The Marvel mythology of Captain America (as I remember it from my years of comic reading) goes like this: During World War 2, scientists came up with something called the "Super-Soldier Serum", which could turn a sickly or ordinary man into a hero with super-strength, agility, speed, reflexes, and if not invulnerability, certainly a healthy share of toughness and resistance to sickness. Both the Allies and the Nazis were working on such a program; the Allies were slightly ahead. Steve Rogers, a young man who'd been turned away from military service because he was too scrawny/weak, was given the opportunity to test the Super-Soldier Serum. It worked, and he became Captain America, an icon of American patriotism.
It goes without saying that Steve Rogers was white, blond, and blue-eyed.
In 2003, Robert Morales (writer) and Kyle Baker (artist) put out Truth: Red, White, and Black, a story that adds a prequel to the Captain America mythology. The scientists were anything but infallible; they didn't create a serum and hit a home run out of the park on their first try. Instead, for years leading up to Rogers's successful experience with the Super-Soldier Serum, there were military experiments on black soldiers -- many of which were horrific failures, resulting in gruesome deaths. In the end, only a handful of soldiers survived the experiment, and that handful was quietly pressed into service, forced to carry out suicide missions, treated poorly, faced with relentless racism even from their fellow soldiers. Years later, even Captain America himself doesn't know the story of "the black Captain America" -- but when he discovers it, he goes looking for more information. And he's not going to let a forgetful, ungrateful government stand in his way.
Needless to say, comic fandom threw fits when this story was first announced. Comic fans are sticklers for their version of continuity, unable to tolerate it when something reboots or retcons a series. When one of their heroes turns out not to be a hero, they freak out and insist that he redeem himself. When one of their villains tries to seek redemption, comic fandom tends to resist it. Death, which ought to be the ultimate continuity-breaker (or continuity-definer, even) is treated as a mere inconvenience; living characters should stay living.
And a black Captain America wasn't in any continuity they'd ever dreamt of.
Never mind the likelihood that exactly that sort of experiment would happen; in real life, medical experiments on black people and black soldiers were absolutely fact, especially in the 1940s. Never mind the fact that the cover-up is exactly what would have happened -- even in the 1960s, popular black musicians were forced to put white people on the covers of their albums so they'd sell, because no one wanted black people to be visible. No one wanted black people to be heroes.
Much of the furor surrounding the original series boils down to the fact that in 2003, some people still weren't looking for that.
But Truth: Red, White, And Black is one of the most powerful, moving series I've ever gotten my hands on. It was reprinted as a trade paperback and has apparently just been re-released as a hardcover. You can probably also find it -- all seven issues of it -- in comic shops around the country. And it's well worth the read. This isn't just an adventure story about black men who got to play hero -- this is a well-written, well-researched, focused and driven story about the circumstances which made those men agree to serve in the military (in some cases, they were very much not volunteers), the lengths to which they had to go to survive both in the military in general and as part of the experiment, what the experiment did to them, and what happened to them years later.
It's a story that doesn't back off from the harsh reality of what it was like to be black in America in the 1940s, and it faces the ugly truth that many of the people who are heroes to the black community today are people the rest of the country has never heard of -- partly due to the fact that people who aren't black often go their whole lives completely unaware of the stories that inspire the black community, and partly due to the fact that there's a long-standing tradition of keeping heroes, and the definition thereof, in the hands of the people with the money and the power. And in the 1940s -- well, we all know who that wasn't.
There are historical events in this series I'd never heard of, and one place to read up on that history is Footnote Comics, which goes into detail about blacks in the military both before and during World War 2, human experimentation and informed consent (there's a link to Tuskeegee, which I had heard of), and Red Summer, which was shocking to me both because of the violence involved and because I had never so much as dreamed that such a time had existed. Reading about it in Truth was the first time I'd heard of it -- but there was no doubt in my mind, even for a minute, that it had taken place. The story is respectful, detailed, and well-told. If I had kids, it's one I'd absolutely read to them and use as a jumping-off platform for discussion and independent research.
