The Knight, when not drawn by Kelley Jones, is just a medium-sized person. Is that true of Bane as well?!
When I first glanced through my issues of The Crusades, I saw this cover and thought, "The knight's a lesbian!" But now I see that my ability to read visual art must be hampered by my desire to see two women kissing and my brain decided Venus's hair was the knight's hair. But just now I thought, "Why wouldn't the knight have long hair and be male, like all males before Reagan took office?" But, no, that's Venus's hair. I wrote that more to myself than all the Status-Quo people who were like, "Yeah, no duh that's Venus's hair. My eyes are actually attached to my brain. Also, all males didn't have long hair before Reagan, you dumb hippie freak who grew up in California watching Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell and Hair. Maybe watch some Dragnet sometime to know what real fucking short-haired men thought of you long-haired faggy acid freaks!"
Whoops! Now everybody knows how much I despise the Status Quo! Well, it's not like I was ever trying to hide it and anyways have exposed myself plenty of times before this. Yes, I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Yes, I watched the Pride Parade every year on KOFY TV-20. Sure, I read Armistead Maupin's Tales of The City. I was introduced to Dungeons and Dragons in 5th grade through the Gifted and Talented Program. I listened to XTC's "Dear God" without ever thinking there was anything controversial about it. My 6th grade teacher had records in the back of the room to play during rainy days and one of them was AC/DC's If You Want Blood. KTVU Channel 2 ran segments during commercial breaks where they showed kids going about their day that ended with the kid saying, "I'm proud to be a Japanese-American!" or "I'm proud to be a Black American!" or even "I'm proud to be an Italian-American!" For a long time, I attributed that sense of freedom and diversity and openness to growing up in the '70s. But when I met the Non-Certified Spouse who is exactly my age but from Nebraska, I learned that, no, maybe a lot of that sense of an unlimited world where everybody could live as they wanted was based on the location in which I was raised. To a lot of Status Quo assholes, they might start thinking that I grew up surrounded by liberal propaganda and that my brain was ruined by it. But the actual fact of the matter is that the Status Quo feeds you the propaganda. Those who think the Status Quo is reality are the ones with the brain rot who have been subjected to mental barricades and made-up rules, living in a labyrinth of pure societal bullshit. I was not taught to believe anything, really: areligious, amoral, a latch key kid who was left to experience and interpret life without judgment or a list of terrifying spiritual punishments made up to limit that life. And even in this open environment, kids picked up hurtful phrases and awful stereotypes. But inevitably, somebody would explain to you how you were being a stupid dick (maybe in nicer terms; sometimes, though, being adults, they just yelled at you not to say whatever you just said and you were left to figure out why (obviously not as helpful but at least they still made you think and take more care next time)) and, hopefully, you'd grow. Sure, bigoted assholes are everywhere. Maybe I should be less thankful about the area or the time I grew up and be more thankful about the people who helped raise me, my grandparents and my mother and my nearby Aunt and Uncle whose house was basically a second home and even the parents of some of my friends, especially their dads who, along with my grandfather and uncle, were more alternate father figures in my dadless world. Because I certainly had friends then who have become Right Wing news junkies. But maybe that's part of the point. They were more than free to choose that themselves. I know for a fact they didn't have anybody raising them to be that way but they wound up there just as I wound up in an opposite place. They just wandered into the weeds, either through fear or brainwashing or bad relationships or nearly being blown up in Iraq. Who knows why people who can't stop thinking that other people's contentment and happiness somehow takes away from their own? It's fucking mind boggling!
