic to not get Covid (which is, er, a virus), or that some folks were blaming the 2020 and 2021 wildfires on Black Lives Matter because they forgot that BLM can also stand for Bureau of Land Management... though I don't understand why the Bureau of Land Management would be setting fires.

(Don't try to explain it. If you give this theory any credit, you're stupid and I don't want to hear it)

(Also, I could list all the QAnon conspiracy ideas but we'd be here all day. Though I'm particularly fond of the idea that JFK Jr faked his death and that he was all set to make his return at Dealey Plaza a couple of years ago, where he'd immediately join Donald Trump's presidential ticket)

It seems to me that Americans are particularly susceptible to falling for nonsense. Part of it comes back to Richard Hofstadter's essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", which I haven't read but from what I know of it encompasses this idea that "they" are all out to get "us" and we need some demagogue to protect us. "They" could be communists, Black people, LGBTQ people, foreigners, or simply the favorite target of bigots throughout the ages, Jews (who are supposedly the ones behind communists and foreigners anyway). 

I get that conspiracy theories come from people feeling disempowered, whether politically, socially or economically. What I don't understand is why feeling disempowered means blindly swallowing every false and/or incoherent thing Donald Trump says. Trump is not exactly disempowered himself - he shits on a golden toilet and has a bunch of buildings with his name on them all over the world. He does and says some of the crudest things you can imagine, but a not-insignificant portion of American Christians think he's basically the Second Coming of Christ.

This is why I think Americans are particularly susceptible to nonsense. Nobody in Britain thought Boris Johnson was Jesus, or particularly smart - they just voted for him because he's an edgelord with an Oxford degree and they thought it'd be a laugh. Geert Wilders and Giorgia Meloni are deeply weird individuals (she's part of some Italian Neo-fascist strand that has built its identity on the radical agrarian society of Tolkien's Hobbits), but no one has built a quasi-religious conspiratorial framework around either of them.

Hell, Australians are probably the most naturally libertarian people I've ever encountered, but because the idea of a "fair go" is so ingrained in the national psyche, they found the political will to ban assault weapons after Port Arthur and have made great strides to attempt to atone for what they did to the Indigenous Peoples from the First Fleet through to the 20th century. Whereas in America, supposedly the land of the free and a place where "all men are created equal", we give undue attention to people who say that their right to buy assault rifles outweighs children's right to not be shot to pieces in school.

I don't know why exactly Americans fall for stupid and lazy arguments so easily, but I do know that this tendency is what underlies the big threats to our society. Trump may run around telling people that he should have won the election, but for some reason a lot of people are prepared to believe him, despite, or because, his arguments are so flimsy. If so many people are willing to disbelieve their own eyes on the say-so of the Party, at least the Party could come up with some lies that are internally consistent and not the deranged power fantasies of people who should know better.

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.

Klopp Says Goodbye to Liverpool

Well, not quite yet. But he's announced when he will, so we're talking about it now.

Jürgen Klopp's announcement that he'll be leaving Liverpool at the end of this season has been the big news in the (English) football world, and rightly so. He's been one of the most successful managers of the past decade, having won every major trophy with Liverpool except the Europa League, and has been consistently up there in the top spots with Pep Guardiola's Manchester City.

When he arrived at Liverpool in 2015, he was coming off a successful few years with Borussia Dortmund, in which he'd turned them into regular challengers for the Bundesliga title. He'd also previously managed Mainz, during which time he'd guided them to the top tier. When he arrived, he was the subject of many adoring profiles that talked about his innovative gegenpressing approach and his "heavy metal football", which came from the fact that this is apparently the type of music he listens to.

He did make an immediate impact, though, which justified all the love. He led Liverpool to the Europa League Final and the League Cup Final in his first season in charge, then the Champions League Final in 2018, and finally won the Champions League the following season. Liverpool took off like a thoroughbred in the 2019-20 season, winning the Premier League at the earliest point in the season, with seven games to spare (although, thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, this was also the latest league win in history, in June). 

