Attending to a little long overdue blog housekeeping. The right hand column of the blog page has been static for far too long. I’ve updated all the little graphics about my current interests in Books, Comics, Music, and Home Video. Not that it’s of interest to anyone but if something really catches my attention I feel like giving the artists a shout out.

DC Pride this Pride month instead of several stories by different LGBT artists and writers, is a single story told by several by different LGBT artists and writers. Very well done.

This year, for its fifth anniversary spotlighting DC’s LGBTQIA+ Super Heroes, the DC Pride anthology transforms from a collection of short stories into a singular story arc of interweaving narratives told by comic book creators Tim Sheridan, Vita Ayala, Josh Trujillo, Skylar Patridge, A.L. Kaplan, Max Sarin, and more.

DC Pride 2025 brings DC’s heroes together when a century-old tavern, the center of queer life in Gotham City, unexpectedly announces its imminent closure. It’s a huge loss to the community, and generations of patrons return to pay respects to a space they’ve endowed with entire lifetimes of memories, wishes and dreams—including Alan Scott, the Green Lantern. Alan returns, for one last time, to the place he fell for his first love, Johnny Ladd, to touch the wall on which they carved the symbol of their love, to remember the days before everything went to hell for them…and to say goodbye.

But love is a kind of magic, and, in Alan’s experience, magic can take on a life of its own. Before anyone knows it’s happening, heroes, villains, and civilians alike from across the DCU with powerful ties to this mysterious place—the Question, Midnighter and Apollo, Harley Quinn, Green Lantern Jo Mullein, Bunker, Connor Hawke, and Blue Snowman among them—find themselves spirited away to strange, alternate worlds where everything they ever thought they wanted can be theirs…but at what cost?

I especially like the new female The Question character. Initially yet another Steve Ditko Ayn Rand homage like Mr. A. The Question was the basis for Alan Moore’s Rorschach, who Moore created after the copyright owners found out Moore intended to kill off The Question in Watchmen. Like a lot of characters who were able to escape the clutches of Ditko’s abject Rand worship, it evolved into an actually interesting character.

Currently, and relevant to DC Pride, the character is now embodied by Renee Montoya who was once a detective in the Major Crimes unit in the Gotham City Police Department. After being outed as a lesbian and framed for murder, she resigned from the police force and began operating as The Question after the original Question was killed. 

“DC Pride 2025 is a celebration of life, love and the power of community—even and especially in uncertain times,” said Tim Sheridan, writer of the GLAAD Media Award-nominated series Alan Scott: The Green Lantern. “The roster of talent shaping this story is as epic as the story itself—so all I can say is buckle up for big action, bigger fun, and the biggest stakes yet. This book, as it has been in years past, is a way to reach out to our community and remind them we’re all in this together.”

So…all in all, another excellent edition of DC Pride. I’m so grateful I lived to see a world where characters like these could exist.

From the No, I Didn’t Imagine It department.  I took to reading at an early age…the stereotypical pastime of brainy, nerdy, only kids.  Mom used to shower me with kiddy reading material, even before I entered grade school.  Little Golden Books and such like.  Also kids comic books.  Many kids comic books.  Many that I wish I still had because they are probably collectors items now.  I didn’t always get the toy I wanted, but I almost always got any book I asked for, including comic books (so long as they were for kids).  I remember her reading to me when I was very small, but by the summer before I entered first grade I was already reading by myself without any help.

I had my favorites, one of which was a quirky comic about three mice who had their own clubhouse in the back yard of some human family.  I remember liking it because of all the clever things they did with random stuff they found in the human family’s back yard.  Their clubhouse was a tin can with a leaf for a door, but they always used a secret passageway into it instead.  I think its entrance was a mushroom they’d turned into a trap door, but the mushroom compartment that I still remember might have been a secret storage space for things.  Understand this is about as far into my past as I can remember much of anything so all I have of it now are disjointed fragments of memory.

