Following their attack on 300, based a comic about a woman growing up there in the days of the Ayatollah’s regime (via ):

TEHRAN (AFP) - Iran has protested to France over the screening at the Cannes film festival of an animated film about a woman growing up in revolutionary Iran, slamming the movie as a “political act”, local media reported on Monday.

“Persepolis”, which stems from a best-selling comic book series by Iranian emigre Marjane Satrapi and is competing for the prestigious Palme d’Or, shows its heroine struggling with the authorities in the early days of the Islamic revolution.

“The Cannes film festival has selected a film about Iran which presents an unreal picture of the outcomes and achievements of the Islamic revolution,” said a letter to the French cultural attache in Tehran carried by the press.

“Could the selection of this film… not be counted as a political or even anti-cultural act on the festival’s part?” said the letter penned by the government-run Farabi Cinema Foundation.

The Farabi foundation works under the culture and Islamic guidance ministry and is tasked with promoting and marketing Iranian cinema all over the world.

It complained that “Persepolis” was the only Iranian film competing in the competition this year and accused the festival authorities of “acting in line with the biased policies of domineering powers” against Iran.

Satrapi, whose black-and-white comic-memoirs have been translated into more than 20 languages and won several awards, co-directed the film along with Vincent Paronnaud.

The film, to be premiered in Cannes on Wednesday, shows Satrapi’s rebellious eight-year-old screen persona watching the downfall of the shah followed by the imposition of Islamic law after the 1979 revolution.

She witnesses the horrors of the war with Iraq, leaves for Austria but quickly feels the solitude of an exile.

Satrapi, who now lives in France, published the first book of the four-volume series in France in 2000.

The series has not been published in Iran, which applies tough vetting on publications and bans books deemed to be decadent and unIslamic or contrary to revolutionary values.

This is not the first time this year Iran has been angered by a major film.

In March the authorities and bloggers alike were infuriated by the war epic “300″, a smash hit for its gory portrayal of the Greco-Persian wars, with officials saying the movie was “American psychological warfare against Iran.”

Oops, I think I may have detected a slight distortion at the end there: Iran disapproved of the film’s depiction of Persia as an antagonist.

I think the best answer to Iran over this would be to award Persepolis with the 1st prize at Cannes, and let them know what free society thinks of them and Ahmedinejad!

Cos said it right when he made that point years ago, that you cannot try to please everybody if you’re to find success. You just have to know what the right crowd is to please.

I found a commentor on who pointed out that, “part of comics’ whole problem stems from this desire to force books and characters to appeal to everybody…” And that sums up a point even I about how one of the big mistakes DC is making is that it’s going out of its way to try and please not just everybody, but anybody, by forcibly adding minority group members at the expense of everycharacters. But even if they didn’t do it that way, it doesn’t mean that minorities are asking for them to, and I’m certainly not. And even if DC hadn’t done it all at the expense of their everypersons, another problem is that they’re being very superficial in their POV of what minorities are: they’re introducing members of races we’re already familiar with (black, Latino, Asian), yet they don’t even think to come up with characters who’re members of nationalities. How many clearly defined characters are there in comics of Armenian, Estonian, Cameroonian, Chilean, and Danish backgrounds are there who’re regular cast members in any major comic book or universe today? Even I can’t think, and don’t know, of any.

So really, what are DC and their defenders trying to prove anyway?

The topic, by the way, is about this argument that came up about the Mary Jane statuette Adam Hughes designed where she’s doing Peter Parker’s laundry. I really don’t have anything to say, because it has been overdone, except one little thing better: of course the would rather talk about that than about misogyny in comics that involves violence. Where were they when Sue Dibny was violated by Dr. Light, Jean Loring was villified, and Spoiler was bashed up by Black Mask? The NY Post used to be a fairly decent newspaper years ago, now, it’s just a tabloid, as is the NY Daily News.

When I see the NY Post doing a story on controversies that arise over gratuitous violence in comics, then I can credit them. But this was really just a waste of space for them, and us.

Update: thinks it’s been overdone too.

, with the Masked Manhunter and the Magic Maiden. Curiously enough, it appears that they’re trying to write up a connection between Bruce Wayne’s dad and Zatara as being partners in charity fund raising, and by extension, it appears that they’re writing that Bruce and Zatanna knew each other when they were kids.

But who’s to know if it’s ever going to be for the better? :

Everything has been leading up to one revelation that will rock the Marvel Universe at its very core. There are no coincidences. There are no heroes who won’t be affected. There is no escape. When you’ve finished reading New Avengers #31, you’ll realize why this is the one issue you just can’t miss. The superstar creative team of Brian Michael Bendis and Leinil Francis Yu have been thrilling critics and fans alike with their new direction for New Avengers, but you never saw the last page of this issue coming!

