This is How it Ends

A Review of Prometheus: Omega

Part Sixteen of "James Versus Fire and Stone"

I was going to say that “Fire and Stone has been a real shit show,” but then I realized that calling it such terms doesn't do it justice. The real value of Fire and Stone is that it's been a learning experience for me. This comes on the heels of me realizing some things about my “career” (which is a term that needs some bold quotation marks). Fire and Stone hasn't pointed me towards this exactly, but one thing I've learned, or at least one thing that has really codified a philosophy I've been developing for some time. Basically, I realized that as bad as something might be, it's not my job to fix it. And it's certainly not my job to fix it for free. As flawed as Prometheus might be as a comic and as just plain incompetent as Alien Versus Predator is, it's not my job to sit there and think of ways that I could make this better.

Because that's a sucker's game.

And that bums me out. I should be the target of internet vitriol. I should be the one with snarky blog posts aimed at me. I should be the one losing sleep to meet a deadline on a book that nobody will remember in two years time. I'm not saying that a “creator” is inherently better than a “critic” (they aren't, just tell me that Roger Ebert hasn't contributed more to art and civilization than Uwe Boll). I've just been struck by this general sense that I need to do more. Whatever that means.

Maybe I should thank each and every book in the Fire and Stone line-up. It wasn't the straw that broke the camel's back, but it has pushed me. In different ways, each one of these books has pushed me to be a better writer. Maybe.

Anyways, with all of that said, when I found out that Fire and Stone was seventeen parts and not sixteen, I know I groaned. I must have. There's no other sane response to finding out that I'm going to get suckered out of another four bucks on a self-imposed dare. All of that said, this last book came as something of a surprise. Because, Blimey. Prometheus: Omega is really, really good.

Omega is written by Kelly Sue DeConnick, she of Pretty Deadly and Bitch Planet (which shares the same pulpy/political DNA that made up the first three Alien movies). That should have told me that this was going to be an excellent book. Of course nobody told me this. It's nice to be pleasantly surprised, though. As much as Pretty Deadly is most certainly not my thing, she is a writer with a point of view and a set of skills that I like to see put to work. There's also this tinge of liberal guilt in the back of my head telling me that it's nice that women are writing more comics and that these comics are good (I'm currently reading a trade of the new Ms. Marvel run. It's so good, guys). There's no inherent value to that, I suppose, but it's nice. And it certainly can't be any worse than the men who worked on AvP.

Agustin Alessio deliver some solid work as the book's artist. Like the artist behind Prometheus, Alessio delivers a painterly quality that gives the work a level of class that you don't see in a lot of other books. Often when you see this style of work in a comic, it ends up being a series of good looking pictures that, when put together form a bad comic book (the companion to this phenomenon would be when a screenwriter or a novelist tries their hand at making a comic). Fortunately, that isn't the case.

Alessio's work isn't perfect, though. His work does lack some of the impact and the kinetics of Mooneyham had on Predator (a very different book, but one with a steady hand behind the art). Yet, conversely, therein lies its strength. His work isn't fantastical. It isn't showy. It's grounded and it gives the story the kind of weight that a horror (or adventure) story like this should have. The world of Prometheus: Omega looks less like a comic version of an alien planet than it does an alien planet. Tonally, it shares the most similarities with Patric Reynolds's work, which couldn't look more different stylistically.

I like it a lot is what I'm saying. I'm sorry I lack the vocabulary for writing about art. I should work on that.

MUTANT OF THE WEEK: Dare I say. . . It's Elden.

That's right. Elden: My Most Hated of Characters. Elden the Abomination. Elden the Plot Device That Just Won't Die. Elden the Least. He's kind of great in this. As listless and silly as he's been in the hands of other writers, DeConnick actually manages to put him into the right place at the right time and turn out a corker of a story.

As I say this, keep this in mind: There is a mutant mountain full of alien juice that the team has to escape from. Elden, for his achievements in this book, is cooler than a living piece of the planet- Cooler than an actual xenomorph as defined in the dictionary.

Then again, Elden's final scene is him becoming a Giger tapestry. How can anything in the world compete with that?

Nothing to do with the topic at hand.
I'm just excited for this movie.

After a long spell in the cold, it's a relief that I can give Prometheus: Omega FIVE OUT OF FIVE CHESTBURSTERS. It's nice to see something this well put together cap it off the only miniseries event that I've ever partaken in. I'm glad it's over, but I'm also glad for the few highlights cut inbetween the crap. Omega is a rare beam of light.

