Comics Cameos in Politics Land
I need to come up with a good name for what could easily be a recurring feature, because I see stuff like this all the time in political and policy writing (or at least more than I’d expect) and it’s like a special shout-out to the comics fans. This is from Matthew Yglesias at Thinkprogress in a blog today on efficiency and urban building height restrictions:
I said something last weekend about how it was a shame that Newark, New Jersey has a more impressive skline than does our nation’s capital and that Washington ought to revisit its extremely stringent restrictions on the allowed height of downtown office buildings. This prompted a reply about how it’s nice that the DC streets get a lot of sunlight. I was going to fire back that New York is hardly full of Morlocks and it’s not like there are a ton of people taking leisurely strolls through Downtown DC anyway (it’s mostly people working, it’s an office district) but the whole argument about aesthetics really misses the mark.
I thought he meant Morlocks like in “the Time Machine,” i had to read wikipedia to realize there’s Marvel warlocks (this is me showing my ignorance of Marvel history.)
Anway, I do see a lot of comics references in the lefty blogosphere, from the “Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics” to Rachel Maddow interviewing comics creators (like the DMZ guy) back when she still had an Air America show.
Oliver Willis is the lefty blogger I’ve seen make the most comic book references. He uses comic book pictures a lot, including a recurring segment he uses Bane breaking Batman’s back for. Yay for comic geekery!