Apparently in
a recent X-Men comic, Iceman – a character who has been around since the 1960s –
was revealed
to be gay. My first reaction was, ‘That’s silly - Iceman isn’t gay’. But
why did I think that?
Iceman, a.k.a.
Bobby Drake, has been in several
heterosexual relationships over the years. Truthfully the thought of him
being gay has never crossed my mind. That may have been part of the point of
the reveal, which I will get back to later. Hence the news of Iceman being gay
struck me in a similar way that any sudden revelation that seemingly goes
against a character’s long-established traits would do – as a ‘shock’ whose
primary purpose was to gain attention, if not sales.
Some
commentators, like the writer who made the reveal (Brian Michael Bendis), have suggested
that this was not entirely out of the blue. One issue in particular that
has been used to support the case that there were previous hints about Bobby’s
sexuality is Uncanny
X-Men #319. In that issue, Iceman and Rogue travel to the house of Bobby’s
parents, and his dad makes some bigoted comments. I read this as nothing more
than Bobby’s dad disliking that his son was a mutant, but others have
apparently read it as more than that, with Rogue acting as Iceman’s ‘beard’ by accompanying
him back to meet his parents. Though as is often the case with the allegorical
nature of the X-Men, and their being despised for being different, the story
could act as an allegory for a son dealing with his dad’s disapproval of his sexuality,
even if that was not what the story was explicitly about.
Further,
returning to my point from before, perhaps part of the reason why Iceman was revealed
to be gay is because he has had girlfriends, and some readers would not have
suspected it, hence forcing them to confront their assumptions. Still fifty
years of continuity is a lot to overturn. I would have found the revelation
more believable with a more recent character, and one that writers had not so
clearly written as ‘straight’ in the past. In the end though, most long-time comic
characters have gone through some major tweaks, and if the character is strong enough
it generally does not make too much difference to how they are written. But if
any long-time X-Man was revealed to be gay I would have put my money on the
Beast.
Halfway
through Saturday night I thought I would be writing this week about how Port
Adelaide and Fremantle appeared to have closed the gap between themselves and
the top two AFL teams according to these rankings, Hawthorn and Sydney. But
then the Hawks and Swans had great second halves, and therefore the significant
gaps between the teams remain. Port and Freo both look like they have a good
chance to reach the top four though, and from there they would be as few wins
away from the flag as any team.
I tweeted on Sunday morning that I was
prepared to call the eight teams that would make this year’s AFL finals –
in alphabetical order: Adel, Ess, Frem, Haw, NM, PA, Syd, and WC. These are, of
course, the top eight teams in the rankings, and by a fair gap. Despite losses
on the weekend for the Crows and Bombers I still stand by that call for now.
Actually the team that I think may be the biggest chance to upset it is GWS,
who has been clearly the big improvers for 2015. While the Giants have played mostly
lower-ranked teams to date, they have beat those teams by considerable margins,
and they finished reasonably close to the highly-ranked Swans when they played
them.
To mark the
release of the new Avengers movie (review coming soon) Marvel this week released
an ‘Avengers Magazine’. In the back of
the magazine is another list of every character who has been an Avenger,
including when they joined the team and when they first appeared.
I have
lamented before about how
so many characters are Avengers now. I had the idea that I could use the
magazine to quantify the rate at which the Avengers’ membership has expanded
over time.
The graph
below shows how many members the Avengers had in total after each year of
publication. I have used the information in the Avengers Magazine even if I am
not sure this information was totally correct (e.g. I thought Sharon Carter was
a member of the Secret Avengers). I have also excluded all honorary members,
such as Deathcry, Mar-Vell, and the future Guardians of the Galaxy.
Unsurprisingly
the fastest rate of expansion in membership has been in the ‘New Avengers era’,
although membership only started to really take off a few years after that
series debuted. In particular, according to the magazine, there were sixteen
new members in 2013. That was the year that Jonathan Hickman’s ‘Avengers’
greatly expanded the membership, and the ‘Uncanny Avengers’ team was
introduced. The magazine also counts the characters in the ‘Avengers A.I.’
title, which debuted that year, as members. No other year has more than eight
new members.
