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Bonus Patreon Release: Arabian Knight! With Hussein Rashid! · Graymalkin Lane the podcast

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_04]: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Graham Oak and Lane Patreon channel where I get to join with friends and talk about all kinds of characters all over the rub.
• 0:07
  [SPEAKER_04]: This month on the Patreon in the month of September, we're going to be focusing entirely on characters that I would file under the category of problematic.
• 0:17
  [SPEAKER_04]: We've had a number of these conversations over the years from, you know, Necra is a great example.
• 0:22
  [SPEAKER_04]: characters that were created under a particular type of lens exposure and representation are so important, but often they just fall into extreme stereotypical tropes and that becomes the whole character definitely from at American lens.
• 0:39
  [SPEAKER_04]: Another character that comes to mind is my episode with Trina Farrell on a shamrock early on, where you just are like, oh no, this is maybe not the most sensitive for trail.
• 0:48
  [SPEAKER_04]: This week, we get to talk all about a character that I have barely given a thought to over the years.
• 0:52
  [SPEAKER_04]: This is the character Arabian night and the only person I can have on the show to have this conversation with me is one of my very favorite people, the incredible Hassan Rashid.
• 1:02
  [SPEAKER_04]: Hassan, I'd love for you to introduce our guests to yourself a little bit.
• 1:06
  [SPEAKER_04]: And share a little bit of your journey as a professional.
• 1:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: You're welcome to weave in as much of your own story here as you can.
• 1:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: And I'd love to kind of open our conversation with the discussion about the Disney's Aladdin movie.
• 1:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so hello, everyone.
• 1:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: My name is Jacen Rashiz.
• 1:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: I am honored to be considered a friend of Chad, and be on this show, and talking about this great, great, parable character that will, you know, one of the epics of all that.
• 1:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: My own background is, I am an academic.
• 1:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: I work on muscles of popular culture, representation of the muscles of the US popular culture.
• 1:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: For you, Olivia Knight has definitely been in my world view, and has been quickly pushed out of that world view, so it's fun to come back.
• 1:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: a big critically.
• 1:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: I will shout out a good friend of mine, Dave Lewis, who's written actually quite a lot on a Arabian night.
• 1:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: So if you are looking for anything a little bit more academic, do check his work out.
• 1:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, so a lot of that do to him and my thinking about this character today.
• 2:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: we're on Aladdin as we're opening because the Arabian automatically puts that old Disney song in my brain on review.
• 2:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, incredibly university professor.
• 2:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: I teach at Barnard College, which is based in New York.
• 2:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: I teach religion and popular culture courses really.
• 2:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're Aladdin.
• 2:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: So there's this thing when we talk about minority representation.
• 2:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: We got representation.
• 2:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: I remember what a lie didn't came about.
• 2:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: I must have been was at 92 so I was in my mid teens and I was like, Hey, there's a brown guy on television who's not blowing things up and then you hear the original opening song with a no longer play where they cut off your ends in like,
• 2:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh no, this is this is straight out racist.
• 2:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is like really problematic in very different ways, but we got a brown man who's not a terrorist on television.
• 2:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's like push and fall and you get to think like, oh, we get this representation and it's also really bad representation.
• 2:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's a representation we want.
• 2:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: What I think I talked a lot about is there's a difference between nuanced representation and bad representation, right?
• 2:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like not every muscle or every hour of business.
• 3:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: You want those complex stories, but stereotype of bad representation, and a lot of it shows chalk full of stereotypes.
• 3:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think we're going to get some of that with Arabian nights because we're dealing with a few of them today.
• 3:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're going to get that to the Ethiopian night.
• 3:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: So because there's a list of Israel, Palestine, initially.
• 3:17
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's a whole pop culture set of stories that would fall into kind of that American lexicon when you go kind of according to era.
• 3:25
  [SPEAKER_04]: And this is where some of my light research lands.
• 3:27
  [SPEAKER_04]: Lawrence of Arabia is one example which was a huge film that has so much homo eroticism.
• 3:33
  [SPEAKER_04]: My word, but you you have to almost think of Americans viewing different cultures as kind of a playable land if you will, right?
• 3:42
  [SPEAKER_04]: Like, ooh, let's set our character in Saudi Arabia.
• 3:45
  [SPEAKER_04]: and there's camels and turbines and swords and genies, and then let's take them over to the Native American lands, where here's this God, and there's this, and then let's take them over to Russia, and then we can pop them down into, you know, there's this idea of kind of the racial stereotypes that exist, and we have a whole history of that with the way that the very complex worlds of the Middle East and other areas around it play into our culture.
• 4:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: Everybody kind of just sees it as one big place.
• 4:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: So you have the pop culture references and then you have the very complex histories with countries like Iraq and Iran and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and the lesser known for a lot of Americans like Oman and Qatar and it's a very complex history and a very divergent people and there's billions of people with a lot of new odds.
• 4:32
  [SPEAKER_04]: But it's not usually portrayed in very positive ways.
• 4:36
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's very stereotypical ways.
• 4:38
  [SPEAKER_04]: Aladdin, for example, just take the characters the Sultan and Jafar.
• 4:42
  [SPEAKER_04]: Look at the very uncomfortable ideas that form about your ideas with leadership and corruption.
• 4:48
  [SPEAKER_04]: And then it goes to the very simple-minded villagers who are all kind of like put in these really odd ways.
• 4:54
  [SPEAKER_04]: You know Aladdin stealing bread and the guard that chases him and all these characters that show up.
• 4:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: And then let's put white people to voice all of these characters.
• 5:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's more than a couple of things.
• 5:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, I'm assuming we're talking only about the animated film.
• 5:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because the live action is a whole other thing where it's like, you're learned a little bit, but not too much.
• 5:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: I've never seen the live action.
• 5:15
  [SPEAKER_04]: Probably won't.
• 5:17
  [SPEAKER_04]: Not now.
• 5:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's the best.
• 5:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: Do you like Lawrence of Arabia?
• 5:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, I remember a question that when I was much younger, I remember a question that was an adult.
• 5:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: I remember the life of you when I was a kid, but that was like, it's just big, epic adventure movie, what's not the law.
• 5:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: But you know, I haven't really gone back to it and looked at it with the more critical I was going to learn to Arabia, it's also got problems in real life.
• 5:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, turn it into a movie, I'm sure those problems don't go away.
• 5:39
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
• 5:40
  [SPEAKER_04]: And then do you want to tell people a little bit about the mythology of the story of Aladdin itself?
• 5:45
  [SPEAKER_04]: Because that very strongly plays into the Arabian night.
• 5:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, so Aladdin or Aladdin most likely is where it comes from, meaning somebody of faith, somebody of religious is often attributed to 2001 nights.
• 5:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, this epic box story format that I think everybody has of this passing familiar already with.
• 6:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Although he seems to exist before that.
• 6:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: And
• 6:06
  [SPEAKER_04]: You know, I think people do, but I actually even love for you to give a little bit of context.
• 6:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah.
• 6:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
• 6:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: In terms of literature, there are already throughout the world.
• 6:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: These narratives that are like box stories.
• 6:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: So you start out with one big story and it opens up another story, it opens up another story.
• 6:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the Western tradition, the camera, and it's probably one of the,
• 6:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: The classics, right, and then the Netflix series was a great way to sort of be exposed to catch very tales, which offers a Similar category tells of the camera and Netflix series to camera and the copyright tells much of things together similar form similar form Civil format structurally, right, so what happens is the thousand and one night
• 6:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sultan, the king, the emperor, however you want to follow him, is extremely dissatisfied with women.
• 6:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: He married to a woman, kills him the next day, finally married to a woman Shahirazad, who tells him a story that comes in a cliphack every night, and so she keeps telling, you know, it opens then a new story the next day, the next day, and hence a thousand and one nights.
• 7:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so she tells us for a while, and eventually at the end of a thousand and one nights, which is, I guess, properly, just under three years, she, you know, they say, oh, let's live happily over after.
• 7:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so the Aladdin story comes, you know, it's most famous through that lens, and he's just a poor boy, nobody loves him.
• 7:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's very much, but I don't know who's getting fan-dango.
• 7:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: He gets a lines of lamp, gets his wishes.
• 7:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: The movie makes it about love and interest, but the original story is much more an adventure story, where love is, the genre is what we would call a romance, but it's not like a rom-com.
• 7:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's these adventures where he finds love.
• 7:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not a love story where they're adventure.
• 7:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's sort of the accident.
• 7:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: But you know, you don't find variations of this because these are oral stories.
• 7:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so even the written text that you pick up your local bookstore because nobody shopping online for books because it's got a bit, you know, you will say, oh, this is the version of Aladdin, but this is the one really that got translated and sort of standardized of the English.
• 7:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: But there are a lot of stories, you know, that through a cross, sorry, so I'll throw it.
• 8:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: But there's usually some magic element.
• 8:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: in the movie had a flying carpet and genius course and the carpet, magical carpet, transportation, pretty consistent.
• 8:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: So that is something you get a lot of.
• 8:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: And then you know, the genie story itself, we've had a lot of conversations on the show, really in depth with the trial of Mephisto, for example, about Faust.
• 8:20
  [SPEAKER_04]: bargains, the idea of, you know, trading your soul to this kind of demonic entity in its way, like you get the blessing now, but you gain the consequence later.
• 8:30
  [SPEAKER_04]: And this is where I'll kind of introduce one blanket statement, and then I think this could be an hour-long discussion on its own, but I'd like to just kind of nip this in the bud right at the beginning, and then his saying, of course, comment wherever you'd like.
• 8:40
  [SPEAKER_04]: We are viewing a complex culture from the lens of a
• 8:47
  [SPEAKER_04]: So it's very easy to attach our value systems and our ways of thinking about love, about innocence, about a legacy, about family.
• 8:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: The things we make excuses for in our culture, are things we often condemn and others.
• 9:02
  [SPEAKER_04]: So there are a lot of complex conversations, even in Aladdin where we have the idea of the teen bride for one thing.
• 9:09
  [SPEAKER_04]: But we see a lot of commentary on quote unquote savagery and survival, and kind of archaic customs in the way that we review them with very complex Muslim societies.
• 9:21
  [SPEAKER_04]: There is a lot of misogyny in certain parts of this, and I've even had clients who have immigrated from different Middle Eastern countries who have had to really process through a lot of the trauma that they've been through in a modern lens.
• 9:34
  [SPEAKER_04]: But some of that trauma is from their culture,
• 9:37
  [SPEAKER_04]: Americans have done really horrible things in all of these places for a long time.
• 9:41
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's not just a thing that we have to be delicate about.
• 9:44
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's a thing that takes an entire education to learn.
• 9:48
  [SPEAKER_04]: You can't know something you don't know.
• 9:50
  [SPEAKER_04]: But that's probably why we got to say out loud in advance.
• 9:53
  [SPEAKER_04]: No matter what the representation is, putting the white writers behind it, particularly when they're not educated in the nuance of things, is very complicated.
• 10:02
  [SPEAKER_04]: So, he said, I don't know if you want to have any thoughts on that, and then do you want to share some examples by Marvel or in other comics where people get it a little bit more right than they do with a rabied night.
• 10:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's no use in denying there's patriarchy and misogyny in cultures around the world, whether it's Arab, Persian, off gone, US, Canada.
• 10:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right, this is a, this is a fact of life.
• 10:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think what becomes called American, I think you framed it exactly right, is when we excuse the worst of our culture and make it the best of somebody else's, right?
• 10:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Where we say, the worst of our culture is only the best of somebody else's in a cheap, rather than saying, we have a shared pool of real, inhumanity to each other.
• 10:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: And how do we rise above it?
• 10:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think we see a lot of that in the region.
• 10:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm sorry, as well as in the Old Sinbad comments, which is another, you know, character who sort of paralleled.
• 10:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm a huge fan of Kamala Khan, Ms. Marvel, particularly Jueville Wilson's Ron.
• 10:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's not shade on anybody else.
• 11:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's obviously I got introduced to it through Jueville.
• 11:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Wilson, for sure, is the first author behind it.
• 11:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think there have been other great writers to meet our Amazon and I think some of the people have written her on Chamkins.
• 11:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm done a really great job.
• 11:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: But you know, I'm holding up Willow's, and partly because she was the first and also because I've quoted her volume called Miss Marvel's Americano Normal, which looks at her first one with Willow Wilson.
• 11:20
  [SPEAKER_04]: Is that a UNI first med?
• 11:21
  [SPEAKER_04]: So thanks for filling that up.
• 11:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: UNI first med, right?
• 11:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: You actually had myself in Jessica, my co-editor on, and you were actually a first podcast, as well, around the book.
• 11:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: That was great, but you know, that that run has got a false thought in my part, but I think there's real complex and complexity in New Orleans that's part of the character.
• 11:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: I, a part of it is I think because Willow Wilson is your self-mustime share of muscle manager, but I don't think you need to be Muslim for an muscle capture, you know, I think she also, she talked about this interview, she reached out to other people to get perspectives to get feedback without violating, you know, her NDAs, and I think that makes a huge, huge difference is, you know, what are the limits of my knowledge and how do I work around that?
• 11:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I, and I think that was really important.
• 11:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think the TV show actually did some really, really interesting stuff as well.
• 12:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm a little bit more hesitant on that because the short season, you know, I'm trying to disentangle like if I came into the TV series Cole, how would I read it for, if I'm having the comments background behind me.
• 12:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so I have a quite put a lot of, as much as I would like, but they do something interesting.
• 12:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: You mentioned Jen's genius, Jen, or become an alien race in the Miss Marvel TV series.
• 12:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's really interesting because for almost some theological perspective, Jen or a separate creation from human beings.
• 12:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: So human beings are made
• 12:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they have free will as well, like humans, so they can be good and bad.
• 12:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, you're not necessarily making calcium bargains, but you are getting in bed with evil forces or good forces, right?
• 12:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like instead of ghost stories, we tell jigs stories, but jigs are also helpful and they can be your allies.
• 12:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: the great heroic stories where Jim comes to the age of human beings in terms of need and help.
• 12:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they're different than angels.
• 12:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: So again, I think it's really interesting how you can play with this pathology.
• 12:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: So there are also complex religious existence.
• 13:02
  [SPEAKER_04]: His countries have a history that goes back thousands and thousands of years.
• 13:06
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's a lot of complexity to the way that they get viewed.
• 13:09
  [SPEAKER_04]: And most people just don't take the time to put any sort of nuance behind anything.
• 13:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: Now there are extremist versions of that where we get to see that played out in kind of the terrorist mentality in a lot of the ways people are viewed, especially since 9-11, where again America had been doing a lot of really horrible things for a long time in places and people retaliated and a lot of innocent people locally were killed and we're not saying that 9-11 was a good thing by any means.
• 13:34
  [SPEAKER_04]: But in it allowed, much like during World War II, America very suddenly quickly turned on all of its Japanese citizens here, they turned on all of their Middle Eastern citizens.
• 13:44
  [SPEAKER_04]: I'm still working with clients from these regions who are still dealing with overwhelming racism whenever they travel.
• 13:51
  [SPEAKER_04]: Now, if we talk about Pakistan versus Syria versus Gaza, there's a lot of complex history woven in and it's just not super nuanced in the way that we portray it often.
• 14:02
  [SPEAKER_04]: The character most relevant for X-Men fans is dust, who is definitely one of these episodes sometimes.
• 14:08
  [SPEAKER_04]: Are you a dust fan to say?
• 14:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: have mixed feelings about us.
• 14:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think I have to separate two things.
• 14:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: So Grant Morrison introduces us what he's writing the episode.
• 14:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: She's sort of big.
• 14:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: She's captured by the Taliban and Wolverine comes and saves her.
• 14:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: There are worse and before you introduce us, her written a series called The Monorama, which takes place in London.
• 14:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he's spent years researching the South Asian community in London, Hindu, Muslim.
• 14:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think there's a lot actually he gets right about the characterization of thus as a result of that research and there's a lot that's still very essentialist.
• 14:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: The way she's drawn is a hot mess, so I think you've got to separate like the visual representation and in her written characterization.
• 14:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I wish, you know, editorial in the exercise a little bit more about stronger handle.
• 14:50
  [SPEAKER_04]: visual.
• 14:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I like the way she's with children grown in the series.
• 14:53
  [SPEAKER_04]: Okay.
• 14:54
  [SPEAKER_04]: So we're introducing a lot.
• 14:55
  [SPEAKER_04]: We're tossing a lot out you and there's a lot of complexity to what we're about to discuss.
• 14:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: But some of the tropes you need to be very aware of very quickly.
• 15:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: Number one, we have the genie flying carpet, turban sword kind of adventure story over the sand dunes, right?
• 15:11
  [SPEAKER_04]: Number two, we have the terrorist mentality and the way that everyone who is Muslim or from a Middle Eastern
• 15:20
  [SPEAKER_04]: We have other tropes that are delicately handled, sometimes where one man has multiple wives, which is funny because my own origins in Mormonism has its own complex history.
• 15:30
  [SPEAKER_04]: And then we also have the very complex history between Israel, specifically, and Gaza, or even Christianity and Middle Eastern.
• 15:39
  [SPEAKER_04]: people who have claims on certain parts of land and we are living in a time where it's always been a very complex thing for decades and decades between these two regions.
