comiXology Conversations
Sam Riedel and Carolyn Cox | The Mary Sue
In this episode Sam and Carolyn from The Mary Sue discuss writing for The Mary Sue and loving comics!
Topics include Kara winging the intro live, that fancy new Pokemon game of course, using Pokemon GO as motivation for POC and transpeople, writing on the internet is actually really really tough when you’re not a man, Matt apologizing for all men everywhere and then stops talking, when Kara discovered The Mary Sue, finding the balance and being inclusive as much as possible, balancing point of views, getting into comics, Tim Drake connections, why write(?), feeling empowered by sharing your analysis, Kim’s nude selfie, and what they are reading!
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Transcription:
Kara: Welcome back to comiXology Conversations, your premiere destination for comics-related interviews.
Matt: That’s an exact quote.
Kara: I’m Kara, this is Matt, and we have a big show today. You ever heard of The Mary Sue?
Matt: I have.
Kara: TheMarySue.com.
Matt: I check it all the time.
Kara: Today we have two big names from that illustrious site, Carolyn Cox, and contributing coordinator, Sam Riedel. Welcome to the show.
Sam: Thanks for having us.
Matt: Let’s just get into the big question right out of the way.
Sam: The big one?
Matt: The big one. Everyone’s talking about it. What do you think of Pokemon GO right now?
Sam: I’m going to tell you something right now.
Kara: Yes.
Sam: I had so much to do this weekend. None of it got done. I spent my entire weekend at a birthday party with my friends. We sat at a bar. All of Saturday we sat at a bar and just checked in at the same Poke Stop and caught a lot of Pokemon. Sunday, I went home and I sat down and I was like, “I’ll just drop some incense down and wait for them to come to me,” and yes. Absolutely nothing got written this week. It’s destroying my life and I love it.
Matt: It has almost, maybe by the time this posts, more active users than Twitter.
Sam: We reported a couple of days ago that it’s one of the most, if not the most, profitable, or it’s making the most money, anyway, out of almost any app, even though it’s ostensibly free. It’s doing even better than Candy Crush at this point.
Matt: You wrote a great piece on how Pokemon GO is extra motivation for people of color and trans people to just go outside and try to experience other communities where it might be more difficult just by default. That’s a situation for me as a privileged white man that never thinks that way, I think that’s a great insight that most people don’t even experience or even think about.
Sam: Thank you so much. I’m glad that you got that from my piece. In my alter ego as a freelance writer, I have a job. It’s funny, because I run the freelance side of things for TMS, and then I take off that hat and I put on my own freelancer hat. I do a regular column on SpliceToday.com about trans issues and politics and things like that. I was thinking about that as GO came out, because I was an early adopter. As soon as we got wind at The Mary Sue that the APK file was available through backdoor channels, I was like, “Oh no, that’s mine right now.”
I side-loaded it onto my phone. I got started and I started thinking about it. It’s still not altogether pleasant all the time for me to go outside, and I did a little follow-up on my Tumblr about this yesterday, that I walked outside on Sunday and the first interaction that I had with a human being that I didn’t know was a dude coming out of the grocery store and idly trying to hit on me in that way that sometimes happens, and then he did a little double take under my hat, and he said, “Oh, that’s a dude.” He said something that I probably can’t repeat on a family podcast, and he walked off down the street.
That wasn’t too fun to experience at 11:30 on a Sunday morning, but then I went off a couple of blocks away to where somebody had put down a lure, and I met three infinitely more pleasant human beings, and we talked about which team was better and what the gym situation was in the neighborhood and what we were all hoping to catch. It was so much more pleasant, and I think that in a lot of ways, it can offer that motivating factor for just going out and being just brave enough to go around and find that Pokemon that you want and get a little bit of exercise and feel good about something in the world, and then kind of go back and retreat.
That doesn’t do anything about the safety issues that so many people have reported on for people of color, for other trans people, especially trans people of color. That’s a huge issue, but it’s something, and that silver lining is really important to grasp for sometimes.
Matt: Sure. I think it’s a new opportunity for people that otherwise would have no interaction with certain kinds of people that do, and for the first time ever, their world is open to a whole other section, which is fantastic.
Sam: Definitely.
