A Geek History of Time - Episode 148 - The Punisher, Masculinity, and Sweatshirt Ideas with Special Guest Dr. Gabriel Cruz Part I

Episode Date: March 5, 2022

So thank you all for coming to Cocktalk. He has trouble counting change, which is what the hands think. Wait, wait, stop. Yes. But I don't think that Dana Carvey's movie, um, coming out at that same time, was really that big a problem for our country. I still don't know why you're making such a big deal about September 11th, 2001. Fucking hate you.

Well, you know, they don't necessarily need to be anathema, but they are definitely on different aspects. Oh boy, I have a genetic predisposition against redheads. So because you are one, yeah, combustion, yeah, we've heard it before. The only time I change a setting is when I take the hair trimmer down to the nether reaches, like that's the only time. Other than that, it's all just a two. I'm joking, I use feet.

After the four Gospels, what's the next book of the Bible? Acts. Okay, and after that, it's Romans. That's a number. It's a drug. Um, we're dealing with it. Yeah, okay. And if you look at the 15th chapter of Romans, okay, and if you look at the 15th chapter of Romans, okay, you will find that it actually mentions the ability to arm yourself That's why it's AR worth it. This is a Geek History of Time, where we connect to the real world.

My name is Ed Laylock, I'm a world history and sometimes English teacher, during the world of California. And as far as news is going on in my life right now, the biggest thing I can think of in this moment is that I'm really, really way too excited, more excited than a man-made age ought to be about the upcoming release of new models and a new rulebook for the LDR in Warhammer 40K. So long-time listeners to the show know that I am the 40K nerd of the two of us here, and so yeah, of the two of us here. And so yeah, the elder or the first armadir actually started really seriously collecting and playing

and they haven't gotten new models in literally 20 years. So this is a really big deal. And yeah, I'm a dork. So no surprise to anybody who knows me, but there we go. And who are you, sir? I'm Damien Harmony. I'm a Latin teacher and a drama teacher up here in

Northern California. And a couple things. Number one, I didn't realize that Warhammer 40k had a crossover with the Spanish dub version of Beastmaster. So that's cool. Okay, wait. El Dar. Yeah, exactly. Oh, okay. Yeah. Right, I see it. And anybody's keeping score that is about two minutes in. Yeah, I was about to ask. Okay, so there we go.

Now, we actually had harvest just last week. So the donuts popped up. Yes. And we planted them three weeks ago. We was hunting net cheers this time because the kids wanted them to be sweeter donuts. We dug them, we planted them, and then the holes popped up, they decided to eat three.

And they were going to show them with their friends, but then they were worried that donuts were not halal, so we did not do that. Indeed. Yeah, it was really cool to see them kind of think that through and then we're waiting until next week and if the reins come it might be jelly filled. Otherwise, it'll probably just be plain, but they will be cake in their form. So nice. Yeah, very good. We have a special guest. So I would say he is at least tied for the most educated guests that we've ever had. Certainly the most educated amongst the three of us. And just a little bit of a narrative, I was going to do a deep dive on the Punisher

because it's time. And then I saw this gentleman on TikTok that I've been following for the last year. And he was talking about a paper he was writing on the Punisher. I said, you know what? I don't want to do all that work. I'll talk to somebody who already did it. Reached out to Dr. Gabriel Cruz from North Carolina, Professor of Communications, and asked him if he wanted to join us. And here he is. Dr. Cruz, welcome. and asked him if he wanted to join us. And here he is, Dr. Cruz, welcome. Hi, yes. So my name is Gabriel Cruz, and I am a university lecturer

at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. My PhD is in median communications. My area of research is primarily superheronarratives. Usually looking at them through like a lens of race, class, and gender. And I also do a secondary area of interest in research in White and Ashless propaganda and political movements because I'm determined to just not have good days.

And my latest endeavor is about whether or not I can trademark the phrase gunmetal genitalia, as that connects to our discussion today. I saw it was either you noted or you actually saying it on TikTok and that's an absolutely wonderful. I love it. And I just I want to say I haven't gotten a chance to nerd out about this yet, but I'm a huge fan of your work on TikTok. Like huge huge. So thank you very much for joining us. This is awesome. Thank you. It's always nice to know that when I'm hollering into the void, someone is less than me. Definitely. Yeah.

No, the email exchange between Ed and I was, yeah, here's the guy guy's like, holy shit, you got him. I was like, yep, that's right. How'd you do it? I reached out. So it goes to show folks, if you, if you are doing something that's incredibly niche, you can reach out to people who are experts in your niche and very often, especially if they're communications professors and lectures, they will want to talk more about it in their off time too. So yeah, people really got to understand that like if you're if you're doing what I'm doing and I'm my job is an excuse to like read comics and watch Netflix and write about it and go to conferences.

And you want to, you want to tell me the job. Anyone at this level of education is a huge friggin nerd and what do nerves, what do nerds love more than just talking about stuff with anybody? So, it's true. True. Yeah. Not wrong. Not all wrong. Yeah. I mean, we were irritating everybody at our gaming table for a year. And then finally, I just turned to them, like, why aren't we doing this on a podcast? And I didn't have a good retort to that. So here we are. Yeah. So 145, 46 episodes. Something. Yeah. So normally what we do is I will dive deep into some sort of 1800s explanation of cartooning or something like that to then bring us up in three

hours to the actual topic. But you're better organized than I am. So I was going to kind of run through just a briefish history of the Punisher comic itself, and we could have actually talked about this off-air, but we're not professionals. But, and then we get to the TV series, but I'm assuming that you have a ton of knowledge of the actual comic itself as well. Fair and a Midland, you know, the Punisher is one of those characters who's been running at this point for 50 years and I've read a fair amount of comics,

but it's nowhere near all of them. But I have a good feeling for the character and I've got thoughts to share with y'all. Sure, okay, that's you. I gotta ask, do you remember the run where he was black? I've read about that run. Okay. And I haven't read it for the same reasons.

I haven't read Frank and castle. Okay. So I just, I just don't know if I want my feelings heard like, like, okay, you guys remember Dexter's laboratory, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's what's his name?

Tartoski. The. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, get it. Get it. Tikovsky. Yeah, right. He wrote a Luke Cage comic All right, and I was like, oh, this is cool. I want to pick this up. I did it was terrible. It hurt me physically created It was just all the stereotypes from the 1970s, but without any of the heart or soul behind it, and it was just It was so bad. And so now I'm like, anytime this looks good on paper, I don't know. It was, I will tell you, the one where he said is black is,

it was when they were doing two for a month in the summers. So it was about a seven issue series. It actually introduced the Luke Cage comic for the 90s. Okay. Because the Punisher invariably he gets pulled over by the police because he falls asleep at the wheel. The whole idea is that he basically got out of Rikers and he went to a street surgeon like you do and said, I don't even want my own mother to recognize me. So she injected melanin into his skin.

Drizzly to black. Right. And she styled his hair and all this. It was. Oh, that's right. When I started eating comics, this is this is a slight bit of attention, but it connects this. Are you guys familiar with the black bomber? I am not.