• 15:48
  [SPEAKER_04]: But now we are seeing genocide and starvation and brutal brutal hate crimes being committed against people.
• 15:55
  [SPEAKER_04]: And no matter where you fall on the line of what you believe, you just can't view any of that news and condone anything that is happening to innocent people in this way.
• 16:05
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's fascism, it's disgusting, and it's really painful.
• 16:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: And part of what we've got to talk about is 1980 storylines, and then again, early 2000 storylines, that involved a character that feels almost untouchable right now, whose name is Sobrough.
• 16:20
  [SPEAKER_04]: Uh, Sabra is a mutant, her name is Ruth Batzeroff.
• 16:23
  [SPEAKER_04]: She has her own complex history.
• 16:25
  [SPEAKER_04]: I would actually love to do an episode on her.
• 16:27
  [SPEAKER_04]: It just doesn't feel like it's okay right now.
• 16:30
  [SPEAKER_04]: I, I, it's a character that I considered for this month of problematic characters.
• 16:34
  [SPEAKER_04]: I have the right people who could join me for that, but it just feels rough.
• 16:37
  [SPEAKER_04]: The word Sabra literally just means like a pure blooded Israeli like a person who is born there in other words.
• 16:45
  [SPEAKER_04]: And she is a woman which makes her interesting, but she's also dressed in the colors and flag of the state and is going on missions quite frequently where she is dehumanizing a Middle Eastern people.
• 16:58
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's like a story where she learns, oh, this innocent child is actually a real person, not just to terrorists, like those types of stories you're like, oh, no.
• 17:06
  [SPEAKER_04]: And when you're viewing that from 2025, it gets deeply uncomfortable.
• 17:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: So we're just going to kind of jump into it and just let all of those ethereal, Iki barriers be all around us as we talk about the complexities of this character.
• 17:19
  [SPEAKER_04]: And again, it has to be the only person I get out of the show.
• 17:22
  [SPEAKER_04]: Talk to me about this.
• 17:24
  [SPEAKER_04]: How do you feel about the framing of all of that as we're stepping in?
• 17:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: I know.
• 17:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: right.
• 17:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: I would just add two things quickly, Chad.
• 17:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: One on sub-rah, you know, this was a panel you're talking about, oh, the humanity of this boy.
• 17:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: It comes from an incredible Hulk issue where the monster taught me to see the humanity of this little boy and, you know, starting that way.
• 17:43
  [SPEAKER_04]: That's our first, yeah, it's like our first couple.
• 17:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I want to just say on that, I think it's really interesting that you know, you have to show the and you matter, you have to dehumanize, subra, and you have to dehumanize the Arabian.
• 17:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I didn't want to tell this story, right?
• 17:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's like, let me tell you how inhuman all these other people are, right?
• 18:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's actually not about who America's allies.
• 18:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's just these are foreigners, they're violent.
• 18:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't matter if you're Israeli, if you're Palestinian.
• 18:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: You're just, you're just all those other people who are violent.
• 18:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: So like this is, I think, a real period of equal opportunity
• 18:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think we've got to keep that in mind right where the Hulk is more human than and the arrow the other thing I would point out you said dust is the most famous act of well-known expert, but I don't forget M she comes out as Muslim right after Right after 9-11 Although boy that family back story is its own because he's that's a whole hot mess
• 18:36
  [SPEAKER_04]: But yeah, yeah, the same crawls.
• 18:37
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, that's a that's a different story for sure.
• 18:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a good most of the name safe cross.
• 18:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
• 18:41
  [SPEAKER_04]: Now I grew up in I was born in 1978 I grew up in the 90s where there was the war in the Middle East happening operation Gulf storm the son of Hussein stuff on South Park.
• 18:53
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's all these crazy tropes that we're existing.
• 18:55
  [SPEAKER_04]: 911 was when I was in my early college years like just starting college is when I 11 happened basically and I remember just kind of the way everything shut down.
• 19:04
  [SPEAKER_04]: Now one of the shows that I was really obsessed with at the time in early college was 24 where we have our committing like
• 19:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: torture and doing anything to save the American ideals.
• 19:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: And there's a lot of Arab characters who are really dehumanized.
• 19:18
  [SPEAKER_04]: But then they give us some of it nuance too.
• 19:19
  [SPEAKER_04]: They show some heroic American civilians who are just people trying to live their lives.
• 19:24
  [SPEAKER_04]: And you get the very complex character played by Shorah Aknochlu.
• 19:27
  [SPEAKER_04]: He was a really prominent actress across a lot of American mediums, most recently in the Wheel of Time.
• 19:31
  [SPEAKER_04]: So I don't know what your personal feelings are on this, but I invite you to pause for a moment everybody and just consider how have you seen people from these regions portrayed, what feelings do you have as we're getting ready to jump in?
• 19:43
  [SPEAKER_04]: Okay, we're going to start with an incredible Hulk number 250 and then 257,
• 19:48
  [SPEAKER_04]: The Bill Mantlow is on the incredible Hulk.
• 19:50
  [SPEAKER_04]: This is just a few years after giant size X-Men number one, which brings a lot of characters from other countries who also have their own struggles and problematic portrayals, you know, Colossus from Russia, Nightcrawler from Germany, Storm from Kenya, although she's American initially as well.
• 20:04
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's all these kind of ideas of let's bring in other characters and give them more nuance and portrayal.
• 20:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: And Bill Mantlow, who is alive, but he has suffered a significant trauma after being hit by a car.
• 20:16
  [SPEAKER_04]: He is living in facility where his family helps care for him, but he's unavailable to interview.
• 20:22
  [SPEAKER_04]: But he brings a lot of diversity and a lot of his stories from his star jammers and Alpha Flight work right in here in incredible health.
• 20:28
  [SPEAKER_04]: And he does a story where Hulk's kind of hopping around the planet and meeting a whole bunch of different types of characters and different cultures.
• 20:34
  [SPEAKER_04]: So let's put the monster in the mix and let's try to give things some complexity in some new ones.
• 20:39
  [SPEAKER_04]: I really admire what Bill's trying to do.
• 20:41
  [SPEAKER_04]: I think he's quite successful.
• 20:43
  [SPEAKER_04]: in a lot of ways, but he's very much taking caricatures and adding some complexity.
• 20:48
  [SPEAKER_04]: And, you know, teaching, I think, young American kids who are the target audience, that there's more to the world than you expect.
• 20:54
  [SPEAKER_04]: Let's not just have the bad guys.
• 20:55
  [SPEAKER_04]: So, of course, to say it all asks for your thoughts on that in a moment, but let me introduce these first two issues.
• 20:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: Incredible Hulk 250 and 1980 is where we see the silver surfer flying around the planet and he's seen by a bunch of heroes from different countries.
• 21:07
  [SPEAKER_04]: and we get a very brief glimpse of a shirtless man and a turban and red pants holding a siametar and flying on a red carpet over some pyramids.
• 21:15
  [SPEAKER_04]: So there we go.
• 21:16
  [SPEAKER_04]: Oh god, I didn't even mention Egypt as another one of these regions that's so much of it.
• 21:20
  [SPEAKER_04]: We jump back to 257 and this is where the Arabian night K&I GHT, so it's a little play on a punny word, right?
• 21:28
  [SPEAKER_04]: Is the featured character here?
• 21:29
  [SPEAKER_04]: He's standing in the background against a backdrop of stone carvings,
• 21:33
  [SPEAKER_04]: as two orange monsters, one in blue shorts and one in a blue singlet, attack the Hulk.
• 21:37
  [SPEAKER_04]: This is called the Crypt of Chaos, and Salbashema is the artist here.
• 21:41
  [SPEAKER_04]: We open on Bruce Banner in his purple pants, laying unconscious under a very expansive desert sun on a very hot desert sand, and in the previous issue, by the way, Hulk visited Tel Aviv Israel.
• 21:53
  [SPEAKER_04]: where he lands on a cargo ship, and he fights, quote, Sabra, superhero, and of the state of Israel.
• 21:58
  [SPEAKER_04]: We'll have again more to say on her another time.
• 22:00
  [SPEAKER_04]: Bruce Banner, but you're going to see her show up here a bunch of times, because writers really love to pair Sabra and the Arabian night together in different formats.
• 22:07
  [SPEAKER_04]: So it's
• 22:08
  [SPEAKER_04]: Bruce Banner covers for a starving Arab kid who tries stealing a watermelon from a fruit stand, which is very Aladdin.
• 22:14
  [SPEAKER_04]: This kid's name is Sahad, and he's learned English from American tourists, and he confesses, I'm not going to use any kind of accent here, of course.
• 22:21
  [SPEAKER_04]: It is very hard to be an Arab in Israel.
• 22:24
  [SPEAKER_04]: Both my people and the Israelis say that this land is theirs.
• 22:27
  [SPEAKER_04]: They could share it, but two very old books tell them they must kill each other over it.
• 22:31
  [SPEAKER_04]: Which is already a nuanced way for an American to view this, because America tends to be
• 22:36
  [SPEAKER_04]: And so allowing the complexity there is admirable, even though it's complicated because you can try to take a side or say that both sides have equal place at the table and it already creates problems.
• 22:50
  [SPEAKER_04]: I'm just reporting on the story.
• 22:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: I do also want to point out that when it says two very old books, some of them is killing children right on the ceiling.
• 22:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's talking about the特, the people Bible, the Quran.
• 23:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: talks about Jerusalem.
• 23:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't talk about Israel.
• 23:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Jerusalem is incredible.
• 23:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: You have to remember up to 30 percent of Palestinians are Christians.
• 23:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is an Arab Israeli question, not a Muslim Jewish question.
• 23:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: This kid's the hot is working and he's begging and he's picking pockets and he has a mom and 15 sisters to take care of.
• 23:19
  [SPEAKER_04]: He says, but then he gets caught in an explosion because there's a group of black-clad terrorists who blow up a building.
• 23:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: They say, in the name of Arab sovereignty over these lands, we deal retribution to those who would steal from us.
• 23:32
  [SPEAKER_04]: And Bruce Banner thinks terrorists, of course, first thought.
• 23:36
  [SPEAKER_04]: And then they have to contend with the Hulk and then he has to fight Sabra, who is there to take down the terrorists.
• 23:41
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's quote unquote.
• 23:42
  [SPEAKER_04]: And then Hulk jumps into the desert and the sun is so hot.
• 23:45
  [SPEAKER_04]: And he has so hot body in his arms.
• 23:47
  [SPEAKER_04]: So braffalo's Hulk screams at her while tears are running down his face.
• 23:50
  [SPEAKER_04]: And he says, boy died.
• 23:52
  [SPEAKER_04]: And Hulk is always very childlike, right?
• 23:54
  [SPEAKER_04]: So there's no nuance for him.
• 23:56
  [SPEAKER_04]: He's just grieving.
• 23:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: A boy died because boy's people and yours both want to own land, he says.
• 24:01
  [SPEAKER_04]: Boy died because you wouldn't share.
• 24:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: Boy died because of two old books that say his people and yours must fight and kill for land.
• 24:08
  [SPEAKER_04]: Now boy is dead and boy didn't even read books.
• 24:11
  [SPEAKER_04]: Arggg!
• 24:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: And Sabra falls to her knees as Hulk jumps away and the caption tells us.
• 24:16
  [SPEAKER_04]: For an instant, Sabra prepares to give chase.
• 24:19
  [SPEAKER_04]: She is after all and is really super agent, a soldier, a weapon of war.
• 24:23
  [SPEAKER_04]: but she is also a woman capable of feeling capable of caring.
• 24:28
  [SPEAKER_04]: Wow.
• 24:29
  [SPEAKER_04]: It has taken the Hulk to make her see this dead Arab boy as a human being.
• 24:33
  [SPEAKER_04]: It has taken a monster to awaken her own sense of humanity.
• 24:37
  [SPEAKER_04]: The title of this story, incredible Hulk 256, is power in the Promised Land.
• 24:42
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's 1981 and I'm way over summarizing, but we have an Arab child killed by an Arab terrorist and a super strong Israeli woman learning to see the dead Arab child as a human being
• 24:53
  [SPEAKER_04]: This is written for American audiences, before we jump back to 257 where we meet a Arabian night, has they do have thoughts on this initial story?
• 25:00
  [SPEAKER_04]: Because my goodness.
• 25:01
  [SPEAKER_04]: Oh my.
• 25:02
  [SPEAKER_04]: Oh my.
• 25:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh my.
• 25:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is what Hulk is jumping out of.
• 25:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think this is a moment.
• 25:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: What are the only way this story makes sense is if you make if you demonize these rallies and you demonize the Arabs and instead of the white savior, you have the green savior coming in.
• 25:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: you know, this is really ridiculously oversimplicated.
• 25:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: At the same time, 1981, like you said, this is probably the most critical introduction.
• 25:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Most people who are reading this are getting to the region of what's happening in the region, because, you know, the old dad and try to weigh most Americans or other geographies by going to war.
• 25:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, I think that there's some truth to that.
• 25:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think this is probably the most critical introduction most people have to the issue in 1981.
• 25:35
  [SPEAKER_04]: Think of like cartoons in the early 80s and the quality of those cartoons and how this would look animated.
• 25:41
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's a wild journey in your brain already.
• 25:43
  [SPEAKER_04]: Okay, 257's a little dense.
• 25:45
  [SPEAKER_04]: I'm going to cover it all at once.
• 25:46
  [SPEAKER_04]: And then his saying I would love to have you pick it apart as much as you would like to.
• 25:50
  [SPEAKER_04]: You're already like shaking your head.
• 25:53
  [SPEAKER_04]: Okay, so Bruce Manor has just left Telopee.
• 25:56
  [SPEAKER_04]: Now, he's lying in the desert in 257 and he gets picked up by some guys in Turbins, writing camels.
• 26:01
  [SPEAKER_04]: And the narrator lets you know several times that the camel's stink.
• 26:04
  [SPEAKER_04]: Bruce Awakens and Quote.
• 26:06
  [SPEAKER_04]: The Muslim maiden in the all-inveloping Chador pours him another cup.
• 26:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: From behind her veil, silvery peels of laughter and outs were amusement at the way the sun burned patient response to her gentle administrations.
• 26:18
  [SPEAKER_04]: We love to tell stories about like American adventures and foreign lands meeting the beautiful princess and of course every place has its own you know version of this So we learn Bruce is in the home of Abdul and Maya the two characters we meet here He's there for five days and he finally recovers and learns he is in Egypt quote nation of the Nile cradle of civilization ancient birthplace of kings
• 26:40
  [SPEAKER_04]: Abdul, this man who is helping Hulk, so he's a nice person, the way we are seeing him portrayed as a protagonist.
• 26:46
  [SPEAKER_04]: He's wearing a dark agalabaya with a turban, but turban wearing like this is more like bedroom times when like, seeing you like something ancient rather than what you might see in Cairo in the 1980s.
• 26:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: So again, we're kind of getting some characters here.
• 26:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: Do you know, am I, am I portraying the clothing worn by these characters correctly?
• 27:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Hey, look, I think that's all right.
• 27:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it's not like you wouldn't see this, but it is more, more, it is not urbanware.
• 27:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like if you're in Cairo, you're not, so you're gonna see this except, you know, some of these paths in truth.
• 27:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: This doesn't seem like the way they've set up upload.
• 27:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: And my end is, and also the turban.
• 27:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: But it does remind me of the mommy, right, where, you know, Brandon Frazier's got people in the turbines and type of modified John the B. I got to be going around with an interest.
• 27:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: I had that visual in my head.
• 27:32
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, so we're just beginning.
• 27:34
  [SPEAKER_04]: We've already seen the child pick pocket with the 17 sisters.
• 27:37
  [SPEAKER_04]: The terrorists, and now we've got this nice couple helping him wearing very traditional clothing.
• 27:42
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
• 27:42
  [SPEAKER_04]: So Bruce emerges to find himself in an archaeological camp where the time lost tombs of Gog and Magog have been uncovered.
• 27:49
  [SPEAKER_04]: Two monstrous carvings adorn the mountain with the entrance beneath their feet.
• 27:52
  [SPEAKER_04]: Okay, we're gonna pause along the way.
• 27:54
  [SPEAKER_04]: I told we were gonna do it all at once, but do you wanna talk about Gog and Magog?
• 27:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: These are characters we see portrayed as monsters, every once in a while in comics.
• 28:01
  [SPEAKER_04]: Spider-Man has a big alien character named Magog that he fights, Mojo has his Gog and Magog that he sends to the planet a few times.
• 28:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: Let's talk about this mythology.
• 28:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: The algorithm was all show up in both political and chronic stories.
• 28:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: I am not as familiar with the political stories, so I'm going to talk a little bit more about chronic stuff.
• 28:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: In Arabic, it's due to an image, due to their described, or the senses that there are groups of people, the two distinct groups of people, but who are basically contained and are ready to come out at the end time.
• 28:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Eventually, they sort of take on this quality of being demons.
• 28:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not the right word, but like these these supernatural beings who, again, still related to the end time to sort of guarding the gates to hell or will be the first beings out of hell at the end time.
• 28:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm so there's a whole mythology that evolves around them, but basically they're bad news, like you do not want to be messing with them.
