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My name is David, I’m from Georgia, and I am going to try to do a weekly Tiny Letter mailing list called “(me + you)” about things that I am into. I really only write for work so this will be a way to do…not that.

inkstuds:

This is Inkstuds Radio and I’m David Brothers, a two-time Eisner Award co-loser. I used to run 4thletter!, the internet’s most popular comics blog that also focused on wrestling, movies, music, Venom, and the black condition. I did Inkstuds Spotlight a few years back, taking a look at the world of comics from a variety of different perspectives, and Robin Inkstuds, the proprietor of this fine internet broadcast, gave me an open invite to come back and interview whoever I’d like.

I chose Zainab Akhtar, the mind behind Comics & Cola (found at comicsandcola.com, with a Tumblr supplement atwellnotwisely.tumblr.com) and a comics critic and tastemaker whose voice I appreciate greatly in the current comics landscape. She has a taste for things that are new to me, and a way of describing them that fascinates me. She’s done an Inkstuds or two herself, most recently with Michael Deforge.

I reached out to her for an interview/conversation, and she was kind enough to say yes. We talked about Mads Mikkelsen, her childhood experience with comics, what led to her critiquing comics, being focused on narrative, the community she has found herself in, serializing comics for others, friendship, a brief aside into Masamune Shirow, and whether Vin Diesel or The Rock is better, more or less in that order.

The intro music is Akira Ifukube’s “Godzilla (Main Theme).” The outro music is Amit Trivedi & Tochi Raina’s Motorwada Song.

If Evangelion 1.11 and 2.22 are about revision, then Evangelion 3.33 turns its eye toward critique. 1.11 and 2.22 celebrate the series and strengthen its central character. 3.33 leaps forward fourteen years, and in this new status quo, The surviving Eva pilots—all women, save for Shinji—are trapped in adolescence, in the exact form you could purchase from your friendly neighborhood bishoujo statue dealer. In the interim, Asuka has taken to wearing a track jacket and an eyepatch, which recalls Eye Bandage Ayanami. The difference is that Asuka’s accessory is a yandere one, while Rei’s bandages were meant to make you feel like your little sister needs your help and yours alone.

The eyepatch is a toyetic change, which speaks to the subtext of the film. Shinji is a boy out of time, confused by the new context he’s forced to relive. His father Gendo and Gendo’s assistant are both set in their ways, determined to see their plans through no matter the consequences, with a Rei Ayanami as their tool. Misato and Ritsuko have turned against NERV, with Asuka Langley and Mari Makinami firmly on their side.

Evangelion 3.33: You Can (Not) Redo is about the men who are determined to have things their way, the women who would do anything to escape the story that has preserved them in resin for years, and the boy who stubbornly resists them because he doesn’t understand how what he knows to be true could ever be wrong, since the pain he’s familiar with is more comforting than the confusion that’s new to him.

In 2004 or 2005, a comics website put out an open call for reviewers. I applied, I was rejected, and I started my own site a few months later. This was back before I realized that numbered ratings were for suckers, before I got bored of “is it good or bad?” and way interested in “but how did it make you feel tho?”, before…everything. I think I’d been a professional writer for a little over a year at this point.

Here’s the first comics review I ever wrote, about the first chapter of a book that I think is still probably the best expression of Good Superhero Comics. I like that I didn’t punk out of discussing the art, that I can see myself trying so hard to be a Writer About Comics, and that I wasn’t afraid to say when I didn’t understand something. It doesn’t really sound like me at all any more, but I can see my self in it, and it was on a blog I called Guerilla Grodd, which is so exceedingly me it positively hurts.
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I missed out on Grant Morrison’s first go at the Justice League. A combination of Onslaught and a couple Spider-clones sent me screaming from comics in general. I’ve spent the past few years catching up. I managed to pick up all of Morrison’s run on JLA in trade form and came out of it feeling impressed and not a little happy. JLA: Classified #1, Morrison’s much hyped return to the team with artist Ed McGuinness and inker Dexter Vines recreates that feeling pretty well.

The blurb on the cover shouts “WHERE ARE THE JUSTICE LEAGUE?” Good question, since the only real Leaguer we get in this issue is Batman. That’s plenty for me, my friend. Morrison’s Batman is a return to the frighteningly intelligent Batman of his original run. This Batman knows exactly what’s going on, who’s behind it and how to fix it. Just stay out of his way. Morrison quickly gives you all you need to know about the most likely unfamiliar Ultramarines. Jack O'Lantern is the loveably Irish comedic relief, Warmaker One the sharp soldier, Squire is a plucky sidekick and Goraiko is… difficult to get. Each Ultramarine has a distinct personality and power. All of them are likeable. Grodd himself is kind of wonderfully evil. “And I suppose you’re wondering what happened to the hostages…” Grodd growls. “I ate them all!” Morrison went the Geoff Johns route and made a gigantic, talking ape a true monster. Add on rock solid dialogue and you have a winner.