The other
strong rate of expansion occurred during the late ‘80s-early ‘90s (which was
the period that I started reading the Avengers titles). The Avengers had two
teams during this period – East Coast and West Coast – which boosted the number
of members, although obviously not at as high a rate as recent years.
Since I had the first appearance information to
hand as well I was interested to see from which periods of comics the Avengers
have drawn the most members from – see the graph below. I have counted
characters from the 1940s such as Captain America and the Sub-Mariner based on
when they first appeared in modern Marvel Comics.
Almost
two-fifths of the Avengers members debuted in the first decade of the modern Marvel
Comics, which began in 1961. About another thirty per cent come from the decade
after that. This may not be all that surprising to those who think that many of
Marvel’s best and most popular characters were introduced in the early Marvel
books. However, the year in which the most number of Avengers made their first
appearance was 2013, with Hickman’s ‘Avengers’ and the ‘Avengers A.I’ series each
introducing several new characters.
By the way, here is the distribution across
Avengers members of the number of years between when they first appeared in
comics, and when they joined an Avengers team.
The
most common gap is zero years, reflecting that several new characters over the
years have been created specifically for the purpose of joining the team,
though some may be surprised to realise that Captain America (based on his
first modern appearance), Iron Man, and the Wasp are all included in this
column. The average gap is fifteen years, and the median gap is eight years.
The longest gap actually belongs to Flash Thompson, who first appeared as a
high school bully in the Spider-Man strip in 1962, and joined the Avengers when
bonded to the Venom symbiote in 2012.
Hawthorn
re-takes the top spot on the rankings from Sydney this week. The Hawks had a
big win over the Bulldogs which gained them a few ranking points even after
accounting for the Dogs being one of the lower-rated teams, while the Swans
could not similarly put away the Giants.
Speaking of
the GWS Giants, they are breaking their record week after week for their best ranking in their
short (mostly dismal) history, and are so far the most improved
team of the season. At the other end of the improvement spectrum fellow newbie team the Gold Coast Suns
have gone backwards the most of any team, followed by Geelong, Brisbane, and
Carlton.
When going
through where the AFL Power Rankings indicated each team was likely to finish
in 2015, I said ‘don’t overrate a team’s final
performance or two in 2014’. While I indeed meant this comment in a general sense, the case of
Sydney and Port Adelaide was prominent in my mind.
Looking
through predictions for this AFL season, I saw a lot of people were rating Port
Adelaide as one of the top two teams, above Sydney. In part, this may be because
Port has a relatively young team that would be considered likely to
improve, which is fair enough. But I suspect it was also in part because Port
ran Hawthorn close in their Preliminary Final, while Sydney unexpectedly got
blown away by the Hawks in the Grand Final.
Port
definitely played better in their last game for 2014 than Sydney did, and at a
significant time of the season. However, at least according to the Power
Rankings, Sydney has still generally been better over recent matches. This point
was highlighted when the Swans easily accounted for the Power on the weekend.
Another
point here is that just considering final ladder positions can be misleading in
gauging the gaps between teams. The Hawks and Swans were separated by one spot
after the finals, as were the Swans and the Power. But according to the
rankings the gap between the former teams is much smaller than the gap between
the latter, and the rankings say there is as much difference between Sydney and
Port as there is between, say, Port and Essendon.
Of course,
since I have just cautioned on putting too much weight on one performance, I
should also say not to put too much weight on Port being done by Sydney by as
much as they were, since there are still many weeks in the season left to close
the gap. And by the way, because the match was in South Australia, I did tip
Port.
Anyway the Swans
are on top of the rankings again. The Swans held the number one spot for the
final seven rounds of the season in 2014 before they surrendered it with their
big Grand Final loss. But their impressive win in Adelaide, coupled with
Hawthorn’s narrow loss, puts the Swans just on top.