Matt: I wrote this note down. I couldn’t remember where I wanted to say it, but the first time I stumbled upon, Carolyn, your work, and one of the first hits is a “Voice Of Men” article. Literally it’s a take down, and it’s just so awful. I’ll apologize for all men everywhere. I know it doesn’t help, but writing for The Mary Sue, The Mary Sue is obviously very important, hugely important, and I just commend you guys for writing and just getting just the worst out of humanity. I think for our audience, there’s a lot of people that just aren’t aware of what women have to deal with on the internet when they write, and it’s literally the worst.
Kara: We mentioned earlier we were reading off of notes while we’re doing this, so this was an early note that Matt wrote in our notes, so I have this beautiful response that I thought I’d share with you, which is like, “Hi, welcome to 2016. Women are still deemed subhuman by some people and tend to make less and have less career growth than man and also have to pay more for the same stuff and it’s real fun and people are trying to define you instead of letting you define yourself and you should try it sometime.” Matt just looked at me and he was like …
Sam: It’s such a rewarding experience, just front to back.
Matt: I think people that are on Twitter or people that go into comic shops, we talk about how comic shops can be a great section for meeting people and can not be great for certain people, but I think that’s what people don’t realize maybe about The Mary Sue, which is very female-centric about different points of view, feminism, how women are portrayed, and there’s just a vast segment of people that don’t realize why that’s important or how it’s impactful, and I’m so glad that The Mary Sue exists, because people do see that point of view and they get to share it with other people.
Carolyn: Thank you. Yes, that’s the most both frustrating and rewarding part of writing for The Mary Sue I think is I work with people who believe that it is important to see yourself in media, so I start taking it for granted that people believe that, but so many people don’t. You look at any comment, like, “Oh, it’s just a comic book. It’s just a movie,” but I think it’s always about way more than that, and it’s really frustrating when people don’t believe that, and really cool when you get to meet and work with people who do.
Sam: Yes. I think part of it is in our tag line really, because we’re specifically about pop culture and whatever that means at the moment. Pop, of course, is short for popular, and it’s that popularity that makes it so important, that things are popular because they tap into something in the cultural zeitgeist, in the collective unconscious. The reason that things get to be these global phenomena, like the Marvel movies, all the controversy about Ghostbusters, means that there’s something really important in all of us that is latching on to this.
We think that’s really important to analyze, and our analysis can go to some places that really bother some people. It can be fairly difficult to see the way that that manifests. I used to do social media for us for the past year, and I would go in and check our Twitter mentions, and I would clock in some days and talk with Carolyn and Dan, our other senior editor, and they’d be like, “Oh, watch out for Twitter today. It’s a trash fire out there.”
Carolyn: Meanwhile, Facebook is just people sending us messages who think our names are all Mary Sue.
Sam: Hi Mary, I found something that you might want to look at.
Kara: That’s kind of sweet, though.
Carolyn: It is kind of adorable.
Sam: It’s all like 50 year old ladies who would just be like, “Oh, I made a new friend named Mary. She’s very sweet. She cares a lot about comic books. I thought those were for kids.” Seeing that vitriol means to me that … I don’t want to go to a place that’s like, “If you’re making people mad, then you’re doing something right,” but at the very least, if we’re making these demographics angry with us, then that means that we’re pushing at something that maybe not everybody wants to acknowledge that things in the 21st century are not as different from the 20th century as we would like to think that they are. I think continually pushing and pushing at that envelope and getting things to a better place is how we make culture better and more accountable, and hopefully we’re going to see that continue.
Kara: When I discovered The Mary Sue web site a few years ago, it was this very dramatic moment that I remember with startling clarity, because it changed my life, because I realized that I wasn’t alone in the universe. There was an entire web site and people who were working on that web site that not only celebrated geek culture, but celebrated being a woman in that space, which was just not something that I had ever thought of celebrating before. It was just going to the comic shop and being the only girl there unless I brought a friend with me, and sort of getting a couple friends into some comic stuff, but not really realizing that there were more women than just me who were into that stuff. That was a huge moment for me, but it made me think about the challenges that you almost face, and I wanted to ask, what are some of those in keeping such a space both curated and inclusive?
Carolyn: There are many. That’s the daily struggle, I guess.
