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The Worst Links

The Ten Worst Cartoon Cars.I don't think I would have ranked the Flinstones car so high. Think about it, they're literally riding on dinosaurs and living in houses built of giant rock slabs. The fact that they've developed any sort of locomotion is pretty impressive. This Spongebob car/boat on the other hand is an abomination which should be killed with fire. Which shouldn't work considering they're underwater but they do have fire, this show is so confusing!

The Making And Unmaking Of Preston Zimmerman, American Soccer Player. This is a great read by Greg Howard. When it comes to talent at the youth level, the American soccer community is kind of like a mule with a spinning wheel. No one knows how he got it and danged if he knows how to use it!

What I mean is that anyone can recognize talent, but what you do with it after you find it is the tricky thing. Most hardcore soccer fans will tell you that you have to go to Europe. Go ahead and read the story of Preston Zimmerman and then tell me you HAVE to go to Europe. It doesn't always work out for everyone.

AFL: The 15 Worst Fighters In The 1988 'Bloodsport' Kumite. This reminds me, I haven't watched Bloodsport or really any JCVD movie in FOREVER. That's what kids will do to you.

Growing fantasy-game universe collides with entrenched boys’ club mentality. This is one of those typical, outsider succeeds at something and everyone freaks out. In this case it's Magic: The Gathering and the outsider is a 31 year old transgender woman. It's an interesting read. It's funny, my guess is that a majority of people playing Magic have at some point been persecuted and picked on and here they are recycling that same behavior because someone from outside their circle dared do something they like doing.

If Geek Girls Acted Like Geek Guys

As loathe as I am to post anything from Buzzfeed this video that's been making the rounds is pretty funny. I especially liked the cosplay jokes. She is right, If you dress up as sexy Khal Drago you're kind of asking for it.

This sort of dovetails off something I said last week. The amount of shit some ladies have to go through to enjoy something that's supposedly "for boys" is awful. I certainly have never understood it at comic book shops. Owning a comic book shop isn't exactly a license to print money, they should be bending over backwards for ANY customer that walks in the door.

LFL, the F stands for Fighting

If you're like me last weekend you were glued to the LFL Eastern Conference play off between the Atlanta Steam and the.. oh who am I kidding? Nobody cares, here's a bunch of female athletes wearing underwear throwing down like they were on The Challenge. I'm guessing the ladies get a bonus for every hit they get on the field and on youtube.

...made the Lake Powell run in 12 parsecs

This GoPro video of a guy jet skiing through the canyons at Lake Powell looks an awful lot like something out of Star Wars. It also looks like a hell of a lot of fun. I've always wanted to take one of those vacations where you get a bunch of people together and rent a houseboat out on a lake in CA or AZ. Then you just spend all day BBQing and wakeboarding and drunkenly floating in the lake. I imagine at some point Duff Man shows up with and hoses down a bunch of old schoolmarms with beer and they turn into bikini girls that want to party.

I'm probably too old for that now aren't I?

Who sexed up Spider-Woman and does it matter?

About a week or two ago Marvel announced a couple new titles, one of which was a new Spider-Woman book. No big deal, right? I mean there's a handful of really adamant Spider-Woman fans out there but Marvel has something like 6 different female driven comics right now and what feels like a dozen different Spider-Man books. A new Spider-Woman book should have just been a regular announcement, but it wasn't. The image above is why.

What you're looking at is the preview of an alternate cover by renowned European (ie erotic) artist Milo Manara. Now let me preface everything I say here by saying I'm a slight fan of Manara's work. I have I think all of two or three comics he's drawn and I have a couple Milo Manara pictures in my "unsorted reference picture" folder on my computer at home. I'm what you'd call a lowercase fan. Anyway, the point here is that holy cow this cover is receiving a lot of negative attention, mostly on comic/geeky blogs but in a couple buzzfeed like places too.

Obviously the cover by Manara is provocative, I can't imagine that it wasn't supposed to be. When you hire someone with the pedigree of Milo Manara you know you're going to get a sexy cover but I don't think there would be as big of an uproar if this was just a sexy cover. The reader's eye is immediately drawn to her ass or more specifically to the super-wedgie she's sporting. It pushes this from what many would consider sexy to near obscene. It doesn't feel very powerful either, the way she's on all fours with her butt in the air it comes across as pretty submissive. More sex doll than superhero.

Just for fun, let's contrast that cover to the way she's been drawn in some of her most recent and memorable appearances:



My point here is that Spider-Woman is not exactly the most demure character ever created. That's not to excuse the Manara cover, I don't really like the cover. Marvel as of late has made a big push to attract female readership, isn't a cover like this by an artists like Manara the exact kind of thing that pushes away female readers? Well, that's why I tried to include some context.

I'm not 100% sure Marvel was targeting female readers with a Spider-Woman series. I have a feeling that Spider-Woman was aimed directly at the stereotypical fanboy, the one with Cheetos stained fingers and impure thoughts about She Hulk. Those guys still exist, and they have money too. As much as I love the current She Hulk or Ms Marvel books I'm sure there are plenty of readers that wish Ms. Marvel (now Captain Marvel) was still fighting crime in thigh-high boots and a swimsuit. Should Marvel completely ignore those guys?

That was an honest question, I don't have an answer. Does Marvel have anything to gain making books for the stereotypical fanboy? Does a near vulgar alternate cover (lets remember it's the alternate cover not the one you will see on comixology) alienate a large untapped group of readers? The cynic in me says that a Spider-Woman solo title was dead in the water anyway and probably won't last more than 12 issues. This might not be the kind of attention Marvel thought they were going to get but I doubt they're that upset about it. Attention is the exact reason you hire Milo Manara to draw alternate covers in the first place.

To sum up, I have very little opinion on the matter. I'll leave you with a picture of Spider-Man in a similar pose (spandex wedgie included) and the question. If this cover was the exact same, with Spider-Woman swapped in for Spider-Man, same pose and everything, would it look like the Spider was about to mount her?



Does that illustrate a difference in what you can get away with drawing male vs female superheroes? Is that sexism? These questions and more answered probably never...

Official Destiny Launch Trailer

So September 9th will see one of the biggest gambles in video games arrive to console and PC. I've seen reports that Bungie spent about $500 Million developing and marketing Destiny. That is a crazy amount of cheddar for a game not named Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto. If it succeeds maybe the video game industry will get over it's sequelitis. I for one would love to see less reboots and sequels and more original games.

Unless we're talking Wing Commander. Oh man, what I wouldn't give for a Wing Commander reboot.

Pstew's Ice Bucket Challenge

So I think Patrick Stewart just won the Ice Bucket Challenge.