They've heard of this. Are you guys familiar with the Black Bomber? I am not. They've heard of this. Okay. So the Black Bomber was the pitch for DC's first Black superhero. All right. So this is like early 1970s. Oh, what's his name? The gentleman who created Black Lightning was a part of the pitch team, right? And someone suggested and even wrote a script out for Attoni Isabella. That was his name. He didn't write this. He actually put an end to it. pitch team, right? And someone suggested and even wrote a script out for Betoni Isabella, that was his name. He didn't write this. He actually put an end to it. But someone wrote a script and pitched the idea of a white supremacist who hated black folks and had served him Vietnam. And Agent Orange gave him this superpower where he could say a particular racial slur and then transform into a black man with superpowers.

But he didn't know like the consciousness of the white version and the black version were separated. So it's like the Hulk, but racist. Yes, and then after like an hour, he would revert back to the white guy. So, and Tony Isabella was white American and would create black lightning in 1977 was like, no, we're not doing this. This is not a thing. And what's great about it is, I think it's, I think it's Dwayne McDuffy, one of the comics creators who has passed on who's African American gentlemen, who has makes references to it in some of the DC comics. There's like two or three panels where someone's like, who are you? And he's like, oh, I'm the brown bomber. My powers aren't no one cares.

And then they move on to the next thing. Oh, that's awesome. That's good. That's great. Oh, good. The point at hand. Yeah. But yeah, he, so Frank Castle is black for a while.

And she, of course, doesn't have actual medicine or charts or any sterile equipment. And so, of course, in fit, I think an infection sets in, he needs antibiotics, but she gives him heroin, which exists in pills. And okay. And it takes a lot to render me speechless, but this has done it. Yeah. And wow. He falls asleep at the wheel to police, get him for, you know, swarving and and then they proceed to beat him up and Luke Cage is driving by sees a bunch of police in a comic book in 1992, 1993, beating up on a black man. So it's, you know, and that's that's at least the second time that Marvel is referencing the Rodney King riots and the

attack on Rodney King by the police, because Nomad also like stopped the burning fire during rooting, during looting, but basically Luke Cage bends one of the guns, gets shot in the hand, he's like, you know, it does hurt, just stop it. And then he frees. And then they become like a buddy cop series for a couple issues. And, and then Frank Castle is Frank Castle. So he ends up splitting ways. And then he lightens up essentially. Literally. Yes. But not figuratively at all. No. And I think that the the starting event was in Rikers, he got carved up by Jigsaw. Jigsaw's like, I want to make you look like me. That's why he needed to have

reconstructive surgery. Got you. Okay. So then he literally went back to being white after about seven issues. That's that's for the best of all parties involved. Um, and I'm just thinking because for my dissertation, I read, um, I think most maybe a dozen or so comics of the 1992 Luke Cage run. And that is a particular version of Luke Cage because each time they reinvent him, they try to make him like topical for the time. And it is very clearly like an attempt at getting at, he's a, he's an angry black man fighting racist everywhere, but he's also sort of paranoid a little bit. Yes. And that's when he linked up with Dakota North, right? Yes, I think so.

Yeah. Yeah. There's that diamond-tipped guy with the nails that would shoot at you. Yeah. It was such a weird run. Oh, right. Such a weird, anyway.

But let's, we were here to talk about the Punisher, right? Yeah, yeah. Sure. This is how we do. So the Punisher was a comic book character that was inspired by the executioner who was a Vietnam vet who was a sniper named Mac Bolin who became a serial killer of mafia criminals after his family was killed by the mafia which debuted this book series debuted in 1969 as a monthly serial action adventure paper book.

And as of December of 2020, it had 464 novels. So by novel, each one of them is, you know, the size of the size of a babysitter's club book. I've seen it in the wild. Yeah, a couple hundred pages. Okay. Yeah. Novela, maybe. So the original author was a guy named Don Pendleton, Yeah, a couple hundred pages, okay. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Novela, maybe. Yeah. So the original author was a guy named Don Pendleton, who wrote the first dozen or so.

Now Pendleton, I found this fascinating because it fits everything that Ed has ever taught me about authors of sci-fi. He, like, in 1942, he enlisted into the Navy at the age of 14. Oh, okay. I mean, there was a war on, but that's pretty so a good child soldier. Yes, yeah, that's, that's, he must have been a big lad. Yeah, I'll say it later, at least. But yeah, yeah, big lad and the recruiter had really bad eyesight or a quoted or a full or yes, that too. Um, because by the 1940s, no, no modern Navy had cabin boys or powder monkeys anymore.

So I don't know why you'd want to do that, but okay. Well, yeah, it wasn't like two thirds of the folks who fought in World War II drafted. So like, right. Yeah. Yeah, they were hard up, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, apparently. Well, you know, if you walk in and volunteer, they're like, well, we're not going to stop

you. Yeah, from wine. Yeah. And in all honesty, a large majority of people in the 1930s would have been classified. They did a bit of a study for the CCC because one of the things the CCC's knock on effect was it actually got people healthy enough to join the army because so many of them would have not been healthy enough to join the army. There was like, because of widespread malnourishments and everything going on because of the depression.

Yeah. No social safety net, no standing army needs, you know, stuff like that as well. But yeah, at 14, he joins the Navy. This is according to his biography, by the way. So, you know, take a salt lake with that. Now, we have writers who are coming out of World War II, like Pendleton, Rod and Barry Heinlin and Serling, Pendleton, which I just found fascinating. There's a whole dearth, dearth or... No, glut. Glut would do that. Glut would do that.

Yeah, oxidative dearth, yes. Or plethora. Plethora? Oh, there you go. That means a lot. Thank you It's so cool to see two people cringe like like Ed. I'm Catholic and I believe that suffering is a part of my face And so that was I'm glad to be able to validate both of your face Thank you. So that makes me feel the same. It could be.

Yeah. Well, we all know I'm a tool. So, got him drinking. So you said it, not me. You did. So I also been called worse by better. So Pendleton was considered the originator of the action adventure novel.

By the way, he's kind of the main guy that we associate the thing with. I'm not saying he's the first, but he's the, and you call it the codifier. The codifier, trope codifier. He later like all of that. TV tropes does. Okay, that's, I don't want to steal, there Thunder. He later licensed the character and the series in 1980

and it continued on for another 40 years. Interesting, just because I like to dig deep on these people, Pendleton turned to metaphysical, writing metaphysical books with his wife, including a book on channeling spirits conversing with them, thus completing the weird circle of life. Now, I did an episode on the dark crystal and there is a bit of overlap here with people coming out of World War II getting into metaphysics in the 1960s and 70s. Now, part of it's because metaphysics was big in the 1960s and 70s and it's easy to hop from one lily pad to the other.

I also think that we didn't have the lost generation, like we did in World War I, but you do have a lot of people who are all the meaning and all the, this makes sense, this way, this way, this way, kind of got shaken a bit. And so I think there was. We're completely destroyed. Yeah, I mean, you know, I think you're soft pedaling a little bit there. Yeah. Yeah. And so he goes from writing the executioner to channeling spirits. Okay. Yeah. He later claimed that he considered the executioner to be a metaphysical study of violence.

And this to me feels like post facto justification. Yeah, yeah, it really does. post facto justification? Yeah, yeah, it really does. Yeah. And because, you know, I think if I were writing about channeling spirits and people were challenging me going, like, but didn't you write this book about this guy? Yes, I did.

