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Dutch Notes #2: “Going Dutch” 1×02: “Tanks for Nothing”

Posted on by Alex Daily

Yesterday was Friday, which means the day before was Thursday, which means another evening of Fox’s dreary Thursday comedy line-up has aired. Animal Control had an A-plot about Joel McHale being kindly asked not to bone a rich lady but doing it anyway, and a B-plot about Ravi Patel getting asked to throw the first pitch at a baseball game but getting upstaged by his lady coworker.

And then, this week’s Going Dutch. Joe Morton visits the base to insult Denis Leary by tasking him with guiding traffic during a tank exercise. To prove he can still get his dick hard he’s still in his prime, Denis Leary decides to steal one of the tanks. In the B-plot, to prove she’s better than him, so does the base’s other commander, his daughter.

Dutch Notes

  • The tank exercise is in “rural Germany,” to see which tanks need to be replaced. Which means this episode is almost entirely set in unspecific fields, because it’s only episode two and I guess we’ve already run out of material on half the premise.
  • And yet.
  • “I met this Dutch weirdo named Baas smoking hookah at a art gallery showing.” I’m gonna blame the subtitles for this one, but “Baas” means “Boss,” it’s not a normal Dutch name, you’re thinking of “Bas,” which is usually short for “Sebastiaan.” Not everyone smokes weed, which is what I assume she means when she says “hookah,” not an actual hookah pipe, because that would be ridiculous, and we’re actually pretty strict about not fucking smoking indoors. Yes, even weed. Later, there are “Baas Baby” jokes.
  • In exchange for helping The Daughter with her own tank heist, “Baas” wants “an immersive experience of American excess.” This, to The Daughter, means throwing a party Danny Pudi describes as “an eighth-grade graduation party at Mar-a-Lago.” Solid joke about how corny the American aesthetic defaults to. This includes the following things:
    • Many American flags and stars, red, white, and blue balloons.
    • A popcorn stand.
    • A statue of a cowboy wearing American flag shades.
    • A statue of an astronaut wearing an American flag top hat. Behind him, a Warhol-style print of four Statues of Liberty.
    • An arcade-style basketball hoop game.
    • Towers of hot dogs and hamburgers.
    • A statue of the Statue of Liberty.
    • A mid Hulk Hogan impersonator.
      • The celebrity impersonator, a classic symbol of the American disease. They crave proximity to fame and fortune, but finding themselves unable to access these things, surround themselves with cheap, bad, frequently tasteless copies of them.
    • Jan doing “improv comedy,” a mean-spirited mime-adjacent act.
  • “Baas” is played by American actor Lolu Ajayi, who is actually based in the Netherlands, shows up in actual Dutch things sometimes, and does, apparently, actually speak Dutch. He never does here, though. His accent speaking English is more Anglo.
  • There’s Catherine Tate again, dressed in a more sensible velvet purple jacket this time. An exchange with Leary. Him: “You’re more blunt than I remember.” Her: “Not blunt. Just Dutch. We believe politeness is deceit.” This idea that we’re… direct to the point of coming across as rude is… Hm. A few layers to this.
    • One, Americans, a lot of Dutch people are just being rude to you. A lot of us are dicks.
    • Two, we are totally capable of being direct and no-nonsense without being or sounding rude.
    • Three, many American cultures are so much about being polite, because you care so much more about how you’re perceived than you do about being useful. This makes some of you fucking impossible to communicate with. Compared to some of your Nice cultures, your Polite cultures, just saying something straight up sounds direct and rude to you only because your culture has driven you incapable of being fucking normal about anything.
      • I had an American teacher once, and this man, you could have shit on your face for the entire class and at the end he might politely tell the whole room we should all consider washing our faces some more going forward, but not in a million years would this man tell you you had shit on your face.
  • Tate: “When I was studying for my PhD, I took a job as a long hauler.” She’d say “trucker,” I think. “I’d listen to the required reading on audiobook.” I feel like Dutch textbooks are not as easily accessible as audiobooks as American ones might be, but maybe I’m just looking for nits to pick.
  • Tate: “Most of the soldiers in Stroopsdorf are flapdrols.” She will never pronounce a Dutch word correctly. “It best translates as useless turds.” I guess.
  • More jokes about sex work. See last week’s post.
  • You can tell this Irish street is a Dutch street because of the inaccurate parking sign, the illegally covered sign below it, the bakfiets, and the building that says… something “PRESS” on it.
  • The house depicted there is what Leary thinks is Tate’s brothel, but is actually, quote, “a charity office offering social and immigration services to sex workers.” Does that exist? I confess I’m out of my depth on that one.
    • Inside: We hear the first actual spoken Dutch, fragments of “even een afspraak met je maken,” en “fijne avond.”
    • Some signage: Most of it hard to make out, but what I can read tracks fine. Machine translation is pretty okay now. “031 099 989 7200” is not a Dutch phone number at all, though.

