Mallard Fillmore Watch

04/21/2018

The subject of today’s outrage is… a song from 1875 having entered the public domain. I wonder what he thinks about reparations for slavery.

CULTURE CORNER

• Everything I’ve heard about the upcoming relaunch of Mad Magazine, now under the stewardship of longtime Bongo Comics editor Bill Morrison, sounds intriguing.
   
• Cautiously optimistic about Nancy, which is now being drawn by a female webcomics artist instead of some baby boomer. Keeping an ancient strip around long after the death of its creator instead of making way for a new strip is not ideal, but sometimes it can lead to cool stuff like Weird Heathcliff. The blog post announcing the change absurdly treats it like it’s a rebuke of Harvey Weinstein somehow?!?
   
• Got around to seeing Dune and now I finally understand the context for a bunch of internet jokes I’ve seen over the years. I couldn’t get to sleep that night because I couldn’t stop thinking about the wonderful imagery: folding space, those dudes with the big microphone, the blocky boxing, Kyle MacLachlan’s amazing hair. The story on the other hand is ehhh. I think the problem with a lot of sci-fi stuff is that you have to spend a lot of time on exposition explaining the politics and status quo of the world. I suppose one advantage of doing a hundred Star Wars movies is that you can pretty much just jump right into the story: “Look, it’s Star Wars, there’s lightsabers, you know what’s up”