Recent events in the X-Men comics have tugged at the edges of one of the company’s stranger editorial edicts of the past ten years – the decision to wipe out almost an entire minority because… there were too many of them.

It sounds a little sinister. Faced with a problem minority, Marvel’s response was a fictional genocide. In the story House of M it was presented as the Scarlet Witch’s way to undo the miseries of her life, which included a failed marriage, a monstrous father, two dead children, a nervous breakdown and a spiral into villainy. Faced with those problems, wiping out an entire race seems like a baffling and inelegant solution. Seen as a solution to editorial concerns that mutants were overrunning the Marvel universe, it makes a lot more sense. (It certainly wouldn’t be the first or last time that a character behaved strangely in order to serve an editorial agenda.)

At the time of the House of M story, editor-in-chief Joe Quesada said, “Part of what is inherently important about the metaphor of the X-Men is that they are a minority. … [T]here aren’t supposed to be a lot of these guys … they never really should’ve been in the forefront. That kind of message got lost over the years, to the point where we ended up with a mutant island where there were over six million of them, and every time you’d turn a page, you’d see a mutant on every corner. We eve had ‘Mutant Town’. So, one of the things that we wanted to do was put the genie back in the bottle.”

Such rhetoric suggests a misunderstanding of the challenges faced by real minorities. The invention of a mutant nation and a mutant neighbourhood really enhanced the metaphor, rather than undermined it. After all, the existence of almost four billion Asians in the world doesn’t make life easier for one Asian kid in a town in rural America. The existence of gay neighbourhoods in almost every major city in the Western world has not made coming out to one’s parents any easier. More than half the world is female, but women still don’t have full equality in the first world, let alone in the developing world. The claim that “there aren’t supposed to be a lot of these guys” is not likely to be well received by anyone who has ever been a victim of prejudice.

The better solution to Quesada’s perceived problem might have been to simply stop telling so many stories about mutants. Writers won’t write those stories if editors tell them not to. Instead, Quesada reduced the mutant population to less than 200 people, which is not a minority at all, but a sprawling family.

I don’t think Quesada was being malicious when he decided to purge the mutants; I just don’t think he thought it through. The changed status quo provided some fertile ground for stories, but it took a while before anyone tried to plant anything there, and the major arc to come out of it was the story that brought the mutants back. Now that new mutants are appearing in the Marvel universe again, Marvel actually can tell stories about mutants as a minority again, rather than as an ‘endangered species’.

Minorities in general do not have the best time of things in comics’ superhero mainstream. The superhero genre is dominated by the straight, white, male majority, and so is the creative community. Convention has it that this is true of the audience is as well, but there are plenty of readers who don’t fit that model, and these readers are used to the idea that they won’t see themselves reflected in the media they consume. That’s not something that we should be complacent about, in comics or in any other medium.

In this column, I plan to examine how minorities have been represented and treated in the superhero genre. This is not about assigning quotas, or imposing a sense of obligation on creators, and I’m certainly not going to suggest that minority characters can never be villains or victims. Rather, I want to challenge the complacency of an industry that always defaults to the majority.

This complacency is present in a lot of the media we consume, but in comics it’s exaggerated by the facts of the medium’s history. Superhero comics are still telling stories that began fifty, sixty, or seventy years ago, and this has created a built-in bias towards conventions from more than half a century ago. White. Male. Straight. The minority characters that we do see often reflect prejudices and stereotypes of the past; women are passive hangers-on; black people are ghetto street-toughs; Asians are mysterious martial artists; and gays don’t exist at all.

Marvel’s mutants have served as a metaphor for just about every minority, and in some cases those minorities remain better represented in metaphor than in fact. Comics’ default position on diversity seems to be one of avoidance – a position that’s perfectly summed up by the Scarlet Witch’s memorable phrase, ‘No more mutants’. Those three words might also suggest the best way forward; let’s stop talking in metaphors and put the actual minorities in comics, to tell their own stories.

It will take a conscious effort to correct comics’ institutional bias. It will take deliberate action to resist the reflex to only tell stories about straight, white men. No more mutants. Let’s let the whole audience in to the story.

Andrew Wheeler writes about food and comics. Sometimes simultaneously. He is the author of Eat Britain!

Kamill1 sez, "My first attempt at an automata, I think it turned out pretty well! Super fun build. A little wink to Jake Von Slatt, sitting down to play the pipe organ. Huzzah!"

Steampunk Automata "Orchestra Von Slatt", Completed Friday, Sep 3 2010 (Thanks, kamill1, via Submitterator!)