• 28:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're very strong and very powerful.
• 28:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: You just do not want to get involved.
• 28:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: My understanding is that it's similar to the little side, but I have a little bit to you on that one.
• 29:02
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yes.
• 29:02
  [SPEAKER_04]: So there's Old Testament references to Gog and McGog.
• 29:06
  [SPEAKER_04]: Gog is like a leader from the land of McGog in certain verses.
• 29:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: And then I think later they are referenced in the New Testament.
• 29:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: More related to kind of the themes of divine judgment and the apocalypse as you jump to revelation.
• 29:19
  [SPEAKER_04]: Like after the thousand-year reign of Christ, then Satan releases Gog and McGog for like the final battle.
• 29:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: I think that's really all their references that we get in in biblical terms.
• 29:30
  [SPEAKER_04]: I think the trope here is that they represent the Ed times or that they're giant crazy monsters that have to be beat very like the harbinger of apocalypse kind of energy.
• 29:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
• 29:39
  [SPEAKER_04]: To the story Bruce meets Dr. Hassan Torim who is in a Guatra tied with an agal the head of the expedition where they are there.
• 29:47
  [SPEAKER_04]: and he claims that he discovered these tombs by translating an ancient papyri related to the band Seth Colts hidden writings.
• 29:56
  [SPEAKER_04]: The Seth is the, this is a real character playable at Marvel.
• 29:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: He's a huge Egyptian god, so we have a cult that has been forbidden basically.
• 30:04
  [SPEAKER_04]: Karim says,
• 30:05
  [SPEAKER_04]: Your familiar with your holy Bible, the Old Testament where in the book of Exodus is told how Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt by parting the Red Sea and how the waters poured back again, drowning Pharaoh in all his cavalry.
• 30:16
  [SPEAKER_04]: Watching from afar was one Nefut Shah, an Egyptian wizard of no small repute.
• 30:22
  [SPEAKER_04]: He cursed Moses and the God of the Israelites and returned to his black temple, where offering sacrifice upon sacrifice to the ancient and terrible gods of Egypt,
• 30:31
  [SPEAKER_04]: He implored them to grant him the power to avenge his nation's honor, and we see an flashback him holding his a woman's body in the air toward the gods in front of a lit-brazer.
• 30:41
  [SPEAKER_04]: Men and ropes are chanting his side at his sides, and Karim says, history has a way of repeating itself, Dr.
• 30:47
  [SPEAKER_04]: Banner.
• 30:47
  [SPEAKER_04]: You see then, as now, Egyptian and Jew were mortal enemies.
• 30:51
  [SPEAKER_04]: So Abdul's here, he says, but Egypt, is it peace with Israel now, Dr. Karim?
• 30:56
  [SPEAKER_04]: Are we Abdul?
• 30:56
  [SPEAKER_04]: He says, in due time, the blood of his victims carried Nehut Shah's prayers, heaven-word, to the ears of the great God's Seth.
• 31:04
  [SPEAKER_04]: Then, according to Hieroglyphics, that themselves wreaked of unspeakable acts and abysmal evil, Seth granted Nehut Shah's request.
• 31:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: He remade the wizard into two bet-beast Jill Carion creatures, the demons,
• 31:21
  [SPEAKER_04]: It is written that not even Neffoot Shaw's followers, the dark-robed priests serving the Ebony shrine of Seth, knew for what reason their master petitioned the death God, and tell Neffoot Shaw stood before them transformed.
• 31:33
  [SPEAKER_04]: Okay, so now this new pharaoh is attacking with his armies of Egypt, and he's placed a curse on the enemy rather than turn them into against the Israelites.
• 31:43
  [SPEAKER_04]: They're captured and entombed alive, and now Karim has found this ancient vault, and he unleashes the old monsters that dwell within them, wanting to use them in his own personal war against the Jewish people.
• 31:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: So
• 31:58
  [SPEAKER_04]: the ceiling caves in, it isolates up dual within the tomb, and a dual wanders into a chamber seeking safety.
• 32:05
  [SPEAKER_04]: A, he says, that glowing simeter lying across an ornate rug, it seems of a different age altogether from the crypt.
• 32:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: Can this be the sacred simeter of which our legends speak?
• 32:15
  [SPEAKER_04]: It is!
• 32:16
  [SPEAKER_04]: The inscription on the Hilt is 13th century Aramaic.
• 32:20
  [SPEAKER_04]: It speaks of an evil that in that emerged from
• 32:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: That's right.
• 32:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: I want to, yeah, let's pause for a second because they're holy crap.
• 32:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: What the hell is going on here?
• 32:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: So just one thing as far as I can tell in this story, Nathletra is not going to work against the Jews.
• 32:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's going to work against the Israelis.
• 32:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
• 32:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I just, I think it's far as I can tell.
• 32:42
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's important clarification.
• 32:43
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yes, they're not connected.
• 32:45
  [SPEAKER_04]: The two of them.
• 32:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
• 32:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Right.
• 32:46
  [SPEAKER_04]: Okay, so Israel is not representative of the religion, lineage, or people belonging to Jewish community.
• 32:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not sure if it's Israel and Judaism or not, Coach Hermes.
• 32:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
• 33:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
• 33:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: So this is what happens.
• 33:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: Nefajra sees mostly the people out, says the God of the Israel, he has to get revenge against the God of the Israelites.
• 33:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so, praise to Seth, who turns them into demons that were created by the God of the Israelite.
• 33:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're shipped here right now to what end set and then you're right to create demons from the Hebrew Bible And then can this be the sacred cemetery which are legends what who's the hour here and who's writing Aramaic in the 13th century.
• 33:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Nobody's writing Aramaic in the 13th century.
• 33:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Let alone on a cemetery.
• 33:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, Aramae was an old language, and it's a medical language related to Hebrew and Arabic.
• 33:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: A lot of favor, probably by the second century of the Christian era.
• 33:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not that people still don't use it, but it's...
• 33:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: If Nehkucha is happening at the time of Moses, we're talking almost 2,000 years before you've created a similar part of the people in Magogna, that feels really weird.
• 33:58
  [SPEAKER_04]: The origins of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, when he started the church in the early 1800s, like an angel led him to some ancient...
• 34:06
  [SPEAKER_04]: plates that were transcribed from the new continent, from a group of Jewish people who traveled over the seas but kept their records in reformed Egyptian, and God had to give him like magic seer stones to be able to translate them into English.
• 34:22
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's
• 34:23
  [SPEAKER_04]: Again, my own origin is weirdly going to this kind of weird, like, what the hell are we talking about?
• 34:28
  [SPEAKER_04]: Rob, okay.
• 34:29
  [SPEAKER_04]: So Abdul himself has found the simitar and the rug in tomed in this place.
• 34:34
  [SPEAKER_04]: We get told, quote, by the narrator, educated in Europe's greatest universities, before returning to lead his wandering tribes people.
• 34:43
  [SPEAKER_04]: The young Arab chieftain looks with some skepticism of the upon ancient legends, even as he have the shimmering simitar in his hand.
• 34:51
  [SPEAKER_04]: Okay, so Gog and Megog who are the ancient wizard into these new beasts are back and they are color coordinated with their outfits and they are going to eat some, quote, bejoan workmen, the monsters call them.
• 35:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: slaves, that Hulk wakes up, there's a big monster fight, there's a new hero suddenly with a red carpet and a golden cimitar and guess what, he took his shirt off, the white turban, white pants, red sash, gauntlets.
• 35:15
  [SPEAKER_04]: In times past you did rise from your arrest demons to unleash the dogs of war on the ancient sands of Egypt, says the Arabian night.
• 35:22
  [SPEAKER_04]: Then my ancestor, a desert nomad, was chosen by the magicians of the east to guard against you.
• 35:28
  [SPEAKER_04]: After a legendary struggle, the first champion succeeded in re-intering you both, but only by sealing himself off for all eternity inside the tomb as well.
• 35:37
  [SPEAKER_04]: His spirit lives on in me.
• 35:39
  [SPEAKER_04]: This time, I am the mystic guardian.
• 35:42
  [SPEAKER_04]: Turn demons, turn and face the Arabian night!
• 35:45
  [SPEAKER_04]: Okay, this man received superpowers from one of his old ancestors because it was the ancient foe of these demons slash wizard guy.
• 35:55
  [SPEAKER_04]: And now this is the beneficiary of these artifacts that have empowered him.
• 36:01
  [SPEAKER_04]: We have a lot of origins in comics that fall into this type of family legacy or I found the object, the promised thing that allows me to stand against the ancient threat, right?
• 36:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: What works in this story, what doesn't.
• 36:14
  [SPEAKER_04]: Beginning with the fact that Abdul was educated in Europe before going home to be the leader of his wandering tribes people.
• 36:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, the fact that he's from Egypt, home of the oldest extent, continuously operating university in the world.
• 36:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'll also are university, but he's got to get him out.
• 36:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, look, it's the 70's 80's everybody's doing.
• 36:34
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's a cool thing to be When we say it's Europe though, he sounds civilized to American.
• 36:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: He sounds civilized, right?
• 36:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: And his tribe sent him and he's back to lead the tribe And you know, this Trump's don't go away.
• 36:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: I forget this
• 36:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: or the show on FXF is the same thing.
• 36:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: This guy is this optometrist in America, and it's a good life, this father's a dictator.
• 36:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Actually, he's called the dictator.
• 36:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: And his father died as he goes, and he scratched the surface a little bit, and he's like, oh, I'm what's ready to kill him, but I'm just as brutal as my dad.
• 36:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm as bad as they come.
• 36:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: So there's a hot mess going on here.
• 37:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: But the origin trim, this is a lot like the Black Knight, right?
• 37:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like there's this family sort that gets passed down, that gets pulled out in times of the need of buyer.
• 37:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: Related to ancient Camelot.
• 37:15
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, absolutely.
• 37:16
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
• 37:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Do you like this origin story?
• 37:18
  [SPEAKER_04]: Nope.
• 37:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: It just doesn't even make sense internally like I forget what comes later.
• 37:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't even make sense in this art by itself It's like so incoherent.
• 37:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: I like I feel really bad But I also realized like there's no editorial review happening at any point in the 80s at Marvel
• 37:35
  [SPEAKER_04]: Right, right.
• 37:36
  [SPEAKER_04]: Okay.
• 37:36
  [SPEAKER_04]: So Abdul immediately realizes that the Hulk must be Bruce.
• 37:40
  [SPEAKER_04]: He says, may it be the will of a law that the monster aids me in returning the demons to their crips.
• 37:46
  [SPEAKER_04]: So suddenly Abdul is flying through the air, slicing boulders in half with a simitar.
• 37:50
  [SPEAKER_04]: And the simitar, like, gives off a yellow light that just looks like urine.
• 37:54
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's just a weird.
• 37:55
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's light yellow, like spray.
• 37:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: I don't know.
• 37:58
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's energy blast, but still.
• 37:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: In mid-battle of Duel yells at the Hulk, excellent my emerald ally, you make me gladder than ever that I saved you from dying in the desert, Dr.
• 38:07
  [SPEAKER_04]: Banner, and Hulk's like, I hate Pewney Banner, and he slaps of Duel off of the carpet.
• 38:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: I'm just like, I'm amazing, it's way out or no.
• 38:15
  [SPEAKER_04]: And listen to the lesson we are taught here by Bill Mantlow as this story ends with what he's trying to achieve with this.
• 38:21
  [SPEAKER_04]: And again, an American guy for American audiences, I think he was trying hard.
• 38:25
  [SPEAKER_04]: He jumped into a lot of other cultures.
• 38:28
  [SPEAKER_04]: And you know, right Thomas did a lot of that too in this early writing.
• 38:31
  [SPEAKER_04]: So Abdul says, I see I have made an error in judgment regarding he who I assumed was my ally.
• 38:37
  [SPEAKER_04]: So if we can get our allies wrong, what does that say about our enemies and other words?
• 38:41
  [SPEAKER_04]: They get the monsters back into their sarcophagi and Abdul feeling like he has no choice seals the tomb with Hulk still inside it.
• 38:48
  [SPEAKER_04]: And as he flies away, he thinks to himself.
• 38:49
  [SPEAKER_04]: It was all as well that you'd be brought into this affair to aid me doing my duty as chosen guardian of the crypt.
• 38:55
  [SPEAKER_04]: I am sorry that Allah also chose fit to reward you with death.
• 38:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: But I sensed in the brief time I knew you that your existence was a tortured one.
• 39:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: I pray now that you have helped ensure the peace of Egypt that you allow at that you at last know peace as well.
• 39:09
  [SPEAKER_04]: But of course, the Hulk is still alive.
• 39:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: And the next issue goes to Russia.
• 39:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: So go see our Ursa major episode from Colossus month for that one to learn more.
• 39:16
  [SPEAKER_04]: And then he goes to Japan and then Easter Island.
• 39:19
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's a whole world tour.
• 39:20
  [SPEAKER_04]: Okay, this is a pretty crazy intense origin.
• 39:24
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's some problems with it.
• 39:25
  [SPEAKER_04]: It doesn't fit anywhere.
• 39:27
  [SPEAKER_04]: But it does work really overwhelming to make the character of the Arabian night very heroic.
• 39:32
  [SPEAKER_04]: It shows that he's
• 39:33
  [SPEAKER_04]: educated, that he has legacy, that he's a leader, that he's faithful to his wife, and that he's heroic, and that he can make mistakes just like anyone.
• 39:41
  [SPEAKER_04]: And this is after the issue with Sabra, who has to learn a really rough lesson about how people are human.
• 39:47
  [SPEAKER_04]: So if Matt was trying to do anything, it's really shed some light on Middle Eastern people being complex and worthy of compassion.
• 39:53
  [SPEAKER_04]: And I like that part, because it's not something we see done in Marvel Comics really frequently at all in this era.
• 39:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: But I know there's a lot of problems
• 40:01
  [SPEAKER_04]: I hope that summary feels okay and tell me tell me your thoughts even on my words.
• 40:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, no, look, I grew to you, Chad.
• 40:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: Look, I'm a little bit older than you.
• 40:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: So remember this time period probably a little bit more clarity.
• 40:11
  [SPEAKER_04]: Well, we have a different culture of upbringing, you and I for sure.
• 40:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's true, right?
• 40:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like our context is very different as well.
• 40:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Look, I can recognize the good.
• 40:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think what you're seeing is the good is right.
• 40:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Also, oh my God, it's still problematic.
• 40:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I've got nothing more to say than what you've had.
• 40:28
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, okay, we're gonna jump to one more trope that we haven't discussed yet, which is Middle East is also also very associated with oil.
• 40:36
  [SPEAKER_04]: Okay, so there's a character that you may know from Thunderbolts.
• 40:39
  [SPEAKER_04]: He's part of, or excuse me, or New Warriors.
• 40:42
  [SPEAKER_04]: He's called Aquaduct in the comics.
• 40:45
  [SPEAKER_04]: Aquaduct is originally goes by the name Water Wizard.
• 40:49
  [SPEAKER_04]: And he basically wears Skintite Orange with an emblem on the chest, and like the longest rubber boots you've ever seen.
• 40:55
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's kind of a hot look.
• 40:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: into it.
• 40:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: This is a character I've profiled for the appendix.
• 41:01
  [SPEAKER_04]: So this is a story asking what if water wizard could form monsters out of other forms of liquid because this guy can manipulate water into various attacks.
• 41:11
  [SPEAKER_04]: And here he's going to do that with oil.
• 41:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: We're jumping
• 41:18
  [SPEAKER_04]: These are stories from, again, 1981, so it's not long.
• 41:22
  [SPEAKER_04]: The first story is titled, Wizardess Waters Run Deep, and the second story is called, The Menace of the Oil Jins.
• 41:30
  [SPEAKER_04]: This story is by Michael Flasher, and The Penciler is Jack Sparling, and I know his name's gonna have a...
• 41:35
  [SPEAKER_04]: So we meet a guy named Sheek Abdul Hurani who wants to become the ruler of all of Saudi Arabia so we're in a completely different country, but the Arabian night is on his way from Egypt all the way over.
• 41:48
  [SPEAKER_04]: The Sheek has traveled to America to recruit the supervillain water wizard.
• 41:52
  [SPEAKER_04]: A radiant night has apparently been chipping away at this evil sheaks criminal empire across the Middle East.
• 41:58
  [SPEAKER_04]: And now the heronning is saying, he has all the powers of a gin and more.
• 42:02
  [SPEAKER_04]: But he also has a new upgrade.
• 42:04
  [SPEAKER_04]: He now has a sash that he wears around his waist, that he can extend outward kind of like a rope or cloth that will tie up his foes.
• 42:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: So magic carpet, golden simitar that fires urine, yellow blasts, and we have a magic sash.
• 42:18
  [SPEAKER_04]: Okay, I'm just gonna sum through this without all the nuances, but Ghost Rider ends up taking water wizard to a small town that's having a water crisis, but this is where she caronny show up, it shows up with his men, they draw guns, they force the criminal to go with them, they fight Ghost Rider, they say a lot of things like Allah's beard and merciful Allah and by the teeth of Allah and we jumped to 62 where we're in an enormous oil field in Saudi Arabia, monsters are attacking, blowing the place up, people are fighting.