Reviews of this story run from people like me, who think it's an amazing piece of writing that brings a valuable piece of history into the Marvel Universe, to people who hated it before they even read it, to people who, even while complimenting it, seem incapable of accepting it as part of the Marvel mythology. (In the Marvel universe, Truth is just that. It's canon. Calling it a "What If" story, even while giving it a five-star review, smacks to me of someone who doesn't even realize that phrasing it that way questions whether the events of the series really happened, someone who doesn't realize they're dismissing the story as no more real than "What If Spider-Man Had Eight Arms?" It is impossible to be respectful to black characters in the Marvel universe while still suggesting that it's up for debate whether their contributions really happened -- but that five-star reviewer probably doesn't even realize she did that.
If there's any complaint I'd like to make about the series -- and this is one I'm not alone in making -- it's that Kyle Baker's artwork is exceedingly "cartoony", with all character images exaggerated for effect. Black characters are given enormous lips and jutting chins; white characters end up looking like the short, stumpy villain sidekicks in Disney movies. I'm pathetically grateful that Baker didn't draw any Asian characters, despite this series taking place in World War 2, because I really, really did not want to see Japanese or Japanese-Americans depicted with those awful slanted eyes and front teeth that jut past the bottoms of their chins. I would have loved to see these characters drawn by an artist who was adhering to realism, partly because I think it would have been a better fit for the story, and partly because the horror of some of the incidents is downplayed enormously by the cartoony look of the artwork. I think the series loses a great deal of impact by having artwork that doesn't appear to take it seriously.
The best thing I can say for the art is that, while I'm continually frustrated with comic book artists who rely on their colorists to differentiate between white and black characters (I love Gary Frank, for instance, but if there were no color overlays on his books, you'd never know who was white and who was black -- and black characters with predominantly European features just bug me, in the same way it bugs me to see Asian characters who have teeny squinty eyes, stupendously bright yellow skin, but European facial features and body shapes -- you'd be amazed how many Asian characters in comics clock in at 5'8" and above), certainly that isn't a problem in this series. But I'm not sure that caricatures of black characters are really what I was hoping for.
I really read this series as a prequel to the one I was extremely excited about, The Crew -- a 2003 series written by Christopher Priest starring one of my all-time favorite comics characters, James Rhodes. I'm so glad I read Truth, though. The World War 2 era is one where my knowledge of African-American history really fails, particularly in light of how much I do know about the experiences of a completely different American minority in that era (during WW2, my grandparents were in the Japanese-American internment camps), but every new story about life in the 1940s for any other race is a revelation to me, and one I'm grateful to have learned about, no matter how hard the story might have been to hear.
This has been, by far, the best thing I've read this year. Maybe the best thing I've read in more than a year. I highly recommend it.
Tags: comics, historical, people of color, reading
If there's a theme running through the Chuck Palahniuk books I've read for, it's the search for identity through extreme and really unusual measures -- or sometimes really mundane measures that are exploited for completely different reasons. In this book, Victor Mancini has spent his life trying to interpret and remember the "facts" his insane mother has been telling him any time she gets a chance, and as an adult, he's become a sex addict and someone who tries to give people a moment of glory through saving his life (which, incidentally, nets him a pretty steady income). However, if his mom's the ultimate in unreliable narrators, how can he find his identity through her? And if everything he tells his would-be rescuers is a lie, is that providing anyone with anything?
I wouldn't call it the best of the Palahniuk books I've read, but I definitely don't feel like I've wasted my time with it, and I'll certainly be looking out for more.
Tags: chuck palahniuk, identity search, reading
Monday was February 2 -- the 10th anniversary of the day Grant actually asked me to marry him. (Totally unprompted! With no arguing on my part that engagement was the only way to go! All his idea! Hey, it's been ten years; we can remember this any way we want.) We had raid on Monday, so we switched our celebratory dinner to Tuesday, February 3, and made a reservation at Barking Frog in Woodinville.