Sigh. Okay. (Begging this show to hire me as its Dutch consultant.)

Bonus section:

  • One thing I didn’t mention last time: The grounds of the base feature a prominent windmill. Not a real one, a decorative one, not unlike something you’d see at a miniature golf course. I sigh every time I see it.

Dutch Notes on FOX sitcom “Going Dutch” 1×01: “Pilot”

Posted on by Alex Daily

I’m about to describe to you a real American sitcom. It’s not made up, it’s not a bit. It’s a real show that airs on FOX on the same day as Animal Control, another show you don’t watch.

In Going Dutch, Denis Leary plays an American Army colonel who gets reassigned not, as he expected, to a prestigious posting as head of an American military base in Germany, but to the much worse base in “Stroopsdorf” in the Netherlands. Danny Pudi plays his assistant.

Classic fish out of water stuff, off the top of your head I’m sure you could come up with a pitch for an episode based just on that description and I’m sure it’s already on showrunner Joel Church-Cooper’s whiteboard somewhere.

Here’s the problem: American media never gets the Netherlands right. But: I am Dutch and thus uniquely1For a definition of “unique” that covers just under 18 million people. qualified to provide some notes on what they did and did not get right in their depiction of my country.

Let’s just get into it.

  • “Stroopsdorf” is nonsense. “Stroop” they just got from the one Dutch word Americans know (“stroopwafel,”) and “-dorf” is a German suffix that means village that does not exist in this country at all. I would’ve accepted “Stroopdorp,” but it’s still lazy.An establishing shot of the Army base.
  • This base doesn’t feel like Dutch architecture. It feels, I wanna say, Irish? I bet that’s where they filmed it, a real US Army base in Ireland.
  • The Leary character is very against bikes for some reason. He lumps it in with the base’s general sort of, slacker vibe, I think, but it’s genuinely baffling to me what he has against the bikes specifically. You can just be normal about a sensible way to get about, you don’t have to be an American about it.
  • This base has a “fromagerie,” where they make all sorts of cheese. You’ll note that “fromagerie” is a French word. “Cheese is what Stroopsdorf is known for,” the woman giving them the tour tells them. We learn from a sign they make ricotta, chevre, pecorino, burrata, and feta cheese, amongst other things. No Dutch cheese is ever named, though large wheels of cheese are littered about the place. I don’t think ricotta comes in wheels, fellas.
  • “Sir, why would we need an Apple Store… when we have a Teen Center!” Solid joke about how dumb America is, how ineffective its bureaucracy. People occupying the Teen Center include about dozen adult soldiers and a man identified as “a small-time gigolo” who turns out have an incredibly thick fake German accent. Sounds nothing like a Dutch person speaking English.
  • We are simply not this into bowling.
  • The Teen Center has some posters that read, “Learn how to speak Dutch, for beginners.” This show will fail the test these posters establish.
  • “Keep those knees high! High! Higher than you heathens get on a 48-hour leave to Amsterdam.” Mandatory drugs joke about Amsterdam specifically. Cannabis and related products are relatively easily accessible around the country, not just in Amsterdam, and maybe 1% of the country consumes any on the regular.
  • The military operation Leary is here just in time to interrupt is, his daughter has organised a bunch of the soldiers to march in, you guessed it, the local Tulip Festival parade. We are simply not this into tulips. The average American thinks of us and thinks tulips, but the average Dutch person simply does not spend this much time thinking about tulips.
  • This fucking tulip festival. I’ll concede that I don’t know yet where Stroopsdorf is meant to be, so this could plausibly be Limburg or somewhere else down south, but this town does not feel in any way like the Netherlands I know.
    • “Mann Licht” night club. Should be “Maanlicht,” but also, the Stroopsdorf Hotel just looks like a little Irish village hotel, how is there a nightclub in there.
    • Far too much orange. Orange doesn’t really come up as much as you’d think, outside of Koningsdag and soccer games.
    • Flower-based events do exist, but they’re mostly pretty no-nonsense things about buying flowers. You go into the town square and you buy flowers. That’s really the extent of it. Why the fuck would there be an American-style parade with any kind of military involved.
    • Why would there be a big speech from an American colonel who just got here. There might be a little speech from like the mayor? This is nonsense.
  • Catherine Tate is here to play another Dutch person, a Katja Vanderhoff. A more plausible name than “Stroopsdorf,” but still clearly written by an American. Her accent is slightly better, but implausibly she’s the town’s head of the Chamber of Commerce. Look, we do have something that literally translates to that, the Kamer van Koophandel, but as far as I know they don’t really get involved in the day-to-day operations of business or organising parades that involve the American military for some reason, the KvK is just a legal body in charge of registering companies and providing them with information and mostly legal services. To present her as something on the level of, say, a Mayor is an American idea. She’s dressed like a 1980s American’s idea of a traditionally-dressed German person.
  • She also owns the local brothel. I’ll let that one just sit here.
    • Actually, I won’t. Sex work is legitimate work, and the Netherlands has more protections for performing that work than a lot of places, but the practice of it is still considered by mainstream politics and general national values somewhat of a nuisance. The “head of the Chamber of Commerce,” if that was a real thing it made sense for this character to be, or, like, the Mayor, would not “own the local brothel.” That would be an insane thing to happen. (Also, brothels do exist here, but most sex workers are freelancers who rent individual rooms, I don’t think you really have “the owner of the local brothel” in that way here, again, a very American idea.)
  • The “gigolo” from earlier returns as Jan, the translator for the colonel’s big speech. “Doesn’t everyone speak English?” “Sure, but I also translate social cues.” Not a thing at all. Everyone speaks English. Jan, too, is dressed like an American cartoon of a German man from the Middle Ages. One imagines he yodels. (He never translates a fucking thing.)
  • People here would not cheer for this random American man who thinks he’s so important. There would be a patient, reluctant withholding of reaction until he actually does something worth applauding.
  • I get the soldiers carry the wheels of cheese because the base has the fromagerie. But visually this is complete nonsense.
  • Also why do they do the parade in this narrow Irish side passage.
  • Why is their laundry service there to breakdance.
  • Why is their bowling thing here.
  • Why is this the start of the parade.
  • Some of the extras they sort of get right, but as soon as somebody has a line, they look… Swiss.
  • “It’s better than being from a country that legalised drugs and ratted out Anne Frank.” First of all, sigh, Anne Frank joke, second, though there are a few plausible theories for who actually “ratted them out,” it was probably an individual acting out of either malice or self-preservation — to blame the country as a whole when we were in the middle of an active occupation by Germany is, frankly, fucking insulting. The scene does go on to have the crowd also react negatively to this statement, but this show does not actually seem to understand exactly why we might feel insulted by this.
    • He’s throwing a tantrum, yes, but this is how this character talks about everything.
  • At a restaurant, the table is covered in Delfts blauw, and there are bitterballen on the table before anyone’s even ordered anything. The Leary character throws another tantrum and yells a slur a few times.
  • The credits confirm they filmed this in Ireland.

