Tag: history

How Boomers Killed Comics

From Part Five of the history of the decline of the comics industry:

“The comics business went into a steep decline in the ’50s and early ’60s. During that time a lot of companies folded, a lot of comic book professionals were unemployed, and so, if you were an editor at a surviving comic book company you never had to train anybody, you knew lots of guys who were out of work. The streets were awash with unemployed cartoonists. So what happened is we had a generation gap—relatively few new people came into this business between the mid-’50s and the early-to-mid-’60s. Around that time a few of us started to trickle in. Among the arrivals in the early to mid-‘60’s were E. Nelson Bridwell, Roy Thomas, Archie Goodwin, Neal Adams, a few others and me. We were pretty much the last guys who got to learn our craft from the older guys–the guys who really invented and built the comic book business.
. . .
“There was a GENERATION GAP in the comic book industry. There were some people in their 50’s and 60’s, there were a lot of people in their twenties and early 30’s, but not enough in between. Because there had been an extended period of decline when relatively few new people came in, we were missing a generation. What that meant is that young guys who should have been assistant editors to a forty-something person were instead editors or editors in chief, even though their main qualification was having read 10,000 comics.”

Jim Shooter, Marvel Editor-in-Chief, 1978

Roll this bit of information back to 1968. The Marvel staff that remained through 1978 would have been in their 40s and 50s in 1968 by Shooter’s estimation. These folks would be Greatest Generation with some very early Silents. The generation gap that Shooter speaks of would be Silents who were generally unable to break into the industry in the late 50s and the 60s due to the downturn in the industry. Greatest Generation creators hung on to the majority of remaining positions. Those new staff at Marvel would have been in their late teens and early 20s in 1968. Those individuals would be Boomers...

Boomers work to undo the Greatest Generation’s efforts

We see in these two titles the distinct generational split between the unified-vision, long-term editor in Stan Lee with Jack, Steve, Don, and the Greatest Generation Bullpen members, and the multiple-editor driven Roy Thomas/Archie Goodwin/etc and Boomer Bullpen model. The Greatest Generation creators took more from the traditional Western Historical canon — focusing on romantic pairings (Reed and Sue, Ben and Alicia, Johnny and Crystal, Peter and Gwen), family formation (marriage and children), forging strong male interpersonal relationships (Reed and Ben, Ben and Johnny, Peter and Robbie, Peter and Capt Stacy, Peter and Harry, Peter and Flash), and investigating the interpersonal relationships of these smaller elements with other family, friends, co-workers, as well as antagonists and villains.

The few Silents and majority of Boomers took the lead on aligning the content of the books with the popular zeitgeist of the current day, moving the books away from aspirational themes of their Greatest Generation predecessors toward ‘realism’. That meant divorce, no marriages, no children, and few relationships outside of the ‘hook-up culture’ varieties. Traditional values highlighted by Greatest Generation creators were ignored, avoided, and eventually derided.

And while we’re on the topic of Boomers, don’t miss Boomer Patrol’s latest, FUNKY BOOMER, which chronicles much the same phenomenon across a wider strata of society.

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China Isn’t Fooled

The Chinese are paying very close attention to how the USA has created color revolutions around the world, and how it is laying the groundwork for military conflict with Russia over Ukraine:

Washington has painted its geopolitical competition between great powers with a thick layer of ideology. It has tried to portray what is happening on the Russian-Ukrainian border as a tragic story about “aggression” and “counter-aggression,” as well as making Ukraine a pawn on the European chessboard as it pushes eastward. Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, many countries, including Ukraine, have experienced “color revolutions” supported by the US. But most of these countries ended up in tragedy, as the US has neither the will nor the ability to provide them with substantial assistance. The US has been providing huge military aid to Ukraine over the years, weaponizing it from top to toe. However, it has explicitly excluded any possibility of fighting for Ukraine. Washington’s policy of creating crises is likely to turn Ukraine into a regional powder keg.

The US is unreliable. This is true when it comes to not only Ukraine, but also Russia. The essence of the issue is not that Washington is “seeking justice” for Ukraine or Europe, but that it is using NATO as a tool to cannibalize and squeeze Russia’s strategic space. Since the end of the Cold War, Russia had also tried to win acceptance from the US and the West through making political changes. But what it gained is the US’ abandonment of its promise that NATO would not expand eastward if a reunified Germany remained in the bloc. The US has led NATO to engage in five rounds of eastward expansion over the past more than two decades. Moscow sees Ukraine as a red line for security. But now even Ukraine is said to be absorbed into NATO. Russian President Vladmir Putin on December 23 accused NATO of cheating Russia at his annual press conference.

