Author: Tom Panarese

In Country: Marvel Comics’ “The ‘Nam” — Episode 15

After taking a look at The Things They Carried, it’s time to return to The ‘Nam with issue #14, “Fatigue Duty.” We spend our first issue after Ed Marks’s departure getting to know some of the other boys of the 23rd courtesy of Doug Murray and Wayne VanSant. As always, in addition to the summary and review of the issue I’ll be talking about the story’s historical context as well as taking a look at the letters, ‘Nam Notes, and ads.

You can download the episode via iTunes or listen directly at the Two True Freaks website

In Country iTunes feed

In Country Episode 15 direct link

Also, here is a link to The History Place, which is one of the resources I have been using for some of the historical notes in this episode: The History Place

Classic College Memes: Fun Things to do in a Final That Does Not Matter

Final exams at Ridgemont High, circa 1983.

The Internet is full of memes–lists, gifs, videos, and other things that often go viral–and that’s been the case since, well, since the Internet was invented. A couple of weeks ago while cleaning out some old files, I found a few things and decided to spend a few weeks talking about memes that I first encountered in 1995.

This one is about 50 Fun Things to do in a Final That Does Not Matter

My academic record during my freshman year of college was less than stellar. My first semester was a nightmare, as I earned a 2.5 GPA, the highlight of which was a D+ in Calculus II. My second semester was significantly better, as I earned the 3.5 GPA needed to maintain the 3.0 for my academic scholarship.

I had two amusing moments happen during finals that year. One was in the spring when I overslept my Politics in Literature final by 45 minutes. I remember waking up, looking at the clock, and then jumping out of bed and grabbing whatever clothes and writing implements were available, all the while saying, “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.” I ran across campus, was admitted to my exam and was riding such an adrenaline high (I probably smelled horrible too) that I was the first one done. It paid off, though–I got an A- in the class.

The other happened during the fall semester. As I said, I wound up with a D+ in Calculus II. Why was someone who would go on to major in writing taking Calculus II? Well, I had scored a 3 on the AP Calculus exam in my senior year of high school and Loyola had told me that if I took Calculus II I would also get four credits for Calculus I. Not having the wherewithal to see that I didn’t need this and also not having the common sense to drop the class the minute things got tough (especially since I knew it had nothing to do with my major), I toughed it out and flirted with academic disaster through December.

That final exam was the hardest test I would ever take in my life. I knew this going in and did what I could to get help from my roommate, Rich, who was studying chemistry and understood this way more than I did. I then holed myself up in a study lounge. That is, until I ran into him during one of my study breaks and he told me that he ran the numbers and I could get a 0 on the final and pass the class. That was good enough for me and I made sure I got a good night’s sleep.

To this day I don’t know what my grade was on that final exam. That I passed the class was enough and I never took math again. In honor of that final, I give you another popular forward from the fall of 1995. The author is unknown but I wish I had followed his or her advice.

50 Fun Things to do in a Final that Does Not Matter
(i.e. you are going to fail the class completely no matter what you get on the final exam) (more…)

Pop Culture Affidavit Episode 22 — 1994: The Most Important Year of the Nineties

Happy New Year and welcome to the first in a series of posts for this year, “1994: The Most Important Year of the Nineties.” All this year, I’m going to sit down and take a look at what was going on twenty years ago. That means movies, comics, music and all sorts of other stuff all this year! To kick off, it’s an “intro” episode where I talk a little bit about last year and also relate why I think 1994 is such an important year in the decade of the 1990s.

You can listen here:

iTunes: Pop Culture Affidavit

Direct Download

Pop Culture Affidavit podcast page

Classic College Memes: You Know You’re in College When ….

Beatty Hall at Loyola University Maryland (formerly Loyola College in Maryland). I took quite a number of political science classes in this building.

First up: You Know You’re in College When …

So the fall of 1995 was a particularly weird point in my life. It was my first semester in college and I wasn’t used to being on my own (few are when they’re freshmen), I wasn’t used to sharing a bedroom with someone for an entire school year and I hadn’t made a clean break from back home (read: I was still with my girlfriend, who was still in high school). Plus, starting college in 1995 meant that Facebook was simply the book of senior portraits that you received at freshman orientation and most of us got our very first email accounts.

And since email was such a novelty, we’d be excited when what we referred to as “forwards” made their way around our social circles. Most of them were chain letters–forward this to five people and receive good luck–but some of the more memorable ones were in list form. This particular list got forwarded around early and employs a common trope of forwards, which is the “You know you’re _____ if/when …” During my four years of college, I’d encounter “You know you’re a Loyola student when …,” “You know you’re from Long Island when …” and would actually create a “You know you’re from Sayville when …” list (that at one point actually was forwarded back to me), but this particular list was the very first one of these I received.

“You know you’re in college when …” is perfect for the type of person who has spent two or three months in a place that beforehand was only spied in 1980s comedies or admissions office brochures. And while it seems weird to make it seem like “college” is a foreign land that I’ve been sent off to, when you think of the life you lead when you’re away at school and the place you came from, a lot of this makes sense.