In conclusion: I’m in Hell. This nonsense was created to torture me. Some of the most singularly American-brained nonsense I’ve ever seen.

Bonus sections:

  • Tulip counter: ∞
    • One in the show’s logo.
    • At least four big plastic ones in the grounds of the base.
    • Pudi calls a man “tulips.”
    • I had this at 6, and then the Tulip Festival overloaded the counter. Ding ding ding.
  • Bike counter: 13, plus loads in the background.
    • One soldier cycles past Leary and Pudi and waves at them. This is considered weird.
    • Seconds later, another soldier walks past them with his bike. He is described as a “fat hippie on a bike.” When he returns later in the scene, the mere act of approaching Leary on his bicycle is portrayed as an act of aggression.
    • When informing the soldiers the base has won an award for “installation excellence,” which, sure, that’s probably a thing, they are also told the base has used the award money, which, sure, that’s probably a thing, to “purchase state-of-the-art equipment to improve our cardiovascular health and emotional wellbeing.” A cyclist rolls past as this is announced.
    • After the first act commercial break, the establishing shot for the next scene features a soldier riding past on a bike.
    • Another establishing shot features bike racks with eight regular bikes and one bakfiets visible.
  • 1
    For a definition of “unique” that covers just under 18 million people.

Movie Review: “Mufasa: The Lion King” (2024)

Posted on by Alex Daily

Was expecting this to be bad, was not expecting this to be this tragically prequel-brained.

I do try not to fall into the same old conversation about these “live-action” Disney remakes and their followups, right, but, like, fuck, man. Consistently they’re worse, duller versions of all-time classics that cost all the money in the world to make and have nothing to say.