At the moment, Klopp is Liverpool's fourth-most successful manager in history, in terms of trophies won. He has seven trophies, compared with 20 for Bob Paisley, 11 for Bill Shankley and 10 for Kenny Dalglish (9 in his first spell as Liverpool manager and 1 in his second). One of Shankley's trophies was the old Second Division, which Klopp never managed in, and Klopp also never won the second-tier European cup, but remains the only Liverpool manager so far to win the Club World Cup. Also in contrast to Paisley, Shankley and Dalglish, Klopp never won the league more than once.

He's also the fourth-longest serving manager, in terms of games played, with 467. By this metric, he lies behind Bill Shankly, with 766 between 1959 and 1974; Tom Watson, who managed for 742 matches between 1896 and 1915; and Bob Paisley, who was in charge for 535 matches between 1974 and 1983. Klopp also has the second-highest win percentage of any Liverpool manager, with 60.81%, lying only behind Kenny Dalglish's first stint, which yielded a win percentage of 60.91%. Even legends like Shankley and Paisley only got 51.98% and 57.57%, respectively.

All of these stats mean Klopp can genuinely be considered one of Liverpool's greatest managers. Indeed, he's unlucky to have been in charge at the same time as Pep Guardiola's stint in Manchester - Liverpool twice came second after Manchester City by a single point, including the 2018-19 season, in which Liverpool won the most points ever for a side that didn't finish as champions.

That said, for all the excitement around his time at the Kop, Klopp's Liverpool has sometimes seemed oddly fragile. One glaring example is the 2018 Champions League Final, which they lost to Real Madrid on the back of two insane goals by Gareth Bale (and some pretty dodgy goalkeeping by Loris Karius). And after their title-winning season, the perfectly oiled machine seemed to develop a stutter, as injuries to key players like defender Virgil van Dijk weakened them, as well as rumors of conflict between Mohammed Salah and Sadio Mane, who were at the time Liverpool's best players and leading scorers. In 2023, Liverpool came fifth, missing out on Champions League qualification.

This isn't to say he's bad - just that, for all that he created a genuinely great attacking team, it took a while for his side to gel, and once they won the Premier League and the Champions League, there wasn't really anywhere else for them to go. Again, contrast that with Manchester City, which has won the league every year since 2018 (apart from the year Liverpool won it); though it's also fair to say that this season City's looked a bit off the pace, too, possibly given that they won the league, FA Cup and Champions League last season.

As far as his successor, the talk at the moment is all about Xabi Alonso, whose Bayer Leverkusen is top of the Bundesliga and mounting the first proper challenge to Bayern Munich in over a decade. His qualification for the Liverpool job seems to be his status as a Liverpool legend, but as they said on the Football Weekly podcast today, he'd make a better case for his selection if he holds on to win the German league.

This is a delicate time for Liverpool, in which the wrong managerial selection could send them spinning into chaos for years. One good example is Manchester United, which still hasn't recovered from hiring David Moyes to succeed Sir Alex Ferguson, or more appropriately, from precipitously firing Moyes ten months into the season and then scrambling to recreate Ferguson's dynasty from day one.

Another good example is Liverpool itself, which took about 30 years to recover from Dalglish's resignation in February of 1991. While the team won trophies between Dalglish and Klopp, including most famously the Champions League in 2005, the league title eluded them until Klopp's side in 2019-20.

Looking at that list of managers between Dalglish and Klopp, there's no evidence of panicky decision-making by the boards, apart from that ill-considered stint for Roy Hodgson in 2010-11. But somewhere in the executive boardroom there was a dysfunction that didn't allow them to choose a manager to properly compete with Ferguson's Manchester United in the 1990s, or Jose Mourinho's (or rather Roman Abramovich's) Chelsea in the 2000s. The worry is that this transition from the Klopp era to whatever comes next could herald another set of wilderness years.

On the other hand, Klopp was selected by the owners wanted a manager borne out by the stats, not by his status as a club legend or as an up-and-coming young British manager. Their analysis team is very different from the one that hired Klopp in 2015, but one hopes that the owners keep those stats in mind, rather than chasing someone with a little buzz because he's a former player.