Sam: I think it’s really about making sure that you’re always centering marginalized voices, and we’re always centering the most marginalized whenever possible. It’s actually kind of interesting that you bring it up, because just the other day, we were talking about how we were going to cover the new Iron Man situation now that a 15 year old black girl is going to be taking over from a middle-aged white man. That’s pretty important. We need to do it due diligence.
I got a very thoughtful pitch from someone that I’ve worked with before in the past about centering this on Brian Bendis and how as much as he has done to create these roles within the comics for marginalized people and marginalized demographics, the fact of the matter is that he himself is still holding these reigns very tightly. In the real world, marginalized creators are not given a platform to tell these stories. He’s still occupying the space, and that’s sort of a problem.
I got this very, very interesting pitch, but then I had to balance that with, “Well, I also know this guy, and he’s white. He’s a white cis dude,” and we needed to make sure that if we were going to run that, we also need to have at least one equally thoughtful bit of analysis by a black woman who can really speak to, “Well, this is what needs to happen with this for this to be an honest story,” and we’re definitely going to be doing that for when the first issue comes out, but if we were to only run that first piece without running the second, then I don’t know if we’d be able to say that we were doing our due diligence with centering the voices that really need to be at the crux of that conversation. That’s something that we ask ourselves all the time with our coverage.
Carolyn: I think this is a separate issue, but something that your question reminded me of, but I think there’s an idea that you can’t cover things you’re passionate about and that you do love unabashedly in a critical way, which can be really frustrating. Again, it’s the same thing. Not everyone believes you can view media through a critical lens, and sometimes if we cover a comic that we’re excited about but we bring up some reservations or anything along those lines, people are like, “Oh, why are you guys always so negative? Why can’t you celebrate the good things?”
It’s hard to not lose heart sometimes when I hear feedback like that, because it’s like, “Yes, we are celebrating it, but it’s possible to love those things and give a platform for awesome creators and awesome titles and still have reservations about some aspects of it.” It’s a hard balance to get people to be onboard with.
Kara: A question that we like asking people is about their own personal comic book origin story. How did you get into comics? I think a better question for the both of you would also be how did you get into media that’s based on comics, like TV shows or movies? Where did it start?
Carolyn: Where did it start? Through friends, I think. Female friends, specifically, like Victoria McNally. She used to work at The Mary Sue, and she was one of the first people to pass me comics and be like, “You will enjoy these.” It was really helpful to have a woman I think curating my experience, because growing up, it was just not something that I ever thought was for me, and so to have someone that I trusted and who knew me well be like, “No, there is a world for you. There are stories out there for you,” that was invaluable.
I feel like once you find a title that clicks with you, all this other media opens up and it’s really exciting and introduced me to a totally different kind of storytelling than I’d ever had access to before. That was when I was older, in college, so it was cool to have the chance to get introduced to that a little later in life than I guess some people. I don’t know when you all started reading comics, but I imagine it was a little earlier than that.
Sam: It was. We were talking when we came over that we’re just from really opposite ends of the continuum when it comes to comics, because I got into them when I must have been five, I think. My dad was a huge nerd growing up. He used to live in New York City with my mom in the ‘80s, and he was on the lower east side and he would go over to St. Mark’s and buy the new issues of Sandman and Swamp Thing when they were coming out all the time, and then we moved upstate, and I guess he had some sort of contact at DC, because he was a media guy. He managed to get pretty good prices on their archive editions, those big hardcover collections of the golden age and the silver age stuff, so I’m pretty sure the first comic that I ever read was Batman #1 with the origin of the Batman, who he is and how he came to be, and then right into punching the Joker in the face …
Matt: “I shall become a bat.”
Sam: Yes. I shall become a bat, and then a murder clown who loves rubies and kills people over the radio, and I was like, “What is going on here?” I was hooked, and I read silver age Flash and silver age Green Lantern. I found golden age Captain Marvel archives lurking in a closet somewhere and I read them in secret when I was six, and I was like, “I don’t know if this is one of the ones that I’m allowed to read.” He had all these Vertigo things lying around, and he was like, “No, my child shall not be reading those at the moment.”
Matt: With the Sandman trades locked away.
Sam: Yes, oh my god. I got to read those eventually.
Matt: I read Sandman for the first time ever maybe last year.
Sam: Oh, really?!
Matt: I mention this issue every time I talked about Sandman, but the diner issue …
Sam: Oh, that’s incredible.