What does the director of Moonlight think his take on this world is? What does Barry Jenkins think he’s adding to the history of these stories?

Sigh. What’s good about this one is what’s always good about these, what’s bad about this one is what’s always bad about these.

But like. As an artist, I try not to ask art to justify itself — art inherently has value just for being made, just for you having made it — but when it costs half a quarter billion dollars to make, I don’t think it’s unfair to ask it to have a reason to exist.

Though I suppose at half a quarter billion dollars, from this company, it can’t afford to have something to say because it needs to appeal to literally everyone and their cat to be worth making… So imagine if it actually had something to say. The thought is genuinely unfathomable.

Any time Timon and Pumbaa aren’t on screen having a fight for their lives with the fourth wall, I’m sat here asking, where are Timon and Pumbaa?

Since Disney didn’t fucking bother making 2024’s Mufasa: The Lion King a new movie, either, my review is entirely compiled of bits from my previous reviews of modern Disney remakes. Also on Letterboxd.

Movie Review: “Kraven the Hunter” (2024)

Posted on by Alex Daily

This is a slightly expanded, lightly edited version of my review (Letterboxd, Mastodon) from right after I saw it last night.

Is 2024’s Kraven the Hunter good? No. Because these movies never are. Of course it’s not good.

Think about what this is for a second. 2024’s Kraven the Hunter is a Sony-made Marvel movie about the guy who hunts Spider-Man… that don’t got Spider-Man in it. Exactly like how Madame Web just aggressively didn’t have Spider-Man in it, just like how Venom and Morbius didn’t have Spider-Man in them. You already know what this movie is. To ask anything different of it is like expecting the weird store-brand M&Ms that are a little too sweet to change.

“Sony’s Universe of Marvel Characters,” the SUMC, was, in the end, for that’s the terms in which we can talk about it now that we’ve been told it’s over, always a cinematic universe desperately searching for a Spider-Man, and it just never found him. It had Venom, who looked weirdly like Spider-Man’s black suit for no apparent reason, it had Spider-Man’s mum and Spider-Man’s uncle, and a guy who looked like if Spider-Man had an emo phase. And now it has Kraven the Hunter, who, I’m not kidding, gets bit, injected with modified animal fluids in the process, gets powers from that, learns lessons about what to do with power from a father figure, and then stalks around the world with spider-like moves. It’s not subtle. He crawls, as they say, walls.

But it never actually found a Spider-Man.

Outside of the fluke of the first Venom, these movies never really did numbers. When Sony got trolled into rereleasing Morbius it might actually, somehow, have done negative numbers. I found a lot of joy in the gonzo madness of the first Venom, and I’ll defend all three of those as fun rides, but these movies, they were never really for anyone. Nobody was jonesing for a movie about the guy whose one good story fundamentally has to have Spider-Man in it without Spider-Man in it. Maybe there’s a subreddit out there somewhere where they lose their minds over these, I don’t know.

Everyone, to get back to the movie, kind of understands the assignment. Which I think was probably… to make a bad movie. There’s fun bits. A good fight, a good chase. The CGI occasionally makes Kraven feel weightless in the world, and characters regularly teleport or know things they shouldn’t, but I liked several of the action sequences, and though it never actually intentionally managed to make me laugh, occasionally a body got flung around in a slapsticky way that got me. The closest comparison might be to the kind of generic action movies we see at Sneak Preview sometimes.

2024’s Kraven the Hunter marks the end of this particular side story. The end, fin, of a franchise that always felt like it was made to please the executives of another universe, one where not Iron Man but Daredevil and Elektra were the breakout superhero hits of the 00s.

So long to the SUMC. It never made sense in this universe.

But fuck, I really think I’ll kinda fucking miss it.

Thinking back on Annie Forever

Posted on by Alex Daily

Just a quick little retrospective to mark the changing of the seasons, as it were.

Annie Forever ended on September 2nd, 2024, after 82 unmissed daily updates. That’s a pretty good score for me these days. All strips are and will continue to be available online for as long as possible, but they’re also available in the form of a neat little packaged PDF/CBZ ebook that you can buy for €5 on Gumroad whenever you want, to keep forever, even if syndicate lawyers get mad at me even though Annie is in the public domain and I’m definitely allowed to do this. Oodles of bonus features include commentary on every strip, analysis, some insight into the origin of the Knife and Dime, and into my process.

Here are some things I learned doing Annie Forever.

