Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 6/16/23

Losses Acceptable and Otherwise Edition

Statement from the Administration Staff on the Passing of Cormac McCarthy

The entire administration team here would like to re-affirm that statements made by the Administrator are his and his alone and do not reflect the rest of his staff or the inhabitants of the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker. His post on social media about the passing of author Cormac McCarthy and the subsequent tongue-lashing he endured should have sent the proper message, but evidently, some people are harder to reach than others. His blog post went up today and further clarifies his position while not walking any previous comments back to do so. We also note the irony of the administrator’s eulogy below, appearing right underneath an article that could, at best, be charitably described as “damning with faint praise.” Very faint, it would seem.

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“Jazzy” Johnny Romita, Sr. (1930 - 2023)

John Romita was my first Spider-Man artist. He passed away this week at the age of 93, leaving behind his son, John Romita, Jr. who followed in his father’s footsteps and became a noteworthy artist for Marvel Comics.

John Romita was handed the unenviable job of replacing Steve Ditko on The Amazing Spider-Man. Ditko, who had defined the look of the character and the feel for the stories and was integral to the book and to Marvel in general, had drawn thirty-eight Spider-Man comics, plus promotional materials, corner box art, fan club posters, you name it. Romita had been working on romance comics—his style was sleek and slick, and he drew handsome men and beautiful women. The opposite of Ditko. This would never work.

John Romita made the decision to not even try. He hit the ground running and immediately began putting his stamp on the comic. Peter got a haircut, a wardrobe change, and within three issues, he was introduced to the love of his life. A long-running gag, wherein Aunt May’s friend had a niece that they were always trying to set up with Peter for a date, finally appeared in the book, and it was Mary Jane Watson. Her reveal was an iconic moment for the book. It would by no means be Romita’s last.

John Romita not only got to bring Mary Jane to life, but he presided over the creation of some of Spider-Man’s greatest foes, including The Kingpin and The Punisher. Romita drew some of the most noteworthy Spider-Man comic book covers—images so inextricably linked to the character that they were used in the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies. It’s no accident that the first successful Marvel Spider-Man movies would be taken straight out of the Romita era of comics. Romita was on hand for the two-part “Death of Gwen Stacy” storyline, and if there’s a more important Spider-Man story out there, I don’t know what it is.

John Romita took Spider-Man into the mainstream, so indelible was his influence, that it became the de facto style of the character until the late 1980s with the arrival of Todd McFarlane as the series penciller. Prior to that, every version of Spider-Man—on TV, in cartoons, in print, on toys or Slurpee cups, you name it—was a Romita or a Romita-esque version of the Wall-Crawler. If you were a Spider-Man fan in the 1970s or most of the 1980s, chances are, you had John Romita artwork somewhere in your room. On a comic book cover, or a bubble gum card, or some cheap plastic tchotchke, or Mego figure box, or on a poster. If you were a Spider-Man fan, you were a fan of “Jazzy” Johnny Romita. I loved Steve Ditko for the mad genius he was. But I grew up on John Romita’s Spider-Man comics. He was my first Spider-Man artist, which meant, his was the first comic book I ever read. It changed everything for me.

Rest in peace, Good Sir, and thank you for every thwip.

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Pupdate

It’s been a bad week for Sonya. She had an episode this week that can only be described as doggy dementia, which is evidently a real thing. It scared me, but not as much as it scared her. She didn’t seem to know me or Janice. She didn’t seem to know where she was.  The fear and confusion in her eyes broke my heart.

She’s finally coming back online again, but slowly, and she seems very tired. I’ve been hovering over her all week, trying to spend time with her while getting stuff done, and not doing a very good job of either thing.

I don’t like what’s coming.

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Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

Note: This report was completed with great haste at the behest of administration for reasons known only to him. We apologize for any errors the report may contain and urge you to take it up with the front office.

Jury Duty (Amazon)

This mockumentary purports to capture the inner workings of jury duty through the eyes of a single everyman. That’s what he’s been told, anyway. The truth is, it’s all a set-up. The other jurors, the trial, the whole thing. So, how does an ordinary guy choose to act under increasingly extra-ordinary circumstances, and how do you come back from being friends with James Marsden, anyway?

This quick and dirty series is half Candid Camera, half Parks and Recreation, and all heart, as we watch our POV guy, Ronald, get thrown curve ball after curve ball, forcing him to interact with his fellow jurors, which includes James Marsden playing a more horrible version of himself, which is always fun. Watching a relatively normal person get caught up in all of their contrived plots and how he navigates them is both funny and a little inspiring. I don’t know if I could have held it together as well as he did. And the case they are supposed to be adjudicating is kind of an Escape Room puzzle unto itself, one that Ronald commits to figuring out.

I’m not sure that you could do this more than once, so it’s cool that it worked as well as it did. It’s Cringe-Humor, but lightly so, mostly because of how Ronald eventually wins over everyone around him. The last episode pulls the curtain back and the post-mortem on the whole thing is great fun to watch. Recommended as a light comedy spritzer or as a thoughtful social experiment.

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The Flash (in theaters)

Barry Allen stumbles into the secret of time travel and decides to use it to go back in time and save his mother from being murdered, which leads to the wrongful imprisonment of Barry’s father, and sends him into a career as a forensic scientist. Things go sideways, and Barry finds himself stranded in an alternate reality with no super speed and relying on the help of Batman, played by Michael Keaton.

I’ve not told you anything you haven’t seen in the trailer, and I’m not going to spoil the movie, per se, but I have to talk about this film and the heroic effort that’s been made to address many of DCEU’s critics while still managing to be grimdark as hell. For those of you who read comics, or watch the Flash TV show, it’s obvious they are doing a version of the “Flashpoint” story, and they have a lot of...let’s call it “Cinematic Elseworlds” material to utilize.

I think this story would have landed harder if I’d not seen it before, in both the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which fills me with complete amusement—for years and years, Marvel fans used to sneer at DC’s “continuity problem” with all its multiple earths and different versions of the same hero. Now they are leaning so heavily into their version of a “multiverse,” and it’s way more messy than DC’s “Multiple Earths” system.  

“Flashpoint” also was done in a recent season of The Flash TV show, which further dilutes the uniqueness of the movie’s storyline. I do think this version delivers the feels, if not exactly the surprise twists. Some of the imagery is not great—mostly the “time bowl” effect, which you expect to look like CGI, but not THAT much like CGI. Now, when the worlds collided, in a Crisis on Infinite Earths kind of way? That was cool, both in visual execution and for the numerous cameos, including a cut so deep it could have been the Mariana Trench.

The Flash is solid, entertaining, and yeah, from the looks of it, the capstone on the Snyderverse as we seem to understand it. Who knows where James Gunn will go from here? It’s worth seeing on the big screen, mostly for the Batman scenes. It always comes back to Batman, doesn’t it?

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”