deerstalker

Writer: Dan Jurgens / Artists: Inaki Miranda and Scot Eaton / DC Comics

If you’ve been following BNP’s comic book coverage for a while, you may know that I regularly reviewed DC’s main Batman title. From issue #1 to issue #85 – with the occasional handoff in between— I rode the highs and lows of that series.

Now it’s time to venture into new territories. But I can’t venture too far from home, however, because Batman has my heart, and I won’t give up until he’s happy! (read: never)

I decided to check out Batman Beyond as it’s a story I’ve dabbled with and enjoyed in the past, but not in its current iteration. Little did I know I’d come across one of the most enjoyable and satisfying Batman stories I’ve read in a while.

The issue features an anonymous Batwoman who has stepped in to don the cowl as Terry McGinnis is suffering from a bad case of amnesia and living on the streets. Batwoman is fighting none other than Blight, a former millionaire named Derek Powers who actually murdered Terry’s father after he exposed his schemes. Oh! And he absorbed radioactive energy and walks around in a body that’s quickly deteriorating.

Back in the Batcave, old man Bruce Wayne and Terry’s younger brother Matt are watching on as this anonymous Batwoman fights Blight and speculate on who should be. Neither of their biggest leads picked up the phone, so who knows at this point?

On the other side of town, Terry is living on the streets with only his first name and the company of another woman who’s hit rock bottom. The only problem is that she hit rock bottom by taking part in the same scheme that got his father murdered.

*gasp*

Now, Batman Beyond #39 is not doing anything new here. As a matter of fact, a lot of this issue is a reintroduction of regular tropes like amnesia, secret identities, and the return of long-thought-dead villains. But Dan Jurgens is having fun here. He’s not dealing with the pressures of trying to steer one of DC’s top-shelf titles, which allows him the freedom to have some fun.

9.0 out of 10

Reading Batman? Check out BNP’s other reviews here.

Want to get Black Nerd Problems updates sent directly to you? Sign up here!
Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram!

The post Batman Beyond #39 Review appeared first on Black Nerd Problems.

From Ge’NeL Magazine

With the impending Wonder Woman 1984 film due for release in the new year, it’s time to revisit Diana’s history — that is her BDSM and polyamory lifestyle.

Written by: Kiesha Richardson

In Sparta, 9th century BC, young men were gathered and whipped by priestesses in a ritual called diamastigosis in one of the cult rituals that alleged to have made the men strong. It makes sense for the Amazonian women who fled ancient Greece to have these same traditions. In addition to the physical portrayals of Bondage, Discipline, Dominance and Submission, Sadomasochism, most historians forget to include the one thing that made BDSM so vital then and today still, and especially with regard to Wonder Woman.

In Greece, truth and sex were linked, in the form of pedagogy, by the transmission of a precious knowledge from one body to another; sex served as a medium for initiations into learning.

This is one of the primary reasons Wonder Woman’s main weapon is the golden Lasso of Truth. William Moulton Marston, a Harvard graduate, self-help author, and comic book writer who created the character Wonder Woman as well as the inventor of the polygraph lie detector test — understood the importance of the character he was creating in his particular era of 1941. Wonder Woman, for Marston, was a symbol of everything our society lacked then: free love and equality for women. The Angela Robinson film Professor Marston and the Wonder Women also explores his history in this respect.

Marston was in school during the Suffragette Movement, where women, borrowing from the abolitionist movement, chained themselves to the gates of the White House in protest for the right to vote. In this way, every time Wonder Woman was tied up or chained, this symbolized her need to escape men’s power over her. In the comics, she is often referred to as Mistress and for another to dominate her is a power struggle that she always wins. And to this, Marston believed that:

The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound… Only when the control of self by others is more pleasant than the unbound assertion of self in human relationships can we hope for a stable, peaceful human society… Giving to others, being controlled by them, submitting to other people cannot possibly be enjoyable without a strong erotic element.

In other words, learn to love bondage and you will become powerful. It’s one of the tenets of modern BDSM: a submissive who gives up control willingly holds the power because it’s a choice.

Though, feminists today who have very little knowledge of Wonder Woman from the Golden Age of comics tended to turn their nose up and feel offense over the Wonder Woman Earth One graphic novel series. Grant Morrison and Yanick Paquette wanted to return Wonder Woman to her bondage roots in their 2016 Earth One series.

The Earth One series, unfortunately, was the first time in decades that the Wonder Woman stories actually worked (it still had its problems, but that’s for another time). Why? Because Wonder Woman’s costume and bondage go hand in hand. As mentioned earlier, she uses the Lasso of Truth to bound her foes, which makes them tell the truth—they submit to her. Her bracelets are a defense against bullets but look like wrist shackles. So, when the Comics Code Authority of 1954 decided to ban “horror, excessive bloodshed, gory or gruesome crimes, depravity, lust, sadism, and masochism” and directly addressing Wonder Woman, saying “Illicit sex relations are neither to be hinted at nor portrayed. Violent love scenes, as well as sexual abnormalities, are unacceptable” the stories just didn’t seem to recover. Though, DC tried.

