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Moments in Comics History, Part 3

Or, My Personal Introduction to the Concept of Gender Dysphoria while Chilling in a Beanbag in Tommy Woodroof's Room.

So, in about 1988 or thereabouts (based on "I had a car" time), I was hanging out one night at Tommy Woodroof's house, which was near the school where we all went and it feels like we might have been waiting on something to happen. The late 80s is well before comics' acceptance into the mainstream, and it predates the Batman movie by one year. (When the Keaton/Nicholson Batman came out in the summer of 1989, Tommy would literally have all of the things. He was a Batman - and DC - guy way before that, though.) Because of this, those of us who had comics would put them in the hands of people who came over to our house. Also, with no Internet or smartphones and no one reading industry buzz, the only way you found out shit existed at all was to have a comic store guy try to sell it to you or to have someone drop you some word of mouth. Tommy's the one who got me to read Camelot 3000 in this way.

Camelot 3000 is a story of a futuristic Earth where aliens are sort of mid-aggressive invasion; they've taken over some stuff, they're poised to do a lot worse, and a resistance is needed. To that end, a young man unearths the tomb of King Arthur, and his Knights of the Table Round are reincarnated in the bodies of people already living. Guinevere's a military leader, Percival's a monster, Galahad's a Bushido Samurai, and so on. The most controversial, interesting, eye-opening, sexy and weird one of these was the reincarnation of Sir Tristan into a woman's body, however. That's him up there on the far left in the tight black pants and short auburn hair. He spends basically the whole series lamenting the state of affairs that has landed him in the wrong body, and nearly commits great evil to get his penis back. His internal dialogue was endlessly fascinating to me, and at least as interesting as the "will they/won't they" with Isolde.

You may recall that Tristan and Isolde have a fairly celebrated romance. When she's reincarnated, her body is also a she. And she still loves Tristan. So, what's the problem? Turns out, there's not one. Tristan and Isolde get back together at the end and it is a definite part of the "happy" endings some of the characters get. (Don't be gross.) For me? This was an introduction to a facet or seven of human sexuality I had never even thought of, much less encountered, and it opened intellectual doors for a kid raised by a tribe of intolerant straight guys who thought all gays were pedophiles. Tristan was male, even if Tristan wasn't. And Tristan could love Isolde - in every way - regardless of equipment. But that headspace was fucking important.

So, thank you, Mssrs. Barr & Bolland and the good people @ DC for broadening my horizons before I even knew I needed them broadened.

Moments in Comics History, Part Two

I never said these (entries about important comic book stuff) would be in any kind of order.

In Drax: Earthfall, Giffen & Breitweiser took a character who had been on the slide basically forever, and made him super interesting and relevant again. Old-school Drax was created by Jim Starlin as a purple-cowled foil/weapon against Thanos, and they kind of jerked him around a lot. To my young reader's mind, he was a boring background part of the space opera, a genre that didn't always fly in comics anyway. Once they made him huge and Hulk-like and stupid, he was insufferable and annoying.

In Earthfall, he apparently (because he's too dumb at this point to know not to) drinks something called singularity drive fluid and survives it and a major crash. This results in a bad-ass redesign and makes him into a hard-as-nails no-compromise killer. For the first time - and you should read the story rather than take my word for it - Drax, and the characters surrounding him had real drama and strife that mattered. And he was kind of terrifying, with a real anti-hero vibe that made him matter again.

It was this version that became part of the Guardians of the Galaxy in the lead-up to Annihilation, and who ripped out Thanos' heart (comics characters rarely stay dead). Unfortunately, for the Bautista movie version, they seem to have melded the denseness of mind with the brutal remorseless killer, and while the portrayal works well in the MCU and I kind of dig it there, it does seem a shame to not have this version on film. It taught me more than anything that you can't give up on characters as long as there's talent and will around to revive them in a way that makes sense.

But yeah, you could easily argue that without this reinvention of Drax, you wouldn't have a popular enough GotG to merit film inclusion on the MCU.