And here's how that fits in with this instead of saying, well, I've changed or I've grown or I'm different now or I need to pay my mortgage. Money, money dear boy. Yes, yeah, the greater the greater Pendleton cinematic universe Yeah, there you go. Yeah, the GPU. Yeah The GPS you I guess So he also claimed that Mac Bolin was a hero I Find that fascinating since he's a serial killer So then we we jump cut to Jerry Conway who was writing for Spider-Man or Spider-Man.

It auto-corrects it to take out the hyphen. So it always just looks like the last name to me. So Leo Spider-Man of the Boston Spider-Man. It goes along with Peter Parker being coded as Jewish, like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Of the Queen's Spider-Man, so. Oh, yeah.

But he was writing for Spider-Man in 1974. He claimed that he didn't steal this character wholesale. And in interviews about a decade and a half later, Stan Lee also claimed that he meant the Punisher to be a hero. Yeah. Anytime, anytime Stanway's in, it just muddies the waters. He strikes me as as part carnival barker and part guy who trades on the idea that he's the trusted uncle. Yeah, that he's the trustee, Uncle. Stanley is was rest of the soul. Was did a lot of great things for comics and was a very

likeable personality. The problem is he was also notorious for giving the fans what they wanted, whether or not it was the truth. Yes. Yeah. That's a really good summation. I used to, I used to teach an after school program and I did it on comics.

And the guy, the floor below me, taught them how to draw comics. And I taught them the history. So we did the theory and then the practical. And I did an entire lecture on, I think it was just on Luke Cage. And I kept coming back to you like every third slide is remember this is a white guy thinking

he knows what black guys are like. And so it's kept coming back. And representation is very important. And sometimes the first version of it ain't gonna be good. And keep in mind, your narrator here is Stanley. Like he's a white guy thinking he's writing for Black guys. Or even worse, you know, Luke Cage was originally created by Archie Goodwin and a couple others. And Archie Goodwin was, he was a veteran. I forget which war. I don't know that it was World War II, it might have been Korea.

But by the way, he has some amazing comics about what it's like to actually serve and more, some that were so grounded in reality and complex and all that sort of stuff that they were banned on PX stores. Like military bases would not sell them, it was called Blazing Combat. And they would not sell them

because they were too humanizing of the end. Oh, wow. Yeah. For example, there was one where it's anthology series. And there's a story of American GIs going through, I think, a French battlefield. There's a German soldier who's wounded. The GIs happen across them.

They shoot the German and kill them. And they, the German shoots one of the Americans and wounds them very badly. And so they carry them away. And someone says, what do we do about the German? Do we just leave them here? And the, one of the GIs says, no, it's not our problem. No one's going to miss him.

And then the last shot is actually the German soldier holding a locket with his wife and child in it. And that's a story he was telling in the 1970s, right? Wow. So, but what's interesting that is to bear that in mind and the complexity of the stories that he tells, with the fact that in 72, when he was writing, when he was writing Luke Cage, he was, he went to black exploitation movies. That was his inspiration. Steve Inglehart, one of the co-writers who picked up after Goodwin says in the forward to the Marvel Masterworks collection of Luke Cage of Hero for Higher, the first series that we were a bunch of white guys who didn't know how to write black folk. And so we watched like

Superfly and Sweet Sweetback and Shaft. And all of my, you know, exactly folk. And so we watched like Superfly and sweet, sweet back and shaft. Dolomite, you know, and Dolomite exactly, right? And like Foxy Brown and stuff like that to get an idea. That was our closest experience. But what's even funny, but also heartbreaking about that, is that the anchor was a fun and Billy Graham not to be confused with the Reverend. Or the wrestler or the rest or the wrestler. Okay. But the Or the wrestler or the wrestler. But the, but Billy Graham was the anchor, right? So, you know, he traces everything and ink and all that kind of stuff. And he was African-American.

And it was probably six months to a year before he had any input in any of the stories. Oh, my God. To Ingleheart's credit when he took over as like the lead writer, he was like, you know, Bill, you should, you should probably help write these stories. Did Bill just like pull out a tone, be like, well, as a matter of fact, I have some notes. I mean, no, a thing or two, right? Yeah, that's, yeah.

Good. Good. That's, I mean, that absolutely, the thing about the black exploitation film absolutely fits with what I remember reading because I've got the Marvel ultimate access app. And I read, you know, some of the old blue cage stuff, the old heroes for hire, or hero for hire.

Heroes once he joins the white guy who knows mystical kung fu. Oh, I'm pissed. Yes. Yeah. Oh, uh, old, uh, was it David Caridine, but yeah, yeah. Yeah. So geez.

Oh, geez. That, that show, by the way, they had a reboot of it in the 90s. Oh, I remember. Yeah. And, and what I loved was that David Caridine was a fatter older and slower. And they didn't bother to speed up the film or anything. They just made him tell parables while he was fighting. So he gets trapped into a pit fight

and he just starts with, did I ever tell you the story of the eagle and the bear? And he punched like almost Tai Chi speed and it still flammoxed the giant Russian guy. And I'm like, what are you doing? Some cold-worship here. Like, they would Keradine did what? comics the giant Russian guy and I'm like, what are you doing some cold-worship here? Like David Keradine did what? Oh, uh, oh, what's his name? Um, oh god, the action hero with the ponytail

crowd Steven Steve's go. Steve's go. Should have yeah, what's the goal should have done 30 years ago? Hanged himself. That's not Well, I mean, I was saying I'm not gonna I didn't mean the final time I just thought you meant like as a habit like I was talking about like taking a back seat And that someone else take over and just be the old mentor in the background. Yeah, also that yeah, yeah, that too I'm just saying to go needs to relax a little and yeah, yeah, yeah, so Wow a little. And yeah, yeah, yeah. So Wow. So that got dark. Yeah. Okay. So who's who's up for some NSX? So, um, so Jerry Conway is just writing for Spider-Man. Um, and, uh, like I said, Stan Lee said, you know, it's guys of heroine. And, uh, here's what Jerry Conway had to say. He said, Stan Lee said, you know, it's guys are heroine and here's what Jerry Conway had to say.

He said, quote, I was fascinated by the Don Pendleton executioner character, which was fairly popular at the time. And I wanted to do something that was inspired by that, although not to my mind, a copy of it. I'm going to break in here for just a second. That's the classic. I was doing a homage. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Back into the quote. back in, that's the classic, I was doing a homage. Oh, yeah. Yeah, back into the quote. And while I was doing the Jackal storyline, the opportunity came for a character who would be used by the Jackal to make Spider-Man's life miserable. The Punisher seemed to fit. I think that there's a little bit of self-protection in the beginning, but I think the rest of it, he's encasing his fable into the truth. Because I think that's precisely what he did.

Like, I'm sure it was there to make Spider-Man's life hard. Which I think feeds right into the TV series. Like, that's why he shows up in the Daredevil, not just his fan service of like, oh, hey, cool, we're doing all the heroes of New York, but also like, he legitimately made Daredevil's life hard in that season. I like how I very often like how in Star Wars they will absolutely borrow from the EU

and they'll pluck the good stuff out of all the bad and they'll just throw it into the movies and regurgitate it in a different way and stuff. And I love when they do that because I don't mind being serviced as a fan like that because most people won't have seen those books that, because I don't mind being serviced as a fan like that, because most people won't have seen those books anyway. So I don't mind stuff like that. But when you take someone's character wholesale, I mean, again, it's dark seed and Thanos, you know? Yeah.