Actually, isn’t that the issue with the shock tactic cover ? That’s why this is one issue and maybe even more that I can miss!

It was mentioned some time ago that good ol’ Miller would work on this, and now, here’s some (via ) that he’s going to work on the movie adaptation of Will Eisner’s famous adventure comic strip with director Robert Rodriguez. I wish them well with it.

the following regarding Capt. America:

NRAMA: Let’s touch upon a prediction or two…first off, there was the feeling that Cap would be back…heck, even with issue #26…from the preview…probably not?

EB: Nope. Not in issue #26. There won’t be anyone running around in a Cap costume in the book for a long time, honestly. This is the start of an epic, and I’m going to let the story unfold at the proper pace. We’ve got a lot more eyes on us all of a sudden, so I don’t want to mess up any detail. The scope here is grand.

I’m not impressed. For some time, they’ve been making it sound as though they’re building up to something, yet are clearly trying to fleece the audience by dragging things on and on with no clear way to tell if this is ever going to have a decent ending to it. That and whole idea of not letting the audience know exactly what’s to come are dishonest.

I see no reason to read this current series if they’re going to actually do it without even a substitute wearing the Cap costume (then again, I don’t approve of the Punisher wearing one over in his series either), and come to think of it, I don’t see why this should have to be published. This is just a whole lot of baloney, and is part of Marvel’s increasing contempt for the audience.

Brubaker, IMO, is a knee-jerker, and is not worthy of respect.

to the in which the reporter credited the pretentious novelist’s recent book as being the first to feature comic book pages included (via ):

It’s horribly, appallingly nerdy of me to pipe up about this, (or even to know it, I guess) but Laura Esquivel and Miguelanxo Prado beat him by over a decade. Esquivel’s novel “The Law of Love” came out in 1995 and contained several comic book sections illustrated by Prado that functioned as part of the narrative.

I have but one thing to say about this: it just proves how anyone who feels that the mainstream press doesn’t do any serious fact-checking isn’t too far off!

Mercury also says that:

It’s always a little frustrating seeing these “novelists do comics” articles because they only seem interested in novelists dipping their toes into work-for-hire superhero projects or (in the case of the Stephen King item) allowing others to adapt their work.

For me, it’s practically appalling, because of how they’re fawning over them, not writing any in depth focus on their work to ask if anything these novelists do is good or bad, and are even worth buying in the first place. Nor do they ask if the novelists really are fans of superheroes or any of the positive impacts they have, or even if they intend to write something positive themselves. Suffice it to say that Jodi Picoult seems to have been a big fuss over nothing to boot.

Basically, all the AP and other such press sources are trying to do is to promote Meltzer by making him sound like this great, super-duper writer who’s a kindly, devoted fan of comics, which amounts to little more than exaggerating and inflating someone’s image and ego, ditto whitewashing it too. I’ve got a fair guess why: if he really were a writer with even an iota of decency, like maybe Harlan Ellison, who worked on a couple of comic stories in the late 60s-early 70s, and did some pretty good items in his time, for all I know, chances are you’d never see Meltzer’s name mentioned in fluff-articles like these. Most likely it’s because they realize that he’s put out some pretty reprehensible items, and so that makes him a hero in their twisted POV. In a sane world, we wouldn’t have to worry about the wrong kind of people being promoted as the best all-time talents, but sadly, this is the kind of reality we live in, where overrated are lionized by a media that doesn’t care about real quality, and those with common sense and perceptive viewpoints are obscured almost entirely.

Either Waid actually believes what he says (via ), or, he sees the audience as easier to blame than the publishers who may not give his book the same promotion they’re giving to World War 3:

MW: Oh, I’ll say it. I hope that proclamation doesn’t doom us, though.

The moment all the reviews started coming in they all said, “It’s fun.” “It’s fun.” “It’s fun.” I started to sweat, because “fun” is a death word in comics these days.

RT: If you kill off Hawkeye, people are going to hate it, but at least they are going to buy twenty of it.

MW: That’s just it.

“Fun, fun, fun” being our rap makes me worried. Sales were strong on the first issue, but the second issue drop-off was a little steeper than we’d predicted. And I honestly think that was because every reviewer said it was “fun.”

“Fun” automatically kills off a lot of your sales. Don’t get me wrong; the book’s still a success in the current market, and no one at DC has expressed anything but enthusiasm. We certainly seem to have a hit on our hands, George and I. I just hope that the “fun” label doesn’t hit us too hard. If so, it’s just another sign that current readers don’t want “fun” comics.

Something tells me that Waid could use a bit of fun himself, by spending time outdoors and at an amusement park, because this is really stupid of him to say that. has a reasonable argument that DC’s use of variant covers for the first issue were what led to big sales for the debut. Personally, I find variants worthless, and even when I still bought pamphlet issues regularly, I didn’t go out of my way to spend my hard earned money for the same story twice. And yet, this shows just how the new Brave and the Bold may actually be a failure, because quite a few people may have bought it more for the value to be had in the variant covers.