Syria, Blowback & Orange Moron

Our Resident Chump is profoundly stupid. I say this not to insult him, but simply to point out simple facts. Our government is being run by a child, and not even a very smart or precocious one; we have traded purple for orange and elected Veruca Salt. As much as I hate the President - and I do, going back to the 1980s - I hate even more what he represents in terms of my fellow citizens, this blind and ridiculous anti-intellectual bullying turn for the worse, the need to wade into the shit and live there, and the continuous participation in our own distractions as we needle and dissect the reactions of a chimp wearing a rug. (Yes, I made 600 things with his quotes in them; what of it?) Mostly, the things he does are designed to get our attention, to pull focus. When they're designed. Sometimes, though, sometimes they're just reactions, like reflexive moves on his part that maybe he doesn't even realize he's done until he's already done them. The thought is the action.

Case in point: Syria. You could make the argument that we've not had really strong foreign policy now from the executive branch since the end of the Cold War, but we've all had long enough to familiarize ourselves with blowback that I thought we all understood it. It's now clear to me that this is not the case. Please go away and read Chalmers Johnson's excellent book, Blowback, and then come back and finish reading this.

I know, right?

So, we're going to get involved in Syria, begin by proffering non-military aid, then get involved militarily against the Syrian government, then kill a bunch of citizens in "surgical strikes" (just what we do) and then, after ramping up our on the ground efforts and seemingly formulating a military plan for going forward and perhaps providing a little bit of a bulwark against the Turks, completely bail out while government forces still hold most of the country and while humanitarian crises are ongoing. And why?Because "We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency." Oh, well, that's all right, then. But wait, Orange Moron, didn't you also just get caught bitching and complaining about European countries decrying our pullout and say that it's their turn to fight ISIS? I thought they were defeated? Maybe they're just Trumpfeated, where you lie about beating someone. Much more expedient than actually beating them. (For the sake of the Resident, "expedient" means "quicker." Okay, "faster." ) Also, didn't we, like a week ago, say that this was a terrible idea, this pullout? And that it would lead to the "slaughter" of many of our allies? I mean, granted, we drone bomb civilians, but doing the numbers, that might be better than a "slaughter." Does anyone remember 1980s Afghanistan, where we trained guys, got their hopes up and then left, and it took them half a generation to raze the World Trade Center to the ground? You know, on 7-11? The Resident knows where he was on 7-11, I can tell you that much. More than anything, I think it's good that we're pulling 2000+ soldiers out of a land in crisis, but leaving more than 5000 at our border with Mexico. That seems important, especially in this time after midterms when the Caravan has ceased to exist and Sessions' prohibitions being contested and so on.

Or we're wagging the fucking dog again. The government shutdown, the new developments in the various investigations and every goddamn rat that bails from this dysfunctional ship of fools, we need to be looking the other way, and a nice fat foreign policy fuckup'll do it every time.

Trumper Villains

So, starting in 2017, I made a bunch of these. I calls them Trumper Villains.

For reasons what I should think would be obvious to people possessed of the standard five and change senses, the idea struck me (and not just me, let's be honest - other folk did variations on this, too, including one fellow who stuck entirely to the Red Skull) to put the words of Resident Chump in the mouths of comic book supervillains, who are, honestly, his inspirations and spirit animals.

I did like, 600+ of these. This one works particularly well, a little known novelty villain known as The Wall, of course, talking about the wall, of course. Perhaps not all of these are as spot on as is this one, but I did dig deep, using Tangerine Scream's tweets, books, quotes from media and his bleak-ass history, such as it is. It's appalling, and I hoped that putting his words into the mouths of super villains would not only give me a creative outlet that I enjoyed (which worked) but also throw his mouthiness into sharp relief, further highlighting the absurdity of thing he said (this worked less well). I underestimated the times in which we were living, and there was just too much bullshit being thrown about and I didn't have a big enough fan. Eventually, my efforts petered out, much like hope and optimism in this country before the giant MAGA Steamroller of Hateful Bile and Ignorance.

