My wife irresponsibly purchased the Spider-Man movie for my son even though it was PG-13. (Way to go, significant other.) But he desperately wanted to see it, so I figured I’d better watch it with him and make sure it wasn’t too frightening or icky or whatever. (It wasn’t — I’m actually not sure why it was PG-13. I guess the violence? Even that didn’t seem too over the top though. Maybe I’m just jaded.)

Anyway, it was pretty good, I thought — William Dafoe isn’t as much fun as a villain as Heath Ledger, but Toby McGuire’s spider-man is so, so much better than the stupid Dark Knight Batman that It more than makes up for it.

But what I wanted to talk about was that — watching the movie reminded me of something I’d often thought of with Spider-Man’s origin story. In both movie and comic, we see Spidey refuse to stop a robber, and then that robber goes on and kills Uncle Ben. And, in both cases, there’s a moment when the cop in pursuit of the robber turns to Spidey after the bad guy has gotten away and cusses him out for not helping. (I think in the comic he asks him why he didn’t trip him.)

So the thing is, that’s completely preposterous. In the comic, the bad guy doesn’t have a visible gun…but we know he has one later on with which to shoot Uncle Ben. So it could be concealed…which is why, if you’re a cop, you don’t expect, or even want, random passers-by to fuck around with fleeing felons. I mean, maybe I’m completely confused, but it seems like, even if (especially if) said random passer-by is wearing a weird red and blue suit, what you’d really want them to do is stay the fuck out of the way. Don’t be a hero, don’t get yourself shot, let the professionals handle the problem, seems like the logical attitude. What happens if he trips the guy and the robber pops up with a gun and shoots him? That’s exactly the sort of thing the police are trying to prevent, right?

The assumption that the man-on-the-street has some sort of moral obligation to attempt to stop a fleeing and possibly armed criminal — I don’t know, it’s a perspective, I guess. Of course, Parker could feel guilty himself, knowing that he’s got super-powers and so on and so forth. But in both comic and movie, it’s not just Parker himself, but the law enforcement officers who think he screwed up — and in reality it’s hard to see why they would.

I know, I know…a plothole in a Stan Lee script! What a surprise! But I think it does speak to the whole super-hero idea, and to the “great power, great responsibility” meme as well. Basically, taking responsibility that isn’t yours is often a stupid idea, and can, not inconceivably, make things a lot worse. Sometimes being responsible involves sitting down and shutting up and figuring out which problems aren’t yours and when it might really be better to leave well enough alone. Lee and Ditko, for narrative and possibly Objectivist reasons, rigged the game against poor Peter. But he really didn’t necessarily do the wrong thing.

I haven’t paid a ton of attention to Kanye West; I’ve heard a couple of productions and been like, eh. So I finally thought, well, maybe I should try to figure out what I think of this more thoroughly.

So I listened to Stronger on YouTube. Jesus Christ what a turkey. The beat is totally whack, it’s got a kind of whiny electro-nineties thing, the lyrics are incredibly stupid (what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger — thanks Kanye. I’ll write that down). And his voice is whiny, his flow is — he sounds like a slightly more ept Kid Rock, really; it’s dumb and thudding.

Love Lockdown at least sounds a little weirder I guess. I’m supposed to be grooving on the minimalism, is what all the critics tell me. But I hate that fucking whiny Akon male R&B shit. And the fact that it’s minimal can’t really change the essential lameness of the lyrics. There is a good beat on the chorus; why not run that through the whole song? It could totally be Beck if the singing weren’t so crappy.

It is totally a white aesthetic. It’s like Devo or something, if Devo really sucked. It’s punk even. No wonder they love him on Sound Opinions; it sounds like it was done in a shed by a completely useless poseur with a trust fund and that sense of entitlement that says, “Hey! I’m a guy with skills! I should get accolades even when I’m not trying, just for being so special!”

Yeah, it really pisses me off. What a pile of crap.

All right, I’m done. No more music blogging for a while, I promise.

Burt Ward (tv’s Robin) said he was offered the lead for The Graduate but those dicks at Batman wouldn’t let him do it.

His claim makes sense, in that he looked like Ben Braddock and was about the right age, whereas Dustin Hoffman did not and was not. In a rare fit of coherence, Renata Adler made the point that it’s a strange idea to cast Dustin Hoffman pushing 30 as a golden boy WASP athlete just out of college. She figured that, as a result, The Graduate was just about impossible to swallow. Yet the one time she made sense, she turned out to be wrong.

From Boy Wonder: My Life in Tights by Burt Ward, Year in the Dark: Journal of a Film Critic by Renata Adler

A couple more drawings:

The scan on that first one is pretty bad, actually; there’s supposed to be textures and stuff in the black, but you can’t see it at all. When my drawings start selling like hotcakes, first thing I’ll do is buy a better scanner, I guess.

Which raises an interesting question…what are hotcakes, exactly, and are they still selling even in this economy?

From Wikipedia:

In 1938, Walter Lippman wrote a column praising liberal arts education as a bulwark against fascism, and said “in the future, men will point to St. John’s College and say that there was the seed-bed of the American renaissance.”

Nothing against St. John’s, of course.

So over the next few weeks the Hooded crew (that’s me, Tom, Miriam, and Bill) is going to do some group theme blogging to kick off the new year. This next week (starting tomorrow) we’re going to blog on the Virtue of Ignorance 2008 — each of us is going to talk about our favorite comics thing we discovered in 2008 that we hadn’t known about previously.

I think the week after that we’re going to write about Manga (I believe that the working title, offered by Mr. Crippen, is “Manga: What the Hell?”) After that we may talk about comics we wish existed …and then we’ll stop or keep going, depending on how the spirit moves us.

So in that vein: are there any topics that folks out there would like to see us have at? Let us know in comments and if something sparks our fancy we’ll pick it up.