And as I said above, I think DC’s been giving far more attention to their needless WW3 than to truly promoting books like Waid and Perez’s new anthology series. Regardless, he did a serious disservice to comics by saying that nobody wants a fun story these days. That’s not how you draw in newcomers either. That sounds more as though he were toeing the company line than reflecting what the audience asked for. And might I just add that, if the Star Wars prequels weren’t as fun as they were, it’s possible that they’d never have done as well as they did in the past few years when George Lucas put them together.

about an artists’ class being held for the purpose relieving stress:

AN international comic book artist is to draw on his experience to offer staff stress-busting sessions.

Blackburn-based Tim Perkins is holding the unusual scheme, which will let employees design a comic book or storyboard in a bid to help them relax.

I don’t know, is such a thing possible, that it can help people to relax?

A while ago, that sugarcoated Brad Meltzer in its report on novelists who turn to comic books. Now it is time to take a look at yet another superficial article about Brad Meltzer that goes the bizarre route, . Another article that pays lip service unto him and apologizes for his actions. And another article that even confuses all the matters his notorious miniseries has surrounding 9-11:

The next big thing for Meltzer and DC would be the wildly successful ‘Identity Crisis,’ a story that found its origins in the tragedy of 9/11.

‘When you think of firefighters after 9/11, you look at them differently,’ Said Meltzer, recalling what DiDio said to him when they were looking at the story. The event made people realize that firefighters weren’t just the guys pulling cats out of trees and marching in parades, they were heroes doing an extremely dangerous job where their lives were on the line every day.

This was something that DC wanted to create for its heroes. They wanted fans to remember that what the heroes are doing is a scary dangerous job.

Since when wasn’t it dangerous? But I guess that’s not the main problem here. When you think about how, as evidenced in the contrived clash with Deathstroke, that the miniseries was so negative in its stance towards heroes, it’s hard to swallow that it really respects the heroes of 9-11 either.

But Meltzer wasn’t on aboard with it initially. He’d always wanted to do a Justice League story, but couldn’t get his head around why anyone would want to hurt Sue Dibny. But DiDio got his attention with two words; Jean Loring.

In other words, this ludicrously written interview from CBR seems to be furthering the false notion that Jean was ever truly a harpy. It also signals a bizarre double-stance: if Meltzer really didn’t want to hurt Sue Dibny, as he’s been using as his defense for some time now, why would he want to hurt Jean Loring? Sorry, but this only weakens any defense he may have been so transparently using.

There’s a part at the end that I can only assume was mistyped, but still involves plenty of head-shaking dishonesty:

Meltzer admitted that he was surprised by fan reaction to some of ‘Identity Crisis,’ particularly the misfortunes of Sue Dibny.

‘The [reaction to the] rape scene surprised me more than anything. I didn’t expect the venom,’ said Meltzer.

But he thought that the response was the result of a very vocal minority, not indicative of the views of most of the book’s readers as a whole. He wishes that rape didn’t exist, obviously, but it doesn’t, and comics should reflect that and deal with real issues.

When you respond that superficially, not willing to even address or bring up the exact arguments at hand, the leading one here being the lack of a female viewpoint in the miniseries, you’re really being dishonest, and when you dismiss the reaction as just coming from a “minority”, then you’re showing yet more contempt. As for the word “doesn’t”, I can only hope that’s a typo, because otherwise, the writer of that slop has convicted himself of offending women as much as he made himself part of the same problem as Meltzer.

One more thing this item doesn’t mention is how Sue was like an allegory/allusion to the WTC towers, when IC suggests that the heroes are to blame for her murder. Needless to say, I find the whole idea of using a defenseless woman as a stand-in for real life details extremely offensive, mostly because in a way, it trivializes the tragedy in real life even more than Sue’s own violation at the hands of Dr. Light was trivialized soon after it took place in the second part.

And this brings up another very disturbing thing about IC: it’s that allegorically speaking, it seems to trivialize , when the building’s underground parking garage was bombed by Iraqi al Qaida Muslim fanatics, egged on by the sheik Omar Abdul Rahman. I thought about this the other day while eating lunch at work, and suddenly, I realized that there was one more very offensive metaphorical act that IC pulled. So, not only did it blame the victims, it also trivialized a previous attack on the same source.

If that’s how comics are going to deal with real life issues, even from a metaphorical POV, then simply put, the superheroes of the DCU had no more business dealing with 9-11 any more than would have in expressing an opinion on abortion, homosexuality, living only on welfare, or any countless other subjects some people in this world seem totally incapable of discussing without nearly taking up arms against each other, the First Amendment notwithstanding.