But I did this 600+ times first. On the left (if you're on a computer, I don't know how this will work for phones and tablets) there's a photo album down there with the same name as this entry. Go check it out and laugh or cry six hundred or so times in a row. Become exhausted and bemusedly sad. This is being an American now.

Source Material? Aquaman? What?

Aquaman on NPR

I'm getting really tired of shit like this, and in this case, it's NPR who should be fucking ashamed. Take four minutes and listen to this ridiculous air-filler and see if you can figure out what my problem is.

Back? Okay. 

So, after insulting the character, this "examination" of Aquaman begins by letting you know he was created by Mort Weisinger and Paul Norris in 1941. I want you to remember that year, because it's going to come up again later. Also, for those of you playing at home, 1941 is three years after Timely Comics debuted Namor, the Sub-Mariner, who is the only other marine comics character anyone cares about. Anyway, after giving you the quick background that Aquaman is a comic book character, the piece bounces from his cartoon in the 1960s, to the SuperFriends cartoon, to the proto-memes that roamed the dismal valley that was the Interwebs of the 90s to the parodies of things like real memes and Robot Chicken. From there we talk about the HBO show Entourage for awhile and then we jump forward using language as a time machine a full decade to the era of the big superhero film, namely Justice League and now, the eponymous Aquaman. Glen here then sums up with a wishy-washy kind of point about how "the bros won," and what is lost when a character changes so much "in so short a time" by which I think he means 10 to 15 years.

Do you see it yet?

The "point," such as it is, fails to instill what is lost with any meaning. Are we meant to care about the discarding of elements from a character which no longer work when attitudes and mores change? If anything, that's a failure of marketing and commodification, not storytelling. Is it that something inherent to the character is lost during his recent broification? Is he no longer truly Aquaman, is that your point? Your point sucks, Glen. I think you might be a minor fanboy out of his league here. I think you might be someone who has made his collection of things into some kind of badge of authority (despite those big collections I see in the background) without learning anything about a character whose emblem you had inked permanently on your skin. Your piece is a waste of time and space, and it enrages me.

But that's still not the real problem.

The real problem is that your narrative is a complete fiction. You invented an endpoint and then strung together some stuff that happened to make it look like it created that endpoint. The reality is, the Jason Momoa Aquaman we see now is less of a shock to comics readers than it is to people who look at fucking memes because between 1941 and 2018, there was some storytelling happening, some character evolution, even some reflexive referencing of Aquaman's place in the DCU and the joke some people made of his presence, powers and appearance. And you may think that doesn't matter. You may think SEVEN FULL DECADES OF the character's PRIMARY FUCKING MEDIUM in stories doesn't affect this movie version. But let's say there was one good Aquaman story per decade. That's not too much of a fucking stretch, is it? That's seven good Aquaman stories. Seven good stories exceeds the quality output of some successful writers, and is way more than enough to evolve a character. So I think it fucking matters. I think maybe - just maybe - you could not pretend like nothing is happening on the comics page just because you're an ignorant loudmouth dork with a piddly stupid collection. I think you could consider, just consider - shutting your fucking mouth. I hate to go all Dark Fanboy on you, bud, but you failed to respect and so you deserve no respect.

And now look what you made me do, Glen. Defending Aquaman. We can talk about our own, GLEN. You have to earn the deep knowledge, fucking GLEN. Don't walk among us without doing the work, GLEN. You make me physically ill, you poser mouthpiece. This is like Ken Turan, all over again. Or that asshole Tim Hanley.

Moments in Comics History, Part One

In some form or another since the late 70s, I have been interested in comics. My collection has changed size, been used for different purposes, and morphed, and what I read has been all over the place, but the baseline sequential art format combined with ideas of good and evil are ingrained into my thinking and overall outlook.