I’d be horribly, horribly remiss if I didn’t touch on McGuinness’s art here. This is sharp work. From the shadowed introduction of the team on the first page to Jack O'Lantern’s hilariously expressive mask to Grodd taking down Jack O'Lantern, McGuinness is on point. What’s interesting is what he didn’t show. Scattered throughout the issue are people draped in shadows, obviously dead, to shadowed gorillas (complete with Splinter Cell- esque night vision gear!). There’s a palpable sense of horror in here, which is a sharp contrast to McGuinness’s cartoony style. His Batman is majestic from his first appearance, permanently scowling and draped in shadow. This book looks good. The panel layouts tend to resist the typical squared-off grid, resulting in skewed angles, characters breaking panel borders (see the second and third pages for the easiest example), panels made out of bubbles, shockwaves and Bat-symbols. Batman’s first scene, for example, resembles a flying Bat-symbol approaching the reader, as if it was flying off the page. All of this, plus the attention to the small details, adds up to a high- impact, high-energy read. You want to speed through the book to see what new visual that McGuinness and Vines are going to throw at you, but you also want to slow it down to fully appreciate the craft. Good isn’t the word for this book. It’s positively beautiful.

This issue opens with a simple introduction of what’s going on and who’s involved. In other hands, this would be clumsy exposition, but Warmaker One’s succint lines read more as a mission briefing than the writer breaking down the story for the reader. “Who needs the Justice League?” he asks. “Shock and awe, gentlemen.” Two sentences set the stage. The JLA is out of the picture, but that’s no problem. The Ultramarines are going to put down the villains with a quickness.

The issue is paced nicely. It jumps from scene to scene with breakneck speed. The dialogue helps here, as it avoids the typical exposition and explanations that a lot of comics used to be plagued with. Knight uses a microwave gun on Grodd and pauses mid- explanation to say “Oh, never mind” and get back to the action.

This comic works on every level. The writing is top notch, the art is even better and the Batphone appears. It’s got a full stock of killer one-liners (Batman on the JLA: “They got lost saving somebody else’s universe. Typical.”), incredible panels and pinups and a good mix of action, speed and mystery. Highly recommended. Four out of five stars.

I listened to Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly on the regular from its release in March to the release of Vince Staples’s Summertime ‘06 in late June, at which point I listened to Vince’s album a few times a week instead, which eventually faded to once a week by the end of the year. I drew power and knowledge from both. I like Summertime more than To Pimp A Butterfly, but taken together, they’re a great look at a certain issue.

I say taken together because they’re part of a pattern of albums about the anxiety of being black and male in America in the modern day. Pharoahe Monch dropped PTSD: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in 2014, an album about dealing with outward and inward threats. The most resonant lyric on the record is “My family customs were not accustomed to dealing with mental health/It was more or less an issue for white families with wealth.” Other albums followed a similar train of thought: J. Cole’s 2014 Forest Hills Drive (2014), Big KRIT’s Cadillactica (2014), Earl Sweatshirt’s I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside (2015), Joey Bada$$’s B4.DA.$$ (2015), Lupe Fiasco’s Tetsuo & Youth (2015), Vince again with Hell Can Wait (2014), Blu’s Good to Be Home (2014), and even portions of Future’s and Drake’s 2014 and 2015 catalogs dig into blackness and masculinity, one way or the other. I banged all of them for weeks at a time and memorized most of them. I joke that they’re the same album, but they’re more like hours on a clock, or slices of a three hundred and sixty degree circle.

To Pimp A Butterfly’s message, bolstered in part by the poem “Mortal Man” that’s threaded throughout (a poem with the alternate title “Another Nigger”) and in full by the complicated presentation of “i” on the album, is “We’re knee-deep in black misery but we can rise above it.” Summertime '06’s response is, “Yeah, but we still in it, though,” and you can hear it when Vince says, “My teachers told me we was slaves/My mama told me we was kings/I don’t know who to listen to/I guess we somewhere in between” on “Summertime.”

Both albums attack the same problem from different directions. Vince is saying Be Honest. He wants to kill somebody because his daddy did it, he’s a gangster just like his daddy, who was a gangster just like Vince’s granny. There’s legacy, heritage, in there, and the only examples we have to follow are the ones we are given. (My career as an adult has been entirely in fields that I didn’t have a model for as a child and didn’t know existed. I fell into them while chasing something else.) On 2014’s Hell Can Wait, the EP that served as a prelude for Summertime '06 and made me realize that Vince Staples was about to drop the hottest album of 2015 bar none, the track “65 Hunnid” includes the line “I told you before that niggas gotta die for this shit to survive.” It’s not about right or wrong. It is what it is, and if you can’t figure out what it is, how are you going to fix it? Gotta name it to claim it.

Kendrick’s saying Rise Up. “Every Nigger Is A Star” is the first sentence you hear on the album, spun up out of empty air like theme music. It’s 2015 “Black Is Beautiful,” it’s the idea that no matter what society tells you, no matter how you feel, you still shine. And Kendrick proceeds to emphasize his own hypocrisy, doubt, and weakness over the course of the album. It’s an album about being a famous rapper and the conflict that comes with getting further and further your center. It’s also an album about finding any type of success and experiencing the same conflict. Kendrick scorns God in his arrogance, indulges in vices, and fights his own self to try to correct his course. The most resonant part of the album is actually in the video for “i”, when Kendrick is screaming I Love Myself while hanging out of a car window, desperate to make anyone including himself believe it by any means.