So from Stan Lee, he said, quote, Jerry Conway was writing a script and he wanted a character that would turn out to be a hero later on and he came up with the name of the assassin. And I mentioned that I didn't think we could ever have a comic book where the hero would be called the assassin because there's just too much of a negative connotation to that word. So I think these are in conflict, ultimately, because Stanley is saying like, you know,

he would turn out to be a hero and Conway is not saying necessarily that he thinks that this guy's a hero. I think that there's some fudging going on, but like you said, it's Stanley. Well, and I think also there's the issue of Stanley reading his own press, drinking his own Kool-Aid perhaps. And I think his desire to remember in a particular way is subconsciously self-serving as well. So I think a part of the root of that conflict could also be that aspect of it as well. I think there's an interesting thing with Stanley, whenever you take into account his perspectives.

And that is it. And we talked about this in one of my classes, I'm teaching, which is sort of a, I got free reign to teach a freshman seminar class. And I was like, well, we're just going to get weird with it. So it's, it's an intro to comic studies class, which the university has no point of reference for at like any part, right? But they signed off whatever. So I was talking about students, I said, well, right? But they signed off whatever. So I was talking

about students. I said, well, we have these two quotes from Stanley. The first one is like in the early 2000s, circa the X-Men movies, right? When he says that like the mutants and the X-Men were this interesting way to deal with issues of metaphors of like race and like things like that. And he was inspired by the things going on in the civil rights movement and the set the other. And then you fast forward into 2014, right? So 14 years later. And he says, yeah, I thought it was a neat idea, but I had never planned it that way from the beginning, right?

So it's his own continuity errors. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I've always kind of fallen back again on like I you know there's certainly As Ed and I very often say it's in the zeitgeist when he was writing it You know, it's the the background in the wall pair the paper it's the wallpaper in the background that you know You might not notice civil rights was happening outside of his windows

You know from from the from his building happening outside of his windows, you know, from from the from his building. It doesn't mean he actively was going in to do stuff, but it could have been influencing what he was doing. And it's it's far kinder to him and his memory to not interpret the original X-Men series as directly inspired by the civil rights movement. Because if you do, it gets real unfortunate real quick. I mean, this is true. Yes. And I, I think we did an X-Men civil rights and gay rights episode. Yeah. Um, and, uh, and I, I, I'd like to think I need to go back and listen and see how bad

okay, we, I bungled it, um, because I handled the civil rights aspect of it. Um, but I think I said, and Ed correct me if I'm making this up and stand leeing my way through it. I think I said something along the lines of he was informed by the times he was seeing, but he was not actually, his use of Magneto, who later is called a stand-in for Malcolm X. That's a little bit more retcony as well, but his use of Magneto is you have a separatist

and separatism existed at the time. You have a separatist, but to white people at that time, that would have seemed evil. And so separatism can seem evil. And then the fact that he's dressed in orange means, you know, he's got a buggy moral code. And the fact that he's a purple means he's, you know, he's got a buggy moral code. And the fact that he's a purple means, he's, you know, he's a leader of sorts. But he is evil because separatism was not something

white people could understand if it wasn't in their own context of segregation. And therefore, that the only way that the separatism could be seen was as evil. Whereas Professor X was, you know was more of an integrationist and that was more palatable to white people who were looking at both things. It's the relatively. And therefore, that's why it was more okay to represent integrationism with Professor X. But I also don't think he set out to actually do it on purpose.

Yeah. Yeah. One, I just wanna say we're going to need to adopt Stan Leeing as a verb in that context, going forward, I think we've determined that needs to happen. Also, I think in this case, you are accurately summarizing what I remember from your argument there. So, can confirm.

Thank you. So now I want to talk about New York in the 1970s for a bit. In the 70s it was not the gentrified police state with neon that we know it as today. It was much less neonny in the 1970s. So it was different. In 1965 there were 18 million people. Am I wrong? It was a police state part. I don't think you're wrong about the gentrified part of the 70s. That's not, I don't know. Okay, okay. I'm just thinking, you know, Queens was much more white than it was Afro-Dominican. Okay, fair. Yeah right, yeah. So in 65, there were 18 million people in New York area. And there were 58,802 violent crimes. There were 836 murders.

There were 27,464 aggravated assaults and 28,182 robberies. In 1970, roughly the same amount of people, but now 124,613 violent crimes. Now there were 14,1444 murders, and there were 39,145 aggravated assaults, and there were 81,149 robberies. Stuff is just flying through the roof as far as the rates go. Huge increases. And they're most definitely in the public consciousness. It is a thing. It is a meme in New York that crime is so big. And interestingly, I think that this actually may have fed more into Nixon's

campaign in 72 for being the long- order dogwistler that he was. You know, you had the hard hat riots in 1970. So you have people already convulsing on one side violently. And then calling out the violence of those people is really easy to do when, you know, people like to tell them themselves, or what they're going to do. Now, New York was still lagging behind Miami and San Francisco that year, by the way. When it came to all of these stats. Really?

Yeah. Yeah. So it's funny that in the popular conception, New York was like Dottes and Ferno. Yeah. You know, where I think it's a volume you talked about San Francisco. Okay.

Yeah. So it's a volume issue Talk about San Francisco. OK, right. Yeah. So it's a volume issue. It's also a compression issue. And I say that knowing San Francisco is one of the most compressed cities there is. But yeah, it's. Well, I think I think I'm going to interject here. I think part of it is all of the major news networks

at the time were headquartered in New York. So everybody who was writing the news, everybody who was involved in forming the zip guist, that was what was going on literally outside their window. Like you talked about with Lee Stanley in the 60s, all the reporters, all the newswriters were seeing how bad it was in New York. And so New York was what got all the attention. I think New York has an outsized presence in our popular imagination because of the fact

that a whole lot of the people who write our entertainment are there. All our comics are based there. That makes sense, especially when you think about things like Alan Moore's Watchman being set in New York City, right? In what 1986? Oh, I'm sorry. Yep. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, name a hero in Marvel that's not in New York. It's it takes a bit. There's a great likes Avengers. What's that? I was gonna say, um, great likes Avengers. I was gonna say, there's a reason they're called the great likes and the West Coast Avengers and not the Avengers. That's a good

way. Yeah. That's true. Yeah. Yeah. The default is New York. Yeah. Yeah. They yeah, that's there. The norm. Uh, okay. So in 74 population still the same. Um, and I the reason I'm picking 74 is Punisher. Yeah. Violent crime in New York goes up to 145,000, 227 instances. Now, again, what do they say in 65, it was 58,000. So we're talking a triple increase within a decade.