The first comics "stuff" I remember having weren't really comics. Probably a lot of kids come to things that way. I had the shitty Ben Cooper vinyl Spider-Man costume, and I had these huge die-cut posters of Superman and Batman that would fall off of the knotty pine paneling walls of my room onto me as a slept, vaguely traumatizing me as a kid. Those things were fine and all, but what I really remember are the things pictured at the left.

The Hulk album was a full-sized 33 1/3 record with two stories per side, and I recall it being super melodramatic, but awesome. It predates the show in my memory, whether it does in real time or not, so it was my first exposure to not only what the Hulk should look like, but also sound like and some of the rules for the character. The tragedy comes fully baked into the character, and I was hooked instantly. I don't know who got this for me, but it's your fault, all this comics stuff.

Around the same time, and we're talking me at age 4 or 5 here, I had this Batman book and record. This was a 45, and you actually followed along, unlike the Hulk stories, which were essentially radio dramas, and one might argue, healthier for the developing imagination. Observe the Neal Adams Batman, here. This, before I ever saw the 1960s Batman, was what I thought the Batman was supposed to look like. And the Joker and Robin. I remember absolutely nothing about the content of the story, other than it was fun to follow along with in the book, and it made me want to get more things on records, but more importantly, more superhero stuff.

What will follow on this blog for a while, are some entries that examine some comics moments that have been important or influential for me, personally. Now seems as good a time as any to do this. Our comics creator heroes are aging and dying, and the influence of comics on pop culture has never been more pervasive, even as the format itself becomes arguably less popular. As I, in my job use comics as an early literacy tool and the movie-going public eagerly awaits giant comic book movies every summer, seems like as good a time as any to do this. So get ready for a bunch of comics moments, explained to death.

Stan Lee Eternum Excelsior [STAN L.E.E.]

(Bill Maher is welcome to fuck himself quietly & vigorously in the ass with a broken stick coated with fire ants & hot sauce. Any culture who gets its political thought from a failed comedian should question its literature, but hero myth is not where we start, assholes.)

Three Years

It's been a little over three years since I really wrote stuff on here on a regular basis. I got busy, tired, unmotivated - pick one. Mostly, I blame you. The audience. The reader. The theoretical mass of broad, open faces focused on the the free "content" that I would occasionally fling across this page, like 10,000 drunken Jackson Pollack-inspired monkeys.

Why do I blame the collective you, other than it's simply easier than taking personal responsibility? Here's why. When I would spend days crafting a blog entry with a solid, escalating, logical argument full of insight about something, I would get a couple of reads and likes, and the attention would die down quickly, like an X-rated metaphor. When I would rant silly, like a bolt of driven rage pushing across pixels and filled with invective, my readers would reward me like a banana dispenser in a chimp piloted spacecraft.

Pavlov. You rewarded me for paying less attention and half-assedly throwing my shit at a wall until it stuck interestingly, and discouraged me from craft. To the point that I ceased to craft at all. Your fault.

Not really, though. In the meantime, we've seen the ascension of Twitter, which is a much more efficient way of ranting - so much so that our Least Executive, Resident Chump, uses this as his secondary form of communication, just after his primary form, assaulting people. I can't tell you how disappointed I am - I see the Chump election as my fault, in a way: I was vigilant during the President Monkeyface administration, and we got the Obama years. I take a break from blogging for a scant trio of annums and people from Appalachia team up with the Mercers and elect a reality show dickbag to the fucking White House.

This is why we can't have nice things, America.

So, I'm back. I have probably stuff to talk about. My kids are older, I'm trying to change some stuff, and the new job I posted about is now three years old. America is in the midst of a great Crappening, lots of comic book-related stuff is part of our country's mainstream conversations, and people are still doing that religion thing, so I should have some stuff to address, yeah?

Everything Must Go!

Well, not everything. But a lot of the really good stuff ABSOLUTELY MUST GO!!

