BEER Ch. 4 The Aggro Hour

[Dave Monroe]

"... The Aggro Hour, featuring both of Otis's currently favorite
superheroes ..." (BE, Ch. 4, p. 32)


krav maga (p. 31)

Krav Maga is a tactical martial system developed in Israel that
consists of a wide combination of techniques sourced from boxing, Muay
Thai, Wing Chun, Judo, jiu-jitsu, wrestling, and grappling, along with
realistic fight training. Krav Maga is known for its focus on
real-world situations and extremely efficient and brutal
counter-attacks. It was derived from street-fighting skills developed
by Slovakian-Israeli martial artist Imi Lichtenfeld, who made use of
his training as a boxer and wrestler, as a means of defending the
Jewish quarter against fascist groups in Bratislava in the mid-to-late
1930s. In the late 1940s, following his immigration to Israel, he
began to provide lessons on combat training to what was to become the
IDF, who went on to develop the system that became known as Krav Maga.
It has since been refined for civilian, police and military
applications.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krav_maga
http://bleedingedge.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chapter_4#Page_31


"The Aggro Hour"

The Dark Age of Comic Books was the culmination of a gradual move
towards an older audience for Comic Books, particularly those
featuring superheroes ....  Usually characterized as a Darker and
Edgier period featuring an increased focus on sex, violence and dark,
gritty portrayals of the characters involved, much of the content
produced during this era is very controversial among comic book fans
and is usually (depending on who you ask) considered either a welcome
breath of fresh air after the medium languishing so long in its own
version of the Animation Age Ghetto, or a period of grotesque excess
and immaturity ... or both.

[...]

.... a number of critics argue that in many cases "mature" content was
actually closer to "adolescent"; while creators were taking
inspiration from The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, many had
completely missed the point, focusing merely on the surface details in
order to Follow the Leader without coupling them with the depth of
narrative and the thematic and psychological complexity that had made
these works unique and well received. Complaints center around a crowd
of deeply disturbed and unpleasant 'heroes' who were quite frequently
little more than psychotic thugs cut from the same template.

[...]

In at least one medium, the Dark Age is still going strong; the number
of comic book movies has increased in recent decades, and these tend
to have darker takes on superheroes and other comics material....

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheDarkAgeOfComicBooks

... and see as well, e.g., ...

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NinetiesAntiHero
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Creator/ImageComics

http://www.progressiveboink.com/2012/4/21/2960508/worst-rob-liefeld-drawings
http://www.progressiveboink.com/2012/6/14/3084348/the-second-40-worst-rob-liefeld-drawings

Pynchon and cartoons/comic books/superheroes?


Disrespect

http://www.blacksuperhero.com/
http://worldofblackheroes.com/black-superheroes/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_black_superheroes
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TokenMinority

Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans

http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/69

Black Images in Comics

http://www.fantagraphics.com/browse-shop/black-images-in-the-comics-softcover-ed.-may-2012-3.html

Super Black

http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/books/namsue

Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation

http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/black-comics-9781441135285/

White Scripts and Black Supermen (2012)

http://blacksuperherodoc.com/
http://newsreel.org/video/WHITE-SCRIPTS-BLACK-SUPERMEN

Most names became one word, usually gritty, edgy, and trendy. At
times, two words were merged into a single name, usually including
some combination of Dark, Blood, or a verb for killing. Because
substandard literacy is kewl, they are occasionally misspelled in
clever ways like Darkchylde, Stryker, or Blüdwulf — which, not
coincidentally, also makes the names easier to trademark.

Characters surviving from this time period may have to struggle with
sounding dated, but then again, surviving the nineties hopefully means
they have more to them than just boasts of Badassness.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DarkAgeOfSupernames


The Contaminator

http://www.toxicavenger.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dht_3NziwSw
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OrdinaryHighSchoolStudent

The Nineties Anti-Hero is a specific version of the Anti-Hero. Not all
such characters were created during the 1990s, but that was the time
when they were most common and most popular.

This guy is the polar opposite of your typical Silver Age superhero.
Not only are they flawed, they may lack any heroic attributes.
However, they're rarely ineffectual or pathetic (in the eyes of the
writer, anyway), generally instead being totally committed to whatever
they're doing at the moment. They have no compunction about killing
villains, and indeed, this may extend to anyone who gets in their way;
facing The Cape or any hero who does mind, they sneer at them as
outdated. Their super-powers ... tend towards the lethal as well ...

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NinetiesAntiHero
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9e1DkKBg4r0
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l