Yeah. Murder climbed to 1919. Aggravated assault was 54,593. robbery actually went up as well to 93,499. The incline is deep. I will even say stark in this creation. Now that continues with a few dips again and then increases again into the early 1990s. And at this time you see the Punisher as well as the Guardian Angels come in. The Guardian Angels come in at 79 I believe, but the Punisher comes in

come in at 79, I believe, but the Punisher comes in. And sorry, I just kicked my heater. So now Punisher comes in, but he is a guest villain. But I do think it's interesting. You're starting to see this move toward a vigilante idea. So now Punisher doesn't become a comic book series, I think until you get a mini series in 86. And by then, the population in New York had actually declined. And violent crime went up again. So you have a population decrease

and an increase in violent crime to 175,210 instances. Murder is holding steady. It literally was eight off from the last time. And there were 400,000 fewer New Yorkers yet. Robberies were also holding steady, even though the population dropped. Robberies were just over 91,000 and aggravated assaults soared to 76,528.

Now, that was 86. So if we want to go back a year when people are writing these things and planning these things, aggravated assaults are still well above the 74 numbers and everything else is holding very steady. So in 86, we also see in November of 85, actually, the emergence of crack in New York into the public consciousness, especially in the Washington Heights area of New York. You also see the heads of the five families in New York brought up on charges for the first time, the bananas, the Columbus, the Gambianos, the Genovesis, and the Lucasis. The Unibomber dropped two albums that year

and Richard Ramirez was caught in August of 85. And also in December of 85, Crime Bosses, Big Polly Costelano and Tommy Belodi are killed in Manhattan in an un-sanctioned hit. I believe in broad daylight, putting John Gotti in charge of the Gotti family. sanctioned hit, I believe in broad daylight, putting John Gotti in charge of the Gotti family. So you've got this confluence of all of this crime, and certain kinds of crime keep just flooding and crashing into the public consciousness. Mafia crime, drug crime, and then just violent street crime. You have central park rapists and stuff like that. You've got a lot of things just feeding into this,

which is important because in the initial run, the Punisher was being made much more extreme due to mind-altering drugs. Somebody was actually putting mind-altering drugs into them. And that, yeah, that gets us to 1987, which is when you have your first actual series called the Punisher. And in 88, the war journal comes out. And then in 92, Punisher War zone comes out. And they all last until 1995, and then it cuts off. The only other series I know that had the same character

featured, but with multiple names is Spider-Man. Amazing, spectacular web of, and then there was a fourth one better for you at which one? What it was. Okay, I think you need to add a caveat there because that's in Marvel. The single character with that many series. Right, that's the only comic that exists. I don't see what it's like. Dude, how many episodes have we been talking about fucking Batman? right? Dude, how many episodes have we been talking about fucking Batman? Way too many. Yeah. Batman at some point is his own like publishing house. At some point, I thought dark psychomics was just them doing a subsidiary of Batman.

When I first saw it. Yeah. But in fact, there is no actual DC. It's just Batman and friends. I see. Yeah. Yeah, I don't mind. Yeah, actually, I remember that was the original name of the Australian rock band. It was AC Batman. smaller than them to your comment history that they mean. And that is that Marvel had a series called Marvel Superaction, which was a short run limited series. So they would do like three or four issues at a time of or depending on the comic, whatever. So like Captain America had one, I think I was volume two, but volume number one was the Punisher where he had a four issue arc. And that was in 1975. And what I like about that is that series is that it's good writing, and it's interesting. And it makes, it's a very different Frank Castle than the one we get when he soloses on series. It's a lot more calm and restrained version of Castle, one who's actually capable of like human attachment.

I think he has a very small love arc in that story. Oh wow. It lasts for like an issue, maybe two. Okay. And but what's interesting is in the forward to it, there's a great summation of the characters, probably my favorite description of the character, by Archie Goodwin, again, the writer I talked about before,

because he wrote this series. And I'm paraphrasing, but effectively he says that the Punisher is a solution that is worse than the problem that created him. Yeah. I like that a lot. He too. And he says, you know, he satisfies, he says, what makes the character compelling is that he satisfies a part of us that wants to engage in action, that wants to engage in decisive, you in decisive action that is not overthought. It is done quickly and then finally, and then you move on to the next thing. But that if we were to act this way as a society, it would inevitably end in like societal

collapse. And not to get, I don't know how political y'all get on your show. Go ahead. Go ahead. You may recall the insurrection last year. Yes, you may have noticed it in the news. Made a few bad guys in there. It's starting to be a little bit. One of the guys who was in the, who made it into the capital or into the, into Congress was where, you was where he had the

like the beauty of you, Sean and Chaman. No, not that full that I was about to say something else that I got. You can we swear it's okay. No, all the time. Have you have your branded protect I understand? No, no, no, fuck them. Like just thoroughly. But you know, I'm trying to some some illusion of professionalism. As I'm hearing my pajamas, anyway, so no, like you're assuming I'm wearing pants. Gotcha.

I'm going to mute my screen before we take break. So I know one of the guys who made it in, who was like wearing, you know, well, a protest and some other stuff in videos and that kind of thing. And he had like, is that the head of the guys who made it in, who was like wearing, you know, a little professants, some other stuff in BDUs, and that kind of thing. And he had like zip ties. Does that guy that had a, yeah, the strip cuffs? Yeah, he had a Punisher logo on his chest. Yeah. Right?

Right, which is an emblem of, and I have a lot of mixed feelings about the folks that participate in their insurrection, some of which I think we're just really caught up in a moment. And some of whom are undeniably criminally involved and all that kind of stuff. But I think what speaks to that, and this is actually something we talk about in this paper that I'm working on with my friends, is that there is a desire to correct an injustice. Whether or not that injustice is actual or perceived, that the Punisher acts as a sort of catharsis for. And yeah, that speaks to us on a very human level, but we always have to remember that second part from from Goodwin, and that is that embracing this solution is a real big

problem. Yeah, absolutely. You know, piggybacking on that, the movie Equal Librium, my brother and I, he introduced it to me years ago. And at the end of it, he's like, so would you think, I was like, it's really good. He's like, what do you think of the ending, you know, when a spoiler alert on a 20 year old movie now, where everybody just decides to not take their meds anymore. And actually, in current context, that'd be an interesting look. But I said, what do

you mean? He's like, do you think that's actually better? Like when everybody's just acting like Landrue has told them it's festival day and they're going, apeshit, you know? So it's like, you know, it's the rest day. Yeah, you know, yeah. It's just start of the purge. Like, right. Yeah. Yeah. You know, but you're, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but you're absolutely right. There's that desire to that desire for vigilantism, but there needs to be that recognition that if we have vigilantism, a lot of shit is broken down and this is this is by no means a good idea. Okay. If we resort to vigilantism as a society, then we are giving up on basically every socio-political

advancement we've made since roughly the Bronze Age. Yeah. Gonna go out on a limb here and trace it back to that. Like, we're giving up on having that society. Yeah, do we want to go back to like the house of atreus and war with Troy? Like if we're talking about going back to that heroic age of civilization, then yeah, okay, sure, do it.

But I don't like that idea. Yeah, me. Like, you know, I like plumbing. I like, you know. I like not sacrificing birds. Yeah. I don't know. It depends. Are we talking about like Canadian geese? Cause I have no problem with that.

But well, they're evil. They are. Yeah. Yeah. As a, as a Mexican American, who's father is an immigrant, I feel like the actual immigration threat are Canadian geese. That is what we should be worried about from a national security perspective. 100% agree. I have 100% agree. I have no opinion on this, and I will go with you both. Yeah, no, Cobra chickens. They're eating all.

