When word first emerged that Kevin Keller, the first out gay character in the Archie comics universe, came from a military family, I assumed that the comics were just going to hint at “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” rather than addressing the issue head-on. Turns out, my expectations weren’t ambitious enough. In his stand-alone comics, Kevin’s going to come out to his family and directly discuss with his father whether the fact that he’s gay means he should abandon plans to serve in the military.

There’s no question that decision is going to polarize, and it will lose the comic readers. But the Archie franchise has needed a major revitalization for a long time. It’s true the series has persisted for an amazingly long time, but it probably can’t go on as a cheerfully irrelevant product that sells decently but unspectacularly and is entirely absent from the national conversation. There are things that should happen just on the marketing end, for sure. The website for the company badly needs a face lift so it’ll load quickly and be more social-media friendly. The Josie and the Pussycats movie, with the exception of Adam Schlesinger’s soundtrack, was a disaster, but there’s no reason that someone couldn’t make a tween- and teen-friendly Archie movie that’s not unbearably stupid.

But really, the core content has needed a facelift to at least catch it up with more serious and sophisticated trends in young adult literature. This may be too polarizing to work, but it’s at least a way to have the characters thinking about their lives and careers beyond Riverdale. And more importantly, it makes the Archie comics look a bit more like the actual experiences of contemporary teenagers. It’s been great that Kevin’s experience in Riverdale has been so positive, but it’s really kind of wishful thinking, almost speculative fiction. I don’t really want to see Kevin get bashed or bullied for the sake of realism, but I do think that dealing with real problems will make him a more relatable, and thus more viable, long-term character.

The state’s governor has just signed a bill criminalizing “entertainment services theft.” I can understand services like Netflix and HBOGO having a legitimate interest in cracking down on folks who steal and resell large numbers of passwords, as Tim Lee at Ars Technica reports is what the bill’s sponsor really intended. But it’s not clear why either that problem or the prospect of multiple people using the same password are a problem that require legislation rather than vigorous internal enforcement of Netflix’s Terms of Use (it’s not at all clear to me that Netflix wanted or pushed for this legislation, though perhaps they did). In fact, those terms make it clear that having multiple people within a household using the same account is a design feature of the service rather than a bug that requires vigorous regulation:

-You are also responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your account and password and for restricting access to your computer or Netflix ready device. If you disclose your password to anyone or share your account and/or devices with other people, you take full responsibility for their actions.

-You may instantly watch on up to six unique authorized Netflix ready devices. For certain membership plans, you will be allowed to instantly watch simultaneously on more than one Netflix ready device within your household, up to total of four devices at a given time.

-You also agree not to impersonate any other person while using the Netflix service, conduct yourself in a vulgar or offensive manner while using the Netflix service, or use the Netflix service for any unlawful purpose.

Presumably, when Netflix wrote that customer agreement, it assumed it would be able to enforce it by monitoring customer behavior and banning or referring for prosecution users who flagrantly violate the rules.

From a more strategic perspective, I question the wisdom of providers pushing for harsh legislation against content theft as a hedge against a shifting market. For the record, I am not comfortable with torrenting content, and made a resolution to stop doing it a while ago. And I don’t really object to prosecutions of services that systematically copy and distribute content illegally. But prosecuting individual users seems both unlikely to deter people from seeking content at lower prices or for free, and to do some harm when industries try to shift to new models in the future. The cost of investigating, indicting, and prosecuting individual users is high enough that it can’t and won’t happen to everyone—or more importantly, to a sufficiently large number of people such that everyone will have to think hard before they torrent.

And big public pushes for anti-piracy legislation tend to overshadow innovation, especially when the innovation we see the results of are things like the movie studios’ obsession with 3D as a way to get moviegoers to pay more for tickets. Fairly or unfairly, I think a lot of consumers look at the entertainment industry as the equivalent of the kid on the playground with a cool toy he’ll only let you play with under circumstances so restrictive you long to feed him a hearty meal of sand. Sure, companies like Apple and Amazon have beat content-creating industries to the punch technologically, but I also think they’re also perceived as companies that are in the business of getting consumers access to what they want, and so people don’t feel a deep and burning desire to stick it to them. Part of the reason Hulu is so brilliant is that it both meets a consumer demand and helps boost the perception that NBCUniversal, Fox, and Disney-ABC are as invested as users are in getting content out there.