To secure its advantageous position by creating disputes, divisions, conflicts and confrontations is what Washington has always pursued in international affairs. Be it deploying missiles on Russia’s doorstep, conducting “close-in reconnaissance” on China’s coastal areas, or sending warships to sail through the Taiwan Straits, all these actions were taken by Washington to test its two biggest “rivals” and the US is waiting and looking for opportunities to drive a wedge. The US may not plan to start a war with Russia or China, but it hopes to maintain a certain degree of tension and chaos in the surrounding areas of the two opponents. As such, it has kept propagating the “China threat theory” and “Russia threat theory” and at the same time tries to rally allies to exert pressure together in an attempt to force Russia and China to retreat from their core interests.

What is happening in Eastern Europe today has taught the Chinese people a good lesson.

The most important thing to note here is that China is following Russia’s lead in determining that “the US is unreliable”. The significance of this seemingly mild statement is that it means neither major regional power believes there is any point in attempting to negotiate with the USA or attempt to reach mutual understandings because they both know that the USA will break any treaty that they sign with it.

Which really shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, as the USA has been a historically treacherous organization from the very start, as it broke its promises to nearly every single counterparty it encountered, from the scores of American Indian tribes with which it signed treaties to the formerly sovereign states of the Confederacy. It’s really rather remarkable that so many Americans genuinely believe that it is Russia and China that are the aggressors today when it is the USA that currently has 173,000 troops in 750 bases occupying 159 countries around the world.

Just to put things in historical perspective, that is more troops than Imperial Rome possessed with its 28 legions during the period of the Principate from 31 BC to 284 AD, which includes the time of the empire’s greatest extent under Trajan in 117 AD.

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Racism is Pro-Human Diversity

On Gab today, I pointed out the obvious fact that racism is not, and has never been, a sin. In fact, racism is entirely laudable, as racism is nothing more than the attempt by a people whose identity is under assault to preserve their unique status as a people, and the term is used in a pejorative manner by those who are attempting to destroy all independent aspects of identity, language, blood, religion, and culture in that group of people. This is neither theory nor speculation, it is simple historical fact.

While many people believe that the term racist was first coined by the Communist – specifically Trotsky, it was actually coined decades before Trotsky had used the term. Trotsky applied the word ‘racist’ to Slavophiles who opposed Communism and the word he used in his 1930 memoir The History of the Russian Revolution was “racistov” (расистов), which translates to ‘racism.’

However, according to NPR’s Codeswitch, the Oxford English Dictionary‘s first recorded utterance of the word’ racism’ refers to a man named Richard Henry Pratt in 1902. Pratt was railing against the evils of racial segregation, claiming: “Segregating any class or race of people apart from the rest of the people kills the progress of the segregated people or hinders their growth. Association of races and classes is necessary to destroy racism and classism.”

However, Pratt is better remembered as the man who coined the phrase “kill the Indian …save the man,” as a reference to the efforts to educate Native Americans.

“A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is the race which should be dead. Kill the Indian in a person, and save the man.”

In October 1879, Pratt took over the Carlisle Barracks in Cumberland County and opened the Carlisle Indian School. He served as a superintendent of the school for the next 25 years. Pratt believed that the Indians could be assimilated into the mainstream of American life through education. To achieve that goal, he required them to speak English and felt that the Indians should be isolated from their home environment in order to successfully assimilate into American society.

Indians who objected to their tribal identity being destroyed were deemed “racist” by their conquerors and had their children subjected to relentless propaganda intended to brainwash them into believing that they were something they were not. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

It’s not the racists who are evil. It’s not the racists who serve the cause of the Adversary. It is those who are anti-racist, who believe in equality, and who wish to unite all the diverse peoples of the world under a single satanic government.

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Why They Hide History

The reason the Prometheans always advocate maleducation and Zero History ignorance of the past is because it allows them to repeatedly make false predictions about the obvious consequences of their actions. What we’re seeing now, with sudden avalanche of false denials that the USA ever promised Russia that NATO would not expand to Eastern Europe, was not only anticipated, it was foreseen by the builders of the so-called neo-liberal rules-based world order.

In 1998 Thomas Friedman interviewed George Kennan, one of the architects of NATO, and was warned by Kennan that NATO expansion was certain to create a martial response by Russia:

”I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,” said Mr. Kennan from his Princeton home. ”I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. NATO expansion was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs.”