• 42:44
  [SPEAKER_04]: fleeing, where'd these evil gins come from?
• 42:47
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's implied that people assume this is like punishment from Allah.
• 42:50
  [SPEAKER_04]: But it's actually some water cloud guys that the water wizard is animating from the helicopter and all the gins are made out of oil.
• 42:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: So this is trying to take over the populist by tricking them.
• 43:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: Although silly foolish Arabs who will believe anything which is another trope that is rough.
• 43:07
  [SPEAKER_04]: Johnny Blaze hears about all this, and he borrows a money from a guy named Flagfargo.
• 43:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: That's a name.
• 43:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: He flies around the world, and once there he changes into Ghost Rider, he manifests his motor cycle, he hunts down the villains, and then he gets a team up with Arabia Night.
• 43:22
  [SPEAKER_04]: Who is dodging missiles and monsters, and he assumes, of course, that Ghost Rider is a bad guy, because it's a skeleton with a flaming skull.
• 43:29
  [SPEAKER_04]: He gets to use phrases like, by the prophet, and praise be to Allah.
• 43:33
  [SPEAKER_04]: So finally, the two heroes work together, kind of chic caronny turns his attack to the palace of the king.
• 43:40
  [SPEAKER_04]: Water wizard forms the oil gins again, a guard yells by the mosques of Mecca.
• 43:45
  [SPEAKER_04]: Like this writer just was coming up with every explodative he could think of related to the Middle East.
• 43:50
  [SPEAKER_04]: The villains are defeated in the end Arabian night basically thanks Ghost Rider on behalf of all of Saudi Arabia and gives him chic caron as Ruby then a sense of flying home on the magic carpet.
• 44:01
  [SPEAKER_04]: So we get Abdul here as kind of a freedom fighter fighting and evil oil barren from his country.
• 44:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's a crazy action adventure story, but again, wow.
• 44:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: What are your thoughts to say?
• 44:15
  [SPEAKER_04]: The question, I think the same country because Abdul is still Egyptian, right?
• 44:18
  [SPEAKER_04]: Abdul is Egyptian, but he's just fighting heronies like evil.
• 44:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right, so that's what I'm talking about here, Abia.
• 44:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, right, because Iranian would love to be.
• 44:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I look.
• 44:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think these are really creative.
• 44:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've never had anybody talk about Allah's beard or square by the boss of Mecca before.
• 44:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the top Allah, which is my team of Allah, I'm like, you know, I have thoughts.
• 44:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: But there is a town in Arizona called Allah, previously called the I of Allah, which I think is hilarious.
• 44:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it is on my bucket list to go to this town in Arizona.
• 44:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's said I visited Allah one time in my life.
• 44:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: But otherwise I've never heard anything like this before in my entire life.
• 44:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think you've been able to say, but what do you do when you've got the teeth of all the hanging around?
• 45:02
  [SPEAKER_04]: The evil oil gins, like, are kind of fun.
• 45:05
  [SPEAKER_04]: But there's a lot of racial stereotypes again.
• 45:08
  [SPEAKER_04]: The simplicity of the civilians, this evil oil barren and the many who work for him for profit.
• 45:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: not that these don't represent real things that exist, but Americans are deeply in the middle of all this in a lot of history as well.
• 45:22
  [SPEAKER_04]: I'd love to hear your thoughts on the addition of a Arabian night's sash to his power lexicon.
• 45:29
  [SPEAKER_04]: I know.
• 45:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Kind of like it.
• 45:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: It feels a little bit wonder woman ask and the last of truth you know why Mike said it's just so before the movie because I was going to say I think the carpet that's over it's in the Aladdin as well, but I kind of like the sense actually feels a little bit more useful and practical rather than just this non functional comorbond it's like dude you're having to exceeder you don't need to come or But it's okay, you don't have a shirt on
• 45:49
  [SPEAKER_04]: We've talked about this on the show with characters like Luke Cage, for example, where when you have a whole cast of black characters, Luke Cage is kind of one version of the stereotype.
• 45:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: He's punching the guys that are the more like hustler street hustlers.
• 46:04
  [SPEAKER_04]: He's dating the girl and calling her, you know, my woman.
• 46:06
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's very black exploitation.
• 46:08
  [SPEAKER_04]: The part that I like is when you get the racial stereotypes kind of dissolve when you have multiple characters interacting with each other, even though it's not nuanced.
• 46:18
  [SPEAKER_04]: So I do love that we see a rabian night in a very heroic light here.
• 46:21
  [SPEAKER_04]: Once again, he's very superhero of the region, even though it's got some struggles.
• 46:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I want to put this out because I think it's really relevant to how we could struggle a lot of these stories.
• 46:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I don't know if you remember the year 24 came out, but it was actually 2001.
• 46:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: The premier episode was supposed to be the week of September.
• 46:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: A lot of, in fact, it may even have been from a lot of this was here.
• 46:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: And obviously it didn't premiere that.
• 46:42
  [SPEAKER_04]: with a black president, which was a wild idea at the time.
• 46:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: The chosen one, right?
• 46:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, incredible.
• 46:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if you remember the first sort of the season, it wasn't about terrorism.
• 46:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was about drug dealers.
• 46:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like if the terrorist was incidental drug cartel, and the producers talked about this in interviews, is that they hadn't written the back third, they hadn't filmed the back third of the series yet.
• 47:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: So they'd done two thirds, like a third was done, a third was in post-production, and a third had yet to be shot.
• 47:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: and they rewrote the back third to focus on terrorism because of the events about 11.
• 47:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so that's why 24 went from being about combating drug cartels to work on terrorism.
• 47:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the last season is basically a return to the original back third to the first season that they read did because they got approached the producers got approached.
• 47:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think your listeners may know better, but I think it used to air Tuesday and nights.
• 47:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: And people would say, when's the mornings there would be an increase in reported hate crimes against Muslims in
• 47:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: who caused, actually, it was very, very strong correlation.
• 47:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was like, Tuesday nights 24 would air and Wednesdays would be a spike in hate crime reports.
• 47:44
  [SPEAKER_04]: And this is our internet era, like, it is only a few years old at this point.
• 47:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: When we talk about these stories, yeah, we're having a good time here.
• 47:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I understand how much is still permeates popular media.
• 47:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: and the real world impact it has and I think it's really important like we're laughing at this representation of the 80s because this was super rough under this like this had real impacts of fat people looked at us and saw us and it is a reflection of the stereotypes I'm not saying these writers are creating this stereotype but these stereotypes had real impacts of people.
• 48:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, thank you for adding that complexity.
• 48:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: I think it's crucial to understand that we, you know, we keep talking and one of the things I really want to create on the show is having people come in everybody's talking.
• 48:21
  [SPEAKER_04]: I love the X-Men for this reason, but as we all come from different cultural backgrounds, we find representation and its problems and its blessings all along the way and I think we have to create that nuance.
• 48:32
  [SPEAKER_04]: Contestability is the the big giant story that's like all of Marvel crossing over and the premise here is that games master and death of entered a wager and they choose super heroes from around the globe to be their combatants so there's a bunch of new characters that are created here for this story.
• 48:49
  [SPEAKER_04]: But they are each working for the entity that selected them.
• 48:53
  [SPEAKER_04]: You have to assume a certain amount of mental coercion.
• 48:56
  [SPEAKER_04]: So one set of combatants, they have to find these like golden globe pieces.
• 48:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's fine.
• 49:00
  [SPEAKER_04]: Death selects as her representatives.
• 49:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: Ironman, the American industrialist, Sabra, the Israeli state superhero, and Arabian night.
• 49:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: And if those three together is just not the worst possible combination that they could have ever, ever selected, it's just truly studying to me that I'm like, what the fuck?
• 49:22
  [SPEAKER_04]: So then we jump to Gamesmaster who has selected She-Hulk Defensor and Captain Britain.
• 49:28
  [SPEAKER_04]: So now let's make it more complicated because
• 49:32
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, we're just gonna jump in.
• 49:33
  [SPEAKER_04]: So they get sent to an old ghost town in the old West.
• 49:37
  [SPEAKER_04]: What in the name of Allah says Arabian night?
• 49:40
  [SPEAKER_04]: And then he refuses promptly to fight quote alongside a US.
• 49:45
  [SPEAKER_04]: Okay, Ironman retorts, is it her nationality or the fact that Sabra is a woman that's bothering you night?
• 49:51
  [SPEAKER_04]: How can we hope to gain the prize when we're fighting both the Arab is really conflict and the battle of the sex is at the same time shut the fuck up Tony Stark, my God.
• 50:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: I really want to be a white savior in the middle of a geopolitical conflict, but it's interesting that they equate religion and nationality here.
• 50:09
  [SPEAKER_04]: A great idea, which is something I've done a lot of times in my phrase, even though I'm delicate with it, I think it happens automatically on my tongue.
• 50:14
  [SPEAKER_04]: This is the thing I need to challenge myself on.
• 50:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: But it's the way we're conditioned, right?
• 50:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: Israel and Jewish are the same in popular understanding, you know, in reality.
• 50:22
  [SPEAKER_04]: And Arab and Muslim is a nice fine mixing on my tongue a little.
• 50:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: Even though I'm careful about it, it's still present.
• 50:28
  [SPEAKER_04]: I love becoming aware of my biases because it gives me a way to change them.
• 50:31
  [SPEAKER_04]: So Arabian night manifests his flying carpet.
• 50:34
  [SPEAKER_04]: He rushes forward.
• 50:35
  [SPEAKER_04]: She hulk knocks him back and calls him turban top in this story, which is super not okay.
• 50:40
  [SPEAKER_04]: Then we get a sword fight between Arabian night with his Simitahar and Captain Britain.
• 50:45
  [SPEAKER_04]: He calls Captain Britain a British swine and then he gets called Sinbad and Return.
• 50:50
  [SPEAKER_04]: Uh, he also sends his flying carpet to help save a falling sabre.
• 50:54
  [SPEAKER_04]: He says, I trust you have landed safely as Rayleigh.
• 50:56
  [SPEAKER_04]: She says, you mean, you ordered your carpet to save me where teammates are we not.
• 51:00
  [SPEAKER_04]: I'd rather be dead than be allied with you, she says.
• 51:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: The conflict ends with Arabian night grabbing the golden artifact.
• 51:07
  [SPEAKER_04]: The were sent to retrieve one point to death.
• 51:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: And the rest of the story just plays out as it plays out.
• 51:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: But holy so much racism mixed into all of this.
• 51:16
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's just, oh,
• 51:16
  [SPEAKER_04]: Iron Man pisses me off the most, but she Hulk also uses a racial slur, but then so does a rabian knight.
• 51:22
  [SPEAKER_04]: Like the word U.S. is so uncomfortable.
• 51:25
  [SPEAKER_04]: This whole story.
• 51:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, it sucks.
• 51:28
  [SPEAKER_04]: In incredible Hulk 279, we see the rabian knight attend a public celebration of the Hulk, where he basically, the world's accepting it was a hero.
• 51:37
  [SPEAKER_04]: He gets a big parade and a rabian knight simply says, May Allah guide the green one.
• 51:42
  [SPEAKER_04]: He's back in at ROM65, the huge group shot of everyone fighting the dire rates, and then in Marvel Comics presents number 47.
• 51:50
  [SPEAKER_04]: We get Scott LeBdell.
• 51:51
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's April 1990.
• 51:53
  [SPEAKER_04]: Don Perlins on this book.
• 51:54
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's they're doing a bunch of Marvel Comics presents of course is the anthology title.
• 51:58
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's a bunch of little eight page stories every issue.
• 52:00
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's a lot of recurring ones, the Panthers, Quest Storyline is throughout this, the Weapon X storyline.
• 52:05
  [SPEAKER_04]: So some of them will go on 20 issues, but others we just get one eight-page story.
• 52:09
  [SPEAKER_04]: And I think Marvel's trying out a lot of new talent.
• 52:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: Scott LeBell did a number of these eight-page stories, taking a lot of the characters from places like the Contest of Champions, who'd never really gotten a lot of attention and giving them a little bit of just like an eight-page feature.
• 52:22
  [SPEAKER_04]: We covered this during the Shamrock episode that I referenced earlier.
• 52:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: Some of it's cool and some of it's like, oh no.
• 52:28
  [SPEAKER_04]: So this story is called a father's love featuring a rabion knight.
• 52:33
  [SPEAKER_04]: I do love the lettering on this book.
• 52:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: The narrator informs us Abdul Khamar So we get a last name here sought refuge from a third intro person Abdul Khamar is probably actually or is properly his first name It's servant of the moon which is really weird because it's just really stereotypical most of the worship the moon god type thing But interesting But it could also be used as a last name here, but when I'm wondering where the moon knight crossover is with all of that too, right?
• 52:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, so Abdul Kamar sought refuge from a storm by entering an underground tomb.
• 53:01
  [SPEAKER_04]: There he discovered a magic carpet and enchanted cimitar and a mystic satch.
• 53:06
  [SPEAKER_04]: We covered these earlier, taking these to be to be a gift of the gods.
• 53:09
  [SPEAKER_04]: He took it upon himself to become the Arabian night.
• 53:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: He hasn't done much in his role as a defender of the desert dwellers, but all of that changes.
• 53:16
  [SPEAKER_04]: Today hasn't done much, judging narrator.
• 53:18
  [SPEAKER_04]: So we open on Abdul traveling through the desert on a powerful chestnut horse guiding a camel by a hobel, by a hobel.
• 53:27
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I looked up the proper terms for things, but I didn't know how to say some of them.
• 53:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I didn't help say it.
• 53:33
  [SPEAKER_04]: He's got supplies tied in blankets on the creatures back there and the desert and a great evil has spooked the animals as they ride.
• 53:40
  [SPEAKER_04]: Abdul is bucked off his horse and the two creatures, the horse and the chemical running off into the desert.
• 53:44
  [SPEAKER_04]: Abdul says, and Hussain, would you read this dialogue for us?
• 53:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: because I don't have to do it in an accent.
• 53:48
  [SPEAKER_04]: Nope, you sure don't.
• 53:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: What evil death transpire here?
• 53:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: I returned from training goods in the city to Harold the birth of my child only to discover my village set upon by a word of deem it.
• 53:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Vile beasts may vultures feast on your entrails to it seemed that I must venture into my possessed village alone.
• 54:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Nay, not alone, though I seldom wield them, I present the ancient gifts of the desert gods, though it may cost me my life, I shall attend to the safety of my family.
• 54:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: So swears, the O'Ready and all right.
• 54:14
  [SPEAKER_04]: Oh, we got to hear you sing as whirlwind and now as a ravey and a ravey.
• 54:20
  [SPEAKER_04]: He does have his simitarian as magic carpet strapped to his person.
• 54:23
  [SPEAKER_04]: So he gets on the carpet surprise.
• 54:25
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's a giant green demon and a white skirt with black stripes and a matching hat.
• 54:29
  [SPEAKER_04]: Traditional of Egyptian royalty this clothing seems to be.
• 54:32
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's a yellow belt with an insignia on it that has no significance that I can tell.
• 54:36
  [SPEAKER_04]: But it's referential almost to like the rising sun flag.
• 54:39
  [SPEAKER_04]: It almost has that kind of energy.
• 54:41
  [SPEAKER_04]: Think of like a red moon with like two yellow evil eyes on a gold backdrop.
• 54:45
  [SPEAKER_04]: Did you recognize any symbolism with this emblem at all?
• 54:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, so again, I think you know, there's this there's this long running trope of the sums worshiping the moon god But if they don't worship the god of Christians and Jews they worship the moon god and when I saw that image my first saw was oh this is the demon moon god like this is really old racist crap that
• 55:04
  [SPEAKER_04]: Before warned, only deceit and death await thee, so speak at Saja, or Saja, S.A.A.
• 55:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: Messenger of the Desert Gods.
• 55:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: For a decade, I've wielded these gifts with not a word of instruction from your masters.
• 55:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: I submit that your intervention is ill-timed.
• 55:19
  [SPEAKER_04]: Humans should not assume to question the motives of the gods.
• 55:22
  [SPEAKER_04]: You cannot be allowed to proceed.
• 55:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: See, not to let me further.
• 55:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: Be not a fool.
• 55:27
  [SPEAKER_04]: The evil of foot is beyond mortal comprehension.
• 55:30
  [SPEAKER_04]: Your ignorance shall unleash unspeakable horrors upon the world.
• 55:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: The only horror I spy is the, the obstacle between me and my newborn child.
• 55:38
  [SPEAKER_04]: The reality warps around at the Rivian night, as he lashes out of the God with the Simitar drawing, spraying yellow blood, and as arg, then he disappears in a portal with a sound effect.
• 55:49
  [SPEAKER_04]: Stretchable, Abdul rushes to his community and he finds all of the people that are possessed with red eyes and green scaly features.
• 55:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: This is giving very shadow king, but among the people possessed is his wife Maya.
• 56:01
  [SPEAKER_04]: Do you remember her from earlier in the story?
• 56:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah.
• 56:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: He says that she makes a comeback.
• 56:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, yes.