  • This is the first webcomics project I’ve started and finished exactly according to plan in my adult life. Everything else has just sort of fizzled out, even things that ran for hundreds of strips. Turns out: It feels very good to actually finish something, and that’s a high I would like to keep chasing.
  • Updating regularly was, honestly, really good for my brain. Getting up at 7am to move the image and the newspost to the right folder first thing every morning isn’t a huge activity, but it fully activated me every morning in a way nothing else does.
  • Several readers indicated that they felt like they were missing something not being familiar with the original comic strip. I assumed a slightly broader reader familiarity with Annie from other media, and part of my style at this point, I think, is to imply a wider world, a bigger story, which I do in Annie Forever by suggesting a bad bridge-burning occurred between Annie and Oliver Warbucks some time before Annie Forever, and I also failed to communicate that it was meant to feel like you’ve just… started reading and keeping up with a strip in the newspaper one day, with no meaningful way to read anything back.
    Anyway, I trust my readers can generally keep up, and if they trust me as a cartoonist at all, I hope they trust I’ll tell them about additional context they might want or need.
  • My comics production speed was always just under seven strips a week. I could easily produce two or, on a good day, even three black-and-white strips, but then life would get in the way and/or the full-colour Sunday strip would slow me down again. With time I could’ve got to a good point with that, but if I’m ever gonna do this kind of daily schedule again, I’d probably have to make a change somewhere — no Sunday, black-and-white Sunday, maybe hire a colourist for the Sunday, something would have to change about the Sunday. But my next project is pages instead of strips, probably two a week at first, so the point is moot for now, anyway.
  • That next project will not be Annie Forever, but I deliberately called the book “volume one” and I do now know what happens to Annie next. Annie WILL return.

I’ve had almost a month off now, and I miss updating regularly a lot, so I’ll just say: We’re closer to new comics than we are to Annie Forever ending.

Notes on a Multiverse #2: “You ever see that really old movie?” (“Spider-Mania”)

Posted on by Alex Daily

These stories weave through our lives like, well, webs around criminals or flies. We relate to them in different ways on different days. This summer, all eight Spider-Man movies were rereleased to cinemas.

Sunday, June 16th, 2024. We go see 2002’s Spider-Man. Having been on a few field trips with a high school class I student taught, I relate to Peter’s teacher more than I do to Peter. These kids should be more upfront with each other. And less noisy during the Oscorp employee’s presentation, yeesh.

On Thursday I practiced my final presentation, and after the movie we walked through the graduation show. I did this two years ago, and I am, in a way, transported right back there, but I already have the credits for the art bit, so I don’t have to this go around. I don’t miss it — the ideal form for my work is a website or a book, not a wall. I find myself wondering if Stan or Steve would be able to relate.1Stan, no, Steve, probably, but you try getting it out of them from behind their personalities.

It rains the whole way to the cinema, and then the whole way back.

Tuesday, June 18th, 2024. 2004’s Spider-Man 2. We go see 2004’s Spider-Man 2. On Thursday I’m giving my final presentation, so I relate to Otto, who knows he has something, but may or may not come across like Charlie from Always Sunny going the full Pepe Silvia. I relate to Harry, who feels like he’s going insane knowing what is to him a truth.

I realise everyone in these movies has the same arc; where the story is Man vs Monster, the emotional core for everyone is Man vs Self — they all have to be different versions of themselves to reconcile their inner turmoil and become their true selves. If the final presentation is the Monster to slay, was the course as a whole the Self?

Sunday, June 23rd, 2024. We took a break because I had to give my final presentation, successfully wrapping up a 2-year bachelor’s degree in art education with good grades, but we’re back, and go see 2007’s Spider-Man 3.

This morning I threw out my back again. I relate to Pete’s back issues from the last one, and to his being surrounded by way too many villains trying to kill him at once. I relate to Dr Conners never having to be the Lizard. In the Dark Pete segment, where he dances through the streets of New York, I relate to the folks it does kinda work for, actually. I wish I could be timeless like these people.

It’s getting sunnier again. It’ll be 26°C out when I get my diploma. I should get some… hand fans.

Sunday, June 30th, 2024. On Thursday I graduated with good grades. There was a speech. My legal name is late in the alphabet but they went in random order and I got to go first, which was: Nice. On Saturday, after #TARDISclub, we drove to my parents’ house for dinner in my brother’s new, first car.

And then on Sunday, we saw 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man and 2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2.

