Camino Cesar Chavez - An Editorial

Do you guys think this is fun for me? Sitting around, talking about superheroes like they're the only thing that matter in what must be a meaningless existence of mine? And also talking shit about Wolverine all the time because I mentioned hating him once so now it's part of my blog persona?

I mean honestly he isn't as awful as I make him out to be. He's really just a symbol for a lot of things I do hate, like dark and edgy "heroes," the need to include fan favorites into every plot line whether it works in context or not, and Hugh Jackman, my real enemy.

Javert should have shot your punk ass, 24601.

Well I fucking love it. In real life, I'm a regular nerd who falls in love with crazy people and knows too much about English culture at the turn of the century. But here, I'm an angry nerd with opinions and stuff.

But occasionally, real life becomes slightly important. For example, they're renaming a street in my city after Cesar Chavez. This matters especially to me because my sister is an activist who organized the first Cesar Chavez day in this city, and worked with the people who were instrumental in getting this street renamed, including Cesar Chavez's niece, Mimi Chavez.

"Who is Cesar Chavez?" you ask. Well, he was a Mexican-American, raised by migrant farm workers, who got a law degree but went back to the fields to organize protests that would seriously improve conditions for Latino and Filipino farm workers.

Now, if you know something about Cesar Chavez but not a lot about him, you're thinking "Wait, he helped Filipinos? Was this some sort of indirect side effect?" No, it wasn't. Cesar Chavez was actually instrumental in uniting farm workers of all races so they could form a meaningful union. Unless you had a really liberal history teacher with a boner for civil rights, you probably didn't learn that because it doesn't fit in with the narrative that says people of minorities can only really help people of the same minority.

Why do you think that no one ever talks about Martin Luther King Jr.'s radical pro-labor views? Or about how Harriet Tubman worked as a spy for the Union? I think the reason Barack Obama freaks people out so much is because he's a black guy with views on things other than black rights.

And for all of you guys who were thinking this wasn't going to be a superhero-related post, you're slightly wrong. I've mentioned before about my, ahem, concern that minorities in comic books are handled badly, if they're handled at all. You either get minority characters who are so whitewashed that their ethnicity is only mentioned in a footnote somewhere, or they're a walking stereotype, like a teen growing up in the rough side of El Paso, struggling in school and having a drug-dealing aunt as an enemy.

Also he gets his powers from an evil alien race that illegally immigrates to Earth. Real subtle, DC. 

We have this idea in our heads that Latino is something that has to define someone fully, if it defines someone at all. Superman is the boy scout. Batman is the brooding loner. Lantern Stewart is the Marine. Jaime Reyes, the third Blue Beetle, is the Mexican. And if you're the Mexican, you don't get to be anything else.

Anyway, so they're renaming this street - which is a major street, by the way - Camino Cesar Chavez. Now, this is a pretty long name for a street, but I guess it's a small price to pay in exchange for recognizing that Latino-Americans did things in America once. So I won't complain, because representation happens in small steps that are usually slightly offensive at first. Right, Immigrant Alien Blue Beetle?

Jaime Reyes approves his slightly stereotypical portrayal.

But, with Camino Cesar Chavez, people are still complaining. Specifically, people are complaining because "camino" in Spanish refers to a little street, not a big street. Never mind that the street being renamed is a major street, probably bigger than our MLK Boulevard. The name doesn't connotate the level of grandeur these assholes are looking for.

Like, seriously? I love complaining as much as Batman loves feeling sad on rooftops and Speedy loves shooting up heroin. But some things are actually important - even more important than that rush of joy you get when you tell people that the guy who plays the archetypal badass in the Marvel Universe also portrayed a gay guy in a musical.

I'm the best at what I do, and what I do is look fabulous!

But this is real life. Latinos everywhere are desperate for someone - anyone - to serve as a Latino role model. The closest thing we have to that right now is Tony Stark, the alcoholic who's apparently too embarrassed of our community to ever talk about us, and Cesar Chavez, a historical figure that our society keeps mentioning vaguely, in passing, before getting back to the white folks.