I’m fond of hybrid solutions, and I think the one here might be for the industries to focus on narrower legislation while marketing their innovations more aggressively. Winning the war on illicit content use is going to be as much a matter of customer service as it is of publicly decrying violations of intellectual property law.

In the wake of the announcement that Jill Abramson will become the first woman to hold the top editing slot at the New York Times, that paper’s crack culture critic Dave Itzkoff joked on Twitter: “Crazy #GameofThrones scene in NYT newsroom. The City Watch swept in and now Prince Joffrey is our new executive editor.” Aside from how bad the tar used to preserve severed heads would look dripped all over the nice facade of the New York Times’ building, it’s actually a really instructive point that the “Game of Thrones” universe appears not just to not have any public media, as Nick Sementelli mentioned to me, but not to have the printing press or a larger literate class. Spoilers to follow if you’ve only watched the episodes that have aired on HBO.

There’s quite a bit made of the fact that the common people don’t really care who’s king. Obviously, when things deteriorate to the point where folks can’t safely get a harvest or a fishing haul in, you end up with appeals to the sovereign—and even then it’s clear, as when the villagers mistake Ned for Robert—or local vigilante groups like the Brotherhood Without Banners. But it’s not particularly clear what information most people in Westeros and across the Narrow Sea have about what policy or management decisions contribute to the conditions that they live under. Certainly, the fact that there’s not more than one copy of the genealogy that leads Ned to figure out who the real father of Cersei’s children is helps her keep that secret for much longer. Similarly, the fact that there’s no way to authoritatively verify that dragons live again and to disseminate the news to a mass audience is a huge strategic advantage to Dany: she gets to become a legend without having people really mobilize en masse to take her down.

Obviously a Westeros that had reasonably widespread literacy and an established middle class in both the cities and the country wouldn’t be Westeros as we know it at all. But in a world where information asymmetry is a major theme, it’s interesting that the press doesn’t even factor into the story.

Come one, come all. 7 PM, Bourbon, 2321 18th Street NW. Holler in comments, or email me at AlyssaObserves [at] gmail if you’re going to swing by. I think we’ll shoot for the back porch now that it’s returned to normal June temperatures. I’ll attempt to look as much like the cartoon at the top of the page as possible. Or, you know, make a sign for the table or something.

Distaste for government employees has been part of Sarah Palin’s brand since she stepped on to the national political stage in 2008. “She’s fought oil companies and party bosses and do-nothing bureaucrats, and anyone who puts their interests before the interests of the people she swore an oath to serve,” John McCain said when he introduced her as his running mate. In her speech at the Republican National Convention, she complained that Obama would “make government bigger…take more of your money…give you more orders from Washington.” Her “death panels” allegation about President Obama’s health care plan was based on the idea that “faceless bureaucrats” would deny her son Trig care on the grounds that he wasn’t productive. Last fall she blamed a “faceless bureaucrat” for taking environmental protection measures that impacted the San Joaquin Valley fishing industry. More recently, she has said that she’s looking for Republican candidates “who do not believe in big government and that bureaucrats can plan our economy and plan our futures for us”

All of which makes it simultaneously hilarious and depressing that what’s keeping Palin’s summer vacation/whistle stop campaign tour going smoothly is, in part, federal employees — though maybe when they’re helping her out, they don’t count as “faceless?” The Washington Post noted that the National Park Service (NPS) has been prepared to set up event logistics for Palin even though the family’s staff hasn’t sent out advance itineraries. The National Archives opened early for the Palins. They’ve gotten private tours and gotten to skip lines at NPS facilities. It’s doesn’t seem like Palin’s asked for special treatment (though showing up on a several-hours notice actually seems more inconvenient than sending out a schedule and coordinating weeks in advance), but the Park Service does stuff like this because it’s a courtesy and helps preserve the experience for everyone else.

The trip is doubly hypocritical given that she’s long been on the conservative bandwagon of targeting federal arts and humanities funding. When she turned down half of the stimulus funding allocated for Alaska in 2009, she cited potential growth in the National Endowment for the Arts as one reason for rejecting the money. In March, she told Sean Hannity that “NPR, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, all those kind of frivolous things that government shouldn’t be in the business of funding with tax dollars — those should all be on the chopping block as we talk about the $14-trillion debt that we’re going to hand to our kids and our grandkids.”