• 56:06
  [SPEAKER_04]: Maya my favorite wife and friend what matter of demons have possessed So we're already employing he has multiple wives, which does exist in some cultures including the old Mormon one And this is the first time we're hearing him having multiple wives.
• 56:19
  [SPEAKER_04]: This is random throw away life
• 56:20
  [SPEAKER_04]: He fires light from a cimitar, he binds his wife and a chanted sash, and Maya says, your other wife, Al-Mira, has given birth to a demon child.
• 56:29
  [SPEAKER_04]: He rushes in to see his newborn baby, that looks weird, it looks weird, they like Kim Jong-un to me, and it's sitting on.
• 56:35
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's sitting on a purple pillow, and all the others in the room are green and possessed as well, and Almyra is nearly nude with a hoop belt around her stomach.
• 56:43
  [SPEAKER_04]: A Arabian night and his newborn are pulled into a vision of the desert while a massive fiery face fills the sky like a sun.
• 56:49
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's like the god of the sands almost, and it's tired and it wants to go back to the sands.
• 56:54
  [SPEAKER_04]: So when reality reverts, Abdul realizes that his entire village and his wives have been buried under the sand and all of them are dead.
• 57:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: dead like there's a the whole village is gone and he's only to be able to escape on his carpet with his son and his arms he says I'm my son we shall one day evangelize that we're lost to the state so swears the array of the night you told me this is the first Arabian life story in the sixty sevenies I've been like okay by the time this rolls around I feel like
• 57:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: it's actually a regression of the character and going harder to the stereotype and also what like what I have no idea what this story supposed to do because as far as I can tell we don't come back to this in any way shape or more meaningfully.
• 57:34
  [SPEAKER_04]: Early not I don't ever ever seen his family again his wives are dead that he has a demon baby child maybe there's truly no I don't know it's it's the desert guy versus the gods and
• 57:47
  [SPEAKER_04]: I don't know.
• 57:47
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's a lot of Jeannie energy with the way these gods are presented.
• 57:51
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's like the evil Jeannie from Aladdin almost, you know, there's some interesting.
• 57:55
  [SPEAKER_04]: I don't know.
• 57:56
  [SPEAKER_04]: Let's just keep going.
• 57:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: It will come back and measure pieces out.
• 57:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: Now, Xman fans may know Arabian nice specifically from this story only.
• 58:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: If you don't read other books, but new mutants annual number seven, Xman annual 15.
• 58:08
  [SPEAKER_04]: and ex-factor annual six have the Fabianne C's a backed up story where we see members of freedom force, you know, blob and pyro and avalanche and stone wall and super savor and crimson commando all kind of split up and they have taken a kind of odd mission in the Middle East and this is where the teams get like split up before the relaunch of the books, you know, blob and pyro for example, join the brotherhood of people mutants just after this after getting a band and
• 58:36
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's, yeah, anyway, these stories get picked up later in the continuity, so for folks they recognize, Arabian Knight has joined a full superhero team of Middle Eastern super villains, so or super heroes, one of them is Black Razor, RAAZR, who's an ancient sorcerer, who's Spirit got trapped in a blade, and if you read AlphaFlet, you'll recognize this character as the one who's responsible for Puck's dwarfism.
• 58:58
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's a mystic blade that chops the mercenary Eugene
• 59:02
  [SPEAKER_04]: and he like shrinks in size and has to contain this evil within him.
• 59:05
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's a whole story.
• 59:06
  [SPEAKER_04]: Well, let's move talk about another time.
• 59:08
  [SPEAKER_04]: There is also a character named Amanetti here who can transform his body into air.
• 59:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: By the way, he later died of the legacy virus noted in X-Men annual number two.
• 59:17
  [SPEAKER_04]: We meet Veil who's a woman in a Veil who can secret a chemical green fog from her skin to various effects.
• 59:24
  [SPEAKER_04]: She gets murdered by Pyro in this story.
• 59:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: We also meet Sorako, S-I-R-O-C-C-O, who's a mutant who can generate tornadoes.
• 59:32
  [SPEAKER_04]: And this team is assigned to fight members of Freedom Force who've been sent to Iraq to obtain the German scientist, Ryan Holtkotsman, who's been captured by this team.
• 59:42
  [SPEAKER_04]: And the name of the team, by the way, is Desert Sword, and we get told that they are the armed agents of the Iraqi Army.
• 59:48
  [SPEAKER_04]: So the body of count rises quickly.
• 59:50
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's a big conflict.
• 59:52
  [SPEAKER_04]: Members of freedom force are killed in this storyline.
• 59:54
  [SPEAKER_04]: Pyro ends up killing the scientist Kurtzman rather than failing the mission and leaving him behind.
• 59:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: The battle takes place in Kuwait City.
• 1:00:01
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's early 1990s.
• 1:00:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: This is already crazy if you're watching the news at this time.
• 1:00:07
  [SPEAKER_04]: and Abdul at one point gets called a, quote, Saudi Arabian coward, we learn he's being forced to serve on this team because his wives and children are being held, as collateral forcing his hands.
• 1:00:17
  [SPEAKER_04]: It doesn't directly state the name of Sadahum who's saying on the page, but this is also, you know, South Park, Sadahum who's saying in bed with Satan, era of left too.
• 1:00:27
  [SPEAKER_04]: We jumped to the final part where Arabian night gets punched by the blob, avalanche escapes, commandos been blown to bits, so he comes back as a cyborg, and blob and pyro get left behind and have to take a job working for the Iraqis for a time.
• 1:00:40
  [SPEAKER_04]: So we get a Middle Eastern super team, the desert sword, I don't know if you read this story when it came out, what are some of your thoughts on this one?
• 1:00:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: I did not read this story when it came out, and it did take me a second, reading it, you know, what 30 years later, and realized, really, not a long has changed.
• 1:00:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: time, I think the operation in 91, I should double check this, but I think it was called Desert Shield, the U.S. first invasion.
• 1:01:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: And Desert Shore was was the second invasion in after 2003.
• 1:01:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: So his blood or Arabian night has his wives back, who are now being held hostage.
• 1:01:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe he got something.
• 1:01:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe he got some real ones.
• 1:01:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.
• 1:01:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's so many things about this.
• 1:01:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: And this is still years before the character dust shows up who's kind of the most common end we talked about dust earlier a little bit, but there are other Middle Eastern mutants, this story is not distasteful, it's certainly not careful, right?
• 1:01:27
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's some stereotypes when you look at a character like Vale for example.
• 1:01:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think that's exactly the right word.
• 1:01:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not careful and I think Vail is probably the biggest miss that, but I also feel like Marvel at this time has such misogyny issues that I can't tell if this is being racist, misogynistic or subcovenation of the two and Arabian night on a team full of, you know, Iraqi mutants if you will.
• 1:01:49
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's the interesting premise that's never really followed up on.
• 1:01:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and we don't know they're all Iraqi right we just know they're all our middle of the feet and are all doing it again.
• 1:01:58
  [SPEAKER_04]: I used to like blank in an area without realizing it might defend folks were recording this at 7 a.m. and I just woke up.
• 1:02:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, no, that's fine.
• 1:02:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: I thought maybe I missed something, but I was like, I didn't know.
• 1:02:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, no, they were all Iraqi.
• 1:02:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: They're in Kuwait City and it's a Middle East team, but the Iraqi army is the one that's conscripting though.
• 1:02:15
  [SPEAKER_04]: That's that's the key.
• 1:02:16
  [SPEAKER_04]: Correct.
• 1:02:17
  [SPEAKER_04]: Right.
• 1:02:17
  [SPEAKER_04]: Uh, and that's, you know, that's one of the things I was wondering at Marvel, like, if mutants are a certain percentage of all populations, but we buy a large only see a very small percentage of mutants from other countries, but in places like the Middle East, there must be a lot of mutants if that's the case.
• 1:02:31
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, who knows what that means.
• 1:02:33
  [SPEAKER_04]: Uh, okay, we're going to jump to Marvel Comics presents 114.
• 1:02:35
  [SPEAKER_04]: This is a Gary Barnum and James Blackburn story.
• 1:02:38
  [SPEAKER_04]: Uh, the story is called Bazaar Tales, B-A-Z-A-A-R.
• 1:02:47
  [SPEAKER_04]: We see Abdul, who has been sent to the bizarre, or like the, well, who's in do you want to tell everybody what a bizarre is?
• 1:02:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: The bizarre is basically a market to open air market.
• 1:02:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, some of the other words, you might hear a circle, those sorts are often covered or something covered.
• 1:03:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is the stereotype that I'm going out on buying spices and lamb and carpets.
• 1:03:05
  [SPEAKER_04]: So he's in this case.
• 1:03:06
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, he's been sent by his wife to get some lamb and he's bartering with the cellar.
• 1:03:09
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's guys selling lamps, guaranteed.
• 1:03:11
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's a gin inside each one.
• 1:03:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's a massive sandstorm approaching and a rabie and nice summons his carpet, rushes to investigate.
• 1:03:18
  [SPEAKER_04]: He's in a new black costume.
• 1:03:19
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's a little more streamlined.
• 1:03:21
  [SPEAKER_04]: He finds a mutated American calling himself Sandstorm.
• 1:03:24
  [SPEAKER_04]: There are a few Marvel characters named Sandstorm.
• 1:03:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: This is the first and only, I believe, a parents of this particular one.
• 1:03:29
  [SPEAKER_04]: This is a former soldier who's grieving the loss of a friend.
• 1:03:33
  [SPEAKER_04]: Arabian hate defeats him, spares his life, tells the gathering Arab soldiers, if you'll read this line to say.
• 1:03:39
  [SPEAKER_04]: So long a life.
• 1:03:40
  [SPEAKER_04]: There will be no killing today.
• 1:03:41
  [SPEAKER_04]: I love the fact that they've mixed Arabic and Hebrew here, but you know whatever.
• 1:03:45
  [SPEAKER_04]: And the following soldier goes, they hate me for my race, just like I hate them for theirs.
• 1:03:49
  [SPEAKER_04]: American soldiers, yeah, anyway.
• 1:03:52
  [SPEAKER_04]: And then in the Arabian night returns home, where his three identical wives are nagging him with literal speech bubbles that say, yak yak yak yak, blah, blah, blah, and a nag nag nag.
• 1:04:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: Okay, yep, the message being that Saudi men are just like American men in that all of their wives nag them.
• 1:04:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: That's the end of this weird story.
• 1:04:11
  [SPEAKER_04]: I don't know why we needed this one at all.
• 1:04:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, I just want to go back rather than a Ribion Knight to Soldier, San Storm.
• 1:04:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's fascinating.
• 1:04:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've taught a lot of schools where what are called yellow ribbon schools where they work with vets when they come back.
• 1:04:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: And a lot of them face, I don't know if you know this term world, I'm sure you know this term world injury, where people are forced to do things that are like against what they think is morally correct.
• 1:04:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 1:04:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: And a lot of these vets come in, they end up in my classes on Islam because they're like, I feel like I did something that
• 1:04:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I've heard this from multiple people, but the only way I could do it because I was told this was my job is to like turn off my humanity and like I had to make them fundamentally opposed to me and I had to be fundamentally opposed to them.
• 1:04:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they're like the education is part of their process of healing and trying to recover their moral center and recover their humanity and other people's humanity.
• 1:04:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so actually that line, it feels both stereotypical and also really, you know, and we have a generation of people like this literally to a 20-year
• 1:05:06
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, and as a as a therapist, I have had clients who have immigrated from this region who've been negatively impacted by the American Warfront there.
• 1:05:18
  [SPEAKER_04]: And I have clients who are veterans, who are soldiers who are negatively impacted by the American Warfront there, just shitty on all sides.
• 1:05:24
  [SPEAKER_04]: Um, we're going to jump to Thunderbolts 55, uh, without a lot of preamble here.
• 1:05:28
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's a character, Phoebe and you see as a brought back that has its own weird history.
• 1:05:32
  [SPEAKER_04]: This is again, in humus sapian, who is, what does sapian?
• 1:05:35
  [SPEAKER_04]: So if you have to be middle-easternly corrupted to this, this character was, uh, so there's, there's an old Marvel magazine called Fume or Friends of Old Marvel, where they ran a contest years and years before this, where they said, hey, whoever wins this contest, create a character will put them in a Marvel book.
• 1:05:50
  [SPEAKER_04]: And the character that won was a guy named Humus Sapien, and they never put him in a book.
• 1:05:54
  [SPEAKER_04]: So like 20 years later, Kurt Bucic built a story that Fabiany sees a follow-up on, where this character Humus Sapien got launched into the Thunderbolts book, with the old X-Men villain, the ogre as part of it.
• 1:06:06
  [SPEAKER_04]: We'll talk more about that.
• 1:06:07
  [SPEAKER_04]: In fact, when I first interviewed Fabiany, you see as we talked about this character a little bit for those of you that are familiar.
• 1:06:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: Anyway, he like has a big global power and he launches it and it just randomly kills a bunch of people around the world and Arabian night just like falls off his flying carpet and apparently he's dead.
• 1:06:23
  [SPEAKER_04]: We get that confirmed in the next appearance which introduces a brand new Arabian night.
• 1:06:29
  [SPEAKER_04]: He's saying I'm going to kind of assume you were unfamiliar with this history.
• 1:06:32
  [SPEAKER_04]: Were you surprised by the shift from one Arabian night into the next.
• 1:06:35
  [SPEAKER_04]: You know, honestly, I never felt the character closely.
• 1:06:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: I just always assumed it was the same one.
• 1:06:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is the first time I realized that there was a different person behind the Femetar.
• 1:06:43
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:06:44
  [SPEAKER_04]: So we're going to jump all the way to early 2000s now.
• 1:06:47
  [SPEAKER_04]: It is Union Jack numbers 1 through 4.
• 1:06:51
  [SPEAKER_04]: This is a Christo's gauge book that draws deep on a lot of Marvel continuity and introduces a couple of characters.
• 1:06:58
  [SPEAKER_04]: So Union Jack is like the working man's hero.
• 1:07:00
  [SPEAKER_04]: He's like the guy Joey Chapman.
• 1:07:02
  [SPEAKER_04]: You might get a drink with him at a pub, but he's, you know, he's gonna punch you out and he's putting on the colors of the flag.
• 1:07:06
  [SPEAKER_04]: But it's giving the essence of like the every man, the worker party, putting on the Union Jack rather than Captain Britain, who's the posh elite, you know, et cetera.
• 1:07:16
  [SPEAKER_04]: And he has been conscripted by MI5 in London along with a couple of international agents to handle escalating terrorist threats from a group called Raid, which is radical, I don't remember what this group is.
• 1:07:31
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's an offshoot of aim, and they're doing terrorist acts around the world with a bunch of really obscure old super villains, including an Arabic one.
• 1:07:40
  [SPEAKER_04]: We'll talk about it in just a minute.
• 1:07:41
  [SPEAKER_04]: The two agents conscripted to work with Union Jack here, our Sabra, we talked about her a little earlier, as well as Contessa Valentina Allegra de La Fontaine, who you may recognize as played by Julia Louis Dreyfus from the new Marvel movies, and we also get a new Arabian night.
• 1:07:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: This guy's name is Navid Hashim.
• 1:07:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: NAVID, H-A-H-A-S-H-I-M. Navid is Palestinian, and he left Israel to serve the Saudi Arabian government, and he has replaced Abdul Kamar as the new Arabian night because Kamar was killed by humus sapiens.
• 1:08:15
  [SPEAKER_04]: And what they've done is they've taken the carpet and the sash, and like had some company, I don't know, we've it into a costume form to be.
• 1:08:24
  [SPEAKER_04]: So his costume is made out of the carpet and the sash, and it responds to his own mental commands.
• 1:08:29
  [SPEAKER_04]: So like he can treat it like it's bulletproof.
• 1:08:31
  [SPEAKER_04]: He can still use the sash a little bit, and he still has the Cimitar that fires light.
• 1:08:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: I look, I think it's a smart way to get rid of someone's share to go with a stereo typical imagery while keeping sort of the incant in the basis.
• 1:08:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, I think the tailoring could be a little bit better, but overall, you know, I think I think it's actually a really smart way to move the character forward and get rid of some of the past without talking to racing it.
• 1:08:52
  [SPEAKER_04]: So we're going to see, and again, this is early 2000s.
• 1:08:55
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's uncomfortable.
• 1:08:55
  [SPEAKER_04]: I like Christos Gage and I like his writing, but this is a part that doesn't hold up well necessarily because we have a Palestinian character working with the state hero for Israel.
• 1:09:06
  [SPEAKER_04]: So both of these characters were in town for a peace summit, and again this is another kind of American writer doing the presumption of why can't you, your, your state's just work together and create peace.
• 1:09:15
  [SPEAKER_04]: You both sides are selfish kind of energy.
• 1:09:18
  [SPEAKER_04]: So the world has grown at this point by the way to love the character Sayyid Jara in Lost.
• 1:09:23
  [SPEAKER_04]: And this character looks like that character.
• 1:09:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: And David has seen it, it looks a lot like Saeed from Lost, who was a member of the Iraqi Republican guard, who had been conscripted into being a torture during the war, but now he's kind of this action hero, sex symbol, like a guy in the Lost show.
• 1:09:43
  [SPEAKER_04]: Did you watch Lost?
