Ryan Murphy, the creator of Glee and American Horror Story, has a new seven-episode series up on Netflix, so I gave it a look. Hollywood (co-created with Ian Brennan) turned out to be one of the more frustrating productions I’ve seen in a while. I found it so annoying, in fact, that I’m going to complain about it in detail. [Spoilers] abound.
A book recommendation for International Holocaust Remembrance Day…
Australia is an interesting country. We love our country. “I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains.” Canberra normally has one of the best air qualities in the …
Last time, we looked at oddball TV shows that couldn’t make it past 13 episodes, and I promised I had a similar list of shows that were marginally more successful. And here we are.
Somehow, we were all convinced to abandon the idea of Utopia, to give up on the notion that the future would be better than today. The reason Disneyland’s Tomorrowland was allowed to become quaint and kitsch and eventually retro-cool is that it couldn’t be updated, because we’ve had no vision for the future since the mid-1970s. Or at least not for a future that’s nicer than our present.
There’s been this trend of late, blaming this generation or that for all the world’s problems — “Boomers destroyed the economy!””Millennials are killing [everything]!” “Gen Xers all want participation trophies!” — and that’s not what this post is about. What it is about is recognizing and appreciating the influences and factors that contribute to some of the trends and attitudes associated with certain generations, and pointing out why some of those generational groupings may be too broad and/or inaccurate.
From where I sit, as a professional artist, cartoonist, occasional comics journalist, and comics reader of 50+ years, I see four areas in which the comics industry has at various times gone off the rails: Format, Content, Distribution, and Marketing. Each of these areas has been affected by a number of foolish, short-sighted, fear-driven decisions over an extended period of time, the cumulative effect of which has led to the current state of the industry.
