Category My Thoughts

Some Thoughts on the Batgirl Variant Cover Featuring The Joker

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Recently, this variant cover of Batgirl #41 by Rafael Albuquerque has been making waves on the internet, and it’s clear why at first glance. Even without understanding the deeper meaning behind the imagery, it’s easy to understand why so many feel this cover is misogynistic. This is a chilling piece of artwork, and something everyone agrees on is the fact that it was exceptionally well drawn. On a surface level, this is a creepy picture of the Joker victimizing Batgirl, but to those who have read the seminal Alan Moore graphic novel, The Killing Joke, the imagery carries a decidedly darker tone. For those that don’t know, during the events of The Killing Joke, the Joker approaches the Gordon household, rings the doorbell, and when Barbara Gordon (Batgirl’s secret identity) answers the door, he shoots her through the spine (an act that paralyzes her and nearly ends her crime fighting career). Afterwards, he has his men capture her father, the police commissioner Jim Gordon. In a plot to drive Jim insane, the Joker strips a bleeding Barbara, snaps pictures of her naked body, and leaves her to die on his way to show those same pictures to her father (who is also to be stripped and degraded in a horrific sequence of events); all while wearing that tonally inappropriate tourist outfit he is sporting in that cover. It is one of the most striking and horrific moments in comic book history, and it is what the artwork above is harkening back to.

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Batman: Death of the Family Review

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Scott Snyder’s Batman: Death of the Family is one of the most ambitious Batman stories I’ve ever read. It is one that seeks to make a definitive statement about Batman’s relationship with his arch-foe and it succeeds in doing so in a way that was never done before. The attention to detail and the obvious reverence Snyder has for the source material is palpable. The Joker is simultaneously at his most loving and deranged in this horror story as he takes Batman down memory lane and makes a serious effort in emphasizing why their relationship is so important, and why the one he has with his supposed family is the part of Bruce’s life that truly needs to be destroyed. The characterization of the Joker in particular is what proves to be both this story’s greatest strength and weakness.

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Is ‘Iggy Azalea’ Racist? – A Look at Every Angle

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For the longest time, I’ve always considered the most inflammatory and controversial question one can ask of something is whether or not it is racist. Today, the hot button question for well over a year has been whether or not the hip-hop artist , Iggy Azalea, is racist. I will be discussing the question itself from numerous angles, but to be clear, this isn’t going to focus only on whether or not Iggy Azalea as a person is racist. Despite that being an important discussion in its own right, it really isn’t my place to be making personal accusations like that at her. Behaviour like that is why legitimate grievances against the artist are drowned out by cries of “reverse-racism” (a problematic phrase in itself). What this article will be primarily examining is whether or not the “Iggy Azalea” brand and its success is racist, and what the common reaction to her presence means for us as a supposedly post-racial society.

It has been about a year since the breakout success of her album “The New Classic”, and the public still doesn’t know what to say about Iggy Azalea, so I’ve decided that the best way to go about discussing her is with examples of commonly held sentiments regarding Azalea herself, along with my responses to them.

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What Is ‘Good’ Satire?

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One of the most influential satirical pieces of all time…

What qualifies as “Good Satire”? Given the horrific recent events over in France, this is a question that has come up quite a bit. There is no debate that the actions of these terrorists are absolutely unconscionable, but there has been a large amount of discussion about what the best response to it actually is. The acclaimed cartoonist, Joe Sacco, and his response has had me thinking quite a bit about the nature of satire and why it exists. According the Oxford University Press, satire is the “employment, in speaking or writing, of sarcasm, irony, ridicule, etc. in exposing, denouncing, deriding, or ridiculing vice, folly, indecorum, abuses, or evils of any kind” (“satire” def. 2b). Satires often utilize sarcasm and irony to aid in getting their points across. Irony is a rhetorical device that depicts “a contradictory outcome of events as if in mockery of the promise and fitness of things” (“irony” def. 2). Under that criteria, how effective is the “satire” being employed today in response to this incident? What is really being accomplished by simply drawing a picture of Muhammed? To better articulate my thoughts, I’m going to look at 2 examples of satirical comics produced by Charlie Hebdo. One excellent, and one I would describe as vapid and pointless.

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James Watson: Challenging What it Means to be Considered a Genius

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James Watson is a Nobel Prize winning scientist who co-discovered the structure of DNA. On the flipside, he is also known for controversial opinions that include advocating the “right” for women to be able to abort their children for being gay, his obvious sexism, and most damning of all, his opinions about race in relation to intelligence. His behaviour has cost him the respect of his peers and his position in the scientific community, and in response he’s decided to sell his Nobel Prize, no doubt as a symbolic gesture of his disillusionment. My take on all this leads me to a number of conclusions about the nature of intelligence and people like Watson.

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The Dirtbags of Popular Culture and Why They Exist

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Dirtbags in fiction have been a fixture in popular fiction for a very long time now. They come in all sorts of varieties but with the common goal of earning the ire of an audience. They are that special kind of character that exists solely to be hated. The reason writers often resort to creating dirtbags is to give the audience a reason to side with the protagonist of their story. Maybe this hypothetical hero has entered a competition but you don’t quite care about whether or not they win, but throw in a dirtbag competitor and you can’t help but want to see that smug grin of their wiped off their face. In short, the dirtbag exists for the purpose of manipulating the audience, so here are a few different types that are used to do just that.

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The Greatest Commercial of All Time

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This commercial is the single greatest ad on television. It’s from a series of Orkin pest control ads that feature walking, talking, and disturbing realistically textured pests trying to live in an unlucky family’s home. Instead of cartoony good guys and stereotypical bad guys of past ads of this type, these pests want nothing more than to live their victim’s house. That’s it. They don’t want to kill them, they don’t want to eat their kids or destroy their lives, they just want to live with them and nothing more. They fully capture the mentality of the real life counterparts to these little monsters by not making them outright malicious, but by just wanting to impose their presence where it is unwanted. These ads are very good at making it clear why someone would absolutely not want to have these pests anywhere near their home even if they aren’t strictly “evil” due to how god damn gross they appear. These commercial villains are closer to commercial anti-heroes if you ask me.

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The Courtier and the Heretic Book Review

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History and philosophy are convoluted and disorderly. Though people desperately try to order and categorize the major events that shape them into coherent categories and timelines, the truth is that it is not truly possible. This is because the fields of history and philosophy are focused primarily on the human beings first, and then their contributions, rather than other fields that focus on the contributions and briefly touch on the people behind them. Humans are not orderly, they contradict themselves, and more than anything else appear highly duplicitous, and as a result, so are the fields of history and philosophy. Writing a book exploring these two things, no matter how much effort one puts into making every element appear orderly and linear, will undoubtedly reveal cracks and anomalies that make the project not as seamless as one would like. Matthew Stewart’s The Courtier and the Heretic however, deals with the messiness of philosophical history in its own unique way. Rather than desperately attempting to stitch together pieces that may or may not fit one another, Stewart weaves the history of two philosophers into an engaging narrative that explores their histories, rather than a cold analysis that provides their details. The stories of Leibniz and Spinoza (the titular courtier and the heretic respectively), are told in great detail separately from one another until they eventually converge into one as their fated confrontation is discussed. The duality of their lives and the many differences between the two men that include their appearance, thought process, and integrity are made abundantly clear; with a central theme being the tension between their true beliefs along with the fear of being associated with them and how they dealt with that. Although the lens in which Stewart views the philosophers (Leibniz in particular) may feel a tad coloured with bias at times, and the level of focus on certain pieces of history may not be ideal, the human nature of this subject is properly accommodated  in a compelling narrative that is both informative and interesting.

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