In my Letterboxd reviews, I defend these movies — I think, removed from the immediacy of, oh, this is what Spider-Man movies are now, they’re good! They’re fun! They mostly work! We’ve been too harsh on them! But sitting down to write this the day after, I realise I don’t relate to them like I did the Raimi ones. Maybe it’s that they’re young people with young problems, and the people who I might relate to more get to sit these one out on the sidelines. Or maybe it’s what the first one explicitly says is the film’s main theme — the question “Who am I?”

Because where that’s something Pete struggles with… I’ve always known exactly who I am.

And that, unfortunately is where this entry has to end. We saw the MCU Spider-Man movies on Thursday, July 11th, Sunday, July 14th, and Wednesday, July 17th, 2024, but I just don’t connect to them in the same way. They diverge from my life a little, but they’re also not really… about anything.

Those movies are about Spider-Man being in the MCU now and, try as I might, I’m not in the MCU, am I.

Have any of you read the new Ultimate Spider-Man? He has a wife and kids and a job. I don’t have any of those things but I relate to him far more than I do the Pete of the MCU.

Time to move on. Such is life.

Earths encountered

  • Earth-One and its various off-shoots, where the ’92 X-Men live.
  • Earth-Two, where the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man lives.
  • Earth-Three, where the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man lives.
  • Earth-Four, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where the Tom Holland Spider-Man lives.

The oldest draft of this post is dated May 16, 2024. It was written one section at a time between June 17 and June 30, and then got a postscript on September 24, 2024.

  • 1
    Stan, no, Steve, probably, but you try getting it out of them from behind their personalities.

Weird Soda Review: Oreo-flavoured Coke Zero

Posted on by Alex Daily

Rest assured that when I saw these in the soda aisle I immediately alerted every relevant authority, by which I mean Mastodon, David, and the family group chat.

Several cans of Limited Edition Oreo Coke Zero in a supermarket display. The can has a black and white design on it of circular Oreo-like shapes stacked to resemble a Coke bottle. They're 79 cents a can.

The Expectation

What I’m expecting is a take on a vanilla-flavoured cola, something in the cream soda zone, but with Vanilla Coke Zero literally easily available for sale right next to it, I can’t quite picture what will distinguish this from it. The can says it’s “fizzy cookie” flavoured (fizzy “cookie” flavoured?) so presumably the dark biscuit taste of the Oreo comes through in some way.

The Nose

Open, let settle, sniff. Hm. There’s a lightness in the aroma that means I might be close with my vanilla/cream expectation. There’s something else there that I can’t quite identify.

The Taste

Pour, let settle, sniff again. No new information. Let’s sip this thing.

Oh, this is really subtle. Sip. No vanilla or cream flavour, really. Sip. No, there’s some of it in here, but not a lot, it’s, somehow, mostly the cookie. Sip. They’ve somehow translated the dark Oreo cookie to the dark soda. Pour some more. Take a bigger sip, hold it in the mouth for a bit. This is weirdly subtle.

The aftertaste is reminiscent of a sweet chocolate, no, not even the aftertaste, the afterfeel, the way it coats the mouth. Yeah, now that it’s settling, what this is a lightly chocolate-flavoured cola.

Conclusion

It’s like somebody left a pile of just the cookie part of the Oreo at the bottom of a vat of cola syrup and then pretended they meant to do that. It’s not bad, it’s just not what I was expecting. I’m not sure I’ll buy these again, because they’re so subtle — I’d rather just buy some Vanilla Coke Zero.

I’m a big fan of these Creations-branded experimental flavours, and I’m glad they’ve figured out a way to do a really nuanced one after a few pretty unsubtle fruity ones.

Notes on a Multiverse #1: “Something Different In Your Genes” (1992’s “X-Men”: Season 1)

Posted on by Alex Daily

I’ve been looking for a way into a big MCU rewatch for some time now. I think I’ve found it — for a long time the thought was, real, proper essays, real, formal writing. Really sit down and write a psychochronography in spandex. But I’m not an essayist, I’m not that kind of writer, not really.1Obviously I do excel in the form when asked to do it, but let’s be honest with ourselves. I’m a cartoonist, I write adventure stories meant to be read in three to seven panels a day. I suppose I’m also: A blogger.

And so I’m gonna blog through it, with a series of pre-written, scheduled blogs inspired by this rewatch. Let’s kick that off with a big idea, a concept adjacent to the idea of canon that I’d like to lay out for you.2If this were an essay I might write up a short history of the idea of canon, shared universes, and my relationship to these ideas. But it’s not an essay! Blogs, baby! My assumed audience here already knows about this stuff!

You’ve heard about canon, now get ready for — Psychocanon.

These are the stories of the Zeitgeist, the stories we’re thinking of, and the other stories the people telling us stories want us to be thinking about.

