I knew going into this weekend that there was no way to escape the bombardment of 9/11 tributes during the football games today. And I didn't even bother trying to turn on the TV because I knew that shit was going to happen. Besides that, turning on the TV is asking for it today. CNN was replaying their filming from 10 years ago. It was literally a news re-run.
What I didn't expect was for my funnies to be compromised. Yes, that's right. The newspaper today had the comics section completely taken over by 9/11 tribute pieces.
There is little to laugh about on September 11, but this year the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on that day happened to fall on a Sunday—when newspaper readers flip to their beloved funny pages. So this Sunday, nearly 100 cartoonists, such as Stan Lee and the ones behind Zits, Family Circus, Marvin, Hi and Lois, and Blondie, have partnered to dedicate their Sunday comic strips to remember the nearly 3,000 people who lost their lives during the September 11th terrorist attacks ten years ago.Just what 9/11 needed. Stupid comic strips and bad puns about the events of September 11thIf you didn't pick up your local New York Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Dallas Morning News on Sunday, all of the digital cartoons have been compiled on a single site for viewing, cartoonistsremember911.com.
Do you remember back a bit after 9/11 there was this sudden push to digitally remove images of the WTC from every movie that had ever featured it. Scenes were cut from unreleased films, 80's movies had bits of sky composited over them, there was literally a concerted effort to just pretend they had never existed.
I guess we're well past that stage of denial and are just all about throwing it on any and everything we can think of. Now, I flip open the Sunday comics expecting to not laugh anyway. Because the comic strips have stopped being anything remotely close to "funny" for at least 10 years now.
Hmmm.. Now that I think about it, 10 years ago was the attack. Maybe funny DID die along with the 300,000 other people that day. Anyhow, back to the story at hand. The Sunday comics are normally not very funny. But today they're even more so not funny. Mainly because the comic strips take themselves way too seriously for what they are.
Don't get me wrong, I think comic strips and comic books can be very serious and deal with subject matter that is beyond what is normally associated with "funny pages", but this shit just feels beyond silly. Take a look at this little snippet.
Fun Fact: They cut out the part where Aaron Byers gets paralyzed from the waist down in Iraq.
Bleep-bloop-blorp-9/11 was when Aaron Byers changed his life forever when he made a dumb fucking decision to join the armed forces for an Imperialist nation and got himself shot up like a fucking idiot.
Then you have others that have no place nor any reason to even bring up the attacks on 9/11 or the events that followed that have been 10 years of imperialistic conquest towards people who live in the desert.
I'm curious, how many people will pick up this paper and point out that they are vikings and because they are fucking vikings they wouldn't know what 9/11 is. In fact, they would sort of think highly of a group of rebels pondering and pillaging while causing destruction on their enemies. Why yes, Hagar, I do support our beserkers.
At the very least the comic is being honest about the American foreign policy of looting and pillaging and being proud of it.
Then I would be foolish to not talk about those more serious comics. The ones who should know better. After 9/11 Marvel and DC took a page out of the book of taking advantage of a situation and we got a slew of books on how the heroes were effected by the 9/11 tragedy and we got to see their reaction to the situation...
That picture of Magneto and Dr. Doom crying at ground zero makes no sense what-so-ever. Dr. Doom has godlike powers and Magneto made an entire planet by pulling metal space junk onto an asteroid. Why would they be shocked at all by 9/11?
I'm pretty sure that each of those men has killed hundreds, if not thousands of people in their career in the comic book stories.
But I guess Dr. Doom only supports the intentional deaths of innocents, and he's probably just pissed that he hijackers stole his thunder. What's worse is the implication that Dr. Doom is still human despite being the "worst of us," so therefore Muslim extremist are basically demons to be worse than Dr. Doom.
On a side note, that fat guy is Kingpin, a man who is responsible for all the drug trafficking, prostitution, corruption and anything else criminal in New York City. But since he's a white male and not motivated by adherence to a god we don't like he gets a pass for his crimes against humanity.
The whole image there is pretty insulting. It's like imagine if Al Capone showed up to Pearl Harbor and went, "Nyeeeeh! Dis is so evil!" It's hard to not laugh when you think about Magneto, a radical mutant leftist who wants nothing more than to obliterate the menace of non-mutants so that he can establish a pure mutant society, having any feelings about 9/11 beyond "Whoa. I guess I was over-thinking it." Magneto could probably have used magnetic powers to make the towers collapse so it really would have taken very minimum effort on his part.
More to the point, isn't New York destroyed on a weekly basis in the comic books? Even the good guys end up plowing through a few buildings. So it doesn't even make sense for Superman to be upset about it. Especially not with the amount of death around the world on a daily basis. But then again... those people aren't Americans and there for don't matter.
Clearly this is different because the perpetrators weren't the faux-moral glamorous super powered Olympian rivals of the metahuman circles, but were instead a bunch of mortals with opposing religious beliefs, So, much like Agamemnon's murder at the hands of his wife, the foundations of the Earth shake over the actions of petty mortals.
In fact, this already did happen in the comics in the exact same fashion. Well, minus the whole fault of it being placed on some mutants in real life.
These are images from Spider-Man issue #16 in November 1991 which shared a crossover storyline with X-Force issue 3. The storyline revolves around Juggernaut and Black Tom who have captured the World Trade Center and the heads of many giant companies for the purposes of blackmailing. X-Force arrives and goes through the building whereupon Black Tom tells them that they have explosives through out the building. Back outside Spider-Man arrives to see about helping the hostages, but before he can get in part of the World Trade Center explodes.
Miraculously nobody is killed or even injured by the top floors of the World Trade Center being blown away, but Black Tom is missing...Juggernaut rams into the World Trade Center. The entire thing falls down on Spider-Man and X-Force. Again miraculously nobody is even scratched for no apparent or logical reason. Spider-Man says that he will lead them to victory.
Bizarrely, the Juggernaut was later shown having joined a clandestine criminal organization known the New World Order. As a part of this network he was first seen working for the Red Skull although the full extent of their operations is unknown. Working with the NWO has twice brought the Juggernaut head-to-head with the Hulk and helped earn him enough money to temporarily cure Black Tom of his wood mutations. The Juggernaut continued as a member of the New World Order up until it's apparent demise.
I mean, how much more tasteless can you get? Of course his was almost a good decade before 9/11/01. Maybe it was an inside job? Wouldn't be the first time an X-men predicted the future...
The FBI agent who is probably taking notes of this communist blog post should probably take a look into Todd McFarlane and Chris Claremont. I'm thinking if they're not terrorist, they've done enough crimes to the comic community in other ways that they should be sent to GITMO.
Anyhow, yeah.. comic strips should probably not deal with 9/11 and be more focused on finding out what Love is.... is. And why there's two naked children in that comic strip every week.
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