Matt: That is one of the darkest, most crazy issues in a comic book I’ve ever read.
Sam: It’s monstrous. I have some mixed feelings about other things that Gaiman might have done, and there is certainly some wonky stuff in Sandman later on that I could write thousands of words about and probably will at some point, but no, you’re right. That one issue is just horrifying.
Matt: You just read it and then you put it down and then you just stare at the wall for an hour.
Sam: It was that for me, and then later on, the serial killer’s convention was the one in the doll’s house where I just kept going back and back and back and reading it over and over and over again, because it was just nuts.
Matt: I was just actually just saying this with my friends. It’s rare to read a comic like that in this day and age I think, that’s so impactful to you in a certain a way, and he can write a book about … I just read volume three where the cats are going through.
Sam: Oh, yes. “Dream of a Thousand Cats.”
Matt: I feel like you don’t read a mainstream book like that anymore.
Sam: No, it’s true. Even in DC’s mature stuff right now, there’s nothing exactly like that where it’s both self-contained and feeds into a larger narrative like that. That was really something special. I got really into Batman because of my dad, and I noticed that in retrospect, maybe a year ago, that I loved the female characters probably most of all. I really liked some of the male characters in some ways because of their proximity to female characters that I really liked.
I realize in retrospect that I love Tim Drake so much because I latched on to Stephanie Brown as a kid, and I read her first appearance in Detective comics where she meets up with Tim. I think in that first appearance, she clocks him in the back of the head with a brick, and then just goes bounding off across the rooftops. I was like, “Oh, I love you,” and she’s spray painting weird Cluemaster clues on the sides of buildings, and I was like, “I’m all about that.” I followed her and Cassandra Cain and all these ladies, so that was one of those, “Oh, yes, you might actually be a girl,” moments. Comics have basically been a part of my life for almost as long as I can remember.
Matt: What pushed you to start writing, to transfer that passion about certain mediums, and Carolyn, what made you want to say, “I enjoy writing. I want to do writing. I want to write about what I love and critique it.”
Carolyn: Yes, it’s interesting. I kind of fell into writing. I’ve always loved writing and I grew up doing it for fun, and then I went to school and did not study writing. I then had a very early quarter life crisis after school and took a fellowship at Geekosystem, which was a geek site owned by Abrams Media, which also owns The Mary Sue, that had a little bit more of a focus on space and science.
I was working for Geekosystem when we were merged into The Mary Sue, and I’d started to do this a little bit at Geekosystem, but The Mary Sue was such a revelation for me because it felt like I’d had a lot of percolating feelings and ideas about the media that I enjoy, but that I had never worked for a web site that validated those ideas and saw them as worth expressing. It made me far more of a feminist. I think I had always been a feminist, but I had never been in a community before where I felt that those feelings were not just accepted, but valuable.
I think it was when I moved into The Mary Sue and I saw that you could make a career out of pop culture writing, and it really confirmed and solidified a lot of things that I think I had been feeling in the back of my mind for a long time, that, yes, there’s a value to writing about what you care about and that if you’re passionate about something, other people who are passionate about something are going to get something from your thoughts on it, as well.
Sam: Yes. I always knew, not always, but since I was pretty little, I knew that I wanted to make things. My dad was a bookseller, so I saw him peddling the fruits of other people’s creativity, and I was like, “No, I want to make those. I want to be involved in that process somehow.” I kept dabbling in that in various assorted ways and I was doing an internship at Seven Stories Press here in New York, and I was doing some editorial work here and there and some publicity work on their graphic canon, which is a great series of big tones of comics adapting the whole mostly western literary canon into little bite-sized chunks of comics by various creators.
During the course of that, the publisher helped me get in with Publisher’s Weekly and do some book reviews there, and I really liked that. It helped me with my writing because those reviews need to be so short. They need to be around 200 words at the maximum, maybe 220, 230, so that really helped me with brevity and getting in and making my point and getting out, whereas beforehand, I was used to writing these essays in college, and just rambling on trying to make my page count. That was a lot of fun.
From there, I went on to do some work with the science fiction and fantasy department, and then I hooked up with … Not hooked up with, I shouldn’t say that. I linked up with Heidi MacDonald over in their comics department, and at the same time, I was doing my own freelance writing. I was like, “Well, I could sell my opinion on things. I have a never ending font of opinions on literally everything. I might as well just figure out a way to monetize that in some way.”