]]> http://www.boingboing.net/2010/09/04/sweet-little-steampu.html 39327@leegovatos.com/fever Sat, 04 Sep 2010 13:13:07 GMT The Daily News in Los Angeles reports that;

A suspected burglar was fatally shot early Wednesday after a confrontation with a Lancaster store owner, officials said.

The suspected burglar, identified as Robert Summers, 28, of Lancaster, was mortally wounded about 3:30 a.m. by the unidentified owner of a store in the 200 block of East Avenue K-8, officials said. Another suspect with Summers managed to escape.

“The owner fired a handgun at the suspects, hitting one and possibly wounding the second,” the Sheriff’s Department said in a statement.

Anyone with information about the case was asked to call the Sheriff’s Homicide Bureau at 323-890-5500.

Comments on the paper’s forum from people who seemed to have knowledge of the involved people seemed to add questions of conspiracy

two bullets in the back of the head is no accident two hours to call the cops its a cover up

people can call this self defense but how when he was outside of the shop and shot in the back of the head!

A poster on the Collectors Society boards named the store in question as Bases Cards and Comics with another twist. This is the second time this has happened. With a similar result. The Los Angeles Times reported in 2003;

A Lancaster shop owner, sleeping overnight in his back office because he’d twice been victimized by thieves, shot and killed a burglar early Tuesday, sheriff’s deputies said.

The owner of Bases, Cards and Comics, a sports memorabilia store, had been staying there “pretty much every night” for the last two months to thwart further theft, Sgt. Shawn McCarthy said.

Detectives preliminarily concluded that the fatal shooting of James Patrick Cassidy, 40, was justified, because the shopkeeper said Cassidy threatened him with a tire iron during the 3 a.m. break-in, McCarthy said. “I have no reason to doubt his story.”

Cassidy, whose hometown had not been determined by coroner’s investigators, died of a gunshot wound to the upper body.

McCarthy declined to identify the store owner, who told deputies he had been in business for about 10 years.

The shopkeeper was awakened by the back door being forced open, Deputy Scott Butler said. Arming himself with a handgun, the store owner crept down a hallway and encountered an intruder, who raised a tire iron as if to strike, investigators said. The owner fired once and struck Cassidy at close range, they said.

Paramedics pronounced Cassidy dead at the scene in the 1300 block of West J Street.

“It appears the owner was defending himself; that tire iron could have killed him,” Butler said. The case will be presented to the district attorney’s office for review, but no charges are expected to be filed, Los Angeles County sheriff’s officials said.

The shop owner, whom McCarthy described as traumatized by the shooting, told deputies he had been burglarized two months ago. Homicide investigators were looking for that report and another filed about a year ago to verify the owner’s statement that he had been a crime victim and was guarding his merchandise, the sergeant said.

“Some of those trading cards are worth a lot of money,” McCarthy said. “He told us it would be easy to grab a couple of boxes off a shelf and have a couple hundred dollars worth of stuff.”

On October 19th, Apocalypse Now makes its debut appearance on Blu-ray, and will be seen in its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio for the first time outside of cinemas. The following trailer showcases some of the shots with this framing.

This goes against the original wishes of cinematographer Vittorio Storaro who decided the film should be transfered in something like 2:1 for DVD and video, as well as any widescreen TV broadcasts. Maybe he’s changed his mind due to the size of modern TV sets and the quality of Blu-ray, or maybe he’s just been ignored.

Here’s the full list of what’s on the discs:

In the 2 disc set:

Apocalypse Now in its 1979 Cut
Apocalypse Now Redux
“A Conversation with Martin Sheen” interview by Francis Ford Coppola
“An Interview with John Milius” interview by Francis Ford Coppola
Complete Francis Ford Coppola interview with Roger Ebert at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival
Monkey Sampan “lost scene”
Additional Scenes
“Destruction of the Kurtz Compound” end credits with audio commentary by Francis Ford Coppola
“The Hollow Men,” video of Marlon Brando reading T.S. Eliot’s poem
Featurettes:
The Birth of 5.1 Sound
Ghost Helicopter Flyover sound effects demonstration
A Million Feet of Film: The Editing of Apocalypse Now
The Music of Apocalypse Now
Heard Any Good Movies Lately? The Sound Design of Apocalypse Now
The Final Mix
Apocalypse Then and Now
The Color Palette of Apocalypse Now
PBR Streetgang
The Color Palette of Apocalypse Now
The Synthesizer Soundtrack” article by music synthesizer inventor Bob Moog

The Full Disclosure 3 disc set adds:

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse
Optional audio commentary with Eleanor and Francis Ford Coppola
48-page collectible printed booklet with special note from Francis Ford Coppola, never-before-seen archives from the set, behind the scenes photos and more
John Milius Script Excerpt with Francis Ford Coppola Notes
Storyboard Gallery
Photo Gallery, including images from photographer Mary Ellen Mark
Marketing Archive

Now, go tell Jeffrey Wells there’s another OAR non-controversy for him to get his pantaloons in a pretzel over.