Whoops! Now everybody knows how much I despise the Status Quo! Well, it's not like I was ever trying to hide it and anyways have exposed myself plenty of times before this. Yes, I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Yes, I watched the Pride Parade every year on KOFY TV-20. Sure, I read Armistead Maupin's Tales of The City. I was introduced to Dungeons and Dragons in 5th grade through the Gifted and Talented Program. I listened to XTC's "Dear God" without ever thinking there was anything controversial about it. My 6th grade teacher had records in the back of the room to play during rainy days and one of them was AC/DC's If You Want Blood. KTVU Channel 2 ran segments during commercial breaks where they showed kids going about their day that ended with the kid saying, "I'm proud to be a Japanese-American!" or "I'm proud to be a Black American!" or even "I'm proud to be an Italian-American!" For a long time, I attributed that sense of freedom and diversity and openness to growing up in the '70s. But when I met the Non-Certified Spouse who is exactly my age but from Nebraska, I learned that, no, maybe a lot of that sense of an unlimited world where everybody could live as they wanted was based on the location in which I was raised. To a lot of Status Quo assholes, they might start thinking that I grew up surrounded by liberal propaganda and that my brain was ruined by it. But the actual fact of the matter is that the Status Quo feeds you the propaganda. Those who think the Status Quo is reality are the ones with the brain rot who have been subjected to mental barricades and made-up rules, living in a labyrinth of pure societal bullshit. I was not taught to believe anything, really: areligious, amoral, a latch key kid who was left to experience and interpret life without judgment or a list of terrifying spiritual punishments made up to limit that life. And even in this open environment, kids picked up hurtful phrases and awful stereotypes. But inevitably, somebody would explain to you how you were being a stupid dick (maybe in nicer terms; sometimes, though, being adults, they just yelled at you not to say whatever you just said and you were left to figure out why (obviously not as helpful but at least they still made you think and take more care next time)) and, hopefully, you'd grow. Sure, bigoted assholes are everywhere. Maybe I should be less thankful about the area or the time I grew up and be more thankful about the people who helped raise me, my grandparents and my mother and my nearby Aunt and Uncle whose house was basically a second home and even the parents of some of my friends, especially their dads who, along with my grandfather and uncle, were more alternate father figures in my dadless world. Because I certainly had friends then who have become Right Wing news junkies. But maybe that's part of the point. They were more than free to choose that themselves. I know for a fact they didn't have anybody raising them to be that way but they wound up there just as I wound up in an opposite place. They just wandered into the weeds, either through fear or brainwashing or bad relationships or nearly being blown up in Iraq. Who knows why people who can't stop thinking that other people's contentment and happiness somehow takes away from their own? It's fucking mind boggling!
I never thought it wasn't crazy Mrs. Singer had this in her classroom. But it was pretty fucking cool.
And with all that, I just remembered there's a lyric to discuss, and, well, I think I've already done the work so we'll just move on after I post it.
Mrs. Descartes makes a good point!
One thing I'll add as succinctly as I can about this lyric: using your mind well, I'd surmise, isn't entirely up to you. You know what? Forget succinctly. Using your mind well suggests that how we think is entirely up to us and not predicated on outside factors. On one side, people understand that our minds are useful only so far as the things we've learned by standing on the shoulders of those who came before us, who made mistakes that we'll never have to make because the lessons were passed on (this, changing the subject completely in this aside, probably accounts for things like vaccine deniers and Flat Earth thinking (not that literally those that think the Earth is flat but those that think everything learned previously must be re-learned and re-proved and re-experienced by yourself, the individual, and that your experiences and interpretations of reality become reality itself, sealing yourself in your own Matrix-style delusion when you've absolutely convinced yourself you've freed yourself from one)). And freeing ourselves from having to commit those mistakes to learn something, our minds begin on a new level to make new mistakes and raise the overall knowledge and intelligence for the next generation. In this context, I think about Ayn Rand's short novel, Anthem. It's the only Rand I've ever read because it's short and because Rush wrote a song about it and I wanted to see why fucking Rush spent some time bamboozled by the whole Randian myth of selfishness. The protagonist has a good mind that readers believe he uses well to see through a system that hurts everybody and keeps everybody from being who they could be. But it's presented as "a system that cares about community hates the individual and thus community is bad," thus exposing Rand's bias almost immediately. It's a bias that continues to live by people who can't see that community's are made of and by people so a healthy community helps the individual. But if you've got Flat Earth brain, you believe everything you've ever accomplished was all by yourself and not predicated on communal safety nets and shared infrastructure and the compassion of neighbors, friends, and family. So this protagonist, the only one who recognizes how harmful community is, goes out on his own (with a woman but she's not allowed to be an individual, a point proven by the end where she introduces him to the pronoun "I" and yet she isn't allowed to choose her own name; he does that). He learns so much all on his own! He lives by the power and strength of his own mind and his own hands! He proves that the individual is worth more than community! Ha ha, no, no. I'm lying. He actually finds an old house with loads of modern technologies that he winds up living in. In the house is a massive library with loads of previous knowledge of a "forbidden" previous society where he learns loads, especially that thing about learning the pronoun "I" (that I guess was outlawed because Ayn Randians hate pronouns?). In other words, he goes off on his own and becomes the greatest man who ever lived by standing on the shoulders of the community knowledge and technology that came before him and then declares, "I did it all myself!" Fuck you, Ayn Rand. Just fuck off.