I used to joke about selling my soul, little bits of myself out into the world, but it feels a lot more empowering now to continually be putting out opinions and analyses on things because of the sort of affirmation I think that I’ve gotten in places like The Mary Sue, that there are other people that think this way. There are people out there who have so many feelings that maybe are bottled up inside them about these things in pop culture that they don’t really know exactly how to express, but they feel that there’s something there that they really need to make sure that people understand.
Along comes maybe something that we write or maybe something that we share from somebody else on the site, and then we’ll get readers that write in and say, “Oh, thank you so much. Thank you so much for that. There was something bothering me about that episode of Arrow, but I couldn’t really put it into words, but no, it was that thing about the 10,000 people dying in the nuclear blast that was off the wall for me.” It’s just so nice, and I still intend to make my own stories at some point, but I love this sort of analysis more than I thought really would be possible when I was a kid.
Matt: I thought you were going to say after seeing Batman say, “I shall become a bat,” you were going to say, “I shall become a writer,” as you looked out the big window.
Sam: Yes. Somebody chucked a pencil at me when I was in grade school.
Kara: Here I was thinking of that quote that the Joker said in The Dark Knight, “If you’re good at something, never do it for free.”
Sam: Heath Ledger had a lot of good ideas.
Kara: I was reading a bunch of both of your articles to get ready for this interview, and the one about Kim Kardashian’s nude selfie was so beautiful to me. I was passing it around to some of my more vocally feminist coworkers, and we were having a really intense discussion about it, because there were parts of the original selfie itself and people’s reactions to it that we had differing opinions on it, and then differing opinions to the article. I love so much being able to say, “Yes, equality for everyone,” but also, I have different thoughts than the person next to me who thinks the same thing.
Carolyn: Yes. I love that, too. It’s the nice thing about working with a bunch of feminists, one of the many nice things. Someone e-mailed us and they asked, “If Ghostbusters does badly, do you guys feel like you have to say it did well because otherwise you’re failing the other feminists?” I was like, “No. That’s not what it’s about. We’re allowed to have different opinions on things.” There’s a vast tapestry out there of ways feminists can feel about things.
Sam: You know there are probably going to be some things about Ghostbusters that we don’t think are particularly funny, but there’s probably going to be some things about it that we really love.
Kara: I did want to ask our best question that we save for last all the time, which is what are you currently reading? It could be comics or another nerdy media. What are you reading, watching, enjoying that you think other people should be checking out, too?
Carolyn: I’m a little late to the game on this because I know a lot of people read it. I think it first came out digitally last year, Becky Chambers’ “The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.” It’s just an old-fashioned space yarn, but it’s so good. I absolutely recommend picking it up. It’s about a ship that punches worm holes through the galaxy to aid in trade and diplomatic relations between different parts of space. If you like “Firefly”, you will love it. I explained it to a friend as it’s like “Firefly”, but way better representation. There’s a really great lady on lady relationship in it that I talk about because you don’t get to see that enough. I can’t recommend it enough. I think it came out in paperback in the US on the 5th.
Sam: Yes, I think so.
Carolyn: Yes. You should absolutely pick it up. It has a gorgeous cover. You’ll definitely see it in the book stores, so “The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet” by Becky Chambers is what I just finished reading and I really loved it.
Kara: You had me at, “It’s like 'Firefly.’”
Carolyn: Yes.
Sam: We have absolutely no connection with Becky Chambers whatsoever.
Carolyn: She did used to be our weekend editor, but this book is so damn good. I absolutely recommend checking it.
Sam: I always have the worst time trying to recommend one thing to people. This is good discipline for me. The last thing that I read and absolutely loved was the first volume of Jughead by Chip Zdarsky and Erica Henderson. Absolutely, I think, for my money, one of the best things that Archie has ever put out. Zdarsky is so good with his, I say zany in the best possible way, because his humor is just so off the wall. Henderson has the perfect style for that, and she can bounce back and forth between these ludicrous dream sequences, which bring back all the alternate universes from old Archie where Archie’s Pureheart the Proud and he’s a superhero. The Man from R.I.V.E.R.D.A.L.E., and RIVERDALE is an acronym that we’re never really sure what it is.
