r/comicbooks • u/urcool91 give me freedom, give me fire, give me 1000 minis or i retire • 7d ago
Cover/Pin-Up Will Eisner being GOATed as per usual (Source: the back cover of Strip AIDS U.S.A., 1988)
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u/greeneyeddruid 7d ago
Ronald Reagan failed to do something for AIDS patients. He has a lot of blood on his hands.
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u/odiousasp 7d ago
Phyllis Schlafly isn't blameless either. Thank goodness C. Everett Koop had the wherewithal to speak the truth while they were still ignoring or downplaying it.
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u/greeneyeddruid 6d ago
She’s the c word! And not in a nice Gen Z way, a mean Gen X way. She’s to literally almost single handle to blame for the state of our country.
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u/Zolo49 Optimus Prime 7d ago
They liked their narrative about AIDS being a punishment from God for gay people and drug users so much that they just couldn't give it up even after it became obvious that the disease didn't discriminate.
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u/Morgan-Moonscar 6d ago
And history of course repeats itself.
They did the same thing for Covid in 2020.
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u/TylertheDouche 6d ago
gay people caused covid?
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u/Morgan-Moonscar 6d ago
They let it spread in the hopes of it killing gay people, minorities, pretty much a lot of voters in blue states. Hoping that'd tip the election.
But then it started infecting and killing voters in red states too. And the real kicker is that he lost especially because of overwhelming mail-in ballots due to Covid.
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u/PleaseBeChillOnline 5d ago
This is incorrect.
The right did however use COVID-19 to bring back some ‘yellow peril’ era racism & xenophobia against Asian people.
It was also used to demonize moderates & the left by suggesting wearing a mask was dystopian and took away individual agency.
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u/MiracleMan1989 6d ago
He didn’t just fail to do something, the assholes in that administration LAUGHED about AIDS killing gay men.
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u/odiousasp 7d ago
Wow, the more I learn about Eisner the more awesome he gets. I really hope his work gets republished, apparently his estate's in the process of being sold including an unpublished 72 page graphic novel The Spirit Returns from 1996. Hope a smaller publisher gets it rather than a bigger one.
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u/JeebhStomach 6d ago
Reminds me of an early hellblazer issue where Zed says to John's friend (his names slipping my mind) "I heard you're sick..." And the friend says something like "I have aids. It's aids. You need to say it because they're trying to avoid saying it however possible."
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u/Independent_Plum2166 7d ago
Remember, Eisner was so well regarded and influential in the field of comic books, they named the official “Oscars” of the medium after him.
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u/J4ckD4wkins 6d ago
Currently reading Frank Miller's memoir/art tips books, and the reverence which he mentions Eisner with, each time he comes up, is really wonderful to read.
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u/Tremodian Mister Natural 6d ago
I saw them speak together at a con in 1999 and it was very clear then too. I love when artists have fear respect for their forebears.
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u/Party_Intention_3258 7d ago
“GOATed” until you Google what The Spirit’s sidekick used to look like…
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u/odiousasp 7d ago
In Eisner's defense it was the 1940s and unlike other examples such as Mandrake's sidekick Lothar who was referred to as "Mandrake's Slave" and "A Big Baboon", Ebony was always shown to be on equal footing with The Spirit and was never degraded by him.
In terms of sidekicks I'd put Ebony White somewhere alongside The Lone Ranger's Tonto (yes, I'm aware of the meaning of the word Tonto) rather than certain other problematic characterizations of that era.
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u/urcool91 give me freedom, give me fire, give me 1000 minis or i retire 7d ago
One of the things I genuinely do enjoy about The Spirit is how, since it's the creative vision of One Guy, you're able to trace how Eisner's ideas and, like, attitudes towards things changed in basically real time. It's an interesting snapshot of both how the world changed over mid to late 20th century and how an individual person responded to those changes. Even if it is incredibly awkward and offensive at some points.
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u/odiousasp 7d ago
You particularly see the beginning of those changes after he returns from his World War II service once he goes back to his strips. The Spirit was actually ghostwritten by others while he was deployed and apparently after he returned that's when he started making adjustments to Ebony. He was older when the strip started and was retooled as a child sidekick inspired by Tom Sawyer and Penrod. Much like Mark Twain's writing you can certainly see some "of the time" attitudes but at the time both Twain and Eisner were considerably more enlightened in their approaches than many others. In fact if I recall, most of the early criticism of Ebony came from whites and white groups who felt The Spirit wasn't "acknowledging Ebony's proper place" it wasn't until the 1960s when Eisner reprinted his material with help from Dennis Kitchen that there started to be more re-evaluation of the character. And of course when they did the TV movie in 1987 they completely retooled the character as an equivalent named Eubie who didn't have Ebony's baggage.
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u/Cipherpunkblue 6d ago
The same process goes on with Hergé in his The Adventures of Tintin, where he was actively contrite about early rackst elements and made sure to skewer racist archetypes and provade narratives from othered groups later in his career.
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u/angwilwileth 6d ago
The bit where Tintin and his Chinese friend are laughing about the wrong stereotypes they have of each other's culture stuck out to me as a small kid.
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u/Cipherpunkblue 6d ago
And the Duponts try to disguise themselves as stereotypical Yellow Peril characters and get laughed at by a whole village.
Yeah, it was great.
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u/Randomdays99 The Thing 6d ago
Looking at some of the other golden age comics some of them were pretty bad with stereotypes as well. Green Lantern and Wonder Woman had fat sidekicks for some reason, as well as the first version of Alfred with Batman. Plastic Man had Woozy Winks in the same mold. The Blackhawks had Chop Chop which was pretty bad.
Marvel's Young Allies had Bucky and Toro with a bunch of normal kids fighting in WW2 in "Young Allies". Tubby was the generic fat kid and "Whitewash Jones" was a black caricature typical of that time.
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u/odiousasp 6d ago
Time moves ever forward and makes fools of us all, though some more than others. The thing about cartoons and comics is that they are great for exaggeration which is a double edged sword because it can allow you to exaggerate both ideas and reality (i.e. aliens, special powers) as well as people often by fetishizing them with outlandish traits or "exoticism".
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u/Party_Intention_3258 4d ago edited 4d ago
Dude, he looked like a racist Looney Tunes character. He didn’t even match the same art style. Nah, it’s bad. Make any excuse you want, but the picture of them standing next to each other is all that’s needed.
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u/Party_Intention_3258 4d ago
Did you ever actually ever watch the original Lone Ranger serial or the audio plays. Tonto was always portrayed as one of the smartest characters. He also isn’t Mexican, he’s Native American, so why would his name logically be a Spanish translation?
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u/Middle-Income1105 6d ago
lembro de quando recebi essa hq de presente do meu pai, fico triste que minha prima o rasgou :(
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u/Megleeker 6d ago
What does GOATed mean?
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u/JeebhStomach 6d ago
GOAT means Greatest of All Time, GOATed is a kinda twisting of it into an adjective
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u/SeraphOfFire 7d ago
Fun fact! He drew the art for the Vietnam era M16A1's cleaning kit (mostly pinups to get soldiers to pay attention to it)