”What bothers me is how superficial and ill informed the whole Senate debate was,” added Mr. Kennan, who was present at the creation of NATO and whose anonymous 1947 article in the journal Foreign Affairs, signed ”X,” defined America’s cold-war containment policy for 40 years. ”I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don’t people understand? Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.

”And Russia’s democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we’ve just signed up to defend from Russia,” said Mr. Kennan, who joined the State Department in 1926 and was U.S. Ambassador to Moscow in 1952. ”It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then the NATO expanders will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are — but this is just wrong.”

One only wonders what future historians will say. If we are lucky they will say that NATO expansion to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic simply didn’t matter, because the vacuum it was supposed to fill had already been filled, only the Clinton team couldn’t see it. They will say that the forces of globalization integrating Europe, coupled with the new arms control agreements, proved to be so powerful that Russia, despite NATO expansion, moved ahead with democratization and Westernization, and was gradually drawn into a loosely unified Europe. If we are unlucky they will say, as Mr. Kennan predicts, that NATO expansion set up a situation in which NATO now has to either expand all the way to Russia’s border, triggering a new cold war, or stop expanding after these three new countries and create a new dividing line through Europe.

23 years later, it is clear that the forces of globalization were much weaker and less inevitable than its advocates preached, and that their lack of good fortune has triggered a new cold war that is already threatening to not only go hot, but go global, as the Promethean-occupied World Order finds itself being stared down by the new Nationalist Alliance of Russia, China, Iran, and India.

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Remember the Maine!

And the Gulf of Tonkin. And the Lusitania. And Pearl Harbor. And the Kuwaiti incubators. And the Twin Towers. And every other US false flag or prearranged incident that was used to justify more US military action around the globe, before you overreact to another one that will lead to making the military error that is proverbial for stupidity: invading Russia in winter.

US private military companies (PMCs) are preparing a provocation using chemical weapons in troubled and tense eastern Ukraine, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu claimed on Tuesday. Moscow believes there are more than 120 employees of American PMCs operating in the region, where they are working with Ukrainian special forces.

Containers with “unidentified chemical components” have been delivered to the cities of Avdeevka and Krasny Liman in Donbass in order to stage provocations, Shoigu said, at Tuesday’s meeting of the Defense Ministry board, attended by President Vladimir Putin.

The minister provided no further details or evidence of the false-flag chemical attacks that had purportedly been planned.

Tensions have been mounting in eastern Ukraine since last month, when several Western media outlets reported that Russia had been amassing troops near the border and claimed that Moscow was planning a large-scale military invasion into the country.

Since the chemical weapons false flag that was staged in Syria – the notorious White Helmets fraud – it’s unlikely that a similar one will work in Ukraine, especially when Russian intelligence is apparently already onto it. But this won’t be the last one, as it is clear that the globalists are never going to stop trying to spend American blood to accomplish their globalist goals while they still possess any influence in the USA.

“U.S. citizens should be aware of reports that Russia is planning for significant military action against Ukraine,” the State Department said in its travel advisory. “U.S. citizens choosing to travel to Ukraine should be aware that Russian military action anywhere in Ukraine would severely impact the U.S. Embassy’s ability to provide consular services, including assistance to U.S. citizens in departing Ukraine.”

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Cuckservative Enhanced Revolution

I’ve been reading a recent biography of Franco, a relatively new one by a left-leaning pair of historians that purports to be neither a vicious condemnation of the evil fascist dictator nor a hagiography of the great nationalist hero. One-fifth of the way through, it does appear to be a fairly balanced presentation, even though the authors make it clear that they are men of the moderate Left.

One lesson that leaped out from the text is the intrinsic problem of allowing cuckservatives in positions of power. The problem of nominal centrists who a) are hostile to the Right and b) are soft on the Left is not exactly a new one.

Franco, ever an ordenancista, was appalled, believing that the president’s appeasement policy—so different from the adversarial relationship that Alcalá-Zamora adopted toward the moderate right—would only encourage revolutionism in the long term, with disastrous consequences. When the fighting still raged, he was quoted by the Italian chargé d’affaires as having told the latter that any failure to punish the insurrectionists firmly and fully would merely “encourage an early extremist response.” As events would reveal, the apolitical general understood his country’s political dynamics much better than the highly political president. Another extremist response was soon to follow.