As a stand alone comic it also works. It's well written. It's funny. It's weird. It's good looking. Like Predator, it's everything a comic book should be and, even better, it's everything this particular comic should be.

If you have any affection at all towards Prometheus, Aliens, Predator, or any combination there of, this is a comic you should pick up. Or you should just pick it up because Kelly Sue DeConnick is a talented lady who deserves your adoration and dollars. If Fire and Stone only provided her (and the team on Aliens and on Predator) a forum for more people to see them, then perhaps it was worth it.

Perhaps. . . 

You can read all of "James Versus Fire and Stone" here! There! It's all there! Read it!

Predator #4

Alien Versus Predator #4
Predator #3
Aliens #4
Prometheus #4
Alien Versus Predator #3
Aliens #3
Predator #2
Prometheus #3
Alien Versus Predator #2
Aliens #2
Predator #1

Prometheus #2

Alien Versus Predator #1

Alien #1 and Prometheus #1

James Kislingbury is basically over it.

As an Expert in Lesbian Pulp Novels. . .

As an antidote to the unfortunate macho postering of Nick Pizzolotta's Galveston I picked up Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt.

I don't know what you've heard, but this Patricia Highsmith character can write the hell out of a book. And I don't care who knows it! Even though it isn't a book about murder or sociopaths (I think there's only one possible sociopath in the book), it still managed to keep my attention. But that doesn't need to be said. The book claims to be a "masterwork" right on the cover. It also claims that Nabokov ripped it off for Lolita in the same sentence so, like a lot of my criticism, I don't see the need in taking on The Price of Salt from the front.

What I'm impressed most by is the importance of correspondence in the novel.


To a person who has sent, maybe, three personal letters in his his entire life, to see this many people send this many letters over this many miles is utterly foreign to me. Reading about mercenaries in Africa or Nazi hunters makes more sense to me, is more familiar to me, than to send a letter to somebody on vacation not knowing where exactly they are. I mean, who forwards letters? Who has the time for that?

And that's what most of the last third of the novel is about. As much as it's about bouncing around the USA in a car (something I am deeply familiar with), it's also about people's words bouncing back and forth to each other. Entire relationships are formed and dissolved based on what people write in letters. This also means that most of the "action" in the book is based around people stopping what they're doing, sitting down, and processing what other people are saying. It's an interesting way to tell a story and it speaks to Highsmith's skill that she manages to ring this much enjoyment out of an idea that sounds so tedious on paper.

I suppose that's the other thing I am impressed by. I am impressed by how much nothing happens in this book. And I mean nothing. Long stretches of it. Not that it's a bad thing. Highsmith has a wonderful grasp of the English language, and like my favorite authors, she has a beautiful handle on the inner workings of human beings. As much as I love procedural novels and books about people moving through the motions, I also love how this book seems to be about people going on about their day. Going to work. Going to a bar. Writing a letter. Then, POW, a gun and lesbians sleeping with each other are introduced within the span of ten pages. It's like it was making up for lost time.

I guess there's also a learning experience in the doomed relationship of Richard and Therese, but that's another entry for another day.


Also, what's that title actually supposed to mean? I haven't felt this confused about a book's title since The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. As a title Carol makes more sense and even then that title doesn't exactly tell me anything.

James Kislingbury is a writer, a podcast, and an aspiring set designer.

WILD CYBERPUNKS RUNNING THE STREETS

WILD CYBERPUNKS RUNNING THE STREETS
Or "How I Got My Shit Together and Finally Started Reading Akira"

I started reading Akira.

More specifically, I finally started reading Akira. I might have been inspired by iFanboy's series on the show or I maybe Spex mentioned it to me one time to many. Or maybe my collective ignorance finally made me feel guilty enough to finally check the damn thing out. Maybe I just broke. You happy now?

I think the first time I ever saw this book on display was at the Virgin Records in Burbank. If you're looking to help date this: Virgin Records no longer exists. I'm fairly certain Burbank has been taken by the mole people, as well.

It wouldn't have been too long after seeing that I began my short foray into the world of anime. It's not a time I'm super proud of, but it wasn't nearly as dark as it could be. One of the reasons for this is that Akira was being re-released in theaters with a new voice acting (I didn't let the fact that Tetsou sounded exactly like one of the Digimon kids distract me. . . Mostly because I really like Digimon).