Deviating from Wonder Woman’s bondage past is part of the reason her storylines just haven’t been as good as it was during the Golden Age of comics. If DC can reconcile the feminist icon with her BDSM roots, Wonder Woman could finally reach her full potential. She could be what she was meant to be.

How do you view the themes of Golden Age Wonder Woman?

The post Will Wonder Woman Ever Reconcile Her BDSM Roots? appeared first on Black Girl Nerds.

Anti-robocall rules benefit "consumers who are sick and tired of robocalls" (via Icons8/Unsplash)

As one of his final acts of 2019, President Trump on Monday signed into law major anti-robocall legislation.

The TRACED (Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence) Act aims to curb unwanted interruptions and thwart the scammers behind them.

Despite its swift adoption by Congress and the White House, don’t expect immediate results: It will take at least 12 to 18 months for the ordinance to kick in, at which point it should begin to lessen the overall number of spammy calls.

Nearly More than 58.5 billion robocalls were placed nationwide so far this year—up from 48 billion in 2018, 31 billion in 2017, and 29 billion in 2016, YouMail reported. That’s equal to roughly 164.4 calls per person affected.

Following their passage in the Senate and House this summer, two separate anti-robocall proposals were reconciled as part of a bipartisan, bicameral agreement: the TRACED Act.

The bill requires that carriers adopt technology to help identify legitimate (or not) calls and let consumers opt in or out of blocking—at no extra charge. It also allows the government to step up enforcement actions against unlawful robocalls, prosecute the criminals generating them, and hand out penalties of up to $10,000 per call.

“I am glad that the agency now has a longer statute of limitations during which we can pursue scammers,” Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai said in a statement. “And I welcome the removal of a previously required warning we had to give to unlawful robocallers before imposing tough penalties.”

I thought my twice-monthly “Unknown Number” calls were annoying.

But, as The Washington Post pointed out last month, these disruptions are more than a nuisance: They endanger hospitals, flood phone lines, and scare patients.

In response, Congress included a clause in the TRACED Act that protects patients, doctors, and hospitals from unlawful robocalls.”

“I thank the American people for never letting us forget how fed up they are with scam, spoofed robocalls,” Pai said. “It’s their voices that power our never-ceasing push to fight back against the scourge of robocalls and malicious spoofing.”

More on Geek.com:

• New FCC Rules Target International Robocallers
• FTC, Law Enforcement ‘Call It Quits’ on Robocallers
• FCC Empowers Carriers to ‘Aggressively Block’ Robocallers

Writer: Gene Luen Yang / Artist: Sergio Fernandez Davila / DC Comics

In all this time, why has no one told me that DC has a series that features a black superhero couple leading a team through a series of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey adventures??

In no way is it remotely my fault for not being informed of this, even if it is my job, and the blame rests entirely on the shoulders of all of you for not telling me!

Anyway…

I checked out The Terrifics #23 on a whim. When I first started reviewing comics for BNP a long five years ago, I was reading The New 52: Future’s End every week — still shaking that one off, if I’m being honest. But one takeaway I had from that series was an appreciation for the genius that is Mr. Terrific. So, it was refreshing to see that he’s leading his own team-up series that’s a whole 23 issues in.

When I started the issue, my first thought was “Oh no… Bizarro!” Because reading a comic with Bizarro-speak can be a real test in mental fortitude and could possibly leave you with a feeling that you’ve developed a mild, temporary case of dyslexia.

But Gene Luen Yang knows this. So the conversations ran smoothly and bounced back and forth and even included a couple jokes as to how absurd the whole opposite language thing is. It’s all in good fun.

As far as emotional notes go, this story caught me by surprise. It opens up with Bizarro’s son telling us how he’s ultimately conflicted by his father’s decision to live in a time loop where he constantly tortures The Terrifics. But this is also his only way to spend time with him.

We then get more emotional resonance as Mr. Terrific gets a reminder that not every problem can be solved with logic, alone. Sometimes, you need to just feel things out. That’s when we get hit with some pretty good sci-fi, which is all you hope to get when you introduce complicated plot vehicles like time warps and such.

Overall, this was a good jumping in point for this series, and I’m going to stick with it for a while.

8.5 out of 10

Reading The Terrifics? Check out BNP’s other reviews here.

Want to get Black Nerd Problems updates sent directly to you? Sign up here!
Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram!

The post The Terrifics #23 Review appeared first on Black Nerd Problems.