5 comic book movies Rza could make not connected to Marvel or DC

By geek swag

1. Wild C.A.T.S.- a superhero team created by jim lee for image comics

Book Review: "The Knight Life: Chivalry Ain't Dead" by Keith Knight

The Knight Life: Chivalry Ain't Dead by Keith Knight

Reviewed by A. Jarrell Hayes

Life’s funny. It takes a keen eye to pick up some of the less obvious humor. It takes a sharp pen to sketch out scenes of life’s irony in a comic strip. In The Knight Life: Chivalry Ain’t Dead, the comic strip’s creator Keith Knight demonstrates that he possesses both a keen eye and a sharp pen.

In The Knight Life strips, Knight uses his wife, family, and neighbors to poke fun at cultural differences, racism, phobias, and other topics that aren’t funny by themselves. But Knight creates an interesting cast of characters surrounded the central figure, Keith Knight. Keith is often the outsider and gets placed in adventurous and perhaps precarious situations because of the people associated with him.

Keith’s wife, Kerstin, is German and has an intense fear of spiders and clowns, and suffers from an overactive imagination concerning them. Gunther is Keith’s friend and is a sucker for punishment and finds himself either manipulated into cross-dressing or undergoing some torturous atrocity, like getting his hands chopped off while auditioning to work as a street sign spinner.

Probably one of the best characters is Dexter, a gangsta rap artist whose record label faked his death in order to boost his album sales (that’s a loaded bio). Dexter walks around in a black hoodie and bullies Keith into participating in his schemes: such as having Keith illustrate Dexter’s inappropriate children’s book or combine his bully camp with Keith’s cartoonist camp. Dexter’s relationship with his brainiac son reminds us that children can be more mature than their parents.

The Knight Life is a product of its times, with the motifs of unemployment, bad economy, and government budget cutbacks of essential programs dominating the strip – including the school system cutting the letter K from the alphabet (much to Keith’s obvious dismay). Knight sprinkles in a few scenes of President Obama’s ascension, racist cops, and racial profiling, to round up the topics of conversation in the black community. Knight keeps his self-directed jokes to a minimum, and does a great job of focusing the humor between Keith and Kerstin on their cultural – rather than racial – differences.

Knight doesn’t just poke fun at unpleasant situations: there is a series chronicling the triumphs of “Life’s Little Victories.” The series gives the book a pleasant outlook on life; when big events go wrong, sometimes it’s refreshing to focus on the little victories. The Knight Life is a total victory for Keith Knight.

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Book Review: "Incognegro"

Incognegro (2008, Vertigo), written by Mat Johnson with art by Warren Pleece, transports the reader to a world of segregation, unabashed racism, and lynchings -- where the color of your skin often foretold the comfort of the life you would lead. Enter Zane Pinchback an African-American man blessed (or cursed) with the appearance of a Caucasian-American. He uses his ability to blend into white society as a means of chronicling the horrific lynchings of Blacks as the journalist "Incognegro." It's a dangerous proposition for Zane, as if he is found out as being Black he'll be the one lynched.

In the beginning of the graphic novel the peril of continuing his work as Incognegro gets to Zane, causing him to reconsider his assignments. He gets pulled back into one last romp in the south to save the life of his falsely accused -- and soon to be lynched -- brother. Zane holds the philosophy that "Whites see what they want to see." Zane uses this to his advantage by successfully posing as a white reporter during lynchings. However, for Zane's brothers the results of this philosophy is that he's accused of murdering a white woman just because he was caught at the seen of the crime crying over the loss. But to white America at that time and place, they saw him lamenting the heinous crime he committed and being a stupid negro all Blacks are to them, he's too dumb to run away.

Besides the obvious expose on race relations, Incognegro makes the claim that America is a white man's world. Those that attempt to make a step up in society have to give something of themselves up -- their identity. This is the assimilation all minorities have to face: losing a part of themselves to fit in the heterosexual, Christian white male America that is the prominent demographic in this country. We do not live in the melting pot of acceptance and tolerance that American propaganda and ideology portrays to the rest of the world.

The artwork is realistic, making it easy to determine intent and emotion throughout the story. It goes well with the heinous subject matter and so-real-it's-surreal plot of the tale. This is a time period that America wants to cover up, to make disappear instead of owning up to it. In doing so we continue to media lynch those that do not fit in the vision of the white man's America. Though this is a fictional story, the real-life person Walter White did the same sort of dangerous work as Zane. I recommend biographies of Walter White as further reading.

Reviewed by A. Jarrell Hayes

SPIDER-MAN GIVES OBAMA A HAND IN NEW SPECIAL INAUGARATION ISSUE!!! CHECK IT OUT!!

Barack Obama will be "nerd-in-chief" when he takes office as US president this month, according to Marvel Comics, which is putting him on the cover of its next Spider-Man comic.
The special edition of the weekly Spider-Man comic features a six-page story about the superhero saving the day when an imposter tries to take Obama's place as president.
It is due to hit American newsstands next Wednesday.
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