Oh, okay, yeah. Yeah, I found a D&D, like, stat block for a geese and they are, they are. And this is my head cannon now for real life as well. They are chaotic evil, and they speak infernal because they are in fact outsiders, not native to this plane. Now that you mentioned it, I'm just thinking about like the history of geese with Rome. And what I tell my students all the time, the Romans are not the good guys.

They never were But so I don't know if you know the story of how geese saved Rome. I have no idea. Oh, yeah, so The Romans were being beset by the Gauls. I think it was it was in the 400s BCE So yeah, it sounds like the Gauls would work some Celtic group Yeah, or it might have been a neighbor that they picked a fight with and the Romans always picked fights that they couldn't win and then they found a way to win. But it's wonderful how much they tell on themselves and their own writing too, like even though they're mythologizing. They're like, he wasn't the smartest or the strongest or the quickest, but we made the right decision at the right moment, you know. But so they had seven gates to guard. The problem with guards is they

can be bribed, they can fall asleep, they can be snuck up on. So they put a gaggle of geese at each gate. Nobody snuck into the city because you can slit one goose's throat. The rest of them are gonna beat you to death and they're gonna be really loud. So this absolutely fits your head cannon because the geese were the guardians of the bad guys.

Yeah, that's amazing. We're going to find out you're sure now that Cabernos was not a dog. It was a large goose. A three-headed goose. Yeah, that makes sense because he's described by a Virgil as having long neck and a large sloping back. Oh, wow. And they threw cakes to him. Oh my god They just brought bread down to the underworld

Some old-style breath Hard tack is everything to survive the journey So and you were worried about losing professionalism with us. So, most of Frank Castle's foes were very ganging and very New Yorkie. He infiltrates an Italian mafia in Warzone. And it's rarely anything else. He's always fighting gangs in his series that, you know, are coming out that all ended in 95. What I find interesting is that the Punisher came out and up right as America was hitting the worst times of the 80s economically. The economy grew by only 2.5% in 1986. The recession was pretty clearly

extent in the US by that point and the Dow plummeted in October of 87. Trickle down wasn't living up to its name other than the fact that we were all getting peed on. And this all combined with urban blight and drug use or at least the perception of it, to really look like the whole system was breaking down specifically in New York. Not to mention the racial strife in New York at the time, the attack on reporters like Dan Rather.

New York is just a churning inferno of madness, and people are blaming, what's his name? It wasn't really his in Chicago. Yeah, it was caught. And then it was, um, binkins. Yeah, yeah. That's how you're right. Yeah. So New York at that time was seen as a very creamy place. And this means that the cops can't or won't do what they're supposed to. So vigilante. So in the popular perception, right. Yeah. And again, there's that that thing that you were talking about, Gabriel, like the desire to write a wrong and the catharsis that comes from that,

the sexual release that comes from spraying your enemies. Unmetagenetalia, no, absolutely. Yeah, there you go, yeah. So I can get away with saying that with you here, Ed would just be laughing at me and mad at me. I want a way to make that an emerge, but if you just print that on like a hoodie, that doesn't get evoked the right.

You make a hoodie where the pocket has a hood under it that drops down and covers the crotch. It covers the crotch and across the crotch, it says gunmetal genitalia. So it's a two hoodie, two headed hoodie. Just like earlier today on Facebook, I got to ask you, why do you always have to make it fucking weird? Why? So Ed actually pundled a little bit on eggs earlier today.

Yeah. And he said, he even said, I need to get the good ones out of the way before Damian poaches them all because I do puns for a living in addition to teaching. And it paid for Christmas for like four years. And my daughter even said said she's like, you're not funny. I'm like, no, demonstrably, I am. People pay money for this. She's like, I don't believe you. I said, all of Christmas last year was because of these jokes. She's like, are you serious? I'm like, and all of Christmas this year will be too. And she looked at me dead in the eye. She was five, six. And she looked at me. I could do without the presents.

five, six. And she looked at me. She's, I could do without the presents. I was so proud. I have. I have never admired your daughter more. So I'll let her know that she peaked at six. That's a call shot on the kneecaps. Good. It was, dude, it was, ooh, man, I got galulied. Uh, but, uh, so, so Ed made a bunch of egg jokes. And I said, you know, I just, I just jumped on there. And the only thing I said was, you know, if you want to make an omelet, you have to have sex with the omesh. I was about to say, how's it about to say come again, but that is not the phrase. Well, it is for rum shbringer. Let me tell you. I still think we need to remix rum shaker with rum spring. I'm spring. There needs to be, you

know, with that saxophone going somewhere, there's an unfortunate film named Ross bring up. Oh, Lord, God, I hope I buzzes. I was in this. No one does. Don't does. Don't worry about it. It doesn't even listen to this. All right. So you've got vigilante gaining popularity through half of a decade of crime being on the rise, right? You've got all this stuff going on. But as it starts to decline, because crime did start to decline in the nineties, so did the comic. And by 95, all the Punisher titles evaporated.

It doesn't mean he's gone forever, but there's a clear message to end all Punisher stuff, even though it was 1995. The Marvel was super struggling as it was in 95. As I've said, there is a convergence of Marvel, DC, pro wrestling, all of these things are struggling mightily in 1995. They seem to be the laggingest of indicators of economic hard times, because as the rest

of the economy is going up, these things are falling apart. And so canceling redundant series when the company is past its solid days is not necessarily in a program against the Punisher. However, in New York, crime was not was on the decline. And throughout the 90s, crime was falling. And what was interesting was that it was an unexpected fall. Steven D. Levitt, an economics professor in the University of Chicago inverted the question, though, he said, we shouldn't look at why crime fell in the 90s, but rather why it was on such a sharp incline leading up to that point.

And he also pointed out that the main explanations of why, why it was falling. You have a good economy, changing demographics, better policing, which was the main claim of New York, gun control, concealed carry, capital punishment. He said all of those had minimal impact. They didn't, they didn't change it, but he did say if you increase policing in general, which they did, and you had higher incarceration rates, which I think that that's a sad solution, if that's the case, the drop off of crack and the long term impact of legalized abortion, he said, all of those did have an impact. The first two are pretty bleak,

but they're also erathmetically sound. Like you lock more people up, there's less people to do crime. And there's also less people to do crime too. So the second two make a lot of sense actually. The legalized abortion and the drop off of crack makes a lot of sense to me. Nonetheless, it's a really bleak story. The taste for vigilante superhero still dries up in such an environment. And once they pulled these three ongoing titles, they were limited runs in 1999, up through 1999. And that kind of became the norm. Like, every once in a while, we'd have another Punisher series.

A four issue here, a six issue there, that kind of became the norm. Like, every once in a while, we'd have another Punisher series, you know, a four issue here, a six issue there, that kind of thing. But there was nothing long term sustainable in 2001 when Marvel Knights picks it up in August of 2001. August of 2001, the Punisher comes out in New York. Wow. Yeah, it's a very different, it's very different,

like guys, America had just been through its most contentious election ever to that point since 1876. And in as much as I like to blame everything on 9 11 that didn't actually seem to have much impact on this particular comic, probably because Punisher's street level in 9 11 was a much bigger deal than even he could do anything about. So in 2004, Garth and his rejuvenates the brand again, he gets a five year 75 issue run out of it.