I do not know the identity of the original author of this list, just that a friend sent it to me during the fall semester of my freshman year and at one point I decided to copy and paste it into MS Word and save it to a floppy disk. Somehow it made it onto my current hard drive with the rest of my college stuff.

YOU KNOW YOU’RE IN COLLEGE WHEN. . . (more…)

In Country: Marvel Comics’ “The ‘Nam” — Episode 14

After a year in The ‘Nam, I take a break to review and discuss Tim O’Brien’s 1990 novel, The Things They Carried, which is a seminal work in Vietnam War literature.

You can download the episode via iTunes or listen directly at the Two True Freaks website

In Country iTunes feed

In Country Episode 14 direct link

Furthermore, here is a link to the New York Times article I reference at one point: “A Storyteller for the War That Won’t End”

And here is the YouTube video that I referenced in the episode, which is part of a series of interviews with O’Brien …

Connections and Revelations (My Life as a Teen Titan, Part Thirty-Six)

1994 and 1995 were odd years for comics. In hindsight, they were the death throes of what we often refer to as “The Nineties” because it was the middle of the market collapse (which explains why my comics shop has so many old IMage books in the quarter bins), but while I could point to crap like Brigade and Bloodstrike as everything that was wrong with comics in the 1990s, the books I was reading weren’t completely innocent. As I mentioned the last time around, DC decided to beef up flagging titles like New Titans and Deathstroke by giving them new lineups, new attitudes, and even new titles.

The first half of the change in Deathstroke was “The Hunted” but once Slade is captured and no longer on the run, what do we do? Well, we drop “The Hunted” and change the title of the book to Deathstroke, which would be the name of the book from issue #46 until it was cancelled with issue #60.

But a title change wasn’t just it. In the issues that follow, we complete the change of Deathstroke’s statu quo, which goes along with the change in the Titans’ status quo. By the end of Deathstroke Annual #4, our hero will have a new boss, Rose will have a new home, Adeline will have a new psychpathy, and the identities of both The Crimelord and The Ravager–who had been around since issue #0–would be revealed.

Marv Wolfman divides Deathstroke #46-50 into 35 “chapters” that focus on different characters and are indended to finish forever changing our main character. In the first two, Slade is in a government holding cell and is eventually convinced to work for Sarge Steel and the government in the way the Titans are under their employ while the three villains of the story are reestablished. There’s The Crimelord, of course; Adeline Wilson, who is now completely obsessed with destroying her ex-husband; and The Ravager, who survived the confrontation with Rose and Sweet Lili but whom we still don’t actually know, even though we see him unmasked.

He won’t be much of a player for a little while anyway because The Crimelord puts his plans into motion, revealing to our heroes that he has placed nuclear bombs throughout the world and they have twenty-four hours to find and disarm them. If The Syndicate doesn’t get in the way first, that is. (more…)

1993, The Most Nineties Year of the Nineties

I don’t know if it’s because it’s been twenty years or because I’ve been seeing so many books from the Nineties sitting in my local comic store’s back issue bins but I have been in a mood to read some Nineties comics lately. Okay, let me clarify: I have been in the mood to read some Nineties comics lately.

We’re closing out 2013 today and I’d say that this was as weird a year as any when it came to comics and trying to come up with something to post on New Year’s Eve that was a sort of “year in review” type of post, I took a look at my current pull list and realized that I’m definitely not the type of person to be doing a “year in review” for 2013 because I have only read a handful of titles from the Big Two comics publishers and even those aren’t the Big Main from the Big Two. For instance, I have not been reading Batman or its associated titles since the New 52 relaunch. Yes, I have been checking out the Year Zero storyline digitally but for the most part I don’t feel like I connect with this version of Batman so I haven’t been reading him. In fact, I got so tired of DC this year that I dropped Nightwing and Batwoman within a month or two of one another and the only New 52 titles that I’m still holding onto with a tenuous grip are Earth 2, Wonder Woman, and World’s Finest. My Marvel reading is even slimmer with the upcoming reprints of Miracleman and the Ultimate Spider-Man all-ages title being the only books on my pull list (though for the record I have picked up an issue or two of Hawkeye and may grab a few more before deciding if I want to add it to my pull list). I have been reading more independent titles as of late, and while I don’t know what that says about me, I can at least say that they’re entertaining and worth the money (seriously, buy Rachel Rising and Herobear and the Kid. Do it now!), but an expert at “what’s current” in comics I am not.

What this year has made me think about, if you haven’t gleaned yet from the introduction to this piece is, 1993, because it felt so much like that. I started off this year with quite a number of DC books on my pull list and it dwindled down to what I just stated, mainly because I’ve been getting sick of the story-light, gimmick-heavy stuff that’s been going on. Oh a crossover that spins into a billion books … again and look … variant covers and 3-D covers and all sorts of covery coverness! You guys grab and fight over that, I’ll be over here with Scooby-Doo Team-Up. And a quick scan of Mike’s Amazing World in January 1993 and December 1993 shows kind of a similar path. At the beginning of 1993 I was buying all of the Batman, Superman, and X-Men titles. By the end of 1993 I was down to Batman and the Titans.

