Black Widow: Deadly Origin #3 and Dark X-Men #3 are both in your (US) comic stores today, and your (UK) comic shops tomorrow, assuming the lorries delivering them can get through the snow. I imagine Danie Ware standing at the door of Forbidden Planet, looking out into the blizzard, as a burly man in furs tramps towards her, a box of comics in his frozen hands. ‘The comics must get through!’ he gasps, as she makes him sip brandy.
If you remain undecided about your purchases, here is the first six pages of Black Widow, alongside a very kind review. The preview pages for the X-Men can be found a couple of blog entries down.
And speaking of Danie Ware, through her kind offices, I’ll be doing a signing at Forbidden Planet in London on Thursday 28th January, from 6pm. It’s chiefly of the Panini Captain Britain and MI-13: Vampire State collection and the Dark Reign: Young Avengers volume, but, you know, I’ll sign whatever you bring. Apart from certain body parts. (I don’t know though, give it a try.)
I wanted to say a few words about Glee, which has just arrived in Britain, and has been heartily embraced by pop culture (with a track from the cast currently at number three on ITunes’ hit parade, and thus about to appear in the earthly singles chart on Sunday). It’s one of those shows that seems made for fans, in that, while no fantastical elements appear, it’s about us, or us as we’d like to have been: the alienated freaks and geeks who have to form an alternative society of their own. It joins shows like Veronica Mars and movies like Heathers in being a story of sweet, sweet high school revenge. But at the same time, through its representation of the well sung show tune as being the epitomy of talent, it also fits right in with British society’s current vision of pop music, as represented by The X-Factor and its ilk. Rather wonderfully, because this is a show which delights in reversing expectations (the young woman who prissily has a phobia about keeping clean is our heroine, that’s not a metaphor for inner darkness this time), the evil bitchy bully girls show up for an audition… and do really well. So our geeks are going to have to live with them inside their world, not build utopia without them. Which makes the Joss Whedon/mainstream talent show collision all the more apt. Most interesting is the show’s fight (because it is a fight), to put genuine outsiders front and centre. The gay lad, black girl and kid in a wheelchair are right at the front of the musical numbers, they’re definitely what ‘we’re’ fighting for… but they’re not ‘we’, in that, as yet, they’ve had moments, rather than plots of their own. We aren’t asked to identify with them. The kid in the wheelchair (Artie Abrams, played by Kevin McHale) is fascinating, in that when he’s given a guitar solo or a rap, we’re asked to gaze at how odd that as, a gaze that might be on the edge of being asked to laugh at him, but the gaze goes on so long it makes us ask why we haven’t been asked to look like that before, and if there’s laughter, it’s for him. The lack of plots for these folk (after two whole episodes, so I have, like, a huge sample to draw from), if I talked Internet language, would lead me to yell about racism, sexism, wheelchairism and the like, but instead I think it may be a rather Brechtian moment of the audience being forced to confront the world. And I suspect they’ll get plots next week. I love the notion, shared by all musicals, that just starting to sing gives you perfect acoustics and choreography, I love the hard route to mass popularity the series has chosen for itself, and so far, I love this show.
Incidentally, I loved the new Being Human too, and will comment as part of Ten Things this weekend. Cheerio!
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