So why, when people are taking the small steps necessary to bring attention to this historical giant, are you trying to bring these small accomplishments down? Now isn't the time for your goddamn negativity. Now is the time to make change.

Caowinman vs. Females

So I'd love to tell you all about the recent episodes of Arrow, The Flash, and Gotham  - an awful show, a great show, and a show I liked but whose last episode freaked me out.

Do I like boys or girls? I like it when you're a powerful criminal and not a perverted weirdo.

I'd love to complain that Arrow keeps getting rid of my favorite female characters, letting Felicity work for the competition, killing off Sara and literally stuffing her into a fridge, and turning Lila (spelling? I don't read my television shows) into a pregnant lady instead of a super badass spy, while trying to make me like Laurel, the only character in a superhero story I've ever hated as much as Wolverine.

But you guys, I met a woman who was funny! Not funny like Harley Quinn, that hilarious jokester who may or may not also be a murderous sociopath. Funny like I never thought a female personage could be so horrible.

Maybe I'm being unfair. But read this text conversation between me and this chick,

ME: Another Alan Moore Story. The guy hated superhero conventions more than I hate Wolverine., I guess.
HER: :O How can you hate Wolverine? We can't be friends anymore.

At this point, I should have agreed, but instead I explained why I hate him (by sending her pictures of him, which should be explanation enough.) She mentioned liking that alpha male thing, so I said:

ME: I love the cheerful jokesters. Our only overlap is probably Deadpool.
HER: Possibly. I don't know his character.

At this point, I told her the only way I wouldn't delete her number was if she let me make fun of her on my blog. Apparently, she responded to that sort of "alpha male" demand, that she let me exploit her for comedy, so she acquiesced. Or, alternatively, she realized that no one reads this blog except for me.

And, in my fantasies, Felicity Smoak.

In fact, I'd tell her how I'd much rather date Felicity, or Fish Mooney, or even Amanda Waller (from the comics, even) but I'm pretty sure it'd go over her head. Either way, any girl who doesn't know about Deadpool is clearly not the girl for me. She can date Wolverine for all I care.

Of course, for Wolverine to be interested, she'll have to be Cyclops' girl first.

Gotham - A Review

Okay guys, here's the deal. Normally, this blog consists of me complaining about something superhero related, usually for trying too hard to be dark and edgy, and then putting a picture of Wolverine with a snide remark underneath it. Sometimes, if I have writer's block, I'll just put a picture of Wolverine in and allow myself to become enraged.

But right now, I'm actually not completely displeased. In fact, I'm feeling almost happy about something - an anomaly, I'm sure, but still. I'm feeling so ecstatic, I might write an entire article without saying anything negative about anything.

In fact, you know what? Challenge accepted. This review will be entirely positive, not just about the reviewed show, but about everything that I mention. But first, let me get mad about Wolverine one last time.

Wait, he's sick in this picture? My day just gets better and better.

What has got me so excited? Well, I've watched the first two episodes of Gotham, a television series about (go figure) Gotham, after Bruce Wayne's parents were killed. Now this could be a really stupid idea for a show; I'll admit that I was concerned it would be a serial installment of "kid Bruce being really sad." But after watching the pilot, I retracted all my cynicism. This is going to be awesome.

The main character of this show is Detective James Gordon, a former war hero who is new to the police force. Now, if I had to imagine my perfect future Commisioner Gordon, I'd probably make him a bit of a goody two-shoes, someone who's eager to fight crime and who believes that, even in a city like Gotham, criminals can be brought down "by the book," as he insists be done in "The Killing Joke." But this is the post-Nolan era, so that will never happen, right?

Wrong! That is exactly who James Gordon is and what he stands for. He's optimistic, principled, and calls out his partner all the time for being a cynic. In the pilot, he's getting attacked by a huge man with a meat cleaver and he doesn't even pull out his gun.