Barking Frog is part of a little resort in Woodinville wine country called Willows Lodge. We've never actually stayed there (it always seems a bit silly, since it's 10 minutes down the road), but we've now been to Barking Frog twice -- the last time on our anniversary, where we had a fantastic Oktoberfest tasting menu complete with beer. Someday I plan on writing this up as if it happened in World of Warcraft, because Grant's main (Valinar, a Night Elf who left Teldrassil to study gnomecraft and eventually wound up serving in Alterac Valley for several years -- do I have that right?) and my former main (Ovistine, a dwarf raised in Stormwind who spent her whole childhood trying very hard to be as un-dwarfy as possible in order to fit in, but who eventually found a group of really fun dwarves to hang out with, and has started reclaiming her native culture) would totally have gone for a meal like this -- and WoW even has an in-game festival called "Brewfest" which is pretty much just like Oktoberfest. :)
But! That was not what we did last night. Last night, we had an utterly divine dinner that started with Salty & Sweet Big Eye Tuna (topped with toasted peanuts, wasabi sprouts, and Asian caramel), followed by a Warm Dungeness Crab Timbale (with green apple, butter braised leek, and spiced walnuts), and then I had Seared Ahi (with crispy pot stickers, baby bok choy, and soy-miso butter sauce), and Grant had Sea Bass (which isn't on the online menu, it's newer, but it was served over this amazing lentil thing that had prosciutto and onions).
Every single bite of dinner was outstanding. We actually started out with a tasty homemade bread with butter that had mustard seed in it (yum!), and then the tuna arrived. It was a seared tuna with a spicy crust, and every bit of flavor was interesting and fun. The Dungeness crab timbale was delicious, every bite better than the last -- if I have any complaint at all, it was that the apple slice wasn't quite large enough that I could have a bite of apple with every bite of crab; they went together wonderfully. I also really enjoyed the walnuts, and if I could find those at a local store, I'd definitely buy them, but I may have to make my own -- they were spiced with cinnamon and sugar and perhaps a little ginger, and were delicious.
As for the dinners, mine was just wonderful. The seared ahi was great, but it was even better dipped into the soy-miso butter sauce. Unfortunately, while I love miso, I have a slight sensitivity to it, which meant Grant finished off my tuna while I ate a good bit of his lentils. Oh my! I'm going to have to figure out how to do that with lentils, because that was great. Meanwhile, Grant's sea bass was great as well. If anything was less than stellar, it was perhaps my pot stickers, which were crispy-fried instead of pot-...stuck. Whatever it is they normally do to pot stickers, I think that would have gone over better than the crispy-fried. Still, with so much on our plates, I didn't feel like I was missing anything!
We came home and had cake, which may not have been our best choice ever; as people who have stopped eating sugar for the most part, we really can't have cake without it having serious consequences. However, I feel pretty good this morning (and hopefully Grant will feel better this afternoon), and although I sure don't feel like eating anytime soon, I'm really, really glad we went out there again; we had a great time. :)
Tags: out to eat, tasty
Well, I was expecting this sort of review to go up eventually, so here's the first negative customer service experience I've had in quite a while.
So here's the deal. I've been playing World of Warcraft for nearly five years now. I raid two to three nights a week; my 25-man raid has now taken out Sartharion+1, Malygos, and Naxx. We're still working on Sarth+2, but suffice it to say, I am a pretty darn serious player whose main is covered in 25-man epics.
I recently decided to dual-box, because I want two more characters at 80, and oh, boy, I don't want to have to play through 60 the slow way. If you link a new account to an old account, you get triple XP for both characters when they're partied. Dual-boxing is not at all uncommon; some people have been known to go up to 20- or 25-boxing.
Blizzard offers an online upgrade option; it costs $10 more than buying the games at a store or online. I was actually all set to pay the $10 extra to not have to leave the house or have a box around to store, but the site failed me, and it was out to a store.
I suggested Target; Grant suggested EBX, because the Town Center is marginally closer. I squirmed a little bit -- a girl in a gaming store is always a target for male employees making rude comments -- but said okay, and while he went to a store on ground level to look at something, I went upstairs to EBX.
A quick look around the store, and I spotted the PC games. A heavyset man with a goatee was sitting directly in front of them, eating a pizza; I don't know whether he was an employee or not. However, I was able to squeeze behind him to pick up a copy of the WoW Battle Chest. I took it to the register, but suddenly realized that the box was open -- which means that the CD-key needed to activate the account was at risk, and so I went back to the rack to pick up a copy that wasn't open. I mentioned this to the guy eating pizza, and he said, "Oh, they're all open. It's a trick question."