Kara: It’s like the S on the sweater. Don’t worry about it.
Sam: Yes. Meanwhile, the actual plot is Jughead is 99% sure that the new principal at Riverdale is turning them all into secret agents. His mission is to stop him from doing so and get his friends to help him, if he can then convince his friends that this is even happening in the first place, because not a whole lot of people are going to take Jughead the local burger schmooze too seriously.
It’s so heartwarming, and it’s oddly relatable as much as the bottomless pit of food, that cartoonish personality, can be relatable. There’s some real gems of humanity in there, and then there’s a bunch of burger gags and background jokes that you’re going to get if you read all those weird Archie comics from the '60s and '70s. Betty Cooper is petitioning to save a forest that Mr. Lodge is going to tear down, and she says, “Oh, we’ve played there since we were little,” which is a reference to Little Archie, and I lost my mind when I read that. It’s just so good. I really can’t recommend it enough. I hope that Zdarsky stays on for a long time. I know that there’s somebody else coming on to the book as of the second volume. I can’t remember who off the top of my head, but I really hope that book goes on for a long time.
Kara: I started laughing when you said the title of that book, because my not so secret hobby is just talking about Archie comics all the time. I grew up reading Archie comics and the Double Digest and everything, so when I’m reading Jughead, I’m like, “Okay, this is a funny, well-written, good book, but I’ve read 20 years of this crap, so I know all of these references that they’re dropping. I feel this,” but also like you said, really great character moments that are so identifiable, like there’s this one page that’s just all these panels showing Jughead as he’s playing video games basically throughout a calendar day. He’s not moving from the same spot, but he’s got a little more food, a little less food, hot dogs over here, one over here, and I don’t play video games, but I’m looking at that, I’m like, “That’s me Netflixing.” I feel that.
Sam: Henderson manages to get that old house style sort of into her work in some ways, but in a way that’s still very recognizably all the rest of the stuff that she’s done, like on Squirrel Girl. It’s such a good update.
Kara: It’s very dynamic.
Sam: Definitely. That’s a perfect word for it, dynamic.
Kara: That’s all we’ve got here, but thank you.
Sam: Is it our turn to ask questions now?
Kara: We’re in for another hour, folks. Sam and Carolyn, thank you so much for joining us today. We’ve really enjoyed speaking with you, and everyone check out TheMarySue.com.
Carolyn: Thank you. It was really nice to get to meet you guys.
Sam: This was great. Thank you so much.
EASSSTER EGGGGG
Matt: As I usually do, I do want to derail into another topic, which I think Sam and I …
Sam: Listen, it’s your podcast.
Matt: I think Sam and I are on the same page here. Pro-wrestling.
Sam: We are. You’ve done your homework.
Matt: I have.
Sam: I only started seriously watching wrestling earlier this year, so I can’t go that into detail.
Matt: That’s perfect, because I grew up watching wrestling. I grew up reading comics probably around the same time, so I’ve had a connection with both of them, but wrestling, like comics, I think wrestling is harder or has been harder over the decades to get people into it as a medium like comic books, because it’s so strange, but it’s very the same to comics. I’m going to guess that you got into with something I have tried to pitch to Kara, which has failed as of yet, with something called NXT, which I compare it to the first ever Marvel NOW. Here’s Marvel NOW. This is where you start to get into Marvel.
Kara: You did not pitch that to me. You said, “Hey, Steven Duhamel’s going to be in this. You should watch it.”
Matt: If that failed, what hope do I have? You did see the GIFs, at least, of that. I do have to give props to the WWE for starting something like NXT, so I guess it did work, and it helped you get involved in their product. What was it like for you?
Sam: Yes. I’ve always had a little nibbling thing in the back of my brain when I was growing up in the '90s while the attitude era was background noise for me. I knew that a lot of my friends were really into this guy named The Undertaker, and everyone was wearing these big shirts that said 316 on them. I was like, “That’s a weirdly in your face Christian thing. I don’t understand what’s happening here.” I didn’t have TV when I was growing up, but anyway, my parents would have never gone for that. They’d barely let me watch one episode of Power Rangers one time, so that wasn’t going to fly.