I haven’t laid eyes on one of those comics since I was a tyke.  But it still crosses my mind from time to time because of something that happened one afternoon while we were visiting some other family.  I don’t remember their names was so they must not have stayed in our social circle for very long.  But they had a daughter who was a bit older then me.  I had not yet entered first grade and I think she was already in third or forth.  I remember her in particular because she did something to me that gave me my first taste of how being smart could make people want to take you down a notch or two, just because.

I was reading my comic book alone out in the front yard while the adults chattered among themselves inside.  I think mom had just bought it for me.  The girl came outside and looked at me for a while like I was a fish out of water or something.  I remember feeling uncomfortable and I think I said "Hi" or something.  She sat down beside me and looked at the comic book and then flatly stated that I was too young to read and so I must only be looking at the pictures.

Which was tantamount to calling me stupid to my face and even at that age it was a sure and certain way to get my hackles severely up.  I promptly told her I could so read and not only that I could draw too.  She smiled at me in a way that made me really uncomfortable and then pointed to the cover of the comic book.  "What does that say?" she asked.

"The Three Mouseketeers," I replied. 

She stared at me for a moment, shook her head and said "No…it’s The Three Mousies." 

You have to picture this…I’m five, going on six years old and I must have stared at her like she was an idiot.  But I remember this much of the encounter pretty well, even after all these years.  For a second I thought she was the one who couldn’t read.  So I parsed it out for her with my finger…  "No…it’s The Three Mouse-Ke-Teers".

She gave me that discomforting smile again and looked me right in the eyes and said "No…it’s The Three Mousies."  And right then I knew she knew damn well I’d read it correctly.  She kept smiling at me in a deliberately patronizing way…and it shocked and pissed me off because I knew I’d just proven to her that I could read and now she was trying to make me doubt I could.  Like she was trying to shove me back into the box she thought a five year old should be in.  Or maybe she’d had a hard time herself learning the trick and didn’t appreciate seeing a much younger kid doing it better then she had at my age.  She was trying to make me feel stupid even though she knew I wasn’t…no, because she knew I wasn’t.  I think that must have been the first time I ever saw that in someone because I can still remember how shocked I was to see it.

I got up and walked back inside with my comic book.  She followed close behind.  Maybe she thought I was about to complain to mom but I didn’t.  I just sat down within earshot of mom and her friends and continued reading my comic book.  I figured if the girl wanted to argue with me about whether or not I could read she could do it in front of the other grownups.  But she didn’t say anything more.

That memory still comes floating back after all these years, and just a few moments ago, while I was searching Google for some other comic book reference, I thought of it again and tried looking up the comic book.  It wasn’t easy because there are actually several different "Three Mouseketeers" out there now, including a Disney version.  But eventually I hit it…

Let’s hear it for the internet tubes.  More info on the title is Here.  It was an odd one, but I remember it being a favorite, along with Space Mouse and Scrooge McDuck.  God I wish I still had those old Scrooge McDuck comics.  I found a reprint a few years ago of one I enjoyed so much I still remembered really well.  It was about the time Scrooge, Donald and the three nephews went looking for the lost treasure of the Incas.  Scrooge finds the treasure but accidentally sets off a trap that washes tons of Inca gold into a river and downstream to the city.  Suddenly there is so much gold now that it’s clogging the streets of the city like mud, and even coming out of the water faucets.  So Scrooge finds the gold but in the process made gold almost totally worthless.  My first lesson in how inflation works.  Indiana Jones adventures were never as exciting to a young boy’s eyes.  And…hilarious. 

What kind of person tries to make a kid think they’re stupid?  Okay…kids are still in the process of forming themselves, and she was a kid then too, and I did some pretty crappy things to the other kids myself at times when I was that age…things I still cringe to remember.  But what kind of person did that girl grow up to be I wonder…

I’m reading a post on After Elton about gay comic book heros, or more precisely the darth thereof, and how the ones that are out there seldom fare much better then other gay characters in pop culture fiction…

Comic writer Mark Millar isn’t thrilled to learn that his story was the breaking point that inspired Perry Moore to tell a positive story of a gay superhero. A 2005 story by Millar was brought up in Sunday’s New York Times profile of Moore:

But things work out relatively well for him, which makes sense given Mr. Moore’s distaste for how some gay comic-book characters have been treated. His hackles still rise at the death of Northstar, a mutant hero who made headlines in 1992 when he uttered the words “I am gay” in the pages of a Marvel comic.

