Hanukkah vs. Kwanzaa

When I was a teenager one of my favorite comic series was the classic Marvel Comics JUNGLE ACTION! series from the mid 1970's featuring The Black Panther and his exploits in his native homeland of Wakanda. A particular favorite was Jungle Action #14, Panther's Rage part 9, "There are Serpents Lurking in Paradise" where King T'Challa battles a T-Rex to the death in some prehistoric African valley. The story and illustrations in this comic are epic in scope and theme - A man battling the dragon for survival - and I don't think my 13 year old self considered the race of The Black Panther to be of any consequence in the telling of this timeless tale. By issue #21 the Wakandan royal was in the jungle of America battling the Ku Klux Klan in "The Panther vs. The Klan!" and melanin was the root cause of everything.

"Question: What proves a nation's achievement? Technological advancement or individual contentment? He is not as positive of the answer as he once was, but it is the only question he completely understands."

"But the time for questions... has passed."

Jack Kirby was the story telling genius who created the Jungle Action comics and is credited, by many, as the innovator who gave birth to the graphic novel which emerged as a unique artform in the 1980's. He was a dedicated Man of the Left, but as has been pointed out on the KOTCB blog in other posts, it is often Men of the Left that make very "conservative" art just by telling the TRUTH as they see it and letting the chips fall where they may. It is true that a liberal minded artist might not like how the general public digests a drawing, music or film and nourishes themselves on some unsavory themes of revenge and blood lust while excreting the intended message of tolerance and submission but that's the beauty of art - once it's completed by the artist the object takes on a life of its own. Kirby developed the backstory of The Black Panther and his conception of the hidden nation of Wakanda in the vicinity of Swahili Africa filled out a character created by the Marvel scribblers 10 years earlier as the first black superhero. Locating the fictional country of Wakanda in eastern sub-saharan Africa is an odd choice considering the fact that most of the US African Americans come from West African tribes but if you examine comic buyer demographics it makes sense:

Overall, the comics and graphic novel-buying public is 69% (non-Hispanic) white, 12% Latino, 10% African American, and 8% Asian;

And those are 2017 numbers - just imagine what the Afto-American comic fan demo was in 1966 when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby crossed the color line and dreamed up this Kang T'Challa and the Shangri La of Wakanda which rivals Superman's Planet Krypton or Thor's Realm of Asgard in pure fantasy. In my view, a more interesting homeland for the Black Panther would be Liberia and that would guarantee an explosive backstory with cultural, political AND racial TNT built into the foundation but... I guess that's why (((they))) don't let me write comic books. It really doesn't matter because Africa is a big dark blob for most Americans and they couldn't tell you the difference between Ghana and Uganda so as far as most comic consumers go they probably think there actually IS a place called Wakanda. It just all blends together into one great African stew of red, yellow, and green which, once consumed and digested, gives us a fruity excrement called Kwanzaa. This "holiday" was created by a Marxist Black Separatist the same year that Marvel Comics integrated their universe with The Black Panther (not Huey Newton) and kicked off a post-Civil Rights Act false dialectic that has yet to reach a coherent synthesis. The False Dialectic is this:

Thesis: (((We))) will create a fake world where )))you((( are "sold" content even though you comprise less than 10% of the market and a solid 70% of our current customers either couldn't care less or actively hate what (((we're))) doing.
Antithesis: )))We((( actively resent and despise (((you))) and have no interest in buying what you're selling and beyond that we are going to actively hold ourselves separate and above the dominant culture that comprises 70%+ of your traditional customers.