So … what was the reason for the drop in interest twenty years ago? I’d say money more than likely, but I remember that 1993 was the year that I became more discerning as a comics reader and collector. I had started collecting three years prior and looking at the end of 1990 I was reading the Batman titles, New Titans, and would pick and choose from whatever Superman and Green Lantern were doing. By the end of 1992 I was grabbing the latest HOT Image books and stuff like Venom: Lethal Protector #1. Because I liked Venom? Not really. Because that was what people were buying? Probably.

Oh God, I owned this at one point.

Plus 1993, when it comes to comics, was one of those years that was important because by the end of the year the bloom had definitely come off the rose as far as the comics speculation market was concerned with 1994-1995 being the time of the rather infamous market crash (I may be misremembering things and the market crashed in 1993 but things were still going strong at least at the beginning of the year). I remember that my loyalties, which were already to DC anyway, strengthened as a result of feeling burned by various crossover events and big number one comics, and by the time I started my senior year of high school in September 1994, I was eschewing most gimmicky books and sticking to my guns, even if I still bought crap like R.E.B.E.L.S. ’94 (and as to why I was buying that title, well, some things are better left unexplained).

But aside from my becoming more finicky, what makes 1993 so important? Why not choose 1992 (the birth year of Image, the Death of Superman) or 1996 (Kingdom Come, Marvel vs. DC) as the most Nineties year of the Nineties? Well, here are fifteen reasons based on what I was reading (so even though “Emerald Twilight” started in the Green Lantern books in 1993 I never bought the issues–in fact, I have never actually read the story–and I never got my free copy of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter #1). I’ve placed them in a particular order with the first item being something that is pretty awesome and still holds up well to the last one being best described as something I am embarrassed to actually have paid cash money for. (more…)

In Country: Marvel Comics’ “The ‘Nam” — Episode 13

Ed Marks’ tour in Vietnam ends in this issue as does Michael Golden’s tenure as the book’s penciller. Join me as I take a look at “… And a Wakeup,” the end of the first year of “The ‘Nam” courtesy of Doug Murray, Michael Golden, and Bob Camp. As always, in addition to the summary and review of the issue I’ll be talking about the story’s historical context as well as taking a look at the letters, ‘Nam Notes, and ads.

You can download the episode via iTunes or listen directly at the Two True Freaks website

In Country iTunes feed

In Country Episode 13 direct link

Pop Culture Affidavit Episode 21 — A Child’s Christmas in Wales

This time out, I present to you Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” a literary selection appropriate to the season.

You can listen here:

iTunes: Pop Culture Affidavit

Direct Download

Pop Culture Affidavit podcast page

And for your convenience, I have included the raw audio of Dylan Thomas’s reading: “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”

Merry Christmas!

Violet, Scourge of Christmas

It’s the holidays and that means that at some point before Christmas Day my family and I will sit down and watch A Charlie Brown Christmas. This has been one of my favorite Christmas specials since I was a kid and remains so despite my lack of regular church attendance or adherence to any religious code. I happen to like the simplicity of the message and how Linus’s moment on stage is done in a matter that is straightforward and respectful. Then, Linus and company gather around a Christmas tree that they have rescued with decorations and sing “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”; the show doesn’t end with Lord of the Flies: War on Christmas Edition.

But for all of the nicety found in A Charlie Brown Christmas, there is one thing I cannot stand and that is the character of Violet.

One of the earlier characters in Charles Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts, Violet is the girl in the green dress whose main characteristic was that she was a snob. She had quite a number of appearances prior to 1960 but as characters like Lucy, Sally, and Peppermint Patty began to be seen more in the panels, Violet faded into the background like a first-season sitcom character that is eventually written out of the show. But since A Charlie Brown Christmas aired in 1965 and Violet was still in the early stages of her fade out, she’s still considered part of the gang and has about three lines, including:

“I didn’t send you a Christmas card, Charlie Brown.”

which she says in response to Charlie Brown sarcastically thanking her for a Christmas card that he never received (in fact, he never receives any Christmas cards); and when Charlie Brown brings back his sad little Christmas tree, she joins in with the other kids, saying:

“Boy are you stupid, Charlie Brown”

and

“I told you he’d goof it up. He isn’t the kind you can depend on to do anything right.”

As a kid, I more than likely didn’t pay much attention to those lines, choosing instead to focus on the antics of Snoopy and his mad quest for victory in a decorating contest. But when my wife and I were in our twenties, we found ourselves having a visceral reaction to Violet’s lines. She became, to us, the epitome of the snotty little bitch who contributes absolutely nothing to the entire scenario except nasty comments. (more…)