I might have seen Princess Mononoke at that point (on a VHS tape at my friend's house along with The Big Lebowski and Rushmore and, for whatever reason, Heavy Metal 2000), I was certainly aware of the medium-- but seeing Akira play out was like hearing Led Zeppelin* for the first time. It was the kind of seminal moments that you get when a work of art completely expands your horizons. It was what the medium was supposed to be. Looking at the comic book, even with it being nearly thirty years old, I realize that it still is everything the medium should be.

Akira is the first comic in a long time where I've though "Can you even do that?"

Katsuhiro Otomo does things in the comic that should be impossible to do in the medium. You see a lot of this in bad comics. You see people trying to fit too many words onto a page. You see people used to working in one medium (almost always film or prose and almost always as failed movie pitches) failing to work in the other. You see all kinds of mistakes based on a basic misunderstanding of how comic book grammar works.

As an amateur, I've caught myself doing this when I write. Most of my mistakes involve a character doing too much in a panel (like, you know, moving) or it involves a sound effect (Note: You cannot cut on a sound in a comic). It's a terrible habit and it's something easy to do if you aren't completely versed in what a comic book can and cannot do.

With Otomo what you see is a man who knows the rules and who breaks these rules whenever he feels like it, and who then gets away with it.He inverts panels, he turns them on their head, he stacks them up and cuts up their borders. He chops things up, he shifts back and forth. He hides things from the reader. This comic has dissolves-- dissolves, for God's sake! That's not a thing you can do in comics! But he is and he's getting away with it!

What's impressive, beyond the strength of the actual artwork, is how seamless it all looks when you're reading it. It doesn't read as a man showing off what he can do, it just reads as good comics. It's the kind of good that seems so simple and so obvious that I wonder why more people don't straight rip it off. At least I know why I haven't ripped this book off.

In all those decades I can't think of anybody that has done what Otomo has done. I can only think of imitators and I can only think of imitators that fall short. And, really, that's all there is. There is Akira and then there's everything else that came after Akira. It isn't only that Otomo is a master draftsman, there is something magical going on inside this book that I can't quite put my finger on.

Again, it makes me feel like an idiot for having waited this long. Don't be like me, go out and read it right now. You won't be sorry for long.

I'm two volumes into the book. I only stopped because, for whatever reason, I'm missing volume three (which means I need to drive over to Long Beach and steal that copy from my friend Alex or just break down and actually buy the damn thing). I can't wait to blaze through the rest of this book. And to finally pick up Domu, which has sat in the back of my mind for nearly two decades with the rest of my hazy memories of Dark Horse's ads. That is if I can find a copy of Domu. After that I'm going to watch the movie again. And then I'll check out Steamboy one more time. And then. . .

James Kislingbury writes comics and podcasts. You can follow him on twitter.



SIDE NOTE:
Actually, you should all go and see Memories. I think I wrote about it once. . . Anyways, one of the shorts in the film is directed by Otomo and you should check that out, because nobody directs rusty industrial design quite like Otomo.

FOOT NOTES:
*I now realize that Zeppelin is one of the most profoundly over-rated and over-played bands in all of time and space, but we were all fourteen at one point and, thankfully, we were only fourteen once.

The One and Only True Detective Theory That You Need To Read

There's a lot of chatter on the ol' computer box about who-done-it in the HBO show True Detective. While this show is one of the most talked about programs on TV, one of most important points about the mystery has been ignored. People are focusing on the wrong details and spinning out into crazy conclusions and my theory would save all of those people-- and their readers-- a lot of heartache.

I've been through the episodes over and over again and I think I have a real handle on the TV show and where it's going. I'm no expert, so let know what you're thinking.

(MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD)

(YOU WERE WARNED TURN BACK NOW!)

Okay, here's my theory:

You all need to shut the fuck up and watch the fucking show.

You're not Poirot. You aren't even Miss Marple. Jesus fucking Christ, if you're anything, you're an Inspector Clouseau if he had taken to smoking industrial loads of ketamine instead of having his manservant randomly attack him. Knock it the fuck off and watch the fucking show. Nobody cares about you half-assed, cockamamy ramblings you've dressed up as a "theory." Remember Lost? Remember it? Remember nanobots? Do you? I can see it on your face that you do.