By the way, I now try to link all of my URLs through the Wayback Machine at Internet Archive because I don't trust anybody but them to not eventually kill a link. I've probably got so many dead links across my 4000+ entries.
"Goddamn, Grunion Guy. Or Tess. Or The Red King. Or The Red Lizard King. Or whatever the fuck your name is. Are you ever going to read the comic?!" That wasn't me simulating what a reader might be thinking. That was a transcription of a thought my brain just sent to my, um, other brain? How do thoughts work when you think them in your head? One part of your brain thinks it and another part of your brain interprets it? And I guess if the part of the brain that connects those two has some janky wiring, that's schizophrenia and you think some other person is projecting those thoughts into your head? What the fuck am I doing? I'm still not fucking reading the comic book! I have still have actual life shit to do today, brain! Get off my nuts!
Should I talk about the picture over the lyric? What is that? Venus watching her mother get her face melted off and her eyes steamed out of her head? Is that why her eyes look like Sandman's The Corinthian's eyes?
Venus has arrived at the part of the story where he begins having sex dreams about the gay knight.
By the way, I now try to link all of my URLs through the Wayback Machine at Internet Archive because I don't trust anybody but them to not eventually kill a link. I've probably got so many dead links across my 4000+ entries.
"Goddamn, Grunion Guy. Or Tess. Or The Red King. Or The Red Lizard King. Or whatever the fuck your name is. Are you ever going to read the comic?!" That wasn't me simulating what a reader might be thinking. That was a transcription of a thought my brain just sent to my, um, other brain? How do thoughts work when you think them in your head? One part of your brain thinks it and another part of your brain interprets it? And I guess if the part of the brain that connects those two has some janky wiring, that's schizophrenia and you think some other person is projecting those thoughts into your head? What the fuck am I doing? I'm still not fucking reading the comic book! I have still have actual life shit to do today, brain! Get off my nuts!
Should I talk about the picture over the lyric? What is that? Venus watching her mother get her face melted off and her eyes steamed out of her head? Is that why her eyes look like Sandman's The Corinthian's eyes?
Venus has arrived at the part of the story where he begins having sex dreams about the gay knight.
"Please, Venus, I have made a fat sausage for you. And hash browns which is what I call my butthole."
Venus wakes up on the couch with her mother declaring she needs to get up and prettify herself because Detective Petronas is coming over for breakfast. Addas knows Venus isn't interested in him yet he's allowing Venus's mother to facilitate his sexual harassment of her. She has rejected his advances multiple times across the series and yet he won't give up because he sees Venus's mother's interest in him as consent to keep trying with Venus. Mostly she's been cold to him because she came to San Francisco to escape her Greek Australian world. But Addas seems to have followed her to America (maybe she followed him? No, that doesn't seem possible), disrespecting her choice to have separated herself from her previous life. And now, just as she's broken up with her asshole boyfriend to begin pursuing a 900 year old medieval knight vigilante she can never possibly have a life with (read: a gay man), her old life has crashed down upon her.
Ah, the Butt-Boob Showcase! How I have missed thee!
Addas drops by to decline breakfast because the Hate Crime Knight murdered three drag queens in an alley the night before. Venus, sitting in her still gooey from her dream about the knight underwear, doesn't see it as a bad thing that Addas is interested. I guess losing her regular fuck sections with Anton, being horny for the rampaging knight, and then watching two twins fuck each other on stage has her thinking, "Where's another fat dick I can sit on?" And look at that! Addas's fat dick is readily available! Too bad her mother will probably be there to help guide it in.
No wait. Venus is just using Addas for his fingerprinting technology. How stupid and careless of me to think the sex object wants sex! She's too busy investigating the sex object with whom the sex object wants to have sex. If Venus can just make sure he's not a 900 year old knight with some really fucked up medieval venereal diseases, she can casually remove his chain mail to give him a sponge bath and accidentally spill the water all over her clothes so she'll need to get out of them so she doesn't catch a cough in the cold sewers and then she'll accidentally fall on his erect and throbbing Zweihänder!
Meanwhile Anton Marx is having trouble in Los Angeles getting his radio show turned into a television show. Ha ha! Who cares? Get fucked!