According to a demo by Life Hacker, iOS 4.1 works much smoother on the 2 year old device than the previous version. The site notes the following regarding their little experiment: Read More

"iOS 4 vs iOS 4.1 – Guess Who Wins" is an article by the iPhone Download Blog sponsored by the iPhone Store. Feel free to leave a comment or discuss this topic in the forum. For the latest iPhone info, don't forget to follow me on Twitter.

Journey to the Final Frontier of Sci-Fi Zombie Horror!

Jim Pike was the world's biggest Star Trek fan—until two tours of duty in Afghanistan destroyed his faith in the human race. Now he sleepwalks through life as the assistant manager of a small hotel in downtown Houston.

But when hundreds of Trekkies arrive in his lobby for a science-fiction convention, Jim finds himself surrounded by costumed Klingons, Vulcans, and Ferengi—plus a strange virus that transforms its carriers into savage, flesh-eating zombies!

As bloody corpses stumble to life and the planet teeters on the brink of total apocalypse, Jim must deliver a ragtag crew of fanboys and fangirls to safety. Dressed in homemade uniforms and armed with prop phasers, their prime directive is to survive. But how long can they last in the ultimate no-win scenario?

Confirming this dead-and-staying-dead status is a new gallery of concept art that offers a cruelly tantalising taste of what the film would have looked like. It’d be insane to think Disney Pixar were sharing this now because they were looking to generate interest in the film. The publication of these images seem to ring a resounding death knell, even more certain than most cancellations at the house of mouse where projects are shelved, reworked and shelved again for decades on end without a single piece of concept art ever seeing the light of day.

Here are some of my favourite Newt pieces. I’ll try not to cry as we look them over.

Reading between the drawings, it looks like the film had a lot going on thematically, not least of which would be some exploration of attitudes towards starting a family. Great material for a Pixar film.

There’s plenty more art on the Disney Pixar Facebook page.

Another day, another CSS3 playground. Are you excited yet? Wait for it - this one has wood paneling for a background! (That's classy!) Even though it's not exactly the first tool of its kind (or the second, ... or the tenth), CSS 3.0 Maker is pretty handy and comprehensive, so I decided it was worth covering. Let me quickly sum it up:

I like:

• That it provides clear compatibility information for Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome (no IE, of course). You can see exactly which browser versions support your bleeding-edge CSS.
• That it's visual and real-time.
• That it provides code that works across as many browsers as possible, including browser-specific syntax (think -moz-border-radius for Firefox).
• The wood paneling! It makes me feel like I'm in a sauna.

I don't like:

• That it won't let you set all parameters at once. You can tweak the border parameters but upon clicking the gradient tab, your changes are undone. It's pretty irritating and almost relegates this to "toy" status.

CSS 3.0 Maker helps you visually create next-gen CSS originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 03 Sep 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Germans in the Woods from StoryCorps on Vimeo.

Most of us will never know the anguish experienced by soldiers whose job it is to confront mortality on a daily basis and often determine it. Joseph Robertson died at the age of ninety in 2009, reliving the moment he killed an angel at the Battle of the Bulge every day since that one. In this Story Corps interview recorded with his son-in-law in 2005, Mr. Robertson recounts what he called the “saddest moment of his life.” The Rauch brothers direct the heartrending reliving of this tale in their short film, German in the Woods.

In the 1930s, when malariologists figured out that England’s malaria had vanished because English malarial mosquitoes preferred pig and calf blood to human blood, and the local livestock population had boomed, they called for a pig under every bed as a solution to malaria.

This week has gone by faster than usual. Perhaps the Apple event made the days come and go quicker but nevertheless it’s Friday. This is the day I’ve been known to spout off about a topic that I feel needs further attention. This week I go after those who feel the need to warn people that jailbreaking your iPhone can “brick” it.

I recently posted an article announcing the recent jailbreak of my iPhone 4. Having been away from the dark side since my iPhone 3G, I wasn’t sure what to expect from the process. Read More

"Why Do People Think Jailbreaking Can Brick Your iPhone? [Rant]" is an article by the iPhone Download Blog sponsored by the iPhone Store. Feel free to leave a comment or discuss this topic in the forum. For the latest iPhone info, don't forget to follow me on Twitter.

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