It's going to show its hand when shows its hand. Stop trying to outsmart it. Like solving the mystery before anyone else in the room does makes you enjoy the show any more. That it makes you understand it any more.

The only theory I have about the show and the mystery is that you're all wrong and you're driving me nuts. Shut the fuck up and just be grateful that we're living in the greatest age of television since. . . ever.

Alright. I'm sorry I yelled, but this is what you have brought me to. You think I'm happy about this?

(END SPOILERS!!!!!11!)

A Boring Review for a Pretty Decent Comic

Lobster Johnson: The Burning Hand

Good to see Mr. Johnson getting cover work.

Hellboy trades are one of those things I wait around for on bated breath. I love Hellboy and have for quite some time and Mike Mignola is quietly one of my favorite names in comic books. The world that Hellboy exists in means a lot to me and every time a new, proper Hellboy trade comes out, I am excited. That even extends to side stories, stories like Lobster Johnson: The Burning Hand.

In this particular case, I was especially excited because Tonci Zonjic, a man as talented as his name is unpronouncable, would be performing art duties alongside John Arcudi's writing. What's more is that the last Lobster trade was something of a disappointment, so this could only

My longing for another Lobster Johnson trade comes from that fact that it was drawn by Tonci Zonjic and increased by the fact that the first trade could only be improved upon.

The Burning Hand exists as its own story and the story that is there is fairly solid. Does it have glow in the dark Indian Italian mobsters? Yes. Does it have a hobo spy ring? Yes. Does it have a dragon lady and a guy who "isn’t" Peter Lorre? You bet. The problem is that it uses the characters, the setting, and the crazy throwaway madness to no real end. It just is. While it is told fairly well, it still isn't Hellboy. Hell, it isn't BPRD.

John Arcudi is skilled at a great many things as a writer. As a nerd and as a fan of what amounts to be pulp garbage, I appreciate that Arcudi is best when he's in a position to throw his idea bucket at the story at hand. What I mean is that all of the zombies, werejaguars, and Fu Manchus all exist to accentuate a more important story. In the same way that Cuba's revolutionary problems aren't what the Godfather series is about, the Nazi clone robots are not what BPRD is about. The story is never just the monsters, it's what these monsters mean to the world and the people in it.

See? Now there's a title!

The problems with the Lobster Johnson series is that it is only ever about the Nazi robot elephant in the room, which I guess is sustaining enough of an idea for 100 pages or so. The book is defined by its disposable thrills and those pointless moments are kind of amazing in their own way. They show you a wider, weirder world that would maybe work better as an ongoing story or maybe one that didn't require you to fill in the gaps with various other series.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that Hellboy, as a series, isn't something that is as self contained as I think it is. Huh. That'll bug me.

Anyways.

 My favorite weird moment is when Lobster Johnson and his team are lured into the mansion of what they believe to be a mob boss’ hideout. In reality, it’s a lair given over to the cannibals that run New York City’s underground and it is a trap. Because of course it is.

Because it’s a pulp book and it stars a guy with two pistols. It isn’t be the solid world building of BPRD or the far-out mythology of Hellboy. It is, however, fun. Saying it is “insubstantial” is almost inherent to the premise. It’s almost a compliment. People don't want to read baggy pulp stories, that's how you get bad Quentin Tarantino movies. This genre was built to move and Lobster Johnson moves.

While it's in the same universe, you buy Hellboy for the mythology and for BPRD you buy it for this cast of characters dealing with the end of the world and in this case you buy it for the mobster cannibal houses.

The art from Tonci Zonjic is the best part of this comic. Zonjic brings something special to the work in the same way that Duncan Fegredo and Guy Davis bring something special to their work, so does Mr. Zonjic. I'd like to think that he gets it.

What are you doing? Buy this book already.

It somehow just fits better into the overall look and feel of  the Hellboy universe. Feel is a word that I have to put in itallics, because there's no real qualifying it. Some artists just feel wrong. I never liked anyone drawing Hellboy until Douglas Fegredo, because he seemed to get it somehow. While Lobster Johnson isn't a proper Hellboy book, he performs the magic that Fegredo has done in the past, which is he makes the content seem both beautiful and somehow perfectly natural in the the supernatural world that Mike Mignola has created.

