Hello everyone and welcome to the latest installment of Brain Food!
On today’s episode, I review two fo DC comics’s Green Lanterns… Green Lantern #0 and Earth 2#3.
Neither one is good.
http://blip.tv/big-wired/brain-food-episode-24-6425737
6 thoughts on “Brain Food – Episode 24”
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Ars Marginal 
The only thing that kept coming to my mind was that shitty YA m/m novel and I wanted to scream FIRE!!!!!!!
Also, I’m listening to one of the tracks you posted on your Tumblr. You have the best music ever.
Awww… thank you! And you’ve got a tumblr too? Link me and I can add you!
And yeah, the introduction of Alan Scott as the new Green Lantern was as badly angsty as the fire rape from FIRE.
I’m Uryel. I’m usually reposting your stuff.
Been looking forward to this episode to see if there was anything to commend in their handling of Simon Baz. Sigh. You nailed my frustration at seeing yet another PoC be a criminal, but the fact that he gets picked up by the US government after blowing up a building is subtly upsetting on it’s own. I have to consider it an act of erasure of some sort that depictions of abuse of power always seem to come packaged with an excuse. He’s a criminal who blew up a building; as if no one ever got screwed by the government by doing not a damn thing at all. There’s a million ways he could have ended up in a Guantanamo lookalike and still been innocent. He could have been a journalist in Afghanistan who got turned over to US forces when they were still paying bounties. He could have been a cameraman for aljazeera. He could have been someone who travelled to Yemen to study Arabic, got put on the no-fly list, exiled from his own country, and (this is where it becomes fiction) got caught sneaking onto a plane headed home using a fake identity.
No. They had him blow up a building. He had to look suspicious.
This is maybe a minor nitpick, but tattoos like that annoy me. Arabic has a rich history of calligraphy and that looks more like someone wrote out the word in a word processor and copied it. Naskh is designed to be readable, and if you were going to use it for a tattoo (which people do) it’d still be more stylized than that one. That tattoo is just boring times a hundred.
I’m reading a book about the history of black superheroes and how some did start off with checkered pasts as a form of commentary on societal ills, such as Luke Cage being an innocent man who is sent to prison being a commentary on the prison-industrial complex of the 70s.
But here, Simon Baz is a crook. Like you said, he wasn’t innocent, he HAD to be a crook, because that’s the only kind of message that one can send. He’s just not a terrorist. Luke Cage was innocent to begin with and a good, honest man, but it was like they couldn’t even have that for Simon Baz, he had to be a crook first.