Psychocanon exists at both a macro and a micro level, an entire franchise can have a psychocanon that overlaps with but does not encompass all of what a single, granular instalment of it has floating around it.

The ’92 X-Men cartoon gets so vigorously invoked by every brief appearance of the X-Men in the MCU now that they’re finally allowed to show up that it’s clearly psychocanonical to the MCU — Disney/Marvel Studios want you to be thinking of it every time the theme tune whispers into your ears, they want you to think of it when Charles Xavier shows up in a ’92-style wheelchair, his ’92-style costume, down to the tie. They’re invoking it at least as much as they are the Fox X-Men movies. They’ve also now just straight up brought it back with X-Men ’97.

On the other hand, take something like the Netflix Marvel shows — clearly nobody making Daredevil really wanted you to be thinking about Agents of SHIELD or Agent Carter, or even Guardians of the Galaxy or Ant-Man. When you’re watching those Netflix shows, they’re in their own little bubble — nothing, except maybe the vague idea that there are Avengers out there somewhere, is truly psychocanonical to them. But in the other direction, they are, by their inclusion of characters from Daredevil, psychocanonical to Spider-Man: No Way Home, Hawkeye, She-Hulk, etcetera. And you can pretend all you like, but clearly Helstrom isn’t psychocanonical to anything at all. 3I haven’t even heard a good case for it being the regular ol’ kind of canonical, frankly. Hi Ti.

A rewatch of the MCU psychocanon would include all the movies, including the Sony and Fox ones, all the Disney+ shows, and Green Lantern, the ’92 X-Men but not more than the first few seasons of Agents of SHIELD, and for all that it’s nice to see Jarvis pop up in Endgame, not Agent Carter, either, not really.4If Agent Carter is in it’s because of Agents of SHIELD, not because of any of the movies. Inhumans? Doesn’t exist. The Princess Bride? A keystone.

For a Doctor Who example: The original Toymaker story is clearly psychocanonical to Doctor Who 60th anniversary special The Giggle, they show clips of it as a flashback, but The Nightmare Fair and Solitaire clearly aren’t — the whole story of The Giggle is that we’re watching the second round of a best of three. Neither, for all that the specials go out of their way to remind you of the Flux and other major elements from the Chibnall era, is The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos. Nothing that happens in that one matters to the specials, it just doesn’t. The same is true for The Krotons and Planet of Evil and the caveman bits of An Unearthly Child and hundreds of other stories — though Ranskoor av Kolos is clearly just not sticking around in the zeitgeist the way the larger story of Dr Who being adopted is.

Let’s chuck in a second and related idea: Historia.5I’m open to a better word for this idea — the one on the original post-it is “chronicanon,” but that’s clunky, awkward.

Where a canon cares about which stories count, and psychocanon cares about what those stories want you to be thinking about, a historia is concerned with the story of something.

No list of which Doctor Who stories “count” would include the Peter Cushing films, or Scream of the Shalka6This is how you can tell I wrote this in May., or The Curse of Fatal Death. But if you’re interested not in “watching all of Doctor Who” but in a broader “story of Doctor Who,” these are crucial chapters of that story — the show itself doesn’t capture Dalekmania, most Dalek stories aren’t even that good, but the Daleks were big enough in the culture that they were the main draw of two blockbuster films, Scream of the Shalka was “new Doctor Who” a year and a half before Rose was, and the entire Moffat era is to The Curse of Fatal Death as, in the words of Douglas Adams, “the whole of creation—every Galaxy, every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition, and their economic and social history” is to “one small piece of fairy cake.”

So what’s “the story of the MCU,” what’s its historia? As I write this, on 5 May, 2024, I haven’t really laid down a roadmap for it yet. I will, and it’ll be the subject of a future post, but I haven’t done it yet. But I know where it starts.

Now, you could go further back than I do. Just writing this, I’ve realised there’s at least one thing I should cover from before where I’ve started. There’s nothing stopping you saying, the historia of the MCU starts at the first performed adaptation of a Marvel comic — the 1944 Captain America serial, where Captain America is a District Attorney called Grant Gardner. Nothing in the MCU, no real part of it, really builds on it, but you could probably make the argument for it.