And of course, historic preservation is part of the mission of both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Those agencies that Palin thinks are so wasteful are part of the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Save America’s Treasures Program. Among the things the program funded in 2011? Efforts to stabilize the foundation of Robert E. Lee’s Arlington House, the Civil War Battle Flag Collection in Arkansas, and physical plant repairs to the Washington National Cathedral. If Palin wants to argue that visiting America’s historic sites and learning about the country’s past is something everyone ought to be doing, something that might help Americans rediscover the country’s core values, she should acknowledge that federal employees and federal funding are often what keep those landmarks standing and their collections on display.

While I was in college, I read bits and pieces of Gilbert Hernandez’s “Palomar,” the big Fantagraphics collection of the Love and Rockets stories set in the Latin American town of the same name. But I never got a chance to do a concentrated deep dive into the book or the Love and Rockets universe more generally, so I decided to go back to “Palomar” a couple of weeks ago and just got finished with the volume. It’s unoriginal to say that too much good cannot be said of Love and Rockets: the comics are proof that men can write compassionately and searchingly of women’s experiences; Hernandez is incredibly intelligent and nuanced about sex; and it’s incredibly visually sharp and funny. But one of the things that struck me as particularly good and particularly unique about the comics collected in Palomar is the way they dramatize characters’ shifting political awareness and convictions.

Politics aren’t inherently boring, of course, but most fiction about them focuses on the big, sweeping dramas of election results. There are very few movies that are actually about the inside workings of campaigns —that’s one of the reasons I love “Definitely, Maybe” and “Primary Colors” so much. And when pop culture looks at how characters’ attitudes shift, politics is low on the list of the kinds of attitudes that get examined, way behind sex, relationships, work-life balance, death, etc.

What Hernandez gets — better than most authors and directors, I think — is the relationship between politics and those other emotions and attitudes. When his heroine, Luba, decides to stand for alcaldesa at the urging of Chelo, her formal rival in the bathing business, it’s a symbol of her investment in Palomar, her willingness not just to be rooted, but to protect her adopted town. It’s a process that took time: Luba went from giving baths in a trailer, to buying real estate that physically anchored her in Palomar and being responsive to its residents as customers, to being not just one of them but representative of them.

Tonantzín’s political evolution takes place on a much bigger scale. It’s a failed romance with an Anglo photographer that catches her up to the rest of the town’s general anti-imperialism. One of the things Hernandez does very well is make her growing radicalism seem cracked without losing respect for the intensity of her convictions. Tonantzín may start wearing native dress, fasting, and get obsessed with nuclear war because she’s getting letters from a prison crackpot, but Hernandez situates those convictions, no matter how extreme they get, within her larger, consuming love of humanity. I don’t think I’ve ever teared up over a depiction of political action I really disagreed with, but this got me bad.

It’s really easy to make art about one-off political campaigns, be it organizing a Ford plant or integrating interstate bus lines, or about the political evolution of major figures. It’s harder to dramatize internal struggle absent a movement or the signals of history.

After our discussion of Quentin Tarantino’s latest yesterday, the question of revenge fantasies and art has been on my mind, so when the Parents Television Council emailed me yesterday to warn me about Rihanna’s latest, of course I went to check it out.* Megan Franko, the spokeswoman at PTC, wrote “In my 30 years of viewing BET, I have never witnessed such a cold, calculated execution of murder in primetime.” It’s true, the murder that opens the “Man Down” video is fairly disconcerting:

But I think focusing on that opening sequence ignores the fairly important work that’s happening in the rest of the video. Because really, this is a video about what it’s like to be sexually assaulted. And I think it’s really useful to have someone who is as big a star as Rihanna deciding to play a victim, and to play a victim in this specific scenario: she flirts with a guy at a club but turns him down when he wants more, he follows her when she heads home, corners her in an isolated location, she fights, but ultimately he overpowers her and she stops fighting. That look of fear in her eyes when she surrenders matters, and it’s powerful.

When you’re being assaulted, it’s not really surprising that at some point you might do a horrible back-of-the-envelope calculation and decide that it’s better to get raped and try to deal with it later than to die. Getting sexually assaulted is not a moment when you have perfect information—like certain knowledge of whether your attacker will kill or grievously injure you if you continue to resist—on which to base your decisions, or at which your theoretical principals are more important than your survival. It’s a disaster for rape and assault victims that cops, judges, and juries still don’t consistently understand that the decision to submit is not a decision to consent. And if this video helps anyone understand that, I can live with the head shot. Which, by the way, I think every line in the song, suggests was a really bad thing to have done.

