Aw, man. Nimona, a comic book written and published while the author was a student at MICA, was released and earned rave reviews, multiple awards, and sold a ton of copies. Blue Sky Studios, the folks responsible for the Ice Age series and some other excellent animated movies, picked up the story and have been in serious production on the movie adaptation since 2015.
Well, Blue Sky just got bought by Disney, and announced that they are killing the movie entirely. Reasons given abound, but the reality is that the story features two gay men as main characters. I can easily imagine the suits at the Mouse spending maybe three minutes tops discussing how damaging the story would be to their lily-white heteronormative brand before greenlighting Toy Story 17 for immediate production. Fuck the Mouse.
As an extremely educated man, my grandfather had all kinds of books in his house. Because there wasn’t much else to do there when we visited, my sister and I read everything that was halfway interesting and a lot of stuff that wasn’t; that’s where I read Profiles in Courage and learned about JFK, and then read all about his assassination conspiracies in The Book of Lists. Grandpa had a bunch of books about 20’s era automobiles and World War I planes, but I was much more interested in World War II and that era, probably because my Dad had a bunch of books about it. I never really got why Grandpa liked that stuff, but given the age difference and his upbringing, I see how the cycle continues: His Great War was my Dad’s Korea to my Gulf War. Either way, I find military history fascinating.
The Naval History and Heritage Command is an incredible repository of information. I often will kill time in a waiting room or on the train looking at the history of an obscure warship or campaign, but often the easily available history will have only the basic information. In a series of articles, the director digs deeper into the histories of people, events and warships and provides a jumping-off point for further research. I could lose days in here.