Here's the situation: my current comic book collection, which I have been curating for lo, these last 30-odd years, is now 32 boxes strong and taking up too much space in my house. This is no longer bringing me joy. I have passed along to my kids what they've shown an interest in, and I have purchased as trades the arcs to which I want quick access.  I have cherry-picked some stuff that has emotional value to me, and now... well, it's time for someone else to enjoy the rest. Lying within the boxes, there's a raft of good stuff, some of which is listed below.

I am meticulous. Most everything is alpha-numeric, and it's all cataloged at this link. Everything is bagged and acid-free boarded, and has been taped shut and away from smoke virtually its whole life. There are many complete series and lots of unique stuff. Everything's in decent shape - most stuff is Near Mint.

The Big Two - Marvel & DC are heavily represented, but there's lots of random indie stuff in here, too, and while the late 80s to early 2000s is the focus, there's quite a bit of the older stuff here, too.

I need your help: Spread the word far and wide to those who will appreciate this. eBay's not for me; it's a bloodless community of people who want me to ship like Amazon: free and within 2 days. I'm not going to break it up and do that. Craigslist is super-local, and the inquiries I'm getting all sound like someone wants to kill me and take my essence. I don't want to turn my kitchen into a UPS center or invite a pack of inquisitive strangers to my house. I will, on the other hand, drive the whole collection to someone who wants the whole thing. I will load 32 longboxes into a van and bring them to someone who can get something out of them. We'll have a beer and talk comics. Please take a look, spread the word, find me a buyer. Contact me for prices not listed, or for a lump sum price.

Some of the rare stuff:

first appearance of X-23 (female Wolverine) - NYX #3 - $430 (NYX #4 is $55)
first appearance of Venom - Amazing Spider-Man #300 - $375 (#298 is $60)
first appearance of Deadpool - New Mutants #98 - $330
first appearance of Bullseye - Daredevil #131 - $220
Captain Marvel #34 (Nitro) - $100
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 #1 - $50
Marvel Spotlight #32 (first Spider-Woman) - $60
Truth: Red, White & Black: $15
Alias #1 (first Jessica Jones) - $80 (get whole series for $225)
Batman Vol. 2 #1 - $100
Batman: The Killing Joke (1st print) - $80
Flash #197 (Professor Zoom) - $80
Omega Men #3 (first Lobo) - $60
run of Uncanny X-Men (crucial stuff) from 123 to 140: $880 total!

Some of the Runs (in the 32 longboxes):

Watchmen complete 1-12
V for Vendetta complete 1-10
Lots of Midnight Sons-era Ghost Rider, Morbius, Blade
tons of Wolverine (many limiteds and signed stuff)
lots of DC/Vertigo stuff
Many things from CrossGen (defunct company)
Green Arrow from just after Kevin Smith
Daredevil reboot from 2000s
lots of Captain America & Fantastic Four: years long runs of each
plenty of Avengers (and lots of their limited series)
Marvel's Annihilation & Annihilation: Conquest events in TOTAL (Thanos, Guardians, Nova, Annihilus): w/o these, there's no GotG movies...
lots of Hellblazer, focused on Ennis, Ellis, and anybody else worth a damn
Spawn (1st 25 issues)
random issues of Preacher and Transmetropolitan
Sam & Twitch (all of it - Spawn spin-off)
Planetary - first 18 issues
The Authority - first 24 issues
lots of Spidey; Death of Jean DeWolff, all of Kraven's Last Hunt, Web of Spider-Man, etc.
lots of X-titles; Morrison's whole run, Whedon's run, all of the Claremont/Byrne, Jim Lee, etc.
Superman: All of the Death of Superman, the pretenders, Doomsday limited, Birthright limited, Red Son, Man of Steel
Sporadic Kyle Rayner Green Lantern (but a couple of complete limited series)
Terry Moore's Echo - the first 20 or so
DC's Zero Hour: Crisis in Time
DC's weekly series "52" - all of it

The Mall in Your Mind

"I'd like to be a mall."

"Really? And have people going in and out of you all day?"