That moment is the album in miniature, and the conflict in miniature too. My skin is beautiful and my mind is sharp, but living under the weight of white supremacy induces doubt, whether from yourself or others. You know it, but you gotta feel it, too. On “Lift Me Up,” Vince Staples says, “Fight between my conscience and the skin that’s on my body/Man, I need to fight the power, but I need that new Ferrari.” The struggle is the same, so when Vince says, “I just want to live it up, can a motherfucker breathe?/Life ain’t always what it seems, so please just lift me up” on the chorus of the same song, he’s asking for the same help that Kendrick is looking for.

We’re just trying to breathe the only way we know how. You gotta play the cards you’re dealt and hope for the best, even if you know it’s wrong, because sometimes an escape hatch is impossible to find. Kendrick’s “King Kunta” stands out for its swagger. Vince’s “Lift Me Up” stands out for its desperate honesty. Both are ideas often coexist in the same brain at the same time.

The two albums work in concert to suggest an idea: life is too complex for easy answers. On a macro scale, the solution to fixing police brutality, to resolving the black condition, is simple. “Eradicate white supremacy.” On a micro scale, a me-and-you scale, we gotta take into account power differentials, old habits that aren’t likely to change, old habits that might could change, and a million different contexts that we’ve gotta wrestle with.

We gotta deal with the reality of the situation while keeping an eye on where we wanna go. We gotta understand what we perceive to be our faults even as we push our achievements to the forefront in an attempt to prove our worth. We gotta look at the whole circle, not just a slice. That kings and queens rhetoric is played out once you hit adulthood and can look at history with real eyes. We were neither. We were people, and people are complex.

Comics&Cola: One last thing: reflecting on comics 2015

I wrote about 2015-in-comics-as-me, and what I learned from the crucible, for my friend Zainab. A lot of people showed up, and it’s heartening and disheartening to see how many of us are bone tired of the status quo.

(Source: comicsandcola.com)

I watched 146 movies in 2015. Here’s some half-formed thoughts on a random selection of them, in alphabetical order. This is as close as I’ll get to anything like a year-end wrap-up because ranked lists are a fake idea.

3 Evil Masters/The Master: There’s a really good bit in here where a guy is practicing a one-inch punch with ceramic plates. He succeeds, and his master is like “aight now do it again, only punch into this tub filled with water and you better still shatter the plate at the bottom.” That is difficult. This was excellent.

47 Ronin: It was dumb to add a bunch of Lord of the Rings crap to what’s already one of the best revenge stories of all time, but this was fine. The cast is pretty much impeccable, though. They would’ve killed in a straight action/drama.

Blackhat: The notes I took say “fascinating use of foreground/background, abstracted dialogue, gunshot audio mixing” but I don’t remember what I meant exactly. I just liked how this movie was mostly a bunch of things I usually hate to see in movies being strung together so well that I came out feeling really good and entertained. Hemsworth was cool, but Viola Davis runs it. Her and Mann need to get into the franchise business.

Creed: A dude sat next to me at this one and was really into it, like it was happening in real life and Adonis was his homey. It was aggravating; the movie was great. Choosing the name “Adonis” was an incredibly swaggery move, the four-wheeler sequence was pretty much perfect Hype Williams, and while his father struggle is different from mine, both jail scenes got me choked up. Looking forward to seeing this one again.

Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection ‘F’: There’s a point in here where Vegeta hits Frieza with a 1-2 and someone in the theater yelled out “TWO PIECE!”, which made Resurrection 'F’ probably my #1 theater-going experience of the year. On home video, the best part is either Jaco’s appearances or Uncle Piccolo.

Fantastic Four: This wasn’t as bad as anyone said it was for the first half, then it was pretty bad but still better than every X-Men movie I’ve seen for the last half. The first half was really solid work, great family dynamics, and some good laughs. Everyone gets to act like a human being, and then ~superheroes~ happen and I got bored.

From Russia With Love: This was cool and I get it but I think I vastly prefer the stripped down self-conscious Daniel Craig stuff. I watched a bunch of the early Bonds in the lead-up to Spectre and they’re all movies I’d watch with friends or family, but wouldn’t own.

Fury: I know it’s a facile observation but this is as close as I’ll get to a proper Garth Ennis movie, I bet. “Ideals are peaceful. History is violent” has stuck with me. David Ayer’s approach to violence and the human body is made clear when you see what’s left of one underneath a tank’s treads. Probably a metaphor in there. Bring on Suicide Squad.

Le Samourai: This is another movie, like Blade Runner, that I saw long after I saw everything it influenced, which made it cool, but not even half as cool as everyone suggested it would be. It had great fashion and Delon was cool, but I liked the police procedural bits the most, I think. I respect it more than I like it, but I’m glad I saw it.

Lupin the 3rd: Jigen’s Gravestone: A waste of Fujiko, some great animation, some great character designs, and my time.

Mestre Bimba: A Capoeira Iluminada: There’s a moment in this where a bunch of older people are sitting around reminiscing about Mestre Bimba and the effect he had on their lives and I straight-up cried. It’s not even particularly emotionally manipulative. It was more that seeing the effect one person can have on so many was overwhelming.