In the perspective of contemporary European history, the repression of the revolutionary insurrection of October 1934 was comparatively mild. Key leaders were treated with leniency. Socialists were not proscribed unless they had been actively involved in the uprising, and most leftist deputies continued to sit in parliament. Within scarcely more than a year, full civil rights would be restored to all the left except for the imprisoned revolutionaries, and they would enjoy complete freedom to try to win at the ballot box what they had failed to achieve by violence. This formed a total contrast with the bloody repression of leftist insurrection in such countries as France, Germany, or Hungary. A case can be made that, in fact, the repression—far from being the atrocity alleged by the massive leftist propaganda campaign—was too limited and that only severe and successful prosecution of the revolutionaries would have made possible the survival of a parliamentary Republic.

Franco: A Personal and Political Biography, Stanley G. Payne with Jesus Palacios\

It’s more than a little appalling to see how easily some of the great tragedies of the past could have been prevented, if only those with the power and the responsibility to take action had done so. One can’t help but read the history of the Spanish Civil War without seeing the way in which President Trump similarly failed to grasp the bull by the horns and take the necessary action when he had the opportunity and the ability to do so.

And other parallels between the leadup to the Spanish Civil War and the current situation in the USA are not only apparent, they are more than a little ominous.

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The Fifth Communism

Asia Times considers the significance of the recent plenary assembly of the Chinese Communist Party that elevated Xi Jinping Thought to the highest ideological level:

Marx. Lenin. Mao. Deng. Xi.

Late last week in Beijing, the sixth plenum of the Chinese Communist Party adopted a historic resolution – only the third in its 100-year history – detailing major accomplishments and laying out a vision for the future.

Essentially, the resolution poses three questions. How did we get here? How come we were so successful? And what have we learned to make these successes long-lasting?

The importance of this resolution should not be underestimated. It imprints a major geopolitical fact: China is back. Big time. And doing it their way. No amount of fear and loathing deployed by the declining hegemon will alter this path….

Make Trade, Not War: that would be the motto of a Pax Sinica under Xi. The crucial aspect is that Beijing does not aim to replace Pax Americana, which always relied on the Pentagon’s variant of gunboat diplomacy.

The declaration subtly reinforced that Beijing is not interested in becoming a new hegemon. What matters above all is to remove any possible constraints that the outside world may impose over its own internal decisions, and especially over its unique political setup.

The West may embark on hysteria fits over anything – from Tibet and Hong Kong to Xinjiang and Taiwan. It won’t change a thing.

Concisely, this is how “socialism with Chinese characteristics” – a unique, always mutant economic system – arrived at the Covid-linked techno-feudalist era. But no one knows how long the system will last, and in which mutant form.

Corruption, debt – which tripled in ten years – political infighting – none of that has disappeared in China. To reach 5% annual growth, China would have to recover the growth in productivity comparable to those breakneck times in the 80s and 90s, but that will not happen because a decrease in growth is accompanied by a parallel decrease in productivity.

A final note on terminology. The CCP is always extremely precise. Xi’s two predecessors espoused “perspectives” or “visions.” Deng wrote “theory.” But only Mao was accredited with “thought.” The “new era” has now seen Xi, for all practical purposes, elevated to the status of “thought” – and part of the civilization-state’s constitution.

That’s why the party resolution last week in Beijing could be interpreted as the New Communist Manifesto. And its main author is, without a shadow of a doubt, Xi Jinping. Whether the manifesto will be the ideal road map for a wealthier, more educated and infinitely more complex society than in the times of Deng, all bets are off.

It is vital to accept that one can no more understand the current and future actions of the CPC – and therefore China – while ignoring Xi Jinping Thought than one could have comprehended the development of China since 1978 while attempting to ignore the Dengist revisionism that has completely transformed both China as well as the global order.

One cannot hope to grasp Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Dengist-Xism any better than one could have grasped Marxist-Leninism by reading nothing but Marx. Or than one can anticipate the actions of the fake Biden administration by referring to the US Constitution.

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A Lesson from Comics History

It’s always a good idea to learn from the successes and failures of the past:

1960s Marvel provided verisimilitude and continuity to characters, allowing characters to experience consequences that mattered to the story, and thus to the readers. When Sue and Johnny’s father died in Fantastic Four Issue 32, it was a permanent change for them and the rest of the team. When the Thing crushed Doctor Doom’s hands in Issue 40, it was a driver for Doom’s revenge twenty issues later in Issue 60 — there was memory of the insult and damage, the thirst for Doom’s revenge upon the Thing, creating an element of verisimilitude for the readers. This is how readers expected the arrogant Victor von Doom would behave–it made sense and it felt “real” to them.