Earlier this year, I made a friend who has been into wrestling for her entire life. She got me to begin giving it a chance here and there, and I just instantly went in for it. NXT really was a way for me to get into it in a different way than WWE as a whole, because there’s always such weird stuff going on in main WWE and it’s hard to follow all the feuds all the time, but NXT is really interesting and easy to quickly latch onto whatever storyline is happening. They’ve got great characters, and you know that if you follow somebody up through the ranks, that eventually they’re going to get good enough and they’re going to get their shot at the big time, and that’s a fun hook in and of itself.
I’m so in the tank for Sami Zayn. He is my ginger boyfriend. I’m 99% a lesbian, but Sami Zayn has a standing invitation to my house. I really liked seeing him do a couple of things here and there on the main WWE roster, and I saw his last match right before WrestleMania this year with Shinsuke Nakamura, and that was an incredible match, and then two nights later, he goes to WrestleMania and gets thrown through a couple of ladders. I’m like, “This is amazing, this whole thing.”
It’s that same thing that we were talking about before about really liking something and finding your passion for it, but being able to find the aspects that you need to critique, as well. For so long this year, right after they decided not to call the Diva’s Division that anymore. “This is the women’s division. We’re going to have a women’s champion,” I was like, “Yes, absolutely. Let’s get a new belt that doesn’t have a gross pink butterfly on it.” Awful. They debuted the belt at Mania, and I was like, “Oh, that looks so good. It’s just like the guys’, only it’s white.” That’s wonderful, and then the first ever women’s match gets broken up by a guy, by Ric Flair, and then the first ongoing storyline then is involved with the Montreal Screwjob reference, which is a storyline from the '90s. It’s literally a 25 year old thing that they’re referencing now for all the old fans.
Kara: This is definitely like comics, then.
Sam: Yes. It absolutely is. It’s 100% like comics in a lot of ways. My girlfriend has said that wrestling is to Shakespeare what comic books are to James Joyce or something. It’s just streamlined storytelling essentially, and storytelling in a more action-oriented and visually appealing way. Also, there’s that thing where whoever is running the show in the moment, you can tell that they’re trying to be a little bit progressive and push it in the right direction, but they don’t always … It doesn’t land.
Matt: It’s interesting. This will probably be an Easter egg because we’re running long, but the WWE in and of itself has been running for so long. The Hamlet analogy was good because it’s the same show for 30 years, like Detective Comics has the same numbering and it’s the same characters essentially running over and over again, but once you’ve seen one suplex, technically you’ve seen them all.
WWE over time, like the attitude era you talked about, growing up, that was the greatest thing ever, but watching it now you’re like, “This is terrible. I can never show this to any female friends because they would literally never speak to me again.” This is what I loved as a kid, but seeing them doing that. It’s literally the same owner and daughter doing the women’s belt, but it’s been decades later. It’s hard to grasp that. You’re doing this probably for promotion for the brand, but you also did this 15 years ago, so at the same time, you’re like, “Well, maybe they changed. Maybe they changed as people as they realized this is different,” but it’s fascinating seeing such a long tapestry of the bad, and then now the good.
Sam: Right, where it’s starting to pay dividends. I think even, I’ll grab onto that silver lining and say just another way is that even when you go back to that “bad period”, you can see the glimmerings of something that’s really good. If you go back to comics in the '90s, then I was talking about Stephanie Brown before. There’s some weird stuff going on, but there are little aspects of it that are just gold. The first little piece of Knightfall is some stunning storytelling, and then it goes into a lot of '90s stuff.
With the Attitude Era, yes, you’ve got D-Generation X. Yes, you’ve got Triple H and Shawn Michaels jumping around the ring and telling people to suck it, but while all that’s going on, you’ve got Chyna standing right there being the ninth wonder of the world and just flexing to beat the band and actually winning. If I recall correctly, she won the heavyweight title.
Matt: I think she skipped over the women’s title. She won the Intercontinental title. Which is like second highest title.
Sam: Right, and she would get in fights with the guys all the time, and she was just such an imposing figure. You can look back on that and draw a line to Charlotte and a lot of the women’s wrestlers today, like Asuka over in NXT and Nia Jax, who are really changing what women’s wrestling looks like. We’re seeing that in comics, as well. We’ve got so many awesome people like G. Willow Wilson and Marguerite Bennett that are totally changing the landscape, and that’s got its roots if you look for them in history, but you’ve really got to pan for that gold.