• 1:09:44
  [SPEAKER_04]: We talked about 24 earlier.
• 1:09:45
  [SPEAKER_04]: We didn't talk about Lost at all.
• 1:09:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: I...
• 1:09:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: I loved the first season of the loss, and then, forgive the pun, but they absolutely lost their way when they had no idea when they were going to end.
• 1:09:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, I love that first season.
• 1:09:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: I've been rewatching that series with my children.
• 1:09:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: It holds up better than I thought.
• 1:10:00
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's a lot of punching, which is silly.
• 1:10:02
  [SPEAKER_04]: So many people get knocked out with gun butts to the head, which is crazy.
• 1:10:05
  [SPEAKER_04]: But, you know, except for that fourth season with the rider strike, it does hold up pretty well.
• 1:10:09
  [SPEAKER_04]: I enjoyed it for the most part.
• 1:10:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: I think it's really good.
• 1:10:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: Okay, so there is this raid group.
• 1:10:15
  [SPEAKER_04]: Uh, the contest is super worried.
• 1:10:17
  [SPEAKER_04]: Uh, I will read the contest here.
• 1:10:19
  [SPEAKER_04]: Uh, and Katessa and Sabra.
• 1:10:22
  [SPEAKER_04]: The contest of Shield says Sabra and I have been meaning to talk to you about badgab and with all due respect sending a Saudi to fight terrorists seems a bit like assigning Hugh Heffner to shaper on your daughter.
• 1:10:32
  [SPEAKER_04]: What the fuck?
• 1:10:33
  [SPEAKER_04]: especially a brand new operative.
• 1:10:35
  [SPEAKER_04]: We know nothing about and David replies.
• 1:10:38
  [SPEAKER_04]: I came here to request from my government to help our friends, not to have my countries and mine integrity question.
• 1:10:43
  [SPEAKER_04]: Sobber says, there are no questions just facts.
• 1:10:46
  [SPEAKER_04]: Your rulers, we denounce terrorism while funneling money to its bloodiest practitioners.
• 1:10:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: You dare?
• 1:10:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: I personally let strikes against extremists and let's good men doing so.
• 1:10:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: I will not be slatter by the likes of you.
• 1:10:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: So here's the other piece we won't take deep time, but 9-11 has also happened at this point.
• 1:11:02
  [SPEAKER_04]: So the conversations around terrorism and its association, there are some connotations that are true, but the sensitivity of the issue is really rough.
• 1:11:11
  [SPEAKER_04]: And especially the way it's being portrayed in the media, because we have taken some French terrorist groups and allowed that assumption to be all people from all these countries and all these religions and all these regions are all the same.
• 1:11:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: which is not at all fair and we're completely ignoring the domestic terrorism and the terrorist acts that Americans and white people are performing around the world including the British people historically.
• 1:11:36
  [SPEAKER_04]: So it's just a very skewed conversation.
• 1:11:39
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's deeply uncomfortable and that can't their comparison is gross.
• 1:11:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh well it's gross, because as far as we don't have to actually have pretty good rules around consent.
• 1:11:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know we've like
• 1:11:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, unlike some people I could mention sitting in the old office.
• 1:11:54
  [SPEAKER_04]: Sending a sending an Iraqi after or sending a Saudi Arabian after terrorists is like sending Hugh Hefner to date your daughter.
• 1:12:02
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's just, yeah, that's a weird weird line.
• 1:12:04
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
• 1:12:05
  [SPEAKER_04]: Okay, so they're going after different super power terrorists wanted a time.
• 1:12:08
  [SPEAKER_04]: One of them is a guy who's an old FF villain who looks like an oil baron.
• 1:12:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: A little like that chic we talked about earlier in the Ghost Raider stories.
• 1:12:15
  [SPEAKER_04]: This guy's name is Fassad F-A-S-A-U-D. His real name is Varuk Al-Fassad.
• 1:12:21
  [SPEAKER_04]: He was introduced in 1987.
• 1:12:22
  [SPEAKER_04]: He's a chic and an oil minister and a turban.
• 1:12:25
  [SPEAKER_04]: Whose body has been changed into electromagnetic energy.
• 1:12:28
  [SPEAKER_04]: So deep old fantastic forecut.
• 1:12:31
  [SPEAKER_04]: His idea of any thoughts on Fassad.
• 1:12:33
  [SPEAKER_04]: Me.
• 1:12:34
  [SPEAKER_04]: They also fight Batrug, Batrug, the Leapur, and Zarran, the weapons master.
• 1:12:37
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's one key moment where Sabri yells, my country does not train its women as whores, countess, speaking to Valentina.
• 1:12:44
  [SPEAKER_04]: I am more accustomed to the role of soldier, an Arabian night replies.
• 1:12:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Perhaps you should embrace the sacred role of wife and mother, and it's gotten kind.
• 1:12:52
  [SPEAKER_04]: Nope.
• 1:12:52
  [SPEAKER_04]: and sovereign grabs him by the throw in anger.
• 1:12:55
  [SPEAKER_04]: That sacred role was taken from me, sorry everybody.
• 1:12:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: When the Palestinians ambushed a bustle of Israeli school children, my son among them, if we didn't need you, but actually this literally is this character's origin, read Evan Skalnik's New Warrior's 5859, where it's referenced the sobriest, son Jacob was killed by the PLO or the Palestine Liberation Organization.
• 1:13:16
  [SPEAKER_04]: But again,
• 1:13:16
  [SPEAKER_04]: to equate an entire group of people, an entire nationality with the acts of one group is just not okay, but also his misogyny here is weird too.
• 1:13:27
  [SPEAKER_04]: So, through out the series, learn how to reluctantly work together, they fight firebrand and the corruptor.
• 1:13:33
  [SPEAKER_04]: In issue three, we seem to be get wounded in combat, but he offers to let Union Jack kill him, and
• 1:13:38
  [SPEAKER_04]: so that the powers of the Cimitar could pass on to someone else, which I don't think that's how that works at all.
• 1:13:43
  [SPEAKER_04]: Then there's a final fight with a giant dread not.
• 1:13:46
  [SPEAKER_04]: The Arabian night, at the end, it respectfully shakes hands with Union Jack, and he and Sobra casually acknowledge each other and then move on with their lives.
• 1:13:54
  [SPEAKER_04]: A brand new character, what are your thoughts on the Union Jack series?
• 1:13:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: Is this bold?
• 1:13:58
  [SPEAKER_04]: Is it good?
• 1:13:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: Is it terrible?
• 1:14:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: It has actually some religious moments, like I think the redesign of the living nights.
• 1:14:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: I kind of liked it.
• 1:14:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like I said, I think it's kind of smart.
• 1:14:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then it breaks some of this tropes and it goes back to some of the tropes, right?
• 1:14:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like we talked about this guy Jack Shaheen before who's written about representations of Arabs on film.
• 1:14:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he's like, they're either shakes or terrorists, right?
• 1:14:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: Or these help us village in here.
• 1:14:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you've got the whole range of characters here.
• 1:14:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: You've got the oil marins, you've got the terrorists, and you've got the,
• 1:14:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: the hopeless city.
• 1:14:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I don't know.
• 1:14:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: It feels like there's a real potential for growth here and they don't really follow through.
• 1:14:32
  [SPEAKER_04]: I do think it's interesting.
• 1:14:33
  [SPEAKER_04]: They're trying to do their spare points on both sides in a really rough conflict.
• 1:14:39
  [SPEAKER_04]: But there's just bias, American bias, very active, young during this.
• 1:14:44
  [SPEAKER_04]: And again, we want the representation, but early 2000s is a wild time to see this story in the middle of all the
• 1:14:52
  [SPEAKER_04]: Okay, there's a red Hulk series that's running in the late 20-auts.
• 1:14:56
  [SPEAKER_04]: A lot of this series is quite good.
• 1:14:58
  [SPEAKER_04]: This is Thunderbolt Ross as the red Hulk, and he gets kind of a long arc in a title that's kind of entertaining a lot of the time.
• 1:15:05
  [SPEAKER_04]: I remember reading this book off the shelf and being really surprised.
• 1:15:08
  [SPEAKER_04]: This is where the Hulk family was huge.
• 1:15:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: Rick Jones was the whole of Betty Ross was a Hulk.
• 1:15:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: Jennifer Walter's a Hulk.
• 1:15:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's like a whole team.
• 1:15:14
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's even a book called The Incredible Hulk's for a while.
• 1:15:17
  [SPEAKER_04]: They're really amplifying this.
• 1:15:18
  [SPEAKER_04]: In fact, this spun off into a larger, like Hulk cartoon, like the Hulk squad or something like that too.
• 1:15:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's right, that's right.
• 1:15:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, that's what we're talking about.
• 1:15:27
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, that's crazy crazy stuff.
• 1:15:29
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's the five part story, Hulk volume two numbers, 42 through 46 that has beautiful art and some problems.
• 1:15:37
  [SPEAKER_04]: Let me turn it over to Hasein to talk about the Hulk of Arabia's story.
• 1:15:40
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
• 1:15:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, when I first, when I first, this first time I read the story, when I first got I was expecting Banner and Green Hulk or Grey Hulk.
• 1:15:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: I got Red Hulk.
• 1:15:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: I really don't like Red Hulk.
• 1:15:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: This affirmed why I don't like Red Hulk, but this is actually really interesting story.
• 1:15:52
  [SPEAKER_04]: Banner, scientist Thunderbolt Ross is a military veteran who uses like billions of dollars in American equipment and blows shit up all the time and breaks laws all the time to try to capture things.
• 1:16:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's a morally compromised kind of bigoted character for sure.
• 1:16:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 1:16:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's full on display.
• 1:16:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the basic premise is Thunderbolt Ross, the Red Hulk, finds out some guy who worked with in the military has been killed.
• 1:16:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: He wants to find out what happened and he wants revenge.
• 1:16:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: So he goes to the Middle East, try to find out what happened.
• 1:16:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Captain Rogers, who's his...
• 1:16:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: handler, overseer, boss, whatever.
• 1:16:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: As you can't go in, it's a very delicate situation.
• 1:16:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're trying to train each or each week of the United States, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:16:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Something happens, and he allows for help to go in, but he's got to go with machine men.
• 1:16:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they go into this Middle Eastern country, and he meets up, or they meet up, a machine man, and repel, meet up with Arabian, our friend, and the Vietnamese, or who they think is the Arabian,
• 1:16:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: They find this magic king that called Shorazad.
• 1:16:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm assuming this is named after Shaharazad, the woman in the thousand one nights, and it's everything I can think of.
• 1:16:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're coming from this place Shorazad is ruled by a guy named Dagan Shah, the Sultan Megas, and he has these magic, he's built this idyllic society, Hulk wants to smash.
• 1:17:07
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, this guy's origins really quickly because this is another Middle Eastern character.
• 1:17:11
  [SPEAKER_04]: A digging show was a rebel leader who got captured by soldiers from the country of Qatar, which is a real place.
• 1:17:17
  [SPEAKER_04]: But he escaped after releasing a grenade.
• 1:17:19
  [SPEAKER_04]: He'd held in his mouth.
• 1:17:21
  [SPEAKER_04]: He stumbles through the desert collapses and is engulfed in white light.
• 1:17:24
  [SPEAKER_04]: So we think he's got god powers, which he kind of does.
• 1:17:27
  [SPEAKER_04]: But he he's discovered some regalian technology.
• 1:17:30
  [SPEAKER_04]: And he uses these powers to start transforming like scientists into servants and then selling weapons to local terrorist groups and he like reverse engineers a bunch of things and is able to like create a really lucrative like arms business for himself and then on the border of Libya and Egypt he claims a region as his own that he calls shazad.
• 1:17:50
  [SPEAKER_04]: S-H-A-R-Z-H-A-D, and it's starting to get international attention because someone has just claimed public land as a new sovereign country, and he has these powers that allow him to project energy generate crystal, like alter his size, regenerate, to let put the illusions like this regalian technology really powered this guy up.
• 1:18:11
  [SPEAKER_04]: So it's an interesting setup that's not sensitively handled, but the visual on this character is really interesting.
• 1:18:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, the
• 1:18:19
  [SPEAKER_04]: This is Jeff Parker in Patrick's Erture, everybody.
• 1:18:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I'm going to show this building inside Deluxe Society and people see that as threat.
• 1:18:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's warming rubbles, but he's very clear, like, I'm warming the rubbles because you're attacking my kingdom.
• 1:18:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I'm creating this to stay a bullet.
• 1:18:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: And of course, you leave me alone, we leave you alone, that sort of commitment he's willing to make.
• 1:18:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: And nobody's willing to make that because he has taken this land from these countries.
• 1:18:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so that's an negotiation that's happening.
• 1:18:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not trying to say he's a good guy, but it's a really interesting premise and set up of this utopia.
• 1:18:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: What I think is really fascinating about this is, and they actually mentioned it in the comic, is like he's in the Arab world, Libya and Egypt, but he's got this Iranian name or Persian at name.
• 1:18:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: He shares all of it, it is a very much Persian name.
• 1:18:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like it's really weird, like he's like, Persians and Arab's are two different people, but we're gonna set up shop here, and it's Afghanistan, and it's a rock, and it's Arab, and it's Persian all mixed, like it's this really hot mess of things.
• 1:19:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I find it's what I find really fascinating about this,
• 1:19:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, that whole history channel, the permits were built by aliens, the documentary, quote unquote, that they were up.
• 1:19:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right, is this idea that people of color can't do anything?
• 1:19:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Unless it's through a higher to, let's say, steal the technology from better civilization.
• 1:19:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, there's a real racist undercurrent to this right, really intact.
• 1:19:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the fact is, he couldn't be a mutant, because he couldn't do this on his own.
• 1:19:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: It had to be some foreign influence, some greater power.
• 1:19:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Otherwise, he's just too damn stupid and too weak to do this.
• 1:19:36
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's a lot of comics happening contemporarily through this era.
• 1:19:39
  [SPEAKER_04]: One really prominently for X-Men fans, as NEC is a cable bed pool series where people launch just like the sovereign nation of Providence.
• 1:19:46
  [SPEAKER_04]: Let me welcome people from around the globe to live here, Magneto, Ingenosa, or Abelon.
• 1:19:52
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's this idea like homeland.
• 1:19:54
  [SPEAKER_04]: I can't fit anywhere, so I got to fit somewhere.
• 1:19:56
  [SPEAKER_04]: And so Sultan Magus does seem to have some noble intentions, but he's doing it through arms deals, and, you know, at any time, someone, anyway, anyone tried to, someone tries to change the balance of power, America suddenly sending in the war veteran halt.
• 1:20:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, very specifically the veteran who has been recommended for extreme violence and as you said, likes to think the laws are optional for him because he's general, vulnerable laws.
• 1:20:25
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:20:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: Do you want to talk about the conclusion of this story?
• 1:20:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, so the conclusion.
• 1:20:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I don't know.
• 1:20:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: What about, which I mean, health wins machine wins.
• 1:20:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the regalians, you know, they go into the machine.
• 1:20:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: They they overload dog and child.
• 1:20:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, so what happens is they beat a guy.
• 1:20:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: They think is the rabbit.
• 1:20:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're in the rabbit night episode.
• 1:20:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: The thing is the rabbit night.
• 1:20:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's an illusion creator by dog and child.
• 1:20:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: They find the rabbit night is involved in the final fight.
• 1:20:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Although ultimately, this is a combat between the Sultan Megas and Red Hulk.
• 1:20:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: But they remain like they're cut soft part of his arm at some point and then re-grose it because he gets juiced up by the Regulating tech if I remember right, which I think is a cool effect, and then they end up saying you leave me alone Like the result is they get this political resolution where they're like, okay America's not going to involve they recall the Red Hulk Red Hulk's not happy, but he's okay Because he wanted to find out what happens for another kind of what happened to his friend and that's really under the story And shows out continues to exist some political limbo at the end of the story
• 1:21:20
  [SPEAKER_04]: There is a fight early on in this with the really can't be Roman supervillain Tyrannus who is part of this.
• 1:21:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: I don't know, we see the character kind of critiquing authoritarianism and he gets like a glimpse into like how national loyalty can be challenged by ethics in a region that's politically unstable.
• 1:21:37
  [SPEAKER_04]: It almost seems to be like what if we declared this sovereign land and let people live and then look at the complications that result.
• 1:21:46
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's not a terrible story, it's not deftly handled.
• 1:21:49
  [SPEAKER_04]: There certainly needs to be some sensitivity reading.
• 1:21:52
  [SPEAKER_04]: And we do see that character assault and mag is come back in a future Jeff Parker story.
• 1:21:56
  [SPEAKER_04]: You can look him up on Marvel.
• 1:21:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: The language he used before for the other Arabian art story is it's not careful.
• 1:22:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like I just really interesting beats that I really like.
• 1:22:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Surprise, really generally surprised at how borderline anti-nationalists now very thoroughly anti-colonialists in American intervention this is in ways
• 1:22:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm finally really surprising for the time it's written.
• 1:22:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: But, again, not careful.
• 1:22:18
  [SPEAKER_04]: We're going to jump to a more recent story that we've covered on the show.
• 1:22:20
  [SPEAKER_04]: This is the final appearance of the Naveed character.