Pelo Malo: I watched this with a friend after she spotted the trailer online and we kept an eye out for a home video release. It was good, but also unbearably sad and sorta stops instead of ending.
b/w
Back to Stay: Another friend of mine recommended this one, and I watched it with my Pelo Malo friend. This one was also unbearably sad, with a dose of most characters being horrifically mean to most of the other characters. Now me and that friend have a verbal contract to strictly watch action movies or comedies instead of llorando at my TV and giving ourselves severe emotional trauma for hours at a time. (I did like how relentlessly dreary this one looked though.)

Re:Cyborg 009: I’m not sure how you take some amazing designs and a good gimmick and make a bad action movie out of it, but I fell asleep around when they introduced a bunch of masked 9/11 truther stuff and instead of finishing it the next morning before commuting to work, like I usually do after falling asleep to a movie, I checked my work email instead. Trash.

Return to the 36th Chamber: Who knew you could have kung-fu in utilizing dust and benches? This was a good time.

Sicario: This movie made me feel incredibly bad, but in a good way. Difficult and frustrating, but in a good way.

Spectre: It is impossible for me to talk about this movie, which I didn’t hate or even dislike really, without sounding like it’s complete trash. Even just describing things that happen in it in a flat tone of voice still sounds like complaining. But Batista was ill and the settings were very cool but Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation ate its breakfast lunch and dinner.

The Black Kung Fu Experience: One of the most enriching things I watched this year, an examination of the intersection of Chinese martial arts and black Americana/Americans. It’s an intersection I hold dear, and this documentary did a good job of getting at why. It’s also fascinating in terms of divining the difference between cultural appropriation and exchange.

The Hateful Eight: Seeing Django Unchained back home in Georgia was fantastic and cathartic, because a whole bunch of negroes were in the theater with me who absolutely got it. Seeing The Hateful Eight in Oakland was weird, because I was in the theater with mostly a bunch of white people who laughed awkwardly or uproariously every time somebody said nigger. The movie was good, and I’m still organizing my thoughts on it. I want to watch it with a group that’s majority non-white, because I think that might color the experience differently, but it’s also grim, so I’ll revisit it on home video. Goggins and Jennifer Jason Leigh were the best from intro to outro.

The Heat: This was funny as heck. I forgive Sandra Bullock for The Blind Side but she only gets a pass for Crash if they make a sequel.

Twilight Gangsters: It’s a feel-good crime movie about friendship, along the lines of The Bling Ring, but with grandmas. Coincidentally, shortly after the credits rolled, I got a text that said my grandma died. I liked it; I can never watch it again.

Wanda Sykes: I'ma Be Me: I didn’t like Wanda Sykes as a kid. As an adult, she’s incredible.

The last movie I watched in 2015 was Return of the Jedi. The first movie I watched in 2016 was One Hundred and One Dalmatians.

I work in a series of sustained bursts, with either music or movies on in the background. It gives me something to semi-ignore so I can focus or absorb and understand while I write. When I’m cooking, it’s a dead sprint. No breaks and no brakes until I hit my goal. When I’m doing something that needs a little more TLC or instant editing, I allow myself breaks. I’ll read my way through an article over the course of a few hours, coming back to the work once my mind has had a change to solve a few problems in the background.

I’ll watch documentaries, action movies, anime, whatever whatever. Yesterday, it was The Black Kung Fu Experience, a PBS documentary on Netflix about the intersection of black American life and Chinese martial arts. I obviously have a vested interest in the subject, and the documentary did a great job of exploring what different people got out of the intersection and influence. I’ve also been mulling over the idea of cultural appropriation and the black kung fu experience, where the line is for that and why.

I’ll read whatever comes across my desk from friends or via Twitter, as long as it sounds interesting. A homey sent over Max Fisher’s VOX piece “It’s not just Trump: Islamophobia in America is spiraling out of control.” I made it about to the first sub-headline before tapping out. It’s well-written, but I know where it’s going, and I had to choose between being mad all day and…well still being mad all day, but not being even more mad at a bunch of people I’ll never meet.

I read and watched these concurrently; black excellence and cultural exchange on one screen and white supremacy-driven hate on the other. The contrast left a sour taste in my mouth, because one is quite obviously the way forward, and the other purely hate speech. People treat Tump like a joke, but he isn’t, not really. He’s only a joke if you’re not brown. To me, he’s a threat. A clear and present danger. It doesn’t matter if he’s ever president. He’s legitimizing poison while you point and laugh at his toupee and dumb quotes. He’s enabling and justifying violent acts from the ignorant.

I had a conversation with myself this year, that “I don’t think I want to have kids any more” conversation, as a direct result of the black condition in America. Everybody I know—to be specific, every brown person I know—that’s paying attention to the struggle is more down than up. Even if you aren’t a victim of state-sponsored violence or homegrown terrorism, you still gotta pay a tax for existing. You gotta set up filters on Twitter so you don’t see it when some idiot retweets yet another picture of dead black people, you gotta deal with schmuck white dudes talking big about police brutality online and in person, you gotta deal with people being given a national platform to use coded language to encourage the death of those you love and respect.

You tell yourself it’ll get better in time, but then you see your friends reacting with surprise to a reality you’ve known since before you could read and you realize that it might get a little better, but you’re still vastly outnumbered by people who are perfectly happy with the way things are. There is a gap.