In any case, it's clear that Klopp is leaving Liverpool in better condition than when he found it. It'll be interesting to see who follows him, but it'll be equally interesting to see where Klopp ends up managing next. He's said he won't manage in England again, so that could mean Spain or Italy, in the best case. Worst case is that he goes to Saudi Arabia or even just Paris St-Germain, though you wonder how he'd square that with his politics, which have always been pleasingly leftwing.

Wherever he goes, I'll be looking out for Klopp in his next role. I've never been a Liverpool fan, but it's always been fun watching them while he was in charge. With luck he'll bring his heavy-metal ethos to another storied club and turn that into a magnet for trophies and great players as well.

Finally Back at the Gym

In the latest of my occasional series on "things I couldn't do during the pandemic", I'm ready to wax poetic about going back to the gym. This isn't actually that new for me, since I started going back in August, but it's now pretty much re-established in my life/routine. I'm broadly quite happy with it, though with a few caveats.

I wrote about it in my post from July 2020, in which I talked about a bunch of things that I missed doing. There are a couple still on the list, but those tend to involve flights to Britain, which I'm kinda ready to do but haven't accomplished yet. Of the ones that I had access to here in the Bay Area, going to the gym was pretty much the last hurdle.

This is for obvious reasons: it's a big, enclosed space with a large number of people gathering together and exhaling at one another. The gym was a disease incubator even before the damn pandemic, so it's not surprising that 24 Hour Fitness shut down completely for most of 2020, even to the point of not charging for the monthly membership. They did almost go out of business, and my local gym not only laid off my trainer, but also consolidated with the site nearby (which it had been planning to do already), so it's clear that this decision cost them something.

When they reopened in 2021, I wasn't quite ready to go back in person, even notwithstanding the fact that I was living with someone who wasn't vaccinated against Covid. I had some training sessions left over from before the start of the pandemic, so I burned those off by doing virtual sessions on FaceTime, and when I ran out of those, I suspended my membership.

The trouble with not going to the gym, however, is that there are parts of the year when it'd be really nice to be able to work out indoors. Cold isn't too much of an issue here in the Bay Area, but when we get a rainy winter, it's nice to run without worrying about slipping in puddles or soggy leaves.

The increasingly long and hot summers are more of an issue, especially if we were to have another year like 2020 when the late summer heatwave was paired with dangerously high levels of air pollution caused by wildfires in Northern California. The air quality in the years since then hasn't been as bad, at least not here, but that still left large stretches where the temperature and the humidity were high enough to make running outside a slog.

So last summer I ventured back in. As I said, my club moved to a smaller location, but one that was essentially next door, so my trip to the new gym is pretty much the same. During the summer I was even still parking in the same parking structure. I'll go back to that when it's light enough in the evenings to not get run over by idiots as I walk to and from the gym, but for the winter I'm parking a little closer.

I've focused mainly on the treadmill, and on keeping up my running mileage. I've always had more tolerance for running on treadmills, in part because I amuse myself by keeping an eye on things like speed, incline, distance and calories burned, but I've also started wearing my Beats Fit Pro earbuds when I run, so that I can listen to music or keep up with my never-ending backlog of podcasts.

As an aside, I've discovered that Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men is remarkably well-suited to running on a treadmill for 30-40 minutes. Go figure.

The other reason I focus on the section with the cardio machines is that I can pretty much always find a treadmill to run on, or failing that, an elliptical or even an exercise bike. The weight section is always too crowded, though, and so, while I try to do a machine chest press or lat pulldown, it's kind of rare that those machines are available. Which doesn't matter because I've picked up some adjustable weights and resistance bands, and can always rely on the good old bodyweight exercises to do my strength training.

I did, however, also sign up for a few sessions with a trainer. Mainly I wanted to pick up some functional mobility tips and have some accountability for my diet and exercise, but I don't know if I'll continue with it long-term. Still, it was a fixture of my pre-pandemic gym-going, so it's nice to be back to that as well.

As far as Covid precautions, I'll admit I'm relatively lax. I see a few people wearing masks on the treadmills, but I'm not one of them. As I said, it's a place where there's a lot of people breathing out, but the cardio section feels unpopulated enough that I don't feel as much anxiety about it. It also helps that I haven't encountered anybody that was hacking up a storm, the way I used to back before 2020, so that's set my mind at ease.

