This comic book is about hating average Americans
based if true
Dear chuds, if you’re not Nazis, why are you so angry on their behalf?
“Muh natzees”
lmao these losers actually think their point of view is popular enough to hurt comic sales.
These people don’t buy comics either
The only people who buy comics anymore are a select few nerds who are dedicated to filling their longboxes until they’re buried alive under an avalanche of cheap paper
And me, who waits for the trades
Though, I don’t buy many anymore because both DC (fired a trans creator for making a Charlie Kirk joke and scrubbed her work in its entirety) and Marvel (owned by Disney, dedicated to making all its characters boring) are shitty
I’ve been trying to get into Anerican comics-- do you have recommendations? I’ve been liking Free Planet for the effort in worldbuilding/politics.
One really good one going on is The Power Fantasy by Kieron Gillen, its like x-men with geopolitics. Also the writer/artist for this batman annual also wrote Transformers (2023), which is also really good
The Power Fantasy by Kieron Gillen
image comics
In every comic of theirs I read there’s always that anti-leftist or anti-global South (imperialist?) commentary there; in Luther Strode you had an ancient woman give a whole speech about how modern feminists don’t know what real persecution/misogyny really is and call everything that; in another Lovecraftian one they portrayed countries in Africa and the Middle East in a very scary, orientalist manner (and this was before anything Lovecraftian had even happened). In another comic you had heroes who were sent to a Middle Eastern country to get rid of a dictator (one of those heroes specifically) tell the violent dictator that actually he agrees with him and that he knows how to manage his people well (but that he was going to kill him anyway because that’s what he was hired to do). I also recall the creators of the company gave off some weird reactionary vibes too. EDIT: Also in invincible, one of the villains is a satire of a leftist; the guy with (earth?) powers; he talks about the founding fathers being slave owners and fascists (he’s being played for laughs).
I’m sure because they employ so many creators, there’s probably lots of stories that don’t have to drop in an anti-leftist or imperialist commentary, but after every comic of theirs I touch I find this stuff I personally decided to give their company a miss.
Well, its an indie comic publisher, the quality depends on the writer, Kieron Gillen is someone who i have read before in immortal x-men (which is x-men with geopolitics lol) and doctor aphara which was also really good. So i trusted in him when i started power fantasy (back then there was only 2 issues) and now at isuue 12 its currently my favorite ongoing comic right now
I also didnt like invincible very much. Another really good Image comic right now its Transformers (2023) the guy who wrote this absolute batman annual wrote the first 24 issues, and they are great super good (sadly kirkman took over in 25 so i dont have much hope for it)
Also i havent read them but i have heard really good things about Radiant Black and Rouge Sun both are in the same universe
Oof, I should’ve checked who Kieron Gillen was first before I said anything; the dude wrote ‘Once & future’, and that comic series opened with anti-white supremacist messaging; this dude is definitely writing good stuff. I’ll look up more of his comics and give the series you mentioned earlier a check! I’ll look into some of your other recommendations as well; thanks!
Power fantasy
Read some of it. It features a sassy woman superman who, in her centrism, decides on her own to personally intervene in the Cuba Missile Crisis by… setting off all the nukes in Cuba and Turkey…
Jesus fucking christ
Not sure if it’s what you’re looking for but Charles Burns stuff is pretty good. Other stuff I like is TMNT (the original comic series), Y: The Last Man, The Maxx, and I can’t remember what else right now.
I’m imagining the “Krakk” onomatopoeia isn’t actually an onomatopoeia and is batman shouting “KraKKKer!” at the top of his lungs.
You know what’s crazy? That’s not even false; I recall that video of the kid who went to a classroom and started Sieg heiling and using abusive language only to be followed out by the entire classroom and grabbed and kicked around (though not that much, someone there stops the folks), and he actually cries about “I thought you guys were the peace party!”
Critical support to chuds and ongoing struggle to completely devalue threats. When “they want us dead” goes for everything from someone killing Charlie Kirk for being annoying to changing the waffle house logo, it really means nothing.
“My Hero did it better”
One of the most overtly fascist shows I’ve ever seen
Nah MHA is just liberal preserve-the status-quo superheroism. There’s even a revolution faction that’s very clearly a dig at marxists where they’re depicted as well meaning but manipulated by their leaders. The superheroes are really just trying to preserve a society that clearly isn’t working. They’re libs.