I say it's a false dialectic because it exists in a semi-virtual world far removed from the one that most people live in - think of it as a meta world or mediasphere inhabited by people who create entertainment to fill the idle hours of modern man. Unfortunately, false though it is, the argument gets worked out in real life like when a Black Domestic Terrorist with Mental Illness dones a mask, grabs his machete and hacks up some Jews celebrating Hanukkah (The #FakeNews always makes the point that the victims are Orthodox Jews as though that makes it somewhat acceptable). Grafton Thomas is not everyone's idea of a white supremacist or Nazi sympathiser but...
Let's face the facts, there is a vast ocean of anti-semitic Jew hatred swirling around the real world and it's fueled by Leftist revolutionaries as a tool to force social change and instill fear in the wealthy leaders of society. There have been a series of religiously motivated attacks during the Festival of Lights this year as a warning and threat of greater future violence. Fear! (((Your))) holiday might be 2000 years old while )))ours((( has been around for just over 50 years but if (((you))) don't get (((your))) mind right )))we'll((( get all Antiochus on your ass and the cold hard fact of the matter is that the cops can't stop )))us(((.

"We return from the slavery of uniform which the world's madness demanded us to don to the freedom of civil garb. We stand again to look America squarely in the face and call a spade a spade. We sing: This country of ours, despite all its better souls have done and dreamed, is yet a shameful land ...

We return.

We return from fighting.

We return fighting."

W. E. B. Du Bois

And that brings me to the Watchmen - not the graphic novel (Alan Moore), not the 2009 film (Zack Snyder) but the TV show on HBO created by (Damon Lindelof) - which is a damn good example of the axiom about Men of the Left telling their truth and "watching" it blow up in their face. I'm not going to run it down - it's good, professional and worth seeing - and the content is so dense that a full review requires a separate, unique and LONG blog post. I will simply embed a link to a podcast where Lindelof discusses the major themes in this 9 hour series and how they play out in the first 3 episodes of the show. 

Podcast: Ep 1

Quintessential Comic Fanboy 

Based on this interview the new incarnation of Watchmen is entirely about race and the "reckoning" that awaits White America due to past transgressions against modern conceptions of morality. This alternate narrative has been informed by Ta-Nehisi Coates's musings on reparations (see KOTCB My President Was White) and the Charlottesville White Riot of 2017 (see KOTCB A Reckoning for Br'er Rabbit)*.  The reverence the production staff hold for the original graphic novel, which they call "the bible" in the writer's room, is emblematic of the post-modern entertainment atheism that skins every shot in every episode. The Creator, if you will, of this alternate history is Allan Moore and he is the living embodiment of the comic book nerd - the exact kind of person that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby depended on to keep their business afloat and "in the black" as (((they))) say. While I was a fan of comics in my youth and would, from time to time, shell out a quarter for the latest issue of Batman or Spiderman I was not the demographic that kept the fantasists in Manhattan employed. The REAL comic reader - the people who know the Marvel and DC Universe in detail + all the other minor titles from other publishers - the people who attend Comic-Con and/or Comicon - the people who spend serious money on comic books - the REAL comic reader is a white, middle-aged, affluent, loser.

This brings me to the point (if I can call it that) of this blog post and that concerns the choice of designing the entire Watchman series around a character called Sister Night played by Regina King (excellent performance) who is a vicious, sociopathic black nun vigilante and sees the world in black and white. It's odd, to say the least, that a studio, which is a commercial enterprise, would allow a series based on a revered graphic novel to be centered around a character representing a demographic (black, middle-aged, woman) that DOES NOT buy comic books or, to the best of my knowledge, have any interest in anything related to comic fandom. It's insane! I credit Ms. King for her professionalism because I can't imagine she had any natural interest in this project - not like Morton Downey Jr. playing Iron Man or Chadwick Boseman playing Black Panther - or the schizophrenic costumed cop she brings to life. In one particular scene in episode 2 Sister Night participates in a police raid on deplorable (and irredeemable) rubes at a trailer park town called Nixonville and beats 230 Lbs of white man to a bloody pulp as a character named Red Scare (Russian of course) looks on - not plausible but hey it's a comic book (sort of). And that's what bugs me - the heroine of this drama is anti-comic and she's beating the living shit out of characters that are proxies for the comics fans worldwide. The world turned inside out and upside down but to what end? Why? Is this some diabolical attempt to fuse Hanukkah and Kwanzaa into a New World Order that comic fans must accept as the truth? That's about as real as the dinosaurs of Wakanda.

*Needless to say, Mr. Lindelof does NOT read the KOTCB blog.