Even better, he's not facing down against the kind of kid-friendly villains of camp Batman world. The criminal underworld is straight-up evil, the police department is incredibly corrupt, and he in no way is sheltered from what's going on. This is Gotham, for Christ's sake. But James Gordon never wavers from principle.

And the name drops! This is obviously Gotham before the Batman days, but you still have Selina Kyle, a homeless child who steals, jumps all over buildings, and loves cats, Edward Nigma, a smart guy who loves riddles and works in the forensics department, and Oswald Cobblepot, a member of the criminal underground who wears a suit, eventually starts waddling, and gets called "Penguin" no small number of times.

He doesn't like being called Penguin.

But my favorite name drop so far? Renee Montoya. Now, if you don't know who that is, I don't blame you. She's pretty obscure. In fact, when I first heard her name, I thought I had misheard or something. No way they could have put a character that awesome in this show.

Except they did.

Renee Montoya, the lesbian Latina who works for the Gotham City Police Department before getting kicked off because of her sexuality and inheriting the moniker of "The Question" from Vic Sage. That Renee Montoya.

"But it cannot be!" you say. "Wasn't it only a few articles ago you were complaining that Tom Hardy as Bane was the closest thing to Latino representation you could find?"

Well, a few articles ago, I hadn't watched Gotham. She's not the Question yet, of course, but she's pretty badass - a cop working for the major crimes unit who is not the type to let police corruption slide. She's not The Question yet, of course, but this is still a huge step.

In a few seasons, who knows? We could have the first major superhero represented in live action who isn't a straight, white male since - well, there was that one chick who played Wonder Woman decades ago, and before that there was, well, no representation at all.*

Only straight, white men can save the world, I guess.

Guys. This is major. You have to understand. The Question is awesome. Queer representation is awesome. Female representation is awesome. Latin American representation is awesome. Renee Montoya being in this show is awesome.

There is nothing in this show I don't approve of. Sure, the color scheme is pretty gray when I prefer bright, campy colors, and it's pretty limited by DC canon because it takes place before Bruce is Batman, a time that writers haven't written much about because, why would they write about Gotham before Batman joins in?

But this show is so fun and interesting and everything I've been waiting for. You guys have to watch this show. It is everything Nolan should have done in his Dark Knight trilogy, but didn't do because he's a god awful hack.

Shit, I said I wouldn't say anything negative.


*No, I don't consider Black Widow to be a superhero. She's a spy who occasionally helps out the Avengers. She doesn't even have a secret identity, guys. Also, fuck Marvel.

The Killing Joke - A Review

If I'm being honest, I'm a bit reluctant to review comic books on this website, for a few reasons. Like I've said, tracking down every comic book in a series can be tiring, especially when you're trying to follow the Blue Beetle story line, and the one comic book shop has hole in the middle of the series, and then the other comic book shop doesn't have any of the new 52 comics at all, and all you want to do is figure out how a fucking Latino deals with superpowers.

I mean, do you know how hard it is to find representation as a Latino comic book enthusiast? Yeah, Tony Stark, Kyle Rayner, and Bane are all Latino comic book characters. And what do they all have in common?

Tony Stark. White name. White face. No discussion of Latin American culture.

Kyle Rayner. White name. White face. No discussion of Latin American culture.

Bane. Super interesting background as a Guatemalan who dresses up like a luchador. (Wait, that's different!) Becomes a popular supervillain in The Dark Knight Rises, where he has a white face and no one even mentions his Latin American culture or heritage. (Oh yeah! I knew there was a reason I mentioned him.)

Latino representation in the 2010s.

So yeah, long story short, comic books piss me off sometimes. But when you can actually get your hands on the one you want, they can be pretty amazing. For example, "The Killing Joke" by Alan Moore, published in 1988, was a great way to make people realize that The Joker didn't have to be some hilarious splash of dandyistic color.

