I’m housesitting for a week in Seatoun, up on the hill. My workspace holds a commanding view over the eastern side of Wellington harbour, including the channel out to the the Cook Strait and the hills of the Wairarapa. Clouds are eating the whole horizon as I type, so the the view proceeds from perfect white sky down to release a short tumble of bush-clad hillside before striking the shoreline. It is very still.
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Getting lots of writing done. This is a very good thing. Feel like I’m making progress with the Ron the Body writing, in that I’m genuinely expressing the tale at its core in an effective way. I’ll see how much Ron I can get done this week, but it feels like I’ve finally found some momentum on this. Writing long-form works is all about momentum, and it can be damn hard to take hold of that.
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Have nosed through house-host’s shelves and, feeling myself coming down with a cold last night I pulled out and read a Batman comic collection, ‘A Death In The Family’. This is the infamous storyline where Batman readers were invited to call a 900 number and vote for whether Robin would live or die. The vote came out narrowly on ‘die’, and having read the crappy character of this Robin for the first time, I’m not surprised.
As a comics geek I’ve known about this story for two decades but I’ve never known that the whole storyline is set in the Middle East. (Which apparently includes Ethiopia, but there you go.) Batman and Robin go into Lebanon and fight terrorists. And what really astonished me, as in I had to check I wasn’t dreaming, was the bit where Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeinei appears in Ethiopia and offers Batman’s homicidal maniac arch-villain the job of Iranian ambassador to the UN.
So the final chapter has the Joker wearing Saudi-style ‘Arab dress’ and ranting at the UN about how Iran is really like he is and then trying to kill everyone in the General Assembly with a deadly gas. Batman and Superman team up to stop him, while berating the evils of diplomatic immunity, Iran-Contra, the American Embassy hostage situation in Tehran, and the obvious wickedness of Iran.
(Side note: the only good character in the whole story, apart from the core cast, is an Israeli agent.)
It was quite ridiculous. Wikipedia notes: “The story arc was panned by many as implausible, and some have accused Starlin’s depiction of the Middle East as racist…” which at least confirms this really happened. Weird.
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I can find no update on the V situation. Can anyone else uncover a follow-up?
5 thoughts on “Sea Town”
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What’s weird about it?
Oddly fascist world views are what super heroes thrive on. And superman fights for truth, justice and the American way, which seems a perfect fit for this story.
The weirdness is the explicit namechecking of the Ayatollah – not just the referencing current events, but advancing ‘make a homicidal maniac the Iranian ambassador’ as a plausible develipment of current events.
You’re right about the greater context – it was the full-page portrait of Khomeini addressing the Joker that freaked me out. Has that been done since Hitler? I don’t think even Stalin turned up in the comics as a bad guy…
*ignores the political aspects of the post, and focusses entirely on fangirlism*
Jason Todd is a wanker. I much prefer his replacement: Tim, who actually has compassion and a certain amount of restraint.
He also wears long pants, instead of the wee panties. Of course, Dick Grayson has my heart ;p
On technical points, I’d question the description of Iran as Middle Eastern more strenuously than Ethiopia. Sure Ethiopia is on the African continent, but look at *where*, and look at its *history*.
Andrew – sure. Ethiopia has a long history of connect with the Middle East, so it’s not completely bizarre. Just mostly bizarre. In the public consciousness, Ethiopia is Africa, and always will be Africa, thanks to Geldof et al.
Likewise, Iran has been widely considered ‘the middle east’ for decades now, their own claims to the contrary notwithstanding. (Iran’s a longstanding point of fascination for me, so I’m very aware of the vagaries of this point.)
(This is exactly the kind of pedantic exchange of detail that the internet most desires! 🙂