• 1:22:23
  [SPEAKER_04]: If you listen to the Ursa Major episode, this is the story where Black Panther is assembling an international summit of Superheroes from other countries during the time when he's living at Avengers Mountain, we have representatives from each place.
• 1:22:35
  [SPEAKER_04]: Collective man from China, Captain Britain, Shaman from Canada, Sunfire from Japan,
• 1:22:44
  [SPEAKER_04]: actually doesn't see what country he's representing.
• 1:22:48
  [SPEAKER_04]: And then Sabra from Israel, when they agree on something in this summit Ursa Major notes, look at Sabra in the Arabian night, even the Jew and the Mozlam are all agreeing how touching and that's basically all that happens for this character
• 1:23:00
  [SPEAKER_04]: We're going to jump to one more character, and this may be one that X-Men fans have read as well, but it's a completely new character.
• 1:23:06
  [SPEAKER_04]: In Black Panther volume 4, number 15, it's 2006, we've got Reggie Hudlin and Scott Eaton writing the epic kind of build up to the storm and Black Panther wedding.
• 1:23:16
  [SPEAKER_04]: And in this story, we get a third Arabian night.
• 1:23:19
  [SPEAKER_04]: In Iraq, uh, Saddam Hussein, yes, really, has men fighting to the death before getting a quote, magical sword, blessed armor, and flying carpet.
• 1:23:28
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's a new Arabian night.
• 1:23:29
  [SPEAKER_04]: We don't know how he's connected to anyone else.
• 1:23:31
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's fine.
• 1:23:32
  [SPEAKER_04]: Hesain himself, not my guest, but set off on his record.
• 1:23:35
  [SPEAKER_04]: Does if the black ops division of the Vatican can invent its own black night to invade Wakanda, which is a thing that happened in a previous story, then why can't we?
• 1:23:44
  [SPEAKER_04]: Africa is a hotly contested territory, Christians trying to convert the populist faster than Islam, China making economic inroads, and of course the Americans sending into their agents who appear to be nationalists while serving at the best of their superiors in the White House.
• 1:23:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: It has to be stopped.
• 1:24:00
  [SPEAKER_04]: but now we have a symbol of our own to trump those, something for the children to aspire to.
• 1:24:06
  [SPEAKER_04]: So in Wakanda, Techalla has just proposed to Aurora, they get attacked, storm knocks down some helicopters, the new Arabian night flies in on a red carpet, this is his only appearance, and he gets this line of dialogue.
• 1:24:18
  [SPEAKER_04]: Die in Fiddles, die by the sort of the Arabian night.
• 1:24:21
  [SPEAKER_04]: And then they barely pay attention to him, they're just talking about the relationship where they beat the shit out of this guy at the end.
• 1:24:27
  [SPEAKER_04]: That's the whole story.
• 1:24:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: I actually had to look up when Saddam Hussein was killed and it's just after this comes out or capture my shit So I had to check up, but I was like, did we forget Saddam Hussein was a psychologist who didn't believe in religion?
• 1:24:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's really weird for him to be like launching a conversion or me.
• 1:24:42
  [SPEAKER_04]: You guys didn't like, they did any research.
• 1:24:44
  [SPEAKER_04]: These writers, I'm not trying to shame anybody.
• 1:24:46
  [SPEAKER_04]: They saw a couple episodes of South Park and that was it.
• 1:24:49
  [SPEAKER_04]: That was it.
• 1:24:50
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, you know, Redding saw them who's saying as like the South Park version, the unreasonable dictator who's foolish almost the way they portrayed Hitler and old comics is always an interesting team.
• 1:25:01
  [SPEAKER_04]: I don't know.
• 1:25:01
  [SPEAKER_04]: So we've covered a lot of ground today.
• 1:25:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: We've talked about cultural sensitivity.
• 1:25:05
  [SPEAKER_04]: We've talked about American bias.
• 1:25:07
  [SPEAKER_04]: and we've covered three versions of the same character and the hero name itself is steeped in problematic origins all on its own.
• 1:25:15
  [SPEAKER_04]: We've also talked a lot about like a portrayals of misunderstood culture, mixing cultures and like the carefulness of not like letting things be unique from each other.
• 1:25:25
  [SPEAKER_04]: How are you feeling about this conversation has seen?
• 1:25:28
  [SPEAKER_04]: And what would you like listeners to leave with a sense of as a result of our chat today?
• 1:25:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, look, I think there's real value in looking characters like they're maybe a knife and sure is looking at how they evolved and what they're pulling out.
• 1:25:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, this part of the reason I look up is you get this real window into a zeitgeist, right?
• 1:25:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: What's happening in American thinking or American public culture, the planet, like, I just, I love it.
• 1:25:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: That doesn't mean it's all good, right, but we've got to come at it with a critical line.
• 1:25:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's what makes it fun and enjoyable.
• 1:25:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think at least for me.
• 1:25:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, it's not just the purest skepticism of it all.
• 1:25:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, at the same time, I think there's a way you can recover this character and I'd love to love to think about how you do that.
• 1:26:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like I think the caution redesign is a great way to do it.
• 1:26:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'd love to give them a nationality that makes sense or really talk about the fact that a lot of these borders are totally artificial.
• 1:26:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if you're going to make him the Arabian night, be like, yeah, I'm Jordanian, but I'm a Palestinian refugee who's part, you know, who's great great grandparents, part of the Ottoman Empire, because that's where Palestine was located.
• 1:26:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, like, let's actually make this complex and border crossing in genre process.
• 1:26:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, I think there really be interesting things you could do.
• 1:26:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I also think,
• 1:26:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, without Arabian name and without sinbed, we don't get characters like dust and we don't get Kamala Khan, you know, like you've, that's how you build and you create, you know, you don't get Tana has to go to writing Captain America without secret Empire, where he's a Nazi, right?
• 1:26:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, like, I'm really, you've got to accept the good of the bad, it's not a simple binary, but also like you've got to know what the bad is, and you've got to know what the better, and that's how you built forward.
• 1:26:53
  [SPEAKER_04]: So, let's say, I have a huge comic writing aspirations myself.
• 1:26:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: Let's say Marvel contacts me and I get to write next
• 1:26:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: And I have a really strong storyline idea for the character dust, for example.
• 1:27:04
  [SPEAKER_04]: Now there are two ways to go about this.
• 1:27:08
  [SPEAKER_04]: And there's only one correct way.
• 1:27:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: Well, there's three ways to go about this, but there's only one right way.
• 1:27:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: Number one, I do a little mild research on Wikipedia, and I learned some words, and I throw it into the character's dialogue.
• 1:27:20
  [SPEAKER_04]: Every, you know, every once in a while, she says an Arabic word.
• 1:27:22
  [SPEAKER_04]: Or I lean into some of the tropes of what it is to be a woman wearing.
• 1:27:29
  [SPEAKER_04]: That's nice, but it's not enough, right, to just work in at pieces because you're probably going to get something wrong and you're creating stereotypes.
• 1:27:39
  [SPEAKER_04]: The other approach I see people doing is we just don't mention their nationality, religion, or organs at all, which is also not super perfect, right?
• 1:27:47
  [SPEAKER_04]: We want the characters to be more than where they come from, but that is part of the story at the same time.
• 1:27:53
  [SPEAKER_04]: So I think the third way is I do my fucking research, and then I ask for people to do sensitivity readings.
• 1:27:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: If I'm writing character of color, if I'm writing a Jewish character, if I'm writing in a Arabian character, I ask the requisite people who know what they're talking about, who are good writers, to give it a look and say, hey, how does this feel?
• 1:28:11
  [SPEAKER_04]: And then I give them a credit in the book.
• 1:28:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: This says, hey, thank you, Hussein.
• 1:28:15
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, yeah, my work here and giving me your opinions, because we want to make sure it's correct.
• 1:28:19
  [SPEAKER_04]: The stories are important, but they need to be done right.
• 1:28:22
  [SPEAKER_04]: And so for people listening,
• 1:28:23
  [SPEAKER_04]: these aren't untouchable characters.
• 1:28:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's something as simple as a couple of lines of dialogue that can change everything.
• 1:28:30
  [SPEAKER_04]: Of these three characters, I'm okay that Abdul is resting in peace, although it'd be out.
• 1:28:36
  [SPEAKER_04]: See, some of his legacy, he still maybe has an evil baby out there for this
• 1:28:40
  [SPEAKER_04]: But I do think the character, Naveed, who, again, is very much sight from lost.
• 1:28:46
  [SPEAKER_04]: I do think that character has some really interesting potential to be nationalistic.
• 1:28:52
  [SPEAKER_04]: I was, excuse me, internationalistic.
• 1:28:54
  [SPEAKER_04]: I think this character has some potential to be a really incredible hero if you can write sensitivity.
• 1:28:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: But ultimately, I don't know if we ever need to see Arabia, Knight, and another comic book, too.
• 1:29:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: I think we can do with new characters, what some of these old characters failed to achieve.
• 1:29:08
  [SPEAKER_04]: How are you feeling, is it?
• 1:29:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm pretty good, you know, I think I just want to say one thing about the three ways you mentioned about writing the character, I think you're absolutely right, but I will say and I'm blanking on the authors of the writers name and you may remember when Kamala Kam was on the champions, the first one of champions with the vision and kid-side clubs and on the different ways.
• 1:29:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: That was more of a way, you know, I think Wade got Kamala's voice really, really well done and avoided the things that he didn't know.
• 1:29:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: right, he's like, I don't know what her home like is like, I'm not going to hit her home.
• 1:29:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to focus on visions only because that's where I know how to do this.
• 1:29:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's also really important is actually also knowing what your limits are and recognizing what you can do with the character, with the limits you have to operate.
• 1:29:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think Wade's version of Kamala Khan was fantastic in the champion.
• 1:29:52
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, these are really a longer conversation.
• 1:29:54
  [SPEAKER_04]: Kamala is now one of the X-Men, obviously.
• 1:29:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 1:29:56
  [SPEAKER_04]: We've seen her written by a few different writers, but in the most recent Nick's run and my X, did you read that?
• 1:30:01
  [SPEAKER_04]: I haven't read the next one yet.
• 1:30:02
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, so it's by Colin and Jackson.
• 1:30:04
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's pretty good, but they really lean hard into Ms. Marvel being a superhero, being kind of a nerd.
• 1:30:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: They amplify her.
• 1:30:11
  [SPEAKER_04]: She's kind of the main voice in the book.
• 1:30:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: They're treating her a little bit like the idealistic, I believe in the good of people.
• 1:30:17
  [SPEAKER_04]: character.
• 1:30:18
  [SPEAKER_04]: You don't really lean much into her family, but they do give her a cousin named Bilal, who is dressed in traditional clothing in America, at least, who is a bigot toward mutants.
• 1:30:29
  [SPEAKER_04]: So he's part of like a crowd of people and he ends up kind of adopting an anti-mutant policy.
• 1:30:36
  [SPEAKER_04]: He's attacking mutants.
• 1:30:38
  [SPEAKER_04]: it's giving a little terrorist vibes but Kamala ends up unmasking for him at the end of this series and he basically just kind of flies away and was like well I don't I don't support you.
• 1:30:48
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's interesting because they don't really play up you know the mosque or the the origins of her family and the heart that we see so often.
• 1:30:55
  [SPEAKER_04]: But it's not a bad portrayal.
• 1:30:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's just, it lacks a little of the sensitivity I wish we saw.
• 1:31:00
  [SPEAKER_04]: And then they've launched Kamala into this new era of giant-sized X-Men books, where she's traveling through time, fighting an evil, amped up version of Legion.
• 1:31:08
  [SPEAKER_04]: We're seeing her interact with Eras all across the teams.
• 1:31:11
  [SPEAKER_04]: That's one of the ways that first way I mentioned.
• 1:31:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: You can avoid touching some of it.
• 1:31:15
  [SPEAKER_04]: But I think if you want to get the character right, there has to be just the right amount of understanding.
• 1:31:20
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
• 1:31:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: But you know, Clips out of it is if she was the Peter Parker of the new generation, right?
• 1:31:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like our total first solo book should be a family book and her team book should be for super her nice.
• 1:31:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like she can be the kitty pride of this generation of the X men for this generation.
• 1:31:32
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yes, but she doesn't have a solo book now.
• 1:31:34
  [SPEAKER_04]: That this is true.
• 1:31:36
  [SPEAKER_04]: You know what I mean?
• 1:31:37
  [SPEAKER_04]: They're going to be this is true because she's popular and I love that she's part of the X men, but I don't know quite seeing what we need to make her fit in the way that she needs to.
• 1:31:45
  [SPEAKER_04]: You know,
• 1:31:46
  [SPEAKER_04]: Okay, well as we're releasing this, I'll see you in New York like next weekend my friend, but this will come out a month later See you in person.
• 1:31:54
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's it's such a joy to have you on the show any time So much fun.
• 1:31:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thanks, Chef.
• 1:31:58
  [SPEAKER_04]: Thank you, and thanks for joining me for these times with the Convert Conversations Not that you're not welcome all the time I always want to make sure people don't feel pigeonholed or tokenized Excellent.
• 1:32:09
  [SPEAKER_04]: Do you have any final thoughts and where can people find you online anything you want to plug
• 1:32:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: No photo box on this, I think we did a really great coverage of Arabian night.
• 1:32:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can find me online at blue sky, slumberyankin, and on maxed on slumberyankin, bassed on dot social, at ISL-AMO-Y-N-K-E-E, and on my website,
• 1:32:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm writing a couple of things at the moment, but nothing imminent, so I'm not worth mentioning, but just keep an eye on it.
• 1:32:36
  [SPEAKER_04]: Okay, and I'm going to agree with you, and I'm going to agree with you on the Instagram, most prominently.
• 1:32:40
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's basically the only place I post, at least for now.
• 1:32:42
  [SPEAKER_04]: The next episode coming out after this, we're going to continue these conversations.
• 1:32:45
  [SPEAKER_04]: So watch for Big Bertha, and then the month or the week after, we're going to close the month with the character Roger Box, the paraplegic amputee character on Alpha Flight, who has some stories.
• 1:32:56
  [SPEAKER_04]: My friends Gabrielle Garbaro, and Darl Lawrence are joining me for that one.
• 1:32:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: Thank you everybody for the ongoing support over on the main show.
• 1:33:02
  [SPEAKER_04]: Please watch for the trial of Agatha Harkness I hope you enjoyed the conversations around marble magic over on the main show this month And then it's Halloween around the corner.
• 1:33:09
  [SPEAKER_04]: So here we go Thanks everybody.
• 1:33:11
  [SPEAKER_04]: Thanks to the same.
• 1:33:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: We'll see you all back here next week on the Green Mountain Lane Patriot
• 1:33:14
  [SPEAKER_04]: And now stay tuned for some thoughts on fascism, as a special guest tonight talked about a red skull story and its modern applications.
• 1:33:25
  [SPEAKER_04]: After Germany's defeat in World War I, the country plunged into revolution and political collapse.
• 1:33:31
  [SPEAKER_04]: In November 1918, the Kaiser abdicated the armistice was signed, and the new republic was born into crisis.
• 1:33:37
  [SPEAKER_04]: almost immediately nationalist and far-right circles begin spreading a convenient explanation for what had happened.
• 1:33:43
  [SPEAKER_04]: Germany had not truly been beaten on the battlefield but had been quote betrayed from within by internal enemies.
• 1:33:50
  [SPEAKER_04]: This stab in the back myth blamed socialists, Democrats and Jews for the nation's humiliation,
• 1:33:55
  [SPEAKER_04]: and for accepting defeat, and it became one of the most potent political legends of the Vymar era.
• 1:34:00
  [SPEAKER_04]: It weaponized the old language of the, quote, rike as a sacred national destiny and helped make resentment feel righteous, turning complex military and economic realities into a
• 1:34:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: stolen victory.
• 1:34:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: The early 1920s also brought an atmosphere of dread that wasn't only political, with society destabilized by poverty, inflation, returning veterans, and street violence, sensational crime stories traveled fast and hit hard.
• 1:34:27
  [SPEAKER_04]: Germany experienced notorious murder cases that fed public fear, including the crimes of one Fritz Haarman, HAAR, MANN, if you'd like to
• 1:34:39
  [SPEAKER_04]: and had killed numerous young people and became infamous as a symbol of urban menace and social decay, kind of a jacked the ripper of his time.
• 1:34:46
  [SPEAKER_04]: Newspapers amplified these horrors and the resulting panic fit neatly into the era's broader mood.
• 1:34:52
  [SPEAKER_04]: An exhaustive nation looking for monsters to explain the feeling that the world had gone off its hinges.
• 1:34:56
  [SPEAKER_04]: In an environment like that, stories of predatory killers weren't just lure at headlines, they became cultural shorthand for national breakdown.
• 1:35:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: Political violence meanwhile was increasingly organized, militant and proudly self-mathologizing.
• 1:35:09
  [SPEAKER_04]: In March 1920, the cup pooch, a KAPP space PUTSCH.
• 1:35:15
  [SPEAKER_04]: attempted to overthrow the Vymar government, led by the Conservative politician Vurfkeng Kopp, and supported by General Valtrov on Luke Vits, right-wing paramilitary forces, the coup seized parts of Berlin and declared a new regime.