"What... why are they all open?" I asked.
A middle-aged male employee with brown hair smirked at me and said, "So you won't just put it in your little paisley purse and walk out with it."
Wait, what? No, seriously--what? I come into the store to make a purchase, I know what I want, I pick it up, I have questions about whether the copy I've got is safe or not--and I'm told the reason it's open is so I won't shoplift it?
Also, little paisley purse? What? For the record, the purse in question is paisley, and it is a purse, but it isn't "little"; that was one heck of a demeaning, belittling comment that a man would not have gotten, not just because he wouldn't have been carrying a purse but because it would never have occurred to the employee to make such a demeaning comment to a male customer. It's possible he might have told my husband, "So you won't put it under your jacket and walk out with it," but I doubt it; he would probably have taken my husband's question seriously and said, "We've had trouble with shoplifters, so we keep the CD-keys in the back where no one can steal them." And if he'd said that to me, I wouldn't have had alarm bells go off in my head--but it's not in my nature to trust someone who's smirking at me and making demeaning comments. Go figure. I'm just that crazy.
I was obviously, visibly flabbergasted by the statement--both parts of the statement--and said, "That's a little bit offensive; why would I want to do that?" The brown-haired employee stammered that he didn't think I, personally, would shoplift, and I then asked, "So how do I know the CD-key hasn't been used already?"
"We keep them all in the back," said the brown-haired employee. I shrugged and got back in line, but I was definitely not happy about it.
For the next few minutes, the brown-haired employee looked around the store to find copies of the game, and failed. He asked if he could ring up the game for me while someone else looked for the CDs, and I said I'd prefer to make sure they actually had a copy before paying for it. He responded that he was sure they had copies, and had to ask another employee for help finding them. At this point, he went back over to the heavyset man in the corner, and both of them proceeded to quietly laugh at me for being "offended" by the notion that someone might shoplift. They were clearly misunderstanding two things: one, I wasn't offended by the notion that "someone" might shoplift, I was offended by the fact that he'd specifically said that I would shoplift if the CD-keys weren't protected. Two, I was offended by his rude, dismissive comment about me and my "little paisley purse" -- believe it or not, women play video games no matter what their purses look like, and making dismissive comments about me and the feminine things about me is rude, sexist, insulting behavior.
It occurred to me at this point that having the CD-keys in the open where any employee making $8 an hour could get at them might be just as unsafe as having them sitting out on a shelf where a 14-year-old who couldn't afford the game could shoplift them; employees at gaming stores in the Redmond area have been known to keep copies of customers' credit cards and use them for credit card fraud. Given the incredibly unprofessional treatment I'd been receiving at this store, there was no way I was going to trust them with my credit card information. I said, "Sorry, guys, never mind," and walked away.
The heavyset man with the pizza called after me, "Anywhere else you go, it's going to be the same, guys."
Actually, it turns out he was wrong. We went to Target, where I found an unopened copy of the WoW Battle Chest for the same MSRP as at EBX; I went to a register, handed over the game, my husband paid for it, and the employee asked if we wanted a bag--when we said no, she handed it to me, recognizing without having to be told that if I'd put it on the belt, it was probably for me, and not simply assuming that it was for my husband because gamers are traditionally assumed to be male.
If you ever wonder why storefront retail is doing less and less business, and why specialized shops are doing worse and worse, employees like the ones at EBX at Redmond Town Center are precisely why. One-on-one sales and employee knowledge may be valuable, but if the employees are rude and exhibit blatant sexist behavior, they're certainly not going to get my money, and I'm going to encourage my friends--half of my gaming friends, by the way, are female--to shop elsewhere. A big-box company like Target may not have the selection of EBX, but if their employees are less likely to make rude, sexist comments, I'm definitely going to look there first. And Amazon.com has a far better selection--and has never once asked me if I'm buying WoW to play with my husband, or accused me of wanting to put valuables in my "little paisley purse". (Amazon.com, if asked, will correctly identify my purse as Vera Bradley and offers me more Vera Bradley products, but it certainly won't bring up my handbag if I don't bring it up first.)
In summary: EBX at Redmond Town Center? Made of epic fail. Avoid.