*NB: I assume this is what everyone does when the PTC puts out an alert, right? I sometimes wonder if they should start complaining about utterly random stuff just to send us on wild goose chases.

Apparently, in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, visits to the National Navy UDT-SEAL Museum in Florida are up. You have to think the Smithsonian kind of kicks itself on occasions like this that it doesn’t have a military museum on the Mall: can you imagine the cafeteria and gift shop revenue from this? Maybe it’s worth considering converting the Air and Space Museum on the mall while keeping the annex near Dulles, given the space program’s diminishing role in American culture and public policy? Since I can’t imagine heading to Florida given how hot it’s been in Washington this week, maybe I’ll use this as an excuse to finally hit up the National Museum of American Jewish Military History, one of the charming oddities of the city I’ve been meaning to visit since I moved here five years ago.

Not to say that there shouldn’t be a National Museum of Jewish Military History, or a Navy SEALs museum, but it sure puts the quibbles over a National Museum of the American Latino in perspective, doesn’t it? I think there’s something to be said for a curatorial argument that organizing museums along ethnic lines would limit exhibitions—though there’s an equally strong argument to be made that without that racial or ethnic framework, it would be hard to put stories like the Civil Rights movement in their most important context. But it all goes to show that you never know when there’s going to be a sudden spike of interest in a museum or historical site for minor topics. Surely there’s a case to be made for museums on broader subjects, even after the Mall’s filled up.

The first book out of Glenn Beck’s new publishing imprint, Mercury Ink, is going to be a young adult novel. From the Amazon description of the book, it sounds like a fairly typical entry in the Kids Get Superpowers, Girlfriends genre that’s been popular with everyone from James Frey’s novel-manufactory to things like The Rise of Renegade X, with one exception. The main character apparently has Tourette Syndrome.

That’s a step above the standard-issue problems high school students face, and I have some respect for the idea of redeeming a tough condition that can invite a lot of ridicule, especially during the teenage years. That of course won’t redeem the book if it’s politically dreadful in other ways (it’s a small step from an inherited neuropsychiatric disorder to becoming a Randian Übermensch, right?), but it makes this choice fractionally more intriguing than it might have been if it was just another political tract or schmaltzy Christmas story.

In comments on this post that have since, frustratingly, been eaten by the system (we’re investigating), Stephen Eldridge and Chuchundra raise what I think are two useful and provocative points about how to make superhero art.

Stephen suggested it might be more interesting to have a show or movie about a world where everyone had some sort of unusual power, rather than a single individual or small group of people. I think that makes sense, particularly because of the way superpowers can magnify and metaphorize conflicts. I’m don’t know that the depiction of Venom as turning Spider-Man into a jazz-playing ladies man in Spider-Man 3 was the way to go, but Anthony Lane is dead-on about the brilliance of Elastigirl as sexy multitasking mom in The Incredibles. And that’s what works about Eureka, SyFy’s show about a town full of superpowered geniuses sequestered by the government so they can work in peace and in a place where they’re unlikely to alarm the general populace. What Eureka ends up needing is someone average who can see conflicts between the town’s citizens—and sometimes their inventions—for what they are, instead of as national catastrophes. I also think in an era of specialization, and at a time when people are getting more comfortable with the idea of enhancements, be they steroids, replacement hips, mental performance stimulants, etc., we might have to spend more time getting used to the idea that there are people who are unusually good at certain things among us—and we’ll need people who are unusually good at other things to compensate.

And Chuchundra wrote:

I see the same issue here that I noted in No Ordinary Family. The distribution of powers is right out of the Silver Age. The men get the combat-oriented powers. The women get the support/informational abilities. The big, black dude gets the super strength. The hot chick gets the mind control. The geeky-looking guy gets the geekiest power. You can pretty much predict how the stories are going to play out.

He’s dead right that superheroes would be more interesting if their powers brought out things about themselves that aren’t obvious attributes, or things that people were uncomfortable with. Superpowers don’t just have to be a magnifying lens: they can be a microscope, and much more revealing.