In the end isn't that all you need? The book is called Lobster Johnson. There are better pulp books and there are worse pulp books and there are very few that involve the Hellboy name, so as flawed or as underwhelming as it is, it does deliver on the title. It is about a character named Lobster Johnson and he does some Lobster-Johnson-ass-shit in between the cover and the back.

At least it doesn't completely drop the ball like The Iron Prometheus, as well. That felt like it someone had forgot that it was a four issue mini-series at the last moment and had to cram in an ending (one which you only get if you read BPRD which, last I checked, is not how Hellboy works. That is how bad X-Men work). If I'm angry at The Burning Hand, it's because I'm projecting all of my frustrations on it from the last book in the series.

In the end, though, this this stuff is fun. And that is kind of all it is. It isn't brilliant, it doesn't transcend anything and it doesn't really need to. I expect more from the talent involved and from the franchise involved and, yet, this book is about a guy with two pistols and his crew of New York stereotypes shooting people and saving the day. If that's the worst thing that can be said about this book then I think we could use a lot more terrible comic books like this.

A Title is Everything

Here are a list of book titles I can buy for 30p in the back of this Modesty Blaise book--

I, Lucifer
A Taste For Death
Sabre-Tooth
The Impossible Virgin
The Long Lavender Look
The Deep Blue Goodbye
A Purple Place For Dying
The Quick Red Fox
The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper
Dress Her in Indigo
Nightmare in Pink
A Deadly Shade of Gold
Bonecrack
For Kicks
Rat Race
The Wrong Side of the Sky
Shooting Script

Goodnight!

Oh, I Get College

Dead as Fuck

Tura Satana. 1938-2011.

That Time That Guy Richie Decided to Get Back to Making Movies

It's good to see after the turgid, self-indulgent whatever-the-fuck-that-was of Revolver, the hideously unfunny Swept Away, and the pointless, cash-grab that was Rock n' Rolla, Guy Richie decided to make a movie again.

And, you know what? It's pretty good.

It's a fairly average tab-A into slot-B mystery-romp, where it differentiates itself from what would have been a run of the mill thriller is that it is set in Victorian London, which is always a fun place to look at (also a place more needing of shampoo than maybe even the city of Deadwood). On paper the treatment sounds like a turkey receipe, thankfully the reality is that, like so many films, it works much better in motion than it does as a static idea.

Plus, it reminds me of the Guy Richie I spent my junior high years obsessing about. In this movie, he's the fun Guy Richie that's full of camera tricks and Jason Statham and not the Thing That Married Madonna. Even though I like the slow, brooding London of a Masterpiece Theater episode, it's fun to see it handled like a high budget action blockbuster or a music video instead of a reassuring period piece engineered to lull dowagers into hibernation. It's a pleasant novelty, which is what a blockbuster like this should be, I guess, if nothing else. I love that time period and I love those aesthetics, so if only for that, I dug this movie.

Moving swiftly along, I want to talk about the guns in this movie, because, boy, this movie has some guns in it. While the whole of the movie doesn't really hold up as a collection of idiosyncrasies as I would like it to, it's got quite a few-- the first being the Victorian setting, the second being antique firearms, and the third being a drugged up bulldog named after a British general that fought in the First Anglo-Afghan War, which is a fixation I didn't know that I had until now.

And for fun, let us revel in Guy Richie's failures:

(As I understand it, when Revolver was coming out, Guy Richie said that he wasn't going to make anymore crime movies like Snatch or Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, and that he was only going to make bizarre, intellectual, art-housey films like this instead. Well, I think we all know what happened with that. Looking at it now it strikes me as an artist going as far as he possibly can with his talent, which is noble in its own way. In that way it also reminds me of Magnolia. Take with some salt, if you get the chance.)

And now, once more, with feeling:

Movies, Babies, and Balloons

So, finally, after seven years of waiting, my sister finally decides to show her kids Raiders of the Lost Ark.



She worried a lot about it and-- Oh, wait, don't worry, this isn't really a blog post about how funny kids are at that age, am I right?-- I'm glad she finally got around to showing them it. I can understand the trepidation. You worry about whether a kid is ready to watch such and such a movie at such and such a time, which is a concept almost utterly foreign to me-- when I was five (two years younger than they are now) I had watched the Terminator movies, Predator, Alien, Aliens, and Total Recall, but, for whatever reason, had to beg-- BEG-- to see Jurassic Park in the theater. Showing kids something like Nazis melting is hard to gauge.