And all the self-care in the world ain’t gonna change the fact that you’re barely even human to so many people, and their hate will continue to define you and everything you do until you drop dead.

William & Misato are two of my oldest friends, and whenever I visit their town, they’re who I stay with. We get it in—food, video games, jokes, whatever whatever is always a treat and a trip.

Misato runs a Japanese-language basketball podcast called B-Ball Muse, and it’s kinda blowing up. She wanted to do a guest show with us because our collective chemistry and charisma is off the charts. You won’t find a trio iller. This episode is in English, because I don’t speak Japanese, and it’s twenty minutes of just talking about the best sport in the world.

I’m a Hawks/Warriors fan, Misa and William are Lakernation, and we run down how deep our love is, Kobe’s just-announced retirement, the role of athletes in our culture, and most importantly, Hawks vs Warriors. It’s a good time.

Listen here, and if you speak Japanese, you might could follow @bballmuse, too.

It is important to use care and precision when writing about race, particularly on the internet. The conversation is fraught enough, and a careless or craven approach to the subject matter can start a fire where there once was fertile ground for conversation. It can kill an opportunity dead.

Earlier today, a comics news/rumor site posted that DC is looking to increase the number of female and non-white freelancers they employ. This is, assuming best practices on the part of the publisher, a good thing. There’s no valid reason why they shouldn’t, and plenty of good reasons why they should. A variety of storytellers appeals to a variety of fans, and having a wider variety of creators means that a company that can sell to a wider variety of fans. (This is the crux of the diversity conversation in comics to me. “Do you want more, or do you want what you already have?”)

There are a number of ways to discuss this rumor. The way I did it in that paragraph is one way. It’s intentionally flat, but a little pointed. “This is what’s happening. Here’s what I think it means.” You could dig deeper into the context of comics (will these books sell, do the creators get a number of chances, what are the plans specifically?) but y'know. Time is money and Tumblr is free. You get what you got.

The way the rumor site chose to go about it was different. Instead of presenting the situation as it stands, the site positioned it differently. They said that DC was instructing editors to hire new blood as a part of an affirmative action (US)/positive discrimination (UK) scheme, “[a]nd for white, male freelancers to be nudged down the submission pool.” As a follow-up, they gave a rundown of possible internet commentary, a four-point list of common responses from the type of people who tend to get upset about these things, and then a few reasons why it may be a good idea.

Set aside the truth of the rumor. (I don’t know what DC is doing, but going by their current line they definitely are pursuing a change in who they hire and why, so good on them if the salient points of this rumor are true.) The truth is not the sticking point for me. The coverage is.

It’s important to be precise not just with what you’re saying, but how and why you’re saying it. By breaking this rumor this way, the site puts the rise of women and people of color not just in opposition to the employment opportunities available for specifically white men, but at the expense of those opportunities. In other words, it was written in such a way that “They’re taking jobs from white men” is not just subtext, the way a dog whistle usually is, but just a hair’s breadth shy of text.

Anything can be turned into a conflict, an Us vs Them. A contest. “This side wins because that side loses.” Reality will tell you that this is not true at all. All it takes to make a space is someone with money saying “Oh, yeah, we should put this out there.” It’s not a true zero-sum game.

I wrote a piece a couple years ago about how “‘Racists React To [thing]’ posts are just passive white supremacy.” The short version is that white supremacy is not just lynchings and beatings. It’s prioritizing white voices over other voices. It is a cultural system, not just something people opt-in to. It is how we are taught, trained, and raised in America. We all live under white supremacy.

By including the comments of imaginary strawmen in the conversation from jump, by treating their negative input as equally worthy of notice and attention as a (possibly) positive move from DC Comics, you’re diminishing the talent and attention that women and people of color rarely receive on the same level as their brethren. You’re saying that their voices matter, but mostly they matter in terms of how they fit in relation to these other dudes who matter more, even when they’re completely made-up.

Diversity isn’t about us getting a look at the expense of anybody else. It’s about everybody getting a truly fair shot.

It is important to be precise. It is important to avoid carelessness. When women speak out, when people of color speak out, they’re often doing so from a place where they are not the most powerful voice in the room. We are constantly questioned—the old saw is “you have to work twice as hard for half the credit.” This is why it is important for writers to be precise, to avoid carelessness, because it is very, very easy for imprecision and carelessness to stop a conversation dead.

Earlier this year, there was a conversation about Marvel creating hip-hop variant covers for their comics. A few people questioned the originality of the idea, and others questioned whether or not it was cultural appropriation to use a predominately black art form to sell comics for the financial benefit of a company that employs black artists, but has a dismal track record employing black writers. Agree or disagree, but there’s a conversation to be had there, one that would probably benefit everyone involved.

On July 20, a writer for a major paper covered the controversy (including quoting a post I wrote on a related subject). The writer focused on the authenticity of the covers, of whether a corporation could be a real rap fan. While the charges of cultural appropriation and hiring practices is a difficult one, authenticity is a much, much easier hill to climb. When asked about the controversy, a Marvel executive focused on this essay—not any of the commentary by black people, not any of the commentary from people steeped in rap culture—and used a piece that missed the point of the conversation to wave away the majority of the criticism. He turned a critique into a marketing opportunity, a move which I simultaneously hate and respect—it’s great marketing, a real Jay-Z move.