Venus finds a badge while visiting the knight (who's back on the floor and unable to walk) and gets the badge number from one of Addas's coworkers. Turns out it's the badge of a cop named Bud Stafford who was killed when a burning Chinatown warehouse collapsed on him. Has she discovered the identity of the knight?! Is that why he won't take off the helmet? Because his face is burned beyond human recognition? She doesn't ask the cop if Bud was into super old and boring books of quotations though. That would have been my follow-up question after "Was Bud gay?" If I was Venus, I mean!
I don't remember if the stable boy ever mentioned the name of the cop whose blind horse lived in the police stables but maybe it was Bud? Hopefully, because I want the knight to be 900 years old, the knight just found the badge in the wreckage after the building collapsed and parts of it wound up in his underground city/closet.
No wait. Venus is just using Addas for his fingerprinting technology. How stupid and careless of me to think the sex object wants sex! She's too busy investigating the sex object with whom the sex object wants to have sex. If Venus can just make sure he's not a 900 year old knight with some really fucked up medieval venereal diseases, she can casually remove his chain mail to give him a sponge bath and accidentally spill the water all over her clothes so she'll need to get out of them so she doesn't catch a cough in the cold sewers and then she'll accidentally fall on his erect and throbbing Zweihänder!
Meanwhile Anton Marx is having trouble in Los Angeles getting his radio show turned into a television show. Ha ha! Who cares? Get fucked!
Venus finds a badge while visiting the knight (who's back on the floor and unable to walk) and gets the badge number from one of Addas's coworkers. Turns out it's the badge of a cop named Bud Stafford who was killed when a burning Chinatown warehouse collapsed on him. Has she discovered the identity of the knight?! Is that why he won't take off the helmet? Because his face is burned beyond human recognition? She doesn't ask the cop if Bud was into super old and boring books of quotations though. That would have been my follow-up question after "Was Bud gay?" If I was Venus, I mean!
I don't remember if the stable boy ever mentioned the name of the cop whose blind horse lived in the police stables but maybe it was Bud? Hopefully, because I want the knight to be 900 years old, the knight just found the badge in the wreckage after the building collapsed and parts of it wound up in his underground city/closet.
Meanwhile, it seems the Hate Crime Knight has taken up gay Internet dating sites to find more victims.
Can the Hate Crime Knight be more obvious? The Ash Wednesday killer going by the name Lent? Come on, man! Lent meets the man outside the Universal Church of Light and Harmony, kills him, and then sets the whole thing on fire. Meanwhile Venus meets with Father Trinidad at the Universal Church of Light and Love to let him know the knight is dying. She finally realized he must have been working with the knight and she's correct. I thought the next scene would be her and Father Trinidad fleeing from a fire but as I noted explicitly, the two churches have different names. But maybe next issue?
The Crusades #15 Rating: B-. This very much felt like a middle episode of a five issue arc. A few steps were taken toward the climax but mostly it was a lot of repeated actions: visiting the knight, Marx pursuing his career, the Hate Crime Knight killing somebody else, Sara still babysitting Cela, the knight vomiting out ancient quote after ancient quote, Venus's mother trying to get her laid. Just a whole lot of the same that finally ends up with Venus and Father Trinidad finally getting back together, the only two people who seem to have had close contact with the knight. So while this issue meandered and repeated plot points to make sure the reader knows what's what, next issue seems to be building to some exciting revelations. Although let's be clear about one thing: this issue had a load of panels with Venus in her pink panties and I, a person who just typed the word "panties" and liked it, fanatically approve! A+ on that scale!
The Crusades #15 Rating: B-. This very much felt like a middle episode of a five issue arc. A few steps were taken toward the climax but mostly it was a lot of repeated actions: visiting the knight, Marx pursuing his career, the Hate Crime Knight killing somebody else, Sara still babysitting Cela, the knight vomiting out ancient quote after ancient quote, Venus's mother trying to get her laid. Just a whole lot of the same that finally ends up with Venus and Father Trinidad finally getting back together, the only two people who seem to have had close contact with the knight. So while this issue meandered and repeated plot points to make sure the reader knows what's what, next issue seems to be building to some exciting revelations. Although let's be clear about one thing: this issue had a load of panels with Venus in her pink panties and I, a person who just typed the word "panties" and liked it, fanatically approve! A+ on that scale!
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