• 1:35:28
  [SPEAKER_04]: It failed, but not because democratic institutions were strong enough to crush it quickly.
• 1:35:32
  [SPEAKER_04]: It collapsed largely because of a massive general strike that brought the country to a halt, and made governing impossible.
• 1:35:38
  [SPEAKER_04]: The pushes failure didn't end the movement behind it, but it did prove how fragile the new republic was and it left behind a dangerous lesson.
• 1:35:46
  [SPEAKER_04]: Armed intimidation can reshape national politics, and would be strongman can test the limits with surprisingly little immediate consequence.
• 1:35:53
  [SPEAKER_04]: By 1921, the pattern had hardened into a rhythm, rival factions with their own marching formations,
• 1:35:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: their own street enforcers and their own appetite for humiliation and blood.
• 1:36:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: Vymar Germany's politics often spilled into fist fights, beatings, raids, and targeted attacks on ideological opponents, especially from nationalistic paramilitary networks that frame brutality as patriotism.
• 1:36:15
  [SPEAKER_04]: Incidents like the one associated with ballastat, the longed in this wider reality, where violence was not random but performative, meant to terrorize enemies and demonstrate dominance.
• 1:36:25
  [SPEAKER_04]: The result was a public sphere where order was increasingly imagined as something delivered by men in uniform or near uniform, or where the boundary began between politics and violence grew thinner by the year.
• 1:36:36
  [SPEAKER_04]: And one of the things I want you to listen for listeners in this is I just formed all of this in the years between 1918 and 1921 Hitler did not rise to power until 1933.
• 1:36:45
  [SPEAKER_04]: Now we're going to jump into red school one.
• 1:36:48
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's 2011.
• 1:36:49
  [SPEAKER_04]: After the success of Magneto Testament, which we have reviewed on the show, Greg Pack is back with another five part series carefully set in the history of Germany.
• 1:36:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: And if you've read Magneto Testament, it's a rough read, but it's very, very carefully set in the real world.
• 1:37:02
  [SPEAKER_04]: This book is called Red School in Carnot.
• 1:37:04
  [SPEAKER_04]: We're just talking about the first issue today.
• 1:37:05
  [SPEAKER_04]: The artist on this book is Miracle Colock.
• 1:37:08
  [SPEAKER_04]: The cover shows a peaceful city with an explosion rising up out of it, a cloud of smoke, deadly fire, airplanes, and the horrifying visage of the Red School over the city.
• 1:37:17
  [SPEAKER_04]: A quote, the strength of nations rests on the great men who are born to them at the right time.
• 1:37:22
  [SPEAKER_04]: By Fridrick Degroza, who was the king of Prussia from 1740 to 1786.
• 1:37:28
  [SPEAKER_04]: We open on Munich in 1923, civilians are standing in line to buy over-priced groceries 16 billion Reichsmarks for a bag of salt, accurate prices for the time.
• 1:37:37
  [SPEAKER_04]: The war has been lost in the country's struggling, and at the Munich home for a wayward boys, young Johann Schmidt is covering for his young friend, Dieter, who has hidden away a puppy to save it from the dog catchers.
• 1:37:47
  [SPEAKER_04]: The man in charge is violent with the kids.
• 1:37:49
  [SPEAKER_04]: He uses fists to enforce the rules.
• 1:37:51
  [SPEAKER_04]: In class he tells them, you are born in 1914.
• 1:37:54
  [SPEAKER_04]: The same year our great nation went to war.
• 1:37:56
  [SPEAKER_04]: A time of great hope.
• 1:37:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: You should be heroes, but instead your cowards, thieves and traders, just like the Jews and socialist who betrayed the Reich in 1918.
• 1:38:05
  [SPEAKER_04]: or maybe your communists, to each according to his need, A, let's see how you like it when you're the ones being robbed.
• 1:38:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: They're rumors of every political party forming their own armies and a mad man-child killer, Lucin Berlin.
• 1:38:18
  [SPEAKER_04]: I referenced this earlier in my synopsis.
• 1:38:20
  [SPEAKER_04]: And one day,
• 1:38:21
  [SPEAKER_04]: Johan Schmidt sees the brown shirts, the military parade for Hitler, basically, marching through the streets of Berlin.
• 1:38:28
  [SPEAKER_04]: The man there tells him, those are the trussons of Germany, men like them fought the communists in 1919 marched with cop and loot fits in 1920, beat down Ballastat in 1921.
• 1:38:39
  [SPEAKER_04]: But then violence breaks out, members of the Nazi party are killed by the police, Hitler is arrested.
• 1:38:44
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's the beer hull push of 1923, which I have discussed in a previous anecdote.
• 1:38:49
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yohan, remembering how his mother died in childbirth, goes to the local dog catcher to learn how to to kill puppies with a knife.
• 1:38:55
  [SPEAKER_04]: Let me welcome my dear friend Derek Cuntskin to the show for a rather sobering story.
• 1:39:00
  [SPEAKER_04]: Let's send him a life of a Yohan Schmidt.
• 1:39:02
  [SPEAKER_04]: Derek, hello my friend.
• 1:39:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's wonderful to see your face.
• 1:39:04
  [SPEAKER_04]: How are you and I'd love to hear some of your early thoughts on red skull number one?
• 1:39:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, great to be here.
• 1:39:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: Super happy to see you.
• 1:39:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is an amazing book.
• 1:39:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: I have to talk about the first one I ended up reading the entire mini series.
• 1:39:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think it's really good.
• 1:39:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm a fan of Greg Pack.
• 1:39:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: And the cover is incredible.
• 1:39:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: You described it, but I think people need to look it up to see it in like for real because David the highest that genius.
• 1:39:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it looks like a, looks like a war propaganda poster, it's, it's all advertising like, yeah, it's so strong.
• 1:39:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: Great, great, great, great.
• 1:39:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, no, I am, it's a weird reading experience, right, because reading about Nazis in 2026 is a different and settling experience compared to.
• 1:39:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: reading about Nazis in 2011 even.
• 1:39:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I think, you know, anybody who looks at history is also looking at the present to see where their parallels, where they're not parallels and stuff, and so obviously there's some parallels to be drawn.
• 1:40:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: I don't think you can draw perfect parallels, but yeah, it's, so I mean, there's, there's an unsettlingness to some of the history, especially one that is well researched like this.
• 1:40:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: You know, puts lines of dialogue in there that
• 1:40:15
  [SPEAKER_04]: or you could take a minute to go read the articles that look up the books, you know, there's a lot woven into this historically.
• 1:40:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's the story of a minor and anytime you're telling the story of a young person a minor it automatically brings impressions of vulnerability, right?
• 1:40:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: Even if they're bad now or they're going to be a bad later and we're seeing that vulnerability with the four knowledge that at some point, Johann is going to become evil like it's like seeing Tom
• 1:40:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: And so I think our first instinct is like, crap, he's nine.
• 1:40:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: Somebody should stop that man from beating him.
• 1:40:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: Somebody should get him in education.
• 1:40:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: Somebody should believe in him and take care of him and everything else.
• 1:40:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: But at the same time, he's got some like this comic shows some seeds that are some of the same seeds you see in Tom Riddle, I think.
• 1:41:00
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's almost like it's asking the question, you know, if society had not failed this young man, would he have turned into the monster, right?
• 1:41:11
  [SPEAKER_04]: This kid is clearly not well.
• 1:41:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: He's he's a sociopathic and killing puppies with a blade is literally where we end this story, which is a rough like whoa.
• 1:41:19
  [SPEAKER_04]: But, you know, there's parts where you almost go if history had been different, would something like this have allowed to become what it became?
• 1:41:27
  [SPEAKER_04]: Is the subtext for me and this?
• 1:41:29
  [SPEAKER_04]: Because I don't sympathize with this child.
• 1:41:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: I bet I shouldn't have.
• 1:41:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: On page four, you know how sometimes the dialogue works against the art or it works against the situation.
• 1:41:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: And there's a moment where the other kid, Dieter, is saying, he just needs somebody to give him a hand and he's talking about the puppy.
• 1:41:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: But I believe the whole page is about Johann ending in larger sense.
• 1:41:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's about Germany.
• 1:41:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's about the society.
• 1:41:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: And so I think there's there was something very thematically important being said in that moment, a bypass that he just needs somebody to give him a hand.
• 1:42:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think we're being invited to, you know, figure out what answer we think that hand looks like.
• 1:42:07
  [SPEAKER_04]: The use of color in this book is really beautiful as well.
• 1:42:09
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's a lot of deep browns, you know, yellows in the skyline.
• 1:42:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: And then the red and the way it's used in the sound effects in the swastika flags and the marches whenever there's blood spatter.
• 1:42:20
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's jarring in the way if you've seen Schindler's list.
• 1:42:23
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's black and white except that one little girl in the red coat in that one scene.
• 1:42:27
  [SPEAKER_04]: So the use of red here, I think is really, really smart.
• 1:42:30
  [SPEAKER_04]: When you line up Johann's story next to Deeders, and you watch how it plays out over these five issues, and who this kid becomes, and what he chooses to believe in, it's just rough.
• 1:42:40
  [SPEAKER_04]: Now, I summarized a lot of kind of complex history beforehand, and there's always a thousand ways to view history from, but this hotbed of kind of changing society and political factions and divides between people and increased levels of violence.
• 1:42:54
  [SPEAKER_04]: that feels very parallel to these days in a faster information era where you know everybody's feeling very affected and very overwhelmed.
• 1:43:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: You think you touched on a lot of the important points?
• 1:43:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: One of my favorite books is called The Rise and Fall of the Third Clague by Shiver, and it was written in 1960 by journalist who lived in Munich who
• 1:43:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: who then was, I think, in Paris or like, like, so any of that, he was at the number of trials.
• 1:43:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: And so that's the way my Republic excels a lot, like, you were saying, like, that because the Kaiser escaped the blame for the war, like, World War I and the Laws, that lack of a reckoning, almost, it feels in some ways, like World War II was inevitable.
• 1:43:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: like it had to happen because the forces that made World War I were not.
• 1:43:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: In some ways, I look at some of the forces that are in our world right now and I'm wondering, like, is there scope or political, if I push myself?
• 1:43:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: Is there scope for like a new political consensus like in your country and my country and you know, in some of the countries of Europe?
• 1:43:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's a direct Canadian, everybody, if you didn't know.
• 1:44:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: At some of the political dynamics, like we have Fox news here, unfortunately.
• 1:44:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I mean, some of the political dynamics are of the US are coming to Canada on our creative opposition, which used to be like a relatively sober, you know, it's becoming a lot more, you know, be like Trump sort of thing, which is is not something that we've had before.
• 1:44:21
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, we want to, I think we want to as humans believe in the goodness of people.
• 1:44:25
  [SPEAKER_04]: I think most people want to believe in the goodness of people.
• 1:44:28
  [SPEAKER_04]: And I think people are feeling very helpless right now because there's so much.
• 1:44:32
  [SPEAKER_04]: But when we're reading this history, I'm talking about these early years where there's a lot of different factions using violence and intrigue and, you know, media and finding ways to politicize causes.
• 1:44:42
  [SPEAKER_04]: And there's disagreements and there's democracy happening.
• 1:44:45
  [SPEAKER_04]: But then there's a certain point where a party takes over and every dissenting voice is silenced.
• 1:44:50
  [SPEAKER_04]: Every person who disagrees is quieted and we call that let's make it great again Right like and whether you were born in 1850 or 1911 you were deeply affected by the events of World War II Which by the way, I think most Americans struggle to even say if you say tell me what World War II was or World War I was they're like, I don't know
• 1:45:08
  [SPEAKER_04]: World War II we feel like it's easy to understand because it's us versus the Nazis, but now we're watching that around us again.
• 1:45:14
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's a difference between disagreeing voices and then every disagreeing or dissenting voice being silenced, which is the era we're falling into, although it not to the same level.
• 1:45:24
  [SPEAKER_04]: How are you getting by in 2026 so far by my friend?
• 1:45:27
  [SPEAKER_04]: We're recording this everyone in mid-January.
• 1:45:29
  [SPEAKER_04]: It'll come out in mid-March and who knows what's happened between now and then.
• 1:45:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm doing okay.
• 1:45:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm sort of trying to cover the basics and I want to be more involved, but as you know, I have a toddler.
• 1:45:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: So between the toddler and then a job and a half with the writing and everything else, I think there's there's a limit to how much I can engage and sometimes you have to say,
• 1:45:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, this is as far as I can do without sort of sinking beneath the waves myself and and that feels really crappy, right?
• 1:45:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: Because to know that you'd like to do something more, but that you don't have an extra, you know, spoon to deal with this.
• 1:46:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: And so there's there's constantly a thing of that and trying to be kind to yourself when you know you can't do more.
• 1:46:11
  [SPEAKER_04]: I could make a list of things that I'm not doing, but I also need to make a list of things I am doing.
• 1:46:16
  [SPEAKER_04]: And you and I are very similar, we're raising incredible children.
• 1:46:19
  [SPEAKER_04]: We're creating safety for community.
• 1:46:21
  [SPEAKER_04]: We're telling truth through art and writing.
• 1:46:23
  [SPEAKER_04]: We're reaching out to our loved ones.
• 1:46:24
  [SPEAKER_04]: We're voting.
• 1:46:25
  [SPEAKER_04]: We're advocating.
• 1:46:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: We're, you know, and I think we're fighting against that sense of overwhelm that so many people are dealing with.
• 1:46:33
  [SPEAKER_04]: But, you know, the news as we're recording this is the stuff in Venezuela, the threats on Greenland, the increased tariffs,
• 1:46:39
  [SPEAKER_04]: the stuff going on in Minneapolis right now.
• 1:46:42
  [SPEAKER_04]: We're so many of my loved ones are impacted.
• 1:46:44
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's just, it's a rough time right now, but the creation of joy and the creation of art remains, I think, just as crucial as any time and always.
• 1:46:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like, I'm super worried about all my friends and the people I don't know in the US.
• 1:46:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, like, I don't know how you guys are getting through with the healthcare stuff being your castle being tripled and, you know, the gun violence and, you know, people being run the street by the state,
• 1:47:09
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's like yeah, I've shared this a few times my one of my favorite comedians is Josh Johnson and I saw him do a set up in Canada a few months back and he's like Yeah, like cute he's like I was watching the news this morning and someone was so upset because like a no parking sign got put up outside Meanwhile back at home the news is like you know legless torso found in canal
• 1:47:30
  [SPEAKER_04]: But not that it's that cut and dry, but yeah, yeah, yeah, no, but we fun to be able to smile when we need to, you know, no, we're doing all right and and and as I was seeing earlier, I mean, I hope that are.
• 1:47:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, our politics stays relatively sane for, you know, a while we need that.
• 1:47:51
  [SPEAKER_04]: I adore your friendship, my friend.
• 1:47:53
  [SPEAKER_04]: We've been friends for a long time now.
• 1:47:54
  [SPEAKER_04]: We get to laugh and be silly.
• 1:47:56
  [SPEAKER_04]: We get to be serious and analytical.
• 1:47:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: And, you know, I'm grateful for any time.
• 1:48:00
  [SPEAKER_04]: We get to hang out.
• 1:48:01
  [SPEAKER_04]: Do you have any final thoughts for our listeners today?
• 1:48:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: A, I think they should go out and read red skull incarnate.
• 1:48:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: That is an amazing thing.
• 1:48:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like there was tons of little craft notes I was thinking and there were layers of symbolism and it was really good.
• 1:48:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think also just like we were both saying, find your joy but like protect yourself, like protect your own reserves and feed what makes you joyous so that you'll be able to go out and make other people joyous.
• 1:48:25
  [SPEAKER_04]: I've been giving a lot of speeches using this concept lately, but if you picture a level with the meters right at the center there's as we live in each moment there's the right amount of blank in each moment there's the right amount of anger right now too much anger is unhealthy too little angers unhealthy there's the right amount of outrage there's the right amount of grief.
• 1:48:42
  [SPEAKER_04]: there's the right amount of numbness or loss.
• 1:48:44
  [SPEAKER_04]: And I think at any given moment, those of us that you used to take care of ourselves, we have to learn how to adjust that meter.
• 1:48:49
  [SPEAKER_04]: So for some of us, it means being more informed and some a little less, for some it means crying a little harder and for some it means getting back up.
• 1:48:55
  [SPEAKER_04]: And that changes for moment to moment as we're going through all this.
• 1:48:58
  [SPEAKER_04]: So take care of yourselves out there, everybody.
• 1:48:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: So many conversations.
• 1:49:01
  [SPEAKER_04]: I think are also helpful as we learn from history and try to figure out how to get through this world.
• 1:49:06
  [SPEAKER_04]: Because, you know, tomorrow is the future today's right now.
• 1:49:09
  [SPEAKER_04]: That's all we got ever.
• 1:49:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: Thanks for your friendship Eric.
• 1:49:11
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's great to see you.
• 1:49:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: Okay, bye everybody.
• 1:49:14
  [SPEAKER_04]: Take care of yourselves.
• 1:49:14
  [SPEAKER_04]: We'll see you back here next week on Grimm welcome later.