This is the scintillating back and forth that can ensue when you're on your 6th day together, with very few breaks away, lots (for us) snow on the ground, no school, and minds wandering deprived across landscapes of disconnected weirdness. So, if you were a mall - what would you have in your Food Court?

I would have a Petro's. I can only say this now because I have spent a fucking half hour looking up various permutations of "Chili Cup Mall" and thinking that they were a defunct chain. They aren't, and I am happy. I was describing this to my kids, everything from the "you could carry this thing around the mall like a street taco" to the diagram you see at left, to the magical slurry of chili goodness and saturated corn chips that was left over at the bottom of the cup when you got close to done - man, that is a vivid childhood sense memory. I can only assume (based upon where they are located) that this was a field trip gastronomic adventure experience.

Next to Petro's, I would have an Orange Julius. Orange fucking Julius, man, with powdered egg whites, and they mixed that shit right in front of you, and there were little ice crystals on top of the drink that bumped up against the lid and crackled in the foam. And I hope that they put powdered egg whites in there, but I bet they don't, I bet it's EGG CHEATERS or something like that, just like they didn't used to advertise "GF" on the Petro's sign, and I don't think they used to have pasta/macaroni, either. Yankee tourists.

Near that would undoubtedly be a soft pretzel place, a Chinese restaurant with fucked up name owned by Chinese people, and a Noodles & Co., because we don't really have that where I live, either.

So, carbs. Carb up, motherfucker, and walk my goddamn mall. The mall in my mind plays the Commodores' on endless repeat in a dark hallway with a carpeted ceiling that runs between the Food Court and the fully-functional arcade, where nothing costs more than 50 cents to play, and there's Smash TV and Narc right out front, and lots of shooting and driving games and real pinball machines (mostly ones that have movie and rock band stuff on them) and an endless line (but really it's just a mirror with gold leaf in it) of Skee-Ball machines with plenty of shoulder room between each one. Also? Skill cranes and a couple of awesome driving games that didn't exist when I was a kid.

There's a kiosk where you can have your name inexpertly applied to anything, and an actual music store. Out front of the music store, there's a display with dinosaurs in a tarpit, and it says "EXTINCT TUNEAGE" and there's 8-tracks and minidiscs and cassingles and shit all in it. And a video display on repeat of the Parental Advisory logo going in flames on a loop. That's right - repeat AND on a loop. Shaddup. There's a bunch of technology stores, and the anchor stores? The big bastards that the mall is ostensibly for? They're just mock-ups. We occasionally drive our 4-wheelers through them and knock everything down. Then we go back out into the mall proper and play glow-in-the-dark mini golf and eat big cookies and buy Chucks from Journeys and books from everywhere and try not to get VD from Spenser's, where it feels like everything has VD on it. There are no nail places, no underwear emporiums, no blouseterias, and no FUCKING JEWELRY STORES, and you can extend a line of credit everywhere, because it's that kind of place.

There's a theatre, and they fucking spell it like that. It's called the Six-Shooter Theatre, and they have six screens and the kids who work it love film and talk like bartenders. Frozen coke comes with free refills, and there's always something playing that's decent and also always something you can walk out of if you don't want to make fun of it. A walk-out will have their money happily refunded if they can say why they walked out. In complete sentences. Don't fuck about - tell us what you didn't like.

It goes without saying that outside of the dark, carpeted, Commodores hallway, that the rest of mall plays 90s rock interspersed with 80s hip-hop and anything else I like, and that there's football and old movies broadcast on monitors around the interior, and roving bands of teenagers find themselves mute when they hit the SnarkMeter® limits. (SnarkMeters® are subcutaneously installed on every teen upon entering. Old people, too. Everybody.) Finally, there are game stores and comic stores fully functioning and raking in profit, an Irish pub at every junction, and cigar dispensaries throughout. The interior aisles are dotted with tables for sitting and smoking and drinking and talking and eating goddamn magical bowls of layered chili stuff that I thought had ceased to exist.