But the argument I’d like to make is this, and I’m gonna keep this simple. It’s March 1990. Having championed the otherwise unsuccessful Pryde of the X-Men pilot, Margaret Loesch, the head of Fox Children’s Network, commissions thirteen episodes of an X-Men cartoon. It does very well, and inspired by its success, Lauren Schuler Donner at 20th Century Fox buys the film rights, and finally, after decades of various attempts by various studios and filmmakers that all ended in development hell, brings the X-Men to the big screen with 2000’s X-Men. The success of that film convinces Sony the Spider-Man concept can carry a film, which it does, in 2002, after Sony buys the rights for a mere $7 million. The success of these films together — and the… different amount of success enjoyed by films like Hulk and Daredevil — is why Avi Arad goes to Marvel and says, let’s do this properly.

So how does a multiverse start? How does a… good multiverse start? Hell, how do you start a universe. Just a regular one seems to be hard to do on purpose. So how does a multiverse start? Definitely not in a board room that sets out to start a multiverse. That can only lead to disaster. It’s more likely to start by accident. For someone to make one thing that… mutates into another thing. Maybe, just maybe… It starts with a girl’s foster parents calling the authorities on her, and with her wondering how she, dressed the most like a main character anyone has ever dressed, could be so different as to warrant it. Maybe, just maybe… It starts with mutants.

(Thanks, Margaret.)

Earths encountered:

  • Earth-One — The X-Men ’92 home universe.
    • Earth-One-A — Days of Future Past ’92 — X-Men ’92’s Bishop’s home timeline.7Though the Days of Future Past future is usually presented as the future of the universe it’s related to, the story of Days of Future Past is the story of making sure the events we see depicted never happen.
      • Earth-One-A-A — The one Bishop creates by going back to Earth-One from Earth-One-A and saving Senator Kelly, in which Senator Kelly then gets kidnapped, anyway.
        • Earth-One-A-A-A — Only implied so far, Cable’s home timeline, the one Bishop creates by trying again from Earth-One-A-A.

The earliest draft of this post is dated March 8, 2024. 56 words of that first draft have made it to this final 1465-word blog post. It was finished on May 5, 2024, with a final round of edits to prepare it for publication on July 20, 2024.

  • 1
    Obviously I do excel in the form when asked to do it, but let’s be honest with ourselves.
  • 2
    If this were an essay I might write up a short history of the idea of canon, shared universes, and my relationship to these ideas. But it’s not an essay! Blogs, baby! My assumed audience here already knows about this stuff!
  • 3
    I haven’t even heard a good case for it being the regular ol’ kind of canonical, frankly. Hi Ti.
  • 4
    If Agent Carter is in it’s because of Agents of SHIELD, not because of any of the movies.
  • 5
    I’m open to a better word for this idea — the one on the original post-it is “chronicanon,” but that’s clunky, awkward.
  • 6
    This is how you can tell I wrote this in May.
  • 7
    Though the Days of Future Past future is usually presented as the future of the universe it’s related to, the story of Days of Future Past is the story of making sure the events we see depicted never happen.

I’ve adopted an orphan.

Posted on by Alex Daily

And she’s about to celebrate her 100th birthday.

Two panels from Annie Forever. In the first, a silhouetted figure with a beard and hat is hiding from Annie on stairs. In the second, she's chasing the silhouetted figure through a room with computers in it.
You and the comic you know I’ve been drawing for like a year without posting it.

That’s right — my next comics project is a 100th anniversary tale for Annie, of Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie, the earliest years of which are in the public domain. The strip is called Annie Forever, and is set to run from June 13th to August 5th — from the fourteenth anniversary of the strip’s final instalment to the hundredth of its first. (It’s likely to run a little longer.)

If all you know Annie from is various versions of her musical, you might be surprised to learn that I feel strongly that Annie is one of comics’ great adventure characters — she’s plucky, she’s funny, she has a mean streak, and can do whatever she sets her mind to — but I also feel strongly that more modern incarnations of the strip, as well as the various versions of the musical, have largely wasted that aspect of her character. By the end of her own strip she’s a supporting character to more typical heroic leads, in her musical she’s precocious, a little kid. Though I can’t legally reference these versions, I am playing off them — Annie Forever is my attempt to transition her back to a place from which she could have another century of adventures… in which she‘s in charge.

You can find the first strip at annie.alexdaily.nl today — and then a new one every day starting tomorrow, on the 14th. I update after breakfast.

About Alex Daily

Alex Daily is a licensed cartoonist who’s about to graduate a bachelor’s degree in art education with good grades. Their previous work includes Noirtown, UNEND, and Aquila the Last Eagle, but their most-seen work is probably a logo for an American middle school you’ve never heard of. They long to return to the sea after centuries of exile.

About the public domain

I swear to breakfast I’m pretty confident this is completely legal, dear the syndicate please don’t sue me.

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