I’ll have to check out Nannette. The Coates passage is somewhere in Between the World and Me. That phrase seems like the perfect encapsulation of something that I’ve seen (and, yeah, done) a million times, and it was both eye-opening and deeply fucking mortifying to see it tossed out on the table in all its…

I think Secret Empire had an interesting idea right up until it was revealed that ‘Stevil’ and Steve Rogers weren’t the same person. that for me was an awful cop-out and really undercut what had seemed to be the core of the whole Secret Empire story—which was that The Dream itself can be problematic.

This is a great interview. After reading the issue, I was very curious how Coates would reconcile Cap’s optimism with his own bone-deep skepticism about “the Dream.” The answer: he won’t.

Let’s unpack it... This, all of this, this convoluted thing, it has been, the whole time, a Bane’s plan, despite involving several plot points beyond his control. And Joker and Riddler, two psychopaths who hate each other to dead (literally!) are working together, under Bane’s orders, nonetheless. Also, somehow,…

White men. They always think everyone is talking about them, specifically.

They should have just let him get married, they could have just One More Day’d it away down the road.

And King (and DC) show once and for all that he doesn’t truly understand Batman. It’s not his misery that gives him strength, it’s his commitment and sheer will.

Alright, folks. Time to argue about which guest artist delivered the coolest page. My top three:

I was relieved to find that the issue itself sidesteps the most common complaint in the wake of the big spoiler in the Times. The sad refrain among Bat-Fans is that King and DC will not allow the character to grow beyond his misery and angst, but then Bruce’s letter reveals that he is ready for something new.

I had not imagined otherwise.

Of course there are those, like myself, who belong to the first group [...] who would also fully support a do-over.

The reason he feels he needs to defend himself and those like him and in this “first group” in addition to the “second group”, is because he identifies with the motivations of those who want to reshoot the movie.

Expectations were set (creating excitement and a desire to see the movie), and then they were all violated because of the wannabe artistic stupidity of the writer.

You’re using the word “article” very loosely, I see.

Yeah, that’s not an absurd comparison at all. Because we’re all really worried about who The Last Jedi is going to appoint to the Supreme Court.

You know, some people also didn’t like The Last Jedi because it’s a structurally questionable movie with some bad writing and underdeveloped (or underused) characters.

But this still feels like a bit of a gut punch, not only because it’s a pretty downer ending, but because it undercuts fifty issues of buildup and narrative tension. And for the most disappointing, uneventful ending possible. The status quo is maintained. Nothing changes, no one grows.

I don’t get why RPO I should on the list. At best it was forgettable and at worst it advocates consuming art for the sake of copying the text rather than to understand the text as well as to imply that only “real nerds” can like nerdy things.

I would have put Annihilation on this list. It sometimes feels like an odd compromise between a thriller and a mood piece, and it risks explaining too much about its weird world, but I thought it was very effective as a sidelong character study about depression and self-destruction.

I’m a little wary of the way that DC is rolling a comics reader into a service that is more about holistic fandom. That sounds like a plausible way to get CW viewers to try out some comics, but it does not raise my hopes that the service will be geared for archival deep-diving into the early years of the company. I…