Demons

Reading a book about Kurt Cobain's legacy right now, and I have happened upon a part of it that deals with the recurrent fact that Aberdeen (where he's from) and surrounding small burgs have not wanted to erect statues or name anything after him because "won't somebody think of the children" and "what kind of message does that send about drugs?"

You know, guys - he made music, too.

Why this is relevant right now? Why THIS, of all things (okay, there was also a copyright thing I had to deal with) pulled me out of a three-year break from blogging? Because I feel like there's an obvious parallel to our current series of escalating (or swirling) situations. Should Kurt Cobain's drug use and suicide and poor-decision-making skills fuck up our relationship with his music? I would land in the "decidedly not" camp, where I would prepare Pennyroyal Tea and for any other recent camp arrivals. But is it that easy?

People don't want to watch the Netflix House of Cards because Kevin Spacey's recently been outed as a career Uncle Touchy Rapist Dickhead. Granted, he's a sexual predator, and while his victims have every right and responsibility to speak out, shouldn't his other actions be able to stand on their own? Does this have more to do with what we imagine (him diddling unwilling guys off camera during the production of Se7en) than his actual performances? I think it does. I think he pissed in the pool of his own performances, and now we don't want to get in any more. I don't know if that's fair, and I don't really care if it is or not. Everyone's going to have to deal with this in their own way.

I do NOT think that it is an endorsement of someone's past behaviors to experience their art, though. Unless their behavior kind of fucks up the whole basis upon which you were evaluating them and their output, the two should be able to be separated. Not every act carries every other act with it. Know how I know? Hitler is worse than Jeff Dahmer. You can look it up. He is. Stalin, for some reason, is only worse than Hitler depending upon who you talk to, but at least there's a metric in place there. So, yes - for matters of egregious and inarguable evil, we have matters of degree. We just do. Otherwise, "worst shooting in American history" would be a meaningless fucking phrase. By that same token, it is not necessary to evaluate someone's whole life based on one event.

Let me clarify: Spacey and Weinstein and O'Reilly and the President are obviously sexual predators. They keep doing the same things, over and over again, forcing themselves on others as part of a sexual power dynamic - so, yeah, defining their entire output through gross-tinted glasses is certainly fair, and probably logical. Do that if you see fit. And if you're a victim? Well, you know better than anyone else, so no one's going to tell you what to do. Also - the zeitgeist of people coming forward (blogs say "zeitgeist," it's a thing) to force what one can only hope is a paradigm shift (also "paradigm shift") in the patriarchy (that one's not funny anymore) is ultimately a good thing, so whatever pushes that up the mountain, good on it.

However. One act does not define a person. If it did, Mother Teresa would be only a racist, while Dr. King would be only a philanderer. Gandhi would be only a misogynist, and most American soldiers would simply be hired murderers. By contrast, Charlie Manson would be a musician, Jim Jones a preacher, and Hitler a landscape painter. You could pick one single act of any other kind committed by any of those people and define them by that. "That Gandhi, what a cloth-maker," is simply not a thing that people say. People are all the sum total of all of the things that they do, and we all have to weigh that out. Context is hugely motherfucking important. People who meet me now think I'm both better & worse than people who have known me for a while, because they're working off of a limited data set.

I say all of that to say this: Don't let actors (or anyone else) fuck up your enjoyment of their output. They did a job, that job is done, and it's a separate act from all the other stuff they've done. Learn to ruefully shake your head and appreciate and/or judge things in a full context. This is a part of growing older. You can enjoy NFL football and hate criminality, concussions and morons. You can like Heinlein's writing and acknowledge that he was a fucking terrible human. Everyone's got a hard-on for Agatha Christie again right now, but WOW at the racism in her books. Her mysteries are awesome, but I can see how black people and Indians would categorically turned off by them. I don't let Tim Allen's cocaine-dealing and Republicanism fuck up the Toy Story movies for me, and you shouldn't either. If you can't get around something, fine. We can sympathize. But if someone else can, you probably ought not judge.