It’s superhero Harry Potter. It has exactly the same world building, exactly the same ability to tell things are wrong with the world, exactly the same commentary about people who try to change things, and it has exactly the same flaws as Harry Potter. It’s lib.
What’s that?
I assume they don’t mean My Hero AcademiaI see the picture, looks pretty bad.That was my assumption
Really? Hero Aca is super misogynistic and the shit with the evil “Liberation Front” is bad, but generally I think it’s at least somewhat progressive. They have a disgraced “hero” who was a eugenicist and they spend a lot of time on discussing how it affected his various victims, how they try to move on, and how he tries to redeem himself, and the usual Great Man thing, while not not a thing, is significantly subverted starting from the penultimate arc and carried through the last one.
Maybe I’m just a dweeb, but while I don’t actually like Hero Aca that much or think it’s that clever, the way that it turns around and substantially rejects the normal shounen “I’m going to become the [whatever] King” in favor of collectively working toward a better future puts it way ahead of a lot of shounen imo
Edit: By the way, the guy saying “my hero” was apparently referring to a comic he drew, though I couldn’t identify it. But it does have a white dude in American regalia sadistically brutalizing a black guy in front of his crying partner, so there’s that.
BNHA is in such a weird place because it’s completely incoherent but there’s at least some acknowledgement in it that its world is completely fucked, the author just doesn’t have the sort of political literacy required to actually understand, unpack, and criticize it cogently. Like the entire hero system is bad, it’s built on hypocritical lies and on exploiting and commodifying people’s desire to help one another, the broader society is just completely refusing to deal with the persecution of anyone with quirks that cause any but the most aesthetically pleasing physical mutations, and there’s no coherent answer or will to resolve this so they just keep sort of kicking the can down the road rather than dealing with it, but the author doesn’t have an answer either because he’s a lib and so only has right wing frameworks to draw on, making the villains the mouthpieces for cogent criticisms of the world’s real problems but at the same giving them more extreme right wing answers that just make things worse.
Like Stain was fundamentally the super-power version of
in terms of mixing cogent critiques with gibbering reactionary nonsense and directionless, pointlessly cruel methods. The Liberation Front had cogent grievances with the bigotry of mainstream society and with how ill-fitting the blanket restrictions on super power use were (although IIRC the author’s explicit commentary on those laws was that they weren’t actually nearly as draconian as initially portrayed, but rather boiled down to criminalizing injuring or endangering others with them, and putting disruptive or reckless use of them in a “you will be asked to please not do that around other people” tier, with anything below that being tacitly accepted), but were a bunch of social darwinist libertarian chuds who wanted to reorder society’s hierarchy based on who rolled the biggest gun and lifted pickup truck combo with their magic good boy genes.There’s no real fully oppositional critique in the story from anything but a gibbering reactionary perspective, while softer liberal critiques just collaborate with and get recuperated back into the system.
the way that it turns around and substantially rejects the normal shounen “I’m going to become the [whatever] King” in favor of collectively working toward a better future puts it way ahead of a lot of shounen imo
Yeah, that’s the best that can be said about it really. It has some thread of solidarity in a stratified, hyper-individualist world that gives it at least some redeeming themes, for all that the rest of it is incoherent beyond just a general understanding that the setting is a bad place ruled by people who are definitely wrong in at least some ways.
To Be Hero X did fundamentally the same conceit way better, and actually managed to cogently critique a similar society in an absolutely scathing way, at least in the first half. I do still need to finish watching that at some point.
I agree that the author’s political literacy is fundamentally inadequate for the setting he wrote, and will keep repeating that I don’t actually really like BNHA, but I talked more about what I viewed as some of the better qualities of the series in another comment. I think their handling of the super-eugenicist is also surprisingly progressive, but I think a lot of other people have spent way more time on that subject and, while I think it’s good, I never found it that interesting tbh.
I think the core message of the series is intended to be a relatively egalitarian solidarity and I can at least give it credit for being pretty clear on that point by the end.
their handling of the super-eugenicist is also surprisingly progressive
I assume you’re talking about Endeavor there? I’d agree, yeah. Giving him a redemption arc without the idealistic feel-good parts of a redemption arc, where he’s an evil piece of shit who’s done so much harm that he can never make up for it and will genuinely never be forgiven nor absolved but that he can still become better and stop being a piece of shit moving forwards, that’s actually pretty good. That kind of story so often falls into giving the subject of it a reward (usually the forgiveness of their victims) for accumulating enough special good boy redemption points that what’s basically a cold “oh, you’re trying to be better, you’re trying to stop being so destructive to everyone around you? Cool, good, you absolutely should do that, but you still suck, we all still hate you, and things can never be the normal you want” response from his victims instead is great writing.