By broadening the conversation beyond its intentional and original limits, the writer inadvertently gave someone a chance to not just ignore, but discredit a number of concerned voices. A company isn’t capable of authenticity. It isn’t a person. But when you accuse a company of being inauthentic, then the easy rejoinder is “Oh, well, we all listen to rap here, so I don’t get the complaint. Here are some rappers I have on my iPod right now.”

I’m obviously unhappy with both pieces, but I’m an “it is what it is” kinda guy. These pieces went up, they’re in the ether, and they defined their respective conversations. They’re just good examples of why care and precision are so important. Care keeps you from indulging in a bit of theater that spikes a worthy conversation. Precision keeps you from accidentally indulging in a bit of the ol’ white supremacy by treating the achievements of one group as equal to the baseless complaints of another. It’s not even really about the outlets or writers in question here to me. Anyone can fall into this trap, not just rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, and nitwits.

You have to think about these things. You have to understand these things. Everyone is created equal, but not everyone is treated as equal in our culture. You have to work the angles, sharp and precise, before you hit send, because one thing white supremacy is good at is screwing up really basic, innocuous things for people. Without care and precision, you end up with easy dismissals thanks to soft pieces and hurt feelings based on how a rumor is positioned in the press.

Every Metal Gear Solid game takes place inside a specific locale that you have free run of, to an extent. Technological and logistical limitations mean that the worlds vary in size and scope. While you have a great amount of freedom in how to play the game, you do not actually have that much freedom in how to progress in the game. Missions begin at point A and end at B. Puzzles happen at C after certain objectives have been met. You can draw a map and a timeline for each game in the series, and as long as your Snake, Raiden, or other Snake are present in the right place at the right time, everything falls into line.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain introduced “free infiltration.” Rather than walking the path Kojima and crew designed, with the specifics of how you saunter up to you, The Phantom Pain takes the leash off. You can start missions at any time, you can infiltrate a location as you please, and escape is entirely in your hands. The world is yours for the taking.

An open world map, sandbox gameplay, and an increased amount of freedom makes The Phantom Pain the purest expression of Metal Gear Solid’s “tactical espionage action.” It feels like the final form of what was set down in Metal Gear Solid, a video game experience with cinematic pretensions but rock solid emergent gameplay where your personal choices actually matter.

If you’d like to sit and scope out a base from a mountaintop 300 meters away for twenty minutes before moving in, you can do that. If you’d rather get inside, do the deed, and escape without any recon at all, you can do that, too. While Metal Gear Solid required thinking about the lethality of your choices and how that affects the player and gameplay, The Phantom Pain wants you to take complete control of Big Boss’s methods. There are no weapon limitations on missions, no methods you have to avoid. There is just you, your armory, and dozens of soldiers to take care of before you find your target.

The Phantom Pain is the one where you finally become the main character. You have an incredible level of control over the gameplay, which means that the type of character Big Boss is at this stage in his life is largely up to you. You see your vision of Big Boss more than you see Kojima’s vision. Do your means justify the ends? Is the opposing force always worthy of death? Or are you a ghost, who leaves no trace of your passing?

The narrative implications added to the story as I built it in my head. At this stage in the series, Big Boss is on the cusp of becoming the villain from 1987’s Metal Gear. His Militaires Sans Frontières have been massacred by another force, and he’s just now waking up from a long-lasting coma. His compatriots are unhinged by the trauma and his new unit, the Diamond Dogs, are a motley crew. What kind of person is he?

Free infiltration lets you decide. My tranqs-to-kills ratio is something like 100:1. Big Boss is expedient, and a killer, but not a killer-killer. There’s no reason to make more trouble than you’re ready for, just because it’ll make your life easier for a split second.

More important than the availability of this decision, though,is the fact that free infiltration requires you to be creative and thoughtful. It isn’t just about making the best with what you have any more. You have everything. You have options. The rails have been removed. What do you do?

It’s hard to describe how pleasant of an innovation this is. I grew up with and alongside Metal Gear Solid. It is very familiar to me, a very comfortable world to visit even when it’s heinous. It is Mine, and to finally get a chance to play it with no chains—visible ones, at least—is a revelation. The pace is mine, the approach is mine, and the execution is mine.

The only other games I get that feeling from are sports titles. There’s a “right” way to play each time, generally along the lines of “however they play in real life.” But if you want to play small ball, run and gun, long range sniping, or anything else, the capacity is there for you to do that, and do it in a way that’s true to the team.

With minutes of experiencing free infiltration for the first time, I got those Hind D shivers as the implications hit me of just what kind of antics I could get up to in The Phantom Pain. It’s deep, complex, and flexible, which are qualities I expect out of the series, but in new and unexpected ways.

It feels good that something I matured with is still breaking new ground and still speaking directly to me. I play fewer and fewer video games these days, though to be fair the few I do play I play often. For something to come along that’s been mine for years, and still prove true…it’s a blessing.

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots came out a month and a year after I dropped out of college and moved across the country from anything I’d ever known. The significance was lost on me then. I was more concerned with Guns of the Patriots being the last entry in a series I’d grown up alongside. Metal Gear Solid was my introduction to a better class of video game. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty featured one of the most entertaining tricks in the history of games. I worked on the strategy guide for Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence, a special version of Snake Eater, which was a career highlight at the time. Guns of the Patriots was the end of an era, or maybe the peak of one.