Now that man has a strange dance with the devil. Doesn't he though? Well, he does a compelling story, but when he's winking and nodding at the camera, it's a bit much for me. Really? I mean, it's, it's, okay. And Ed correct me on who this is. Not Alan Moore. Not not Michael. I mix up these three guys all the time. Mike Miller. No. Roger. Not. Oh, uh, uh, Frank Miller. Frank Miller. Frank Miller. Yeah. Frank Miller.

I'm terrible with names of authors. Um, but uh But Frank Miller tells a very compelling story. Really likes hurting women. She's the in the baggage that man carries around. Good for it all, mate. At some point, he began to drink his own coolate and became a parody of himself. Yes, that exacerbates all of the problems. Yes, that is, there's a great hope.

And now I don't remember the web comic artist's name, but there was a web comic that was a parody of working in retail. It was bad. A bunch of people working in a toy store. But one of one of this authors, like side comics that he did one time was, One of this authors like side comics that he did one time was, all right, you just see a guy who kind of vaguely looks like Frank Miller sitting in front of a laptop and there's a faceless figure pointing a gun at his head. And he says, Frank Miller, your job is to now write a full page of text.

You've got to write a story that doesn't say any in which nothing bad gets set about or done to a woman. And Frank Miller types W. Looks around. H. Looks back. And the last last panel is just horse horse horse horse horse horse horse horse. BAM! You know, like I'm struggling through mid-age run on Daredevil on the first handful of issues. Not because it's not good storytelling. It is very important. It's very compelling. He really does a lot with Daredevil. But the way he writes black widow is.

Herotesque. It is. There's a scene. There's a scene where where Murdock has Daredevil saves one of his exes because she's about to die. And it's what you do as a superhero, right? And then he's like, he's holding her as she's like passed out on the floor because, of course, she's passed out. And like, Black Widow swoops in at the last minute and they've just, you know, kind of had this on again off against what a relationship. And then without even confronting and finding out what she's weird for a spider not find out what just happened. She says something along the lines of clearly, I can't keep his heart. So I just need to learn how to move on. How will I ever like live my life or whatever it's like, oh my god. This is this is the Cold War super spy.

Oh my god. Natasha goddamn Romanov, really? Right. Exactly. Really. Right. Like, you know, who who who who can honestly has taken down whole whole shield teams, like because their bath got interrupted, like, knew that the red room did not, you know, prepare her for these kind of emotional and emotional and like, entanglements, like, even though it exactly did that. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Oh, hey, boy. All right. That's that's that's ridiculous. It's gross. Yeah. All right. So, you know, 9-11. So, a couple of little. Um, so, uh, and Garth Ennis, uh, he's doing his thing. Um, it's also possible that the federal weapons, uh, assault ban, assault weapons ban, uh, in October,

assault band, assault weapons band, in October, sun setting, October of 2004, and all the buzz around that made the Punisher a more appealing hero. It could also be that Fallujah, as well as many other aspects of our invasion of Iraq, a sovereign nation, and Afghanistan, another sovereign nation, were in the news regularly. The shield was then its prime on TV, and so was 24. And there's a lot of real and unreal violence in our zeitgeist. So at that point, the punditure kind of fits in. He's there for the Civil War, for real moral dilemma, for the underground heroes.

And that brings us essentially to Obama. But I think- A relationship. Oh, go on. Oh, please. Sorry, sorry. His relationship with Captain America in Civil War and in secret empire is fascinating. But yeah, anyway, we can talk more about that later. Oh, yeah. It's actually why don't we end with that for this episode. And then in the next episode, we can pick up and really get into the meat of what you're here for. I told you I was going to Damien it.

But yeah, his relationship with Cap, go for it. Yeah. So, and just as a side note, when you said he ended in 95, pardon me, wonders if maybe the hyperviolence of the publisher at the time was starting to wane on people because that's what the late A's into the 90's were known for in their comics. That's what we had with Deadpool. And if you are living in that kind of environment, if you are very concerned, if you're inundated with media about the violence of the world, then your escape as I'm being hyperviolent in the way that the 90s comics were, it was probably kind of a put off. So anyway, but no, so cap and and Frank's relationship is interesting and civil war.

He's sides with cap and he does it for partly ideological reasons about, you know, not one register and all that kind of stuff. Imagine Frank Castle not want to abide by the law, right? Right. Big shot. Slain road. And in the plot twist, no one saw comic. So, but there's this interesting moment where Castle and is meeting with the resistance, right? The folks who are anti-registration and obviously Cap is leading the meeting

and two villains show up to their on-boys to express their support because obviously the villains don't want to see their most of them don't some do. Some were like, oh, I get to hunt down this guy because now I know his name. Right. And some, well, and some, yeah, I can, you can, I can be an agent and be paid to do villainy. That's amazing. And, and I can write it off on my taxes, I guess. I don't know. Anyway, so like Castle just unloads all of them. And these are like seedless characters. And he just machine guns them down right there in front of God capping everybody just dead. And cap loses his mind and like grabs castle and just start and like punches him and starts

fighting them and just wailing on him. And he says, why aren't you fighting back? Why aren't you doing anything? Why aren't you defending yourself? And he says, I couldn't you fighting back? Why aren't you doing anything? Why aren't you defending yourself? And he says, I couldn't, not against you, never against you. Right? And I think someone else from Marx, it might be, Spiderman, it might be Hercules or one of the others there that says, they are effectively in castle's mind, like two sides of the same coin.

He idolizes the cap as a kid, probably joined the military and part because of him, that kind of thing. So how could he ever turn against cap? And that sounds kind of silly and a little hokey, but then when you fast forward to secret empire when we have Nazi cap, right? So for those who weren't familiar, there was the thing where they made cap into a hydra agent because of magical, the cosmic cube and all that kind of stuff. We wrote reality. And castle ends up citing with Nazi cap.

And when asked about it, actually, there's an interesting scene with black widow, where she hand his ass to him. It's, it's, it's, I love the art. And also it was just cool. Yeah. And she says, castle, I never took you for the sentimental sort, why are you doing this? And he says, there's a chance that I can, he says, maybe I can get my family back. And if I can't, we can make sure this never happens again. Also, he has a blind devotion to Captain

America. And that sort of following that imagery wherever it goes, that symbolism, because of what Cap represents to so many people, and he's a complicated figure with a complicated history, but like that is a great example. I think of how senses of unity and these ideologies of what it means to be American are so easily manipulated and so easily contorted. And it's especially for those of us who operate from places of pain, right? Because we get a sort of sense of community and belonging in these grand narrative archetypes in history that, you know, we can say, I'm an American and I'm just that in the other and I'll, you know, do the right thing.

And I think that vulnerability, because we often think of Castle as being unfeeling, but there is a layer of him that just doesn't stop feeling on some level. And it's extremely exploitable. So yeah. Yeah, I don't think he's unfeeling so much as he's joyless. That's fair.