…

Death is rarely final in comics, so it’s no surprise that Northstar came back to life. “They couldn’t bother to mention he was gay,” Mr. Moore said of Northstar’s most recent appearance in “X-Men.”

Taking a cue from Gail Simone, a comic-book writer who first gained notice as a fan with her Web site, “Women in Refrigerators”, detailing the mistreatment of female heroes, Mr. Moore created his own tally. “Who Cares About the Death of a Gay Superhero?,” which he has delivered as a speech, includes more than 60 gay and lesbian comic book characters who have been ignored, maimed or murdered.

“Yes, bad things do happen to all people,” he wrote in it. “But are there positive representations of gay characters to counterbalance these negative ones?”

Not nearly enough, Mr. Moore said, and that’s one reason he wrote “Hero,” for which he already has ideas for future installments.

Millar wasn’t thrilled to see a story he wrote mentioned as a low point in superhero comics’ treatment of gay characters, and he reacted on his website:

Oh, tell him to f**k off.

He didn’t die because he was gay. He died because he’d been brainwashed by The Hand.

Well that explains it.  If that’s not geek enough for you, there’s always the reader comments, where one poster named ‘Cylon’ defends the treatment of Northstar thusly:

I think it was just a bad coincidence that he died three times that month…

He also died in X-Men: The End and Age of Apocalypse.  I hope he’s getting workman’s comp out of all this.

I’ve been reading a lot of Yaoi manga lately…stuff I’ve been buying almost by the ton from Amazon.  It’s probably a symptom of how starved for romance I’ve been most of my life, because in case you aren’t aware, yaoi are Japanese boy meets boy soap opera kinda stories, mostly marketed I’m told, to teenage Japanese girls.  When I joked in my cartoon series A Coming Out Story, about how I’d once had a stash of Tiger Beat and 16 Magazines under my bed, I wasn’t kidding.  And my tastes in comic book superheros ran more toward Spider Man then The Incredible Hulk.  I think Denny O’Neil and Michael Kaluta created a far more formidable dark knight in The Shadow (I have Every issue), then Frank Miller’s aging bar stool reactionary Batman.  I’m not generally attracted to the over muscled double-y chromosomed hulking bodybuilder genre of comic book hero, or to stories that are little more then blood and guts, slash and burn.  But the word ‘yaoi’ was originally coined as a term of derision by teenage Japanese boys, and it’s basically so I’m told, an acronym that means "no climax, no point, no meaning".  

I want my torrid same sex romance.  But I’d also like a little action and adventure please.  It would be Real Nice if some publisher could combine all these elements someday.  Or maybe it already is out there somewhere and I just haven’t found it yet.  Every now and then the manga creators manage to sneak in some Super Hero-ish elements.  One title I’m reading now, Hero Heel, the story of an actor cast as a TV superhero, who finds himself falling in love with the actor who plays the series super-villain.  I’m hopeful about the possibilities here.  Already in book one the creator Makoto Tateno seems to be weaving the plotline of the actor’s realtionship, with the plotline of the space opera they’re acting in.  This could be fun…

No…the guys of manga aren’t generally over muscled double-y chromosomed hulking bodybuilders.  They’re just unabashedly beautiful.  And the stories are unapologetically about love and desire.  Which is why I keep buying the damn things.  But high art they’re not.  Hmm…Northstar is actually pretty good looking…at least in this artist’s take…

…too bad he keeps dying.   Seriously…read Perry Moore’s Who Cares About the Death of a Gay Superhero, and you’ll see why I’m skeptical that the big comic book publishers, with their business focus on the fantasies of straight teenage boys and twenty-somethings, who also happen to be the demographic group responsible for most gay bashings, will ever be able to treat gay characters with much respect.  Of course Northstar had to die.  Read Moore and you’ll see how gruesomely, and what his fate was after being "resurrected".  The surprising thing is they only killed him three times.