At some point as a kid, I’d shed comic books for video games. I didn’t read Sandman or Preacher or Watchmen or any of the books people describe as being formative until I was old enough to go to college. But I had Metal Gear Solid, and that was enough.

The first few entries in the series—the entire series, but these are specific about it—are unified through the themes of MEME-GENE-SCENE. Ideas, biology, scenario. What we are, what we believe, and what situation we are in are all things passed down to the next generation, who are left to clean up their mess. I was in at the ground floor, young and impressionable at 15, and Hideo Kojima hooked me. Anti-nuke philosophy, secret histories of the world, men and women ruined by the repercussions of their own will, and an ultimate enemy too big to punch—Kojima was doing a lot, even without the narrative trickery or pop culture savvy that infests the games.

Kojima put ideology and philosophy front and center in the conflict, and in doing so made it a part of the gameplay. You have to take it into account because you’re playing an established character with his own thoughts and opinions. I want to play Metal Gear “the right way,” which means working within the limitations Kojima has provided, but also taking advantage of the freedom in the game world. As a result, the way I play Metal Gear Solid is a combination of my own personal ideology, gameplay interests, and what Kojima is putting forth in the game.

Most games don’t do that for me. I play a lot of Destiny, and I do it in an expedient manner. What will get me to Phogoth fast enough that I can do something else twenty minutes from now? What can I do that will let me capture this zone and escape from the retaliation? Most video games are very straightforward puzzles to me, and the fun come sin not just solving the puzzle, but solving it in such a way that I can have fun, too.

The connection is deeper with Metal Gear Solid. Maybe it’s because of my early exposure, or just a matter of spending a week’s worth of hours with each game, minimum, but it comes with expectations and rules that I try to follow. I can’t min/max a Metal Gear game. I can’t grind my way to winning at the select screen. I have to play, and more than that, I have to play correctly.

Guns of the Patriots, then, was apotheosis. Plot developments were closed off, hacked away, or burnt to the ground. Characters got one last moment in the sun before walking off-stage. Long-running in-jokes become endearing plot points. Themes were made explicit, old ideas took new shapes, and fan service shot through the roof. The Metal Gear system gets an update, with an increased emphasis on camo and misdirection, an elevation of tactical espionage action.

I “beat” the game around 11pm one night, and didn’t make it to bed until well after 1, thanks to the ending, the mid-credits ending, the post-credits ending, and the post-script. Kojima took a heavy hand with Guns of the Patriots. The game is littered with references to Kojima’s other work, from his first game ever to Zone of the Enders, his other franchise. It’s overwrought, and a mess, and the perfect finale to a franchise. It’s Metal Gear Spectacle, a lumbering, wheezing beast I couldn’t help but love.

Kojima understands his audience well. There’s a moment in Guns of the Patriots where you return to the site of a previous game, now abandoned and dusty. It’s hard to oversell the power of that moment. Apotheosis, culmination, climax, take your pick: twenty years after I first stepped foot on Shadow Moses Island and video games changed, I returned. I was a different person than I was back then, and the games were different, too. The passage of time counts for both people and games alike. We’re different now, but do you remember what it was like then?

We’d settled into ourselves, into our “selves” if you feel me, and the intersection of the two is what led to the grand return being an incredibly emotional experience. I didn’t get my personal philosophy from sitting at the feet of Hideo Kojima, but Kojima and his games did influence it, just like everything else has over the course of my life.

I expect a lot out of Metal Gear Solid. Part of it is that the game expects a lot out of me, with the endless cut scenes, non-stop info dumps, and complex web of motivations and alliances. Another part is that I’m always chasing that high that hit the first time I saw the Hind D lift off or watched a cyborg ninja kill a hallway of men. The baseline for MGS is “impressed me somehow.”

The older I get, the more I know, the more I appreciate, the more I understand. Every new Metal Gear hits some new button for me, or I understand some aspect of the franchise in a different way. Every successive entry in the series has to go further, just like I have to build and destroy and build and destroy.

Sons of Liberty went all-in on the story and making the player question the reality of the situation. Snake Eater was a survival game, in addition to the tactical espionage action. Guns of the Patriots was a sprawling affair, an old dog on its way out but eager to show you the last few tricks he learned. Peace Walker made the series bite-sized without sacrificing its “Metal Gear-ness.” The Phantom Pain is what’s next.

I first played Metal Gear Solid right around when I was realizing that video games could have interesting or compelling stories, in addition to being action sequence delivery systems.

I was fifteen, and Metal Gear Solid was a ground-breaker. Analog sticks were new (Colony Wars was what made me a believer there) and force feedback was new. The force feedback paid off big very early on, the first time I witnessed a Hind D taking off from Shadow Moses Island. The controller shook, the helicopter rose, and it was a shock, but it deepened the storytelling. Instead of playing the game, you were creeping closer to being in the game, too.

By offering the option to pacify, instead of just neutralize, an enemy, MGS made me ask a question that really only crossed my mind in sports games: How do I Want To Do This? This is fundamentally different from How Can I Do This or Why Am I Doing This, questions I asked while trying to jump the bridge in Contra or grinding for Chocobos in Final Fantasy 7. How Do I Want To Do This means taking into account more than pure logistics or time management. It’s about repercussions.