I think the core message of the series is intended to be a relatively egalitarian solidarity and I can at least give it credit for being pretty clear on that point by the end.
I agree, it’s not a noxious series in the way some people think, it’s just a flawed and incoherent but ultimately well meaning one.
MHA is superhero Harry Potter
That’s not fair, it’s not even close to that bad. Harry Potter is a story about a rich nepobaby jock with special good boy genes who lives in a nightmarish hellworld the author fundamentally thinks is right and good, who just sort of coasted along on pure vibes reacting to shit that happened from my very distant memory of all the books that were out when I was still a literal child which was only like the first half of the series at the most, who wins on his own with a special good boy technicality and grows up to be a cop.
BNHA is a story about a working class kid who lost the magic gene lottery but gets the super power equivalent of a scholarship for being selflessly altruistic and self-sacrificing, who suffers considerably in the course of working towards his dream of inspiring and helping others, in a nightmarish hellworld the author clearly recognizes is bad and can make some cogent criticisms of even if there’s no offered solution, and the ultimate conflict is resolved through the combined efforts of the entire cast in a stand up fight, although the protagonist does still grow up to be a sort of cop-without-the-license-to-kill/first responder hybrid.
It’s a flawed and incoherent work, but is fundamentally the work of a well-meaning lib who just doesn’t have the necessary framework to do better, as opposed to HP which is reactionary slop from a noxious status-quo neolib who is completely amoral and monstrous.
The only difference between Harry and Deku is that Harry has a horrible upbringing and Deku has a nice mom. Otherwise their stories are basically the same, totally normal kid gets magical/super powers and gets thrust into a world they couldn’t have been in otherwise where they live out a school life as The Chosen One before ultimately facing a pre-ordained nemesis evil to change literally nothing about the world.
And they both become cops.
Harry Potter is also a working class kid who is given everything he could ever want upon becoming The Chosen One. Just the same as Deku. You can’t pretend his upbringing with the Dursleys wasn’t real just because he gets given everything he could ever need when he discovers he’s magical. Deku similarly is given everything he could ever need upon becoming The Chosen One.
after learning more about this guy than i needed to know, i think it might be called Lonestar
That’s definitely the one. Sorry about indirectly prompting you to subject yourself to this guy’s garbage.
no worries, it’s an incredible little diamond of soy-right drivel, it includes faux fourth-wall-breaking on page one and the word “yoink” while also being racist violence-fantasy wank
the context of that pic is the hero just rescued the woman from a gang attack (hispanic coded, naturally) and the other guy was the group leader or whatever
MHA is superhero Harry Potter with exactly the same worldbuilding, exactly the same main character (minus horrible childhood) and exactly the same flaws in that it just wants to preserve the status quo despite depicting a society that is not good. It has the same takes on everything as Harry Potter does.
I think this is a little extreme. It’s not exactly on the “ethical slavery” meta that HP is, it just commits the most generic sin of superhero media while still having an unusual (not unique, just unusual) emphasis on solidarity by the end.
I have been inspired https://hexbear.net/post/6593791
I think the very first words of the series is the protagonist chosen one saying that some people are inherently better than others
The very first words in the series are that people aren’t born equal and that the protagonist (Deku) is on the negative side of that inequality, because not everyone has powers and Deku was born without them, something for which he was abused throughout his childhood. The first arc of the manga hinges on him unknowingly demonstrating to the lead hero of the time (All Might) that he has a courageous disposition, throwing himself into danger to save someone despite lacking powers. All Might tells him that he should be a hero, that he is the sort of person most suited for it because of his character, regardless of his relatively lack of ability. The end of the first chapter comes back to the scenario of those first words you allude to and Deku being heartbroken in his childhood that he couldn’t be a hero because he didn’t have powers, remembering that as his mother tried to console him back then, he wished that she had instead told him that despite it all he still can become a hero. It’s made somewhat more obvious by this that the opening monologue was an expression of internalized bigotry and despair at his condition.
All Might’s power (“One for All”) has a unique feature, which is that he can pass it on to a new bearer, and he chooses Deku because of his character. I obviously have some misgivings with this plot point, but I think it works out in the end.