Plus, I'm up to date on my Covid boosters (for what that's worth, since they don't really stop you catching it, they just stop you dying from it), and I practice good masking etiquette and hygiene everywhere else. The fact that the weight section is always crowded is another blessing in disguise, Covid-wise, because that's probably the dirtier part of the gym. I always make sure to wipe down the machines I use and wash my hands after I've finished my session, which is hygiene theater to a point, but is probably helping to reduce the amount of crap I wipe into my eyes and nose and mouth.

Still, I have no illusions that it's a relatively risky thing to do, especially when cases surge in the winter. I'll look forward to going back to running outside again in a few weeks, although I'll probably have to keep going to the gym when it's too hot to run outside. I'll also revisit the concept if I do catch Covid from there, but again, I'm also heartened by the fact that the strains are less dangerous than they used to be.

Overall, this is probably the sign that, for me at least, the pandemic is over. I accept we haven't been in a state of emergency for a while, and I've modified my behavior accordingly since 2021. I've grown more comfortable with more and more things I used to do, and I'm also lucky to live in a place where the majority of people take it seriously, so vaccinations are common and so are masks. I'm still wearing masks at the grocery store and the doctor's office, and I'm keeping up with my boosters, so some behavior from 2020 persists.

Overall, though, 2020 and its attendant horrors grow ever more remote, and I'm happy about that. I never had much time for the "just gotta live my LIIIIIFFFEEE" crowd, especially when the Delta variant was raging, but it is good to be able to do stuff outside the house again.

And if there is another big pandemic, at least I won't have to worry about one thing: I'm keeping a pretty damn good stock of toilet paper in my special Covid-hoard.

RIP Franz Beckenbauer

The big news in football this week was the passing of legendary German sweeper Franz Beckenbauer, at the age of 78. Much was made of the fact that he was one of only three men to win the World Cup as both a player and a manager, as well as the fact that another of those men, Brazil's Mario Zagallo, also died this week. That leaves Didier Deschamps, who accomplished the feat with France, as the only man still living who's managed it, though the question is whether he can be the first World Cup-winning player to win it more than once as a manager...

Another point that came up in the various testimonials to Beckenbauer on the podcasts I listen to was that he's one of those players that you heard about, but didn't really ever get to see in action. Beckenbauer's heyday was Euro 1972 and the 1974 World Cup, both of which West Germany won under his tutelage, but there's little good YouTube footage of those tournaments, so it's hard to get a sense of how great he was.

This is a problem with all players before about 2006 - even someone like Matt LeTissier, who does have some good reels of famous goals from the 90s, is ill-served by poor-quality transfers to digital. Of course, YouTube highlights aren't always the best way to see players at the peak of their powers, but it seems a shame to lose documentary evidence of them, especially since all that seems to exist of the 1930s World Cups is the odd picture here and there.

On the more negative side, there was also a lot of talk on the podcasts about Beckenbauer's involvement in some of the shadier aspects of winning the 2006 World Cup for Germany. This is too bad on several fronts: on the one hand, it's unfortunate that part of his legacy is tarnished that way, and on the other, that tournament is considered the first great coming-out party for Germany as it is now, dynamic and open and friendly, and so it's equally a shame that an event that brought so much joy to so many people is tarnished that way.

But then, there was also the absurd side, as I learned on Football Weekly. He apparently chose a phone number consisting of all 6'es after appearing on an ad for O2, and this led to him getting a bunch of calls from men who thought they were calling a sex line. Of course, as the host of FW, Max Rushden, said, imagine calling a phone sex line only to find yourself talking to one of German football's greatest players?

I think the most interesting thing I learned, though, was how Beckenbauer seems to have embodied the new (West) Germany. He was born in 1945, amid the wreckage of the Second World War, and his fortunes followed those of his country, so that he came of age as it became one of the richest countries in Europe, and as Bayern Munich became one of Europe's elite too. He was considered a national hero, and despite the damage to his reputation from those FIFA issues mentioned above, it's sad to see him leave the stage.

Revisiting the X-Men Movie Universe

With a few days to kill at the end of the year, I decided to have another look at the X-Men movies, starting with the first one from 2000. I'd been thinking about it for a while, especially now that I'm reading an issue of X-Men per day on the Marvel app, but I'd kept putting it off, in part because a few of them were only available to rent and I wasn't sure I'd be able to finish them in the time before they expired.