What is more frightening, and this is the fear I share, is that they aren't going to like it or that they aren't going to Love it. My sisters Anne and Amy share a lot of movies together-- Star Wars, Aliens, and Indiana Jones. It hurts if the kids don't get those movies, because they're so close to our heart. Getting rejected sucks and what is more is that you want other people to have these great experiences that you had.

I'm like a lot of people where I blanch when I hear that they've "Never seen Star Wars," because, first of all, they're probably fucking liars and I should wear their tongue as a necklace. What frightens us, though, when we hear mad bullshit like that is that they've gone their whole lives without understanding what the it's like to run through the Death Star's trench or to watch Obi Wan get cut down or to watch Greedo get shot or to watch Old Man Kenobi use his Force powers to trick that stormtrooper. It's unimaginable. All of that is a part of our childhoods. It's a part of what makes us US.

The Indiana Jones movies-- with the exception of the fourth movie-- holds the same place in my heart. What is it like to not have seen those movies? I imagine it's on par with being molested-- you're simply a lesser person for it.

Getting back to me and my sister, she held off on the movies because she wanted the time to be right. It's a noble endeavor, but it comes from fear. That fear is always going to be there, though. Kids not liking Indiana Jones or Star Wars is on par with your children enjoying the speech of the National Socialist Party. It's awful to think about.

We finally watched it though and despite a few hiccups with popcorn and drinks and forts and imagined maladies and attention, we had a good time. It was fun to experience that movie for the first time again, if only tangentially. I haven't seen that movie in far too long and it was fun to go through it again with someone who had never seen it-- even if we had to answer retarded questions every five minutes.

The funniest thing and probably the most surprising thing was having to explain to these kids who the Nazis were.

Think about that. Have you ever lived a day in your life that you can remember where you didn't know what Nazis were? Where, when you thought about that side of things, you weren't bothered by it? How amazing, how strange must that be to not know about what the Nazis were and what they did. When my niece asked me who they were, I just told them that they were bad guys-- bullies-- and that they were German and left it at that. She took it well enough, but later on in the movie, she wanted to know-- serious, this time-- if they were actually real. There isn't anything too profound I'm trying to say with this, I mean, this kid can barely read, let's not run away with ourselves here, but it's just funny that something as important as World War II and the Nazis is a whole other frontier for them. It's as amazing as not ever having seen Indiana Jones, I guess.



When I got back home PBS was showing on their Classic Art Showcase The Red Balloon. I've never watched this movie (and I realize that makes me a poorer person, sorry). In the ten minutes of it that I watched I was pretty impressed. My first impression was that my niece and nephew need to watch this and this would be a cool experience for them to have, this weird, French short film. My second thought, which is a thought that has only occurred to me upon writing this is that maybe kids need to be imbued with the basic concepts of film grammar and film theory. Not Lacon and not Arnheim or Godard or Ebert or whoever, but basic films so that they understand it. That can't be that crazy, right?

I'm reminded of an anecdote I heard during my Latin American Film class, which was that there was this South American director who wanted to make films for and about South American Indians. In order to show them what film was-- after all, the concept of running water to these people was a river-- he showed them film around him and that he liked. They didn't get it. They had no exposure to that kind of story telling. They had no exposure to that medium, this flat, probably black and white, dreamscape that was cinema. And he realized that if he wanted to make a movie about these people, it would have to use the same grammar and ideologies that they had. I don't know if he ever succeeded, I assume he did if I had ever heard about him, but maybe the same is true for children. Kids are probably more sophisticated media-wise than Indio-Americans, but they're being fed nothing but junk. Milie Cyrus (which is a name I refuse to know how to spell), the Jonas Brothers, Nick Toons, and all of this other meaningless crap. I can't imagine that adds to their cultural point of view.

So, maybe the difficulty with showing them movies is that they don't speak the same language. It's this foreign thing. They're used to simple, easy to follow, meaningless pap. They aren't used to submarines and Nazis and black people. Maybe that's my job in this case. Showing movies to children is important, because it's as big a part of our culture as, I don't know, liberty and voting and freedom. Not to put to grand of a point on the end of this stick, but art is as big of a part of what makes Americans who we are as anything else-- Hell, it's as big of a part of what makes us HUMAN as anything else.

So there's that.

Here's my Card