Yeah. And like you said, it's extremely exploitable because he is perpetually aggrieved. And he was made into a weapon. And now we're pointing him. And they talk about that in the series, which you're going to jump into when we talk about the series. But yeah, he's I really find it interesting that he when he's on the side, I'm going to say right and wrong. When he's on the side of right, he's on the side of the resistance. And there are certainly issues with, you know, do we want people running around essentially vigilanteing? No, I don't, but at

same time, I don't like people losing their civil liberties. But I consider him on the side of right because he's on, not because he's on cap side, but he's on the side of right because he's on not because he's on cap side But he's on the side that cap shows for the right reasons. Yeah in Civil War And then when he's with with him in Seagrad Empire he's on I'm gonna I don't think it's the side of right. I'm gonna come out against Hydra I know it's bold stance to take. Yeah, yeah controversial. is. The internet's going to eat you alive. I'm so woe for being anti-hydra, but he's on the side of right in scare quotes because it is the side of

cap. And just that idea of, like you said, that blind loyalty that that need to follow your avatar no matter how orange he might turn no matter how how he might think that Nazis are very fine people indeed. Yeah. So there was a guy in Germany. I was I was in Germany in 2019. No 2018. I was in Germany in 2019. No, 2018. I was in Berlin.

And I was in the museum. It's called the topography of terror. And just outside of it, our tour guide was talking to us about his grandfather who served in the Wairamacht, who was a loyal German. And he was 19, and he's very clear about his grandpa was on the wrong side of things, but his reasoning was, I'm fighting for my country. I'm a patriot, this is what I do, you know?

And that's a hard thing to argue against unless you're gonna dismantle that whole thing, which I'm more than happy to, but it's hard to do against 19 year old when your country's being bombed by the Allies. Yeah. So his grandpa fought for the Nazis. And he talks about it. And he talks about talking to his grandpa later and how his grandpa, you know, everybody said, yeah, Nazis is bad afterward. But grandpa still didn't say I was on the wrong side of things. I was fighting for my country. And it's that, you

know, I'm not with them. I'm with us of that kind of thing. And that's absolutely manipulated. And I said, I said, it is amazing how easy it is for bad people to do bad things when they're standing on the shoulders of good people who think they're doing the right thing. You know, yeah. Yeah, I totally get that as a southerner in North Carolina, growing up with images of the Confederacy and things like that, like part of what I think folks don't understand in these discussions of the Confederacy is that there is a lot of complexity here, not in terms of who was right, who was wrong.

The South was absolutely wrong. The North was happy to benefit from the South's wrongness for a long period of time until they broke free, but all the same, the South was wrong. But when you think about this on the micro level of individuals and you read journals and diary entries from people who think that they're doing this for the right reasons that to them, it folks who are not even addressing it from the aspect of race, but from a matter of like, this is our attempt at making an independent nation like our forefathers did in the revolution, things like that. And whatever real or delusional perceptions of reality they may have been operating

with, it's a weird thing where like they, whatever their motivations, however noble they may have been operating with. It's a weird thing where like they, whatever their motivations, however noble they may have been in their own minds for pulling the trigger of a rifle, they were still doing it in service of a great evil. Yes. And both can be true at the same time. I ain't gonna say anything better after that. Yeah, and I'm not even gonna try.

Okay. So we're gonna cut this one short. I'm gonna we're gonna talk about what we're reading real quick and what not and how to contact us. And then in the next episode, I promise we will get to the Punisher. The I was gonna say the animated series, but it's the opposite of that. It's a live and who would make a cartridge for network wood. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, good part. But we're going to talk about the Netflix series in great depth. So start with you, Ed. What are you reading? Well, like immediately right now, I'm reading a lot of student work. Sorry. And since I teach middle schoolers, it's an exercise in pain, sorrow, and grief. Because, because grades are due Sunday night.

So I'm speaking of Dante's in Furnow. Hi, how you doing? How about you? I am reading a book again. I'm not quite finished with it. It's not showing up on the camera. It's called All of the Marvels by David Wolk. And I think I could be wrong. But Gabe, did you recommend this book at some time? I don't think so. I'm not familiar with that book. Oh, OK. So I must have caught it from someone else then. But it's essentially it is doing all the things that we do. All the different chapters are there very, very fun.

My parents sent it for me for my birthday. But for instance, the first couple chapters are where to start or how to enjoy being confused, the curse of the weird, the junction to everywhere, monsters and rising and advancing, the Vietnam years, the mutant metaphor, thunder and lies, what kings do, the iron patriot acts, and on and on. Like it's nice, good chunky nice good chunky, not paragraphs chapters, dealing with very specific aspects of comic books. Nice. A lot of fun. Very cool.

Gabe, do you get to read anything? I should be reading my student's papers. I am teaching five classes this semester. I am woefully behind in grading. But I do feel so good to hear somebody else say that. Thank you. I'm sorry to kind of talk over you there, but thank you for validating me that way. I'm so that's why I'm here at this. So, but I am reading actually a book called Unstable Masks, which I got for Christmas. But it is Unstable

Masks, and I'm forgetting though what the second part of the title is, but it's basically a analysis of common books through the lens of critical whiteness studies. And so for those who are not aware, critical whiteness studies on the surface sounds like which do when you're hanging out of Starbucks and you just take notes. That is not the case here. Critical whiteness studies is a offshoot of critical race theory looking predominantly at how media constructions center whiteness in a way that alienates folks of color and other marginalized identities

while also dehumanizing whiteness at the same time. Like the idea of what it means to be whitened is sort of, it's meant to go in the way way in which it's impressive to a lot of people. So it's, but it's looking at comic books in particular. And it's great because comic studies is a relatively new field. It's, you can go back to like the 1950s with, uh, Frederick Bortham in the production of the NSM and all his stuff. But like modern comics in the way that we understand now as a field,

they only started like the mid to mid to late 80s to early 90s. So this feels a gap that has long existed in the field. And it's, it's a lot of fun. Cool. Cool. It's very cool. All right. Well, if people want to find you ad, where would they look?

I'm saying, well, okay on social media, so I said, I don't know the Well, if people want to find you Ed, where would they look? They, well, okay on social media, so I was about to say it. I don't know these three about, you know, yeah, no. No, no, no. I just moved, I got people to get away from. If they want to find me, I am E.H. Blalock on Twitter. I am Mr. Blalock on Instagram and on the tiki talk where I don't post

anything. I just follow people like like Gabriel. And yeah, that's where I could be found. Where can you be found, Mr. Harmony? Well, let's see. If the pandemic over lightens up, you can find me in Sacramento on the first

Friday of almost every month, sling and puns with capital punishment. We had to cancel two live shows on account of Delta or Omacron. And so we'll let us further down the alphabet there. Yeah, okay'm going to ask. So I can't laugh as loud as these jokes deserve because my kid is sleeping in the next room. Just good excuse. But you can also find me on the Twitter and the Insta at the Harmony 2Hs in the middle. You can find me there. I lurk mostly on TikTok. I have no content. But speaking of which, Gabe, working people find you.

Millen about in your local Walmart for the most part. I like to remember my roots. So, no, I am on I am on tiktok at dr.umscorec. I'm on Twitter and Instagram at gacruz.ht. And I also have a podcast called Office of Azure Doctor C where me and my buddy do short form content on like pop culture and stuff. So yeah, cool, nice, cool, very cool. Definitely. Well, for a geek history of time, thank you very much

for joining us for this episode. Can't wait to hear you on the next one. Dr. Gabriel Cruz. I'm Damian Harmony. And I'm Ed Blalock. And until next time, keep rolling 20s. you