When I did decide to do it, I figured on sticking with the main X-Men movies, so the first three from 2000-06, then the four reboot films starting with First Class, and ending with Logan. I briefly considered watching New Mutants, the Deadpool movies and the first two Wolverine movies, but decided that Logan was the only spin-off movie to watch because it acts as a sort of capstone to the entire mini-universe. 

That, and I couldn't bring myself to watch X-Men Origins: Wolverine again.

As I was watching, it also struck me that I haven't rewatched most of these films since I first saw them. Indeed, I know for sure I've watched the first one more than once (but I don't recall watching it since about 2001), and I think I watched Days of Future Past twice. I also watched The Wolverine a second time last year, which, while an okay film, didn't feel like something I wanted to revisit so soon.

I'd also never seen First Class in its entirety, apart from a stint on a plane, so there were large sections I didn't recall. I'd also only seen Apocalypse on a plane, but all I remember being censored from that was Psylocke's cleavage.

My main takeaway is that the movies benefited from some excellent casting, but weren't always particularly well-written. Some of it is the problem of introducing and managing too many characters, but it also comes down to an imperfect grasp of some of the source material. The movies that were strongest - First Class, Days of Future Past and Logan - all had strong relationships at their core, while the weakest seemed to be more an attempt to throw as many characters and images at the audience as possible.

X-Men (2000) is a good example. Rogue (Anna Paquin) is meant to be our gateway in as she gets initiated into the mansion, but Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) steals the show. As a result, the other three main X-Men - Cyclops (James Marsden), Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) and Storm (Halle Berry) - get very short shrift. Storm, in particular, disappears apart from delivering one of the worst lines in movie history. Even Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) get a little lost in the whole business, despite being dream casting for those two characters.

The movie also feels very dated. The other bad guys get very little time to establish themselves, apart from Mystique (Rebecca Romijn), about whom more anon. The camera work is very static, apart from one bit at the end that evokes the Matrix, so there isn't much jumping around, and the little that there is looks cheap.

On the other hand, it was a bit of a shot in the arm for the characters, especially in the comics. I'd stopped reading the books by then, but it was all recognizable to someone who knew the basic story and knew to look for Easter eggs like Kitty Pryde and Colossus. Around the time this movie came out, the X-Books were all rebooted to have the characters wearing black leather, so that they'd look like the movies. It also let Marvel streamline the stories a bit, rather than the bloat that had taken over when I started reading them in 1991.

The second movie, X2 (2003) was a little better than I remembered. I was one of those rare people who didn't particularly like it, but rewatching it more than 20 years later, it's hard to remember what I objected to back then. I think part of it was the seeming death of Jean Grey at the end, but what made me appreciate it more this time was reading about its source material, the graphic novel God Loves, Man Kills. On the negative side, many of the characters from the first movie (mostly Storm and Rogue) were sidelined even more, in favor of Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming), who I normally like but didn't quite land here.

X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) is generally held to be the worst of the trilogy, and it is, but I also didn't hate it as much as I remember hating it back in the day. A lot of it looks pretty dodgy, and it sidelines Rogue so much that she takes the mutant vaccine and gives up her powers. Elliott Page does a good turn as Kitty Pryde, and it was nice to see Leech onscreen, even if they didn't keep him green, like in the comics. But my favorite part of the movie comes early on, when a younger Xavier and Magneto go visit Jean's parents.

It's the first time we get to see Stewart and McKellen together onscreen as anything other than adversaries, and their dynamic is delightful. It's not hard to get a sense of them as a couple, in part because Magneto is delightfully catty. But apart from the homoerotic subtext, which is rife in Bryan Singer's X-Men, the idea that they once worked together is core to the conflict between them, so it was nice to see that firsthand.

After that misfire, they decided to reboot the films entirely and explore that relationship between Xavier and Magneto in First Class (2011). They recast them with James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender, respectively, and heavily played up the friendship/boyfriendship as the core of the movie. And it finally works!