I see a guy patrolling near a truck on Shadow Moses Island. He has something I want inside that truck. It’s an infiltration mission. Do I leave no trace of my passing or do I leave a passel of tranquilized or shot bodies in my wake? What would Snake do? How does the choice affect who he is? How does the choice affect who I am? What does it say about me that I would choose expedience over mercy? Are they worthy of mercy? Is that a question you should ask of anyone?

What do you believe in and why?

There was narrative trickery in MGS that got a big rise out of me, too, but the thing that sticks with me more than HIDEO and turbo buttons is that I suddenly had a lot more control over the pace, and therefore my impression, of the game. There were limits I had to work within, like standard guard patrols and various narrative constrictions, but What Kind of Person Is Solid Snake was, to a certain extent, up to me. He is Mine in a way that Link or Simon Belmont never were, a Mario with a personality.

My goal in each of the games has been no kills with an eye toward total stealth, with exceptions made for extenuating ammunition circumstances or having to re-do a scene a million times. I used to play video games for a living, and have a pretty honest idea of what I’m capable of in games. No kills is achievable, with a little care. Creeping into and out of a base while leaving no sign of my passing is much harder.

That figures into the gameplay, too. I know what I’m capable of, and if I know that I tend to botch one thing, then that’s going to change what stresses me out, what I focus on, while playing. It becomes very much about not just being spotted, but finding a position where I can not just take people out before they spot me, but move them off the field of play before their friends notice.

I watched Blade Runner for the first time a couple years ago, after years of everyone telling me how deep it is. Is Deckard a Replicant? Of course he is. They wouldn’t ask the question in a movie about the nature of humanity if he wasn’t, is how I saw it. I see Metal Gear Solid the same way. You’re given a gun that fires bullets and a gun that fires tranquilizers. Your focus is a stealth mission, save for certain encounters that require a loud response. The franchise, on a very basic level, is about how war and violence ruins lives and precludes the idea of peace.

Metal Gear Solid was my introduction to this kind of semi-roleplaying approach, to asking myself “What would satisfy not just myself, but also be true to the character as depicted?” in addition to “How can I get past this part?” In hindsight, it led to a deeper connection to the franchise and an appreciation for pointed choices in storytelling. I want variety when I play games. Even if I do the same mission over and over, I want it to roll out in as many different ways as I have attempts.

The Harpy Agenda is a microgrant for comics journalism by writers of color founded and run by Shing Yin Khor & Taneka Stotts. You can read an interview with Khor here. I’m the second recipient, after JA Micheline’s “The White Privilege, White Audacity, and White Priorities of Strange Fruit #1,” and I got the award for an untitled post about Marvel’s hip-hop homage covers and their hiring practices. I’m grateful for the honor, and after talking with Khor & Stotts, I’m going to pay it forward and donate my reward to two places I think are doing good work: Women Write About Comics, which is probably my main place to find original writing about comics right now, and Vixen Varsity/Black Comics Month, which does a tremendous amount of legwork in spreading the good word.

I’m passing it on because I got my first paid freelance gig in 2003 or so writing about video games before I started writing about comics. I know how thankless it can be, and now that I’m in a place where I don’t really have to worry about pitching or invoicing, I want to try to help somebody else get there, too. I’m doing okay.

I wish we had a better phrase for it, but comics journalism/comics criticism/talking about comics on the internet counts. It’s how we connect with each other, how we figure out where we’re headed, and how we look at what we have and take stock of whether it’s worth anything. I went from reader to critic to non-creative professional, and my time writing and reading criticism informs what I do in my 9-5. I wouldn’t be who or where I am without reading and vibing with people like Tucker Stone, Gavin Jasper, Sean Witzke, Joe McCulloch, Cheryl Lynn, Abhay Khosla, and the FBB4l! def squad. And now that I’m who I am, and where I am, maybe I can pair that knowledge with my influence.

If you’re one of the precious few getting paid to write about comics online, you probably get paid once and that’s a wrap, no matter how big a post goes. I know of only one site that gives bonuses for traffic, and I dunno if they still do. I’m pretty sure nobody ever got rich talking about race and comic books on the internet, so in my mind, it’s even more of a labor of love than writing about comics, which probably also never made anybody rich. You can’t really do it for the hits, unless a little bit of walking around money is tall paper wherever you’re from.

There aren’t a lot of upsides to writing about comics, but the few that exist count for a lot. Some people will jump down your throat for speaking your mind and others will fake interest to look good. They don’t matter. They’re ghosts. The ones who count are the people who hit you with “Dang, I didn’t know it was like that” or “Thank you” or just RT your joint because they feel it and can’t add no more to it.

I respect the Harpy Agenda, and Khor & Stotts, because they’re on a similar wave and trying to force direct change through encouragement. The more we talk about this stuff, the more “normal” it becomes, in terms of being part of our daily comics conversation. It’s easy for companies to shift a conversation in their favor through the sheer weight of their voice, so it’s important we encourage and support those who are agitating for change—without demanding that they agitate on our own terms—until a day comes that we can make that change real.

That’s it. Thank you.