Chris’ page on “How to Make Great Comics” highlights this formula, but I believe that Chris, Stan Lee, and Jack Kirby were on the wrong track by calling it “Realism”. I believe the word they wanted was “Verisimilitude”–it needs to feel or appear real enough to generate belief. It does not necessarily need to be “real”, but rather “real enough”. The scientific jargon Reed Richards uses doesn’t have to come from a real-world physics text, but it needs to be believable enough to the reader to give that impression to the story. The verisimilitude benefits from continuity and is reinforced by it. Discontinuity tends to pull the reader out of the story.

What is clear is that when Marvel was sold in 1968, the bonds of continuity and verisimilitude were being damaged and ultimately removed. With that removal, the quality of the books began to suffer. Under the sale, Marvel was no longer under the agreement with National Periodicals to limit the number of its titles, and that number almost doubled in two years. But, the creative engines that built the 1967 Marvel were leaving or had left. Working within those externally imposed limits may have also contributed to the 1960s Marvel’s sharp writing, tight pacing, and innovative art. The quality of the books declined rapidly with the onset of the 1970s, and this was quickly seen in the sales.

I re-created the graph that is on Chris’s page discussing the Marvel Universe and how it lost its way. My version removes some of the sharp peaks and adds a few real-world events against the sales curve. Note that the Marvel upward peak in 1977 is likely from Roy Thomas convincing Marvel senior leadership to allow him to create a 6-issue mini-series of the new movie Star Wars, which is credited with saving the company from bankruptcy.

That 1968 sale and the change in the fortunes of Marvel are well-aligned, though not causally linked via this data. So we have correlation vs causation event here — but correlation is strongly predictive. Stan brought over 35 years of experience managing creative teams and writing dialog for comics to the fore for Marvel’s success. Notice how many people attempted to assume the Editor-in-Chief role after Stan left it, and were only in the job a year or two. It was not until Jim Shooter took the Editor-in-Chief position that Marvel’s sales fortunes began to turn around. Shooter demanded hewing to a universal continuity for Marvel. Though the creative talent chafed against it, sales improved throughout Shooter’s tenure, and declined after his departure.

It is worth observing that the two Editors-in-Chief who practiced or demanded continuity were the most successful in financial benefit to the company.

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They Tried to Cancel Thanksgiving

But even The Wall Street Journal is having none of it.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board announced that the paper will continue with the publishing of its annual Thanksgiving editorials despite efforts by the left to cancel them.

In a Monday op-ed, the board declared that efforts by progressives to stop the publishing of the “racist” 1620 account of the first Thanksgiving, as well as a mid-20th century “contemporary contrast” of American progress, would not succeed and that The Journal wouldn’t “bend to political demands for censorship.”

“No doubt it was only a matter of time. The progressives have come for our annual Thanksgiving editorials. They won’t succeed, but we thought we’d share the tale with readers for an insight into the politicization of everything, even Thanksgiving,” the board wrote.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board announced that the paper will continue with the publishing of its annual Thanksgiving editorials despite efforts by the left to cancel them. It noted that the pair of editorials had been run every year since 1961 without complaint.

Whether you can bring yourself to admit it yet or not, the wicked elite that presently rules the Imperial USA through the fake Biden administration and the finance-media complex is seeking to eliminate every last vestige of Christianity, Heritage America, and American history from the United States, and there is no element of it too small to ignore.

This elite are the heirs of the Bolsheviks who did the same thing to the Russian people – in some cases, they are literally their grandchildren and great-grandchildren – which is why the history of the Soviet Union provides an accurate road map for both their evil intentions as well as their inevitable failure.

So be thankful to God this Thanksgiving that at least you are given to know the truth about the historical situation facing you, your family, your nation, and your faith.

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Winter Heart Attacks

Posted for the record, in anticipation of the media attempting to explain away the unprecedented number of heart attacks this winter as being “in the normal, because people are shoveling snow”.

As winter arrives, it’s worth noting that each year about 11,500 people in the United States are treated in emergency rooms for injuries related to snow shoveling. On average, 100 of those injuries are fatal, generally heart attacks. The data, compiled by the Consumer Product Safety Commission and analyzed a few years ago by the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Ohio, indicates that soft tissue injuries are the most common (55 percent), followed by lacerations (16 percent), fractures (7 percent) and heart-related injuries (7 percent). In the 17-year span of the data, however, cardiovascular injuries accounted for half of the hospitalizations and 100 percent of the fatalities.

And obviously, the number of fatalities related to snow shoveling should be on the low side, due to all that global warming of which we hear so much.