Welcome back
to the AFL Power Rankings for 2015: it may be one of many AFL power ranking
systems, but it’s the only one on this blog.
These
rankings continue on from where they left off at the end of last
season. Hence,
Hawthorn, Sydney, and Port Adelaide are still the top-ranked teams, while Melbourne
and St. Kilda remain at the bottom.
One of the
big movers for this week, in the wrong direction, is North Melbourne. Following
on from their big loss in the preliminary final last year the Kangaroos had
another big loss to open up this season against Adelaide. This week they
dropped from seventh to ninth in the rankings, which is their lowest position
on the rankings since Round 14 in 2013.
Geelong has also
hit a trough after its big loss to Hawthorn. The Cats fall to tenth spot, which
is their lowest position since these rankings began in 2011. After many false
finishes this may finally be the end of being at or near the top for one of the
most successful modern football teams.
Adelaide,
meanwhile, looked pretty good in their win on the weekend, although these
rankings already rated them highly towards the end of 2014. The Crows remain in
fourth place, but close the gap slightly with the third-placed Power. They are
at this stage, according to these rankings, the team most likely to replace
North Melbourne in the final four this year.
In other
news, the Footy Maths Institute’s AFL rankings have also kicked off again, with
some content and format changes for 2015.
5.First Light – Django Django
This song
has been out for a few months now, but I’ve grown more attached to it over the
past 30 days. Remember U2 singing in ‘Beautiful Day’ about seeing the oilfields
at first light? Well replace that with the power lines you see on your street and
stretch that feeling out over a whole song, and you get a sense of the mood
this song brings out in me.
4.Lampshades On Fire – Modest
Mouse
I featured a
song from Modest Mouse’s new album last month (‘The Ground Walks, With Time In
A Box’), but on further listens this has emerged as my favourite track, albeit
a more conventional Modest Mouse one. The lyrics seem to
have an environmental bent, suggesting that humans manage to ruin any
habitat they are in. This being Modest Mouse some lines seem to veer off from
the main message (‘Our ass looks great inside these jeans?’ …), still the music
chugs along with enough momentum that even the most abstract lines manage to get
me humming along.
3.Dancing In The Corner –
Monarchy
Could there
be a more typical example of gloomy, us-against-the-world, teenage angst than the
lyrics to this track? ‘We’re not welcome anymore … They don’t want to set
us free/Fuck it we don’t need them… They can’t see/Born with dulled out
eyes/They don’t understand who we are …’ Billy Corgan would be proud.
Nevertheless, this slice of synth-pop is still able to draw me in, staying just
the right side of sounding like Hurts.
2.Should Have Known Better –
Sufjan Stevens
Sufjan
Stevens seems to re-enter the nostalgic territory of ‘Casamir Pulaski Day’ on
this song, as he travels back to his childhood, and
the time his mother left him in a video store as a young child. It’s a
sombre, pretty song, the kind that Stevens’ has done many times more, but few
times with as good a melody as this.
1.King
Kunta – Kendrick Lamar
Some of
favourite hip-hop/rap albums are those that get a bit creative/weird and sound
a little less like hip-hop; for example Kanye West’s ‘My Beautiful Dark Twisted
Family’, and Outkast’s ‘Speakerboxxx/The Love Below’. Kendrick Lamar’s latest
album, ‘To Pimp A Butterfly’ fits that category I think, and I like it more
than his previous one. Although I don’t like it quite as much as this reviewer. I don’t get Kendrick’s narratives
as much as others seem to, so I couldn’t really tell you much about what ‘King
Kunta’, my favourite track on his new album, is meant to be about. I gather
than the reference to Kunta is meant to be a symbol for ‘black
empowerment’.
Regardless I love the beat, and the backing vocals (“what’s the yams?”), and so
it’s been the track I’ve returned to the most over the past month.