It's super fun getting to see Xavier as a groovy scientist who uses his knowledge of genetics to chat up ladies, at the same time that Magneto's rampaging through ex-Nazis in his search for Kevin Bacon. Because the movie's all about getting the X-Men together, it also introduces us to the characters in more organic ways, like discovering that one of the scientists working at the CIA is actually a mutant himself, and the montage where McAvoy and Fassbender go looking together for the other mutants they've identified. The cameo where Wolverine tells them to go fuck themselves is also delightful.

That relationship remains at the heart of the next movie, Days of Future Past (2014), but here I should acknowledge that the third pole of the triangle is Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique. She does a good job of bouncing between their two philosophies in these two films, showing that she herself is looking for her own path in life. She also does a great job of making the character her own, while also paying tribute to Rebecca Romijn's portrayal, which was very far from the comics but worked brilliantly because of it. In fact, I think Mystique in the movies is one of my favorite things about this movie universe, because she's so striking.

The other thing that makes Days of Future Past work, for me, is that instead of building a whole new team in 1973 the filmmakers use it as a bridge to the previous trilogy, bringing Stewart and McKellen and Berry and Jackman, among others, back to reprise their roles. The bit in the future where a dying Magneto tells Xavier that he regrets spending so much time fighting is both touching and a good counterpoint to the relationship between their younger selves.

Apocalypse (2016) and Dark Phoenix (2019) are less successful, in my opinion, because they lose sight of this relationship between Xavier, Magneto and Mystique. Mystique is pretty established as a good guy by now, which takes away much of the tension around her character, and she doesn't have much to do by the time the Phoenix kills her in the final movie. Magneto has a bit of an arc in Apocalypse, as we see his new family in Poland killed by anti-mutant sentiment, but I think it would have been more interesting to see his philosophy contrasted with that of Apocalypse (a kind of mis-used Oscar Isaac).

One thing that I think these two movies do relatively well, though, is the relationship between Cyclops and Jean Grey, now recast with Tye Sheridan and Sophie Turner. Rewatching the original trilogy, it struck me that Marsden and Janssen had no real chemistry together, and there's nothing to show why they're together; Cyclops is just a bit of a dick because he sees that Wolverine has designs on his lady. In Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix, we get to see them bond over being the freaks at their respective schools, and the two actors have better chemistry together. It's just too bad that they ruin that chemistry by killing Jean off again.

And finally, there's Logan. It came out in 2017, so chronologically isn't the final X-Men movie, but it works as such because we finally lay to rest both Wolverine and Xavier (although a version of Xavier turns up again in the second Doctor Strange movie, and Wolverine's apparently coming back for the next Deadpool movie). Like the other good films on this list, it has strong relationships at its core: Xavier is a good father figure for Logan, who in turn works well as a reluctant father figure for Laura (Dafne Keen). It also helps that Keen is a good enough actress, even at 11, to hold her own with Stewart and Jackman.

The movie takes a lot of things about Wolverine and Xavier to their logical extremes, most notably the violence that Logan's claws inflict on just about everybody, and so it's pretty brutal to watch. But it's nice that it has lower stakes, and it's paced well, so that among the violent sequences you get some nice, quiet moments where the characters can experience joy together, after all these years.

Overall the X-Men movies suffered from some variable quality, to put it kindly, so it's not surprising that they aren't as big a deal as the MCU or the Spider-Man movies. However, on balance they do a nice job of showcasing Marvel's flagship team, and when they're at their best, they beat pretty much any MCU film for quality - unfortunately, as I say, not enough of them reach that level of quality.

Apparently Marvel is working out how to bring them into the MCU, which I'm kind of excited about but also makes me nervous. I've said before that I think they sit uncomfortably in the wider Marvel universe - partly because I don't want to know that all my other favorite heroes turn out to be anti-mutant bigots, but also that the X-Men mythos are large enough that you don't really need to have them mingle with the Avengers and such. It's also hard to see how they fit into the wider crossovers, since the X-Men work best when you can do the soap opera and emphasize the differences between Xavier and Magneto.

That said, I'm curious what an MCU version of the X-Men will look like. At the very least, if they get a feature film or two, maybe we can mine some other good stories from the characters. Here's hoping it won't be too long.