Friday, August 04, 2006

'Do not get out much?'....Out of the mouths of babes

Last week I taught a few summer schools on the pretenious title "Up Up and Away! Introduction to Cultural and Media Studies through Superheroes". They were great kids, (in mind I kept say 'Yes, The Little Lebowski Urban Achievers and very proud we are off all of them). It was basically my usal gibber gabber with powerpoint and discussions. I randomly selected about 30 comics at random and getting the kids to analyse them. It was good fun (although one kid spilt his lemonade on an issue of Firestorm: The Nuclear Man No. 25, but that's no biggie it only cost 25p, it was weird seeing kids trying to get to grips with The Heckler and Captain Atom. A black guy happened to get Truth, Red White and Black and was sayign he thought it was reallt racist. He had a point, it was a storyline that imagined it the Captain America experimetns really happened if so, in the manner of the Tuskegee Experiment they would try the super soldier serum out on African American frist hence Truth, the first black Captain America) is left-wing and admirable bu thtey did get Kyle Baker to do it . Now Baker's a great artist, but I can see how his exaggerated and cartoony style could be misconstrued.

There was on funny Vicky Pollard/ Lauren moment with a girl from Hackney who comes into the room and sees me in my Batman T-shirt and just goes:

'What, did you just wear that because you're doing superheroes stuff?'
'Do you just stay in all the time reading comics?'
'Do not get out much?'

my only answer was a mumbling 'yell emm I get out a bit...'
never a trueer word spoken....

1 comment:

Caddy Powers Jr said...

I see your point about Baker all right. While I love his work (his Plastic Man being histerical and even, dare I say it, worthy of the Cole originals) it didn't work for me when fitted into the more political / social story 'Birth of a Nation.'

The Vicky Pollard moment is when you have to resist the urge to respond 'Compared to the amount of times you've been 'out and about' [said with the best possible inuendo tone], not so much.

But then that would be mean.