In the end,
All Might, as a result of the above, eventually loses his power, though he is still involved in the final conflict because he basically gets Iron Man armor, and of course he still has his character and experience which let him make good use of it. Deku, the so-called chosen one, is more or less defeated on an individual basis, and passes his power on to one of his classmates by the same means, losing it in the process and returning to his original state of not having powers, because the urgency of the situation demanded that every available resource be put toward the immediate defeat of their opposition. That classmate, who incidentally was the main person who abused him in their childhood, thwarts the Big Bad (someone whose power was basically to rob others of theirs, “All for One”), and to some extent makes amends with Deku. For the next few years, Deku is in semi-retirement from being a hero because of both not having powers and being traumatically injured in the fight, instead working as a teacher, but eventually is able to become a hero again via the same technology that All Might used.
The subversion that I was talking about is based on the very last line of the first chapter, where Deku’s narration continues from the scene I just mentioned to say that “This is the story of how I became the greatest hero” (which I’m also seeing translated as merely “a great hero”). This can be viewed as the “promise” of the series, which is a common trope in shounen, like Naruto saying “I’m going to become Hokage!” It can also be viewed as him slingshotting from despair to a type of well-meaning but misguided arrogance, though the audience is clearly not meant to read it as such at the time, but just to take it at face value.
The penultimate arc, while it can easily come off as a senseless and needlessly edgy sidetrack, is meant to be the expression of the flaws in Deku’s Great Man, self-sacrifice-fetishizing ideology, as he works himself nearly to death taking on every possible fight alone so that other people don’t get hurt. It’s an overly narrow expression of the meaning of the phrase “One for All,” you could say. The details don’t really matter and the execution is clumsy, but it ends with one of his classmates, assisted by a huge crowd and his other classmates, talking sense into him that this approach is irrational and he needs to accept other people bearing the weight of things rather than acting like the so-called chosen one because of the power he inherited and his confused, condescending attempt at compassion. Deku, collapsing in tears, addresses the reader by going back to that “promise” and amending it, now saying that the present story is also “The story about how we all became the greatest heroes.” i.e. himself, his peers, their mentors, their supporters among “hero society,” and even the general public (kind of), as a small child who is a fan of Deku’s and another nameless civilian come to Deku’s aid while he is collapsed on a rainy street.
Anyway, like I said, I don’t really like the series and there are lots of things to criticize about it, but calling the core message fascist is a complete misunderstanding of what it’s trying to communicate.
I wanted to know how MHA ended but couldn’t really get past the internship season and now I know how it ends, sorta. Thank you.
Glad I could help. Yeah, that’s probably the most boring arc, though I quit watching the anime around season 2 because I just thought it was poorly written outside of the first episode (and even then, the “promise” made the story feel kind of flat). My memory on all the stuff that happens with One for All is a little hazy and I think it was a little confusing to me even when I was reading it, so it might not be exactly right along with there being a ton of things left out. I think the rest of the series is worth seeing, but it’s hardly the best, so I can’t fault anyone for bouncing off of it.
I think I started reading the manga because I briefly had a friend who was a big fan of the anime, and otherwise I probably would have just ignored it indefinitely. I’m glad I read it though, mostly for the last part I mentioned in the previous comment.
Ohhh so that’s how it ends. That’s a more unique conclusion than I actually expect, I think it deserves some praise in that front.
What’s wrong?
I thought they wanted a Batman who brutalizes the bad guys?
They don’t actually think white supremacists are bad guys.
bro Batman hits a One Winged Angel in this one
anyone whining about this issue is automatically a mark
What’s a One Wing Angel? I tried to search for it and only got Final Fantasy results
I think he’s a troper
I’m refreshing an old tab but it’s the finishing move of talented weeb pro wrestler Kenny Omega
If I was a fascist pretending to be a reasonable person I would simply not constantly go out of my way to defend fascism.
They can’t though. Part of the point of most fascism.
That was sooo cathartic
Talk about raving reviews!
You mean the comic series where batman is explicitly from a working class background and the joker is a billionaire living in Manila has leftist undertones? And isnt pro-fash?
What is this series called? Edit: I’m stupid. its right there in the linked comic Edit 2 : look i haven’t had any coffee today, ok? I’m still getting up. I’ve been sick. English isn’t my first language. My little brother grabbed the keyboard
in fairness to you “absolute batman” and so on are horrible names