So if you really liked the way Heath Ledger portrayed the Joker, you can thank Alan Moore for crafting a story where The Joker is exactly the kind of sociopath who would dress up like a clown and kill schoolbuses full of children for laughs.

In this story (watch out: heavy spoilers, in that I tell you the whole plot in detail and if you try to read the comic book afterwards nothing will surprise you), The Joker escapes out of Arkham Asylum (again? who would have guessed!), shoots Barbara Gorden in the spine, kidnaps Commissioner Gordon, strips him down naked, puts him on some creepy old amusement park ride, and makes him look at pictures of his daughter before, during, and after she became paralyzed from the waist down.

The climax of the story isn't even a fighting scene. It's The Joker's villainous rant to Commissioner Gordon, which is basically the same speech he keeps trying to give in The Dark Knight. You know, the old, "I'm crazy because I had one bad day. Now I'm going to give you a bad day and you're going to become just as crazy as I am."

Meatloaf again? That's it! I'm going to become a serial killer.

Now you guys know my two standards when it comes to entertainment: fun and interesting. And this was definitely fun, in a horrifying kind of way. The scene in the beginning, where The Joker is playing cards with Batman, works as both an eerie "Let's Have Tea with Chthulu" moment, and as a shout-out to The Joker's motif. Then, after he's escaped, The Joker manages to make buying abandoned property exciting.

And honestly, as psychopathic as this may sound, I think the most fun thing in the world was watching as The Joker does every shitty thing he can imagine to Commissioner Gordon. I honestly started rooting for The Joker in that scene. (Is that evil of me?)

"We have to take him to Joker. But first, let's piss on him!"

But what was interesting was the ending. Now, you might remember, at the end of "Batman Begins," Batman lets Ra's al Ghul die, sort of a "good guys don't kill people so I'm just going to leave you on this train that's about to crash instead." At the end of "The Dark Knight," Batman tackles Harvey Dent off a building and kills him, not even looking for a "well it's not really killing" loophole.

And, I think worst of all, at the end of "The Dark Knight Rises," Batman defeats Bane by cutting off his access to his anesthetic, which is about as badass as hiding a diabetic's insulin. Then Catwoman kills him, and Batman's kind of like "Thanks! Now I don't have to break my no killing rule that I only really pay lip-service to anyway."

But here's where the ending to "The Killing Joke" differs. When Batman saves the Commissioner from The Joker, Gordon hasn't turned into a hateful clown who uses The Stranger as his go-to life guide. He hasn't lost his internal moral compass. He hasn't even lost his dedication to the law. He tells Batman that he wants the Joker caught "by the book."

So The Joker kills a bunch of people and gets brought in by the book, but Mike Brown steals a cigarillo and gets shot six times?

Christopher Nolan's Batman disregards the judicial system, the privacy of innocent citizens and the rights of the accused. And he treats his "no killing" rule like something to work around at best and ignore at worst. The criminals Batman faces are dark, Nolan reasons, so Batman must become even darker.

But "The Killing Joke," for all its darkness, puts Batman firmly in the side of light. The victory at the end isn't just about catching the bad guy, but proving to him that, no matter how much evil a good man encounters, no matter how much you torture and humiliate him, no matter how bad you make his day, a good man can and will do the right thing, always.

Why Do Superheroes Need Angst?

Recently (and by "recently" I mean since the eighties, so pretty recently considering the history of the superhero, which is still a comparatively short amount of time in the history of Western storytelling), there has become this trend in superhero movies to portray them as misunderstood loners with tragic personal lives and chasms of unfathomable depth in their heavy hearts.

My point with that ridiculously long run-on sentence was that there must be a reason people like these kinds of stories. I mean, there has to be reason that so many like "The Dark Knight Rises" even though it's basically the story of a whiny cripple who tries to relive the glory days and breaks his back in the process.

Also, he looks like a dirty hobo the whole time, despite the fact that he's one of the richest people in the DC universe.

I mean, superheroes didn't start out this way at all. Superman, the first superhero, was basically designed as a man beyond human limitations, with the ability to jump high, run fast, and punch hard (there's a more poetic description with bullets and buildings but that's basically what it boils down to).

And you might argue that superhero fans secretly craved realism back then. But consider Captain Marvel - who's basically like Superman but his powers are based on magic, not science, and also he's like double the boy scout Superman could ever hope to be because he's actually a ten-year-old boy who's literally a boy scout.

In the 1940's, Captain Marvel consistently sold more copies than Superman, and he was way less realistic than Superman. Yeah, that's right. At one time, Superman was the realistic superhero.



Realism in the 1940's.

Captain Marvel, in addition to being magically powered and childishly innocent, also had one more difference between himself and Superman - he could fly. So what did Superman's writers do? Did they try to market Superman as being a more human, more realistic, more gritty depiction of a superhero? I'll give you a hint.

Does he look "gritty and realistic" to you?

Instead, they said, "Oh, yeah, Captain Marvel? You can fly? Well anything you can do, Superman can do better!" and thus Superman became a flier. You could argue about whether this actually makes for a better story, but my gut tells me they didn't give a fuck about the story. They were just trying to figure out whose dick was bigger.

Maybe they thought that the only way that Superman could beat Captain Marvel in sales was to make it so Superman could beat Captain Marvel in a fight. The whole comic book industry might have been an arms race that took place entirely in the imagination of nerds.

But then everything changed. In 1986-8, three comic books came out that led people away from the "Superman with a bald eagle perched on his shoulder" archetype of a superhero and more towards the "hobo Batman with a broken back has to stop a crazed terrorist and by the way Batman's love interest is also a terrorist" archetype of a superhero.

These comic books were Watchmen (which is about a disbanded group of ex-masked vigilantes reacting to the death of their comrade The Comedian, starring a character who is basically The Question but crazier), "The Killing Joke" (where it is revealed that The Joker's murders are actually a form of absurdist expression, like Waiting for Godot but not quite as horrible), and Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? (which is about Superman giving up his powers and retiring to spend more time with his family.)

Whatever happened to the Man of Tomorrow? He's teaching some snot-nosed kid the ABC's.

Because these comic books offered a new, fresh, realistic take on superheroes, they were exhilarating, interesting and shocking. Back in 1986. You know, when there wasn't a hundred thousand other comic books/shows/movies trying to do the exact same thing.

You see, thirty years ago, no one was giving superheroes human flaws, world-weariness, and varying degrees of insanity. But nowadays, you can't get away from writers who think they're clever because they made Batman even edgier. The next Batman movie will be three hours of a black screen with a voice-over by what sounds like a smoker with pneumonia.

Although I'm not entirely sure that isn't the plot of the last movie.

But that's the thing, isn't it? Kids don't like superheroes because of the air of painful realism. Kids like superheroes because they punch the bad guys! I think every child is born with something in their psyche that wishes all the problems in the world could be punched in the face before dinner.

And being an adult doesn't mean you grow out of that. Everybody wishes that there was an easy solution for all of the world's problems. But there isn't. The world is a dark, cold, scary place with racism, poverty, disease and famine. And it's very hard to punch these problems away.

Superman's first encounter with an unpunchable problem.

So there's the appeal of superhero angst - it's a dark solution to a dark world. But I have to believe - and maybe this is my quixotic inner child speaking - that we don't have to believe that Superman has to cry like a baby whenever he fights General Zod. Adding darkness to darkness doesn't make the world any brighter.

Many comic book nerds argue, as they put down their Mountain Dews and brush the Dorito crumbs out of their neckbeards, that this dark, edgy brand of superhero is a good thing. They're finally taking superheroes seriously. These superheroes are profound.

But what if we could see superheroes in all their overoptimistic, idealistic, and even campy glory? What if we could see them facing this cruel world with childlike hope in their hearts instead of the despair which would provide such a comforting numbness? How much more profound could a superhero be?