POP-CULTURE COLUMN: If You Want To Be A Star, Hide Your Face
By Dan Brown Angine de Poitrine. Count Binface. Daft Punk. What do they have in common? I couldn’t tell you what their faces look like. That’s because when these people are on the job, they wear masks. As Paris Hilton might say, masks are so hot right now. The list goes on. When Lady Gaga burst on the scene, she obscured her features, too. Toronto Bag Head is a social-media personality who wears a brown paper bag on his head to Toronto Maple Leaf games because he’s ashamed to support the perpetually underperforming team. And who could forget the hero of V for Vendetta, who hid his identity behind the facade of Guy Fawkes? I don’t know why this trend is happening at this moment in history. Indeed, it may be possible this is one of those evergreen things, and there are always entertainers or other well-known figures who would rather the general public not be able to identify them. Back in the day, the Human Fly, a Canadian daredevil, also wore a mask. As did the mummy musician Nash the Slash. The Unknown Comic was just that because he never did standup without his trademark upside-down grocery bag. Some well-known artists – I’m thinking of the street artist Bansky here – don’t put on literal masks, but they do take drastic steps to ensure their identities remain secret. All of them are, to quote the Forgotten Rebels, just shadows in the crowd. I don’t think it’s a coincidence these public figures are choosing to cover up. It feels to me like masks have a renewed urgency and a more layered meaning in our online world. One of the biggest concerns at this moment is the possibility of identity theft. It may be the most lucrative type of fraud being committed in 2026. But it’s impossible for scammers to make off with your identity if you don’t reveal it in the first place. If you’re like me, you get itchy when a company or government wants to know personal details about you for no apparent reason. Has there ever been a more pressing time to maintain your anonymity? Now, I will admit masked entertainers do have a certain kind of appeal for me. A mystique. The last thing I would want to know, for instance, is what the math-rocking duo of Angine de Poitrine look like without their costumes. I love the backstory they’ve created for themselves, that they pretend they’re from another planet. I don’t want to find out that they have balding heads and bleary eyes and acne scars like everyone else. It would spoil the mystery. It wouldn’t be as fun. And it’s beside the point. I just read the Brian K. Vaughan graphic novel The Private Eye, about a future society in which everyone wears a mask because the most important aspect of this post-internet world is being able to protect one’s privacy. All kinds of solutions pop up so ordinary folks can hide their faces, from devices like mystery cloaks to high-tech holographic masks. I hate to break it to you, but the truth is we already live in that world. So don’t expect the facial camouflage to go away anytime soon. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
May the Spidey Sense Be with You
By Dan Brown I knew this day would come. The Marvel and Star Wars universes are finally converging. January will see the release of Hope Assembles, a five-part comic series in which the good guys and bad guys from each franchise team up. You’ll be able to see Wolverine, for example, joining forces with Han Solo and Chewbacca. Darth Vader gets a new ally in the form of Doctor Doom. Luke Skywalker and Captain America fight side-by-side. This is the first time this has happened. Naturally, fans are losing their heads. Some are calling the crossover awesome, some absurd, some an act of desperation. After it was announced last week, one internet pundit called the exercise “mashing the action figures together” for its own sake, not because the creative team has a story to tell. In other words, it’s the kind of thing a child would do while playing in his bedroom, not something that a serious comic publisher would actually attempt. Details about the plot are scarce at this point. Kevin Smith is writing the series, with David Marquez providing the art. What is known is the Star Wars cast of characters from 1977 will be drawn to Earth-616, the main Marvel Universe, by means of “a reality-shattering spell.” In keeping with crossover tradition, the tale will take place outside the regular continuity of both worlds. While alternative universes have been a staple of Marvel Comics for decades, they’re not a Star Wars thing. The event is part of parent company Disney’s plans to mark the 50th anniversary of the release of Star Wars next year. And it’s impossible to ignore the wider context. On the comic side, Marvel has lost its market-leading position to DC’s Absolute line of titles. The last Star Wars movie, the Mandalorian and Grogu, was a dud at the box office. Disney needs for these underperforming subsidiaries to generate some magic. The announcement last week billed Hope Assembles as Smith’s love letter to Star Wars. “Lifelong lovers of both Star Wars and Marvel have a lot to look forward to as we finally bring the characters together in ways fans have been dreaming about for decades!” Marvel Editor-in-Chief Stephen Wacker enthused. Does Smith have a story he’s been burning to tell, or is this just a case of squeezing merch from two different properties into the same box? And don’t forget, big-event crossovers featuring heroes from different universes have a checkered history. When Superman boxed Muhammad Ali in the 1970s, for example, the catch was that the Man of Steel was prevented from using his superpowers while fighting the champion pugilist. That kind of hokey plot device has been at the heart of a lot of these teamups. But let’s suppose Hope Assembles moves lots of units. Where does Disney go from there? Is this series the preliminary first step leading down the road to a combined animated series, or even a live-action motion picture? No one knows for sure. All I can tell you is, I feel a disturbance in the Force. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
POP-CULTURE COLUMN: To What Purpose Do You Return, August?
By Dan Brown Every month has its own individual flavour and character. Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay once said April is like a babbling idiot coming down a hill scattering flowers. Funksters Earth, Wind and Fire sang about how September is the best month for dancing. And December struck Counting Crows as feeling like a lot of oysters but no pearls. Which brings us to the month we’re currently in. What is August’s personality like? For me, the eighth month on the calendar is mostly about regret. Perhaps you can relate. When July exits, the change triggers something inside of me. It’s like an alarm saying, “You have only one more month of summer left. Make it count.” Yes, I know autumn doesn’t officially arrive until the dying days of September, but I’ve been conditioned – from being a student, from working in the education sector – to fear and lament the onset of the school year. So this month is the time of year when I look back on all the high hopes I had at the start of May. I think about the things I planned to do in the summer. I consider all the promises I made to myself. I remember the feeling of sheer potential I experience every year when school finishes – this summer, I tell myself, I’m going to do stuff. I’m not going to waste the warmest months. I’ll have something to show for this interlude free from the duties of my second job, teaching. When the first days of August arrive, always too soon, I do some internal accounting. I try to figure out what I’ve done for the last three months by making a mental list of everything I accomplished. Did I make it up to the Grand Bend flea market and the Pinery? Did I spend all the time I could with friends? Did I visit the Mustang Drive-In? Did I eat every meal I could on a patio? Did we barbecue every opportunity we got? Did I read as much as I could in our sunroom, which is most comfortable in summer? In other words: What summer memories am I going to take with me from this year? As a stoic, I know it’s up to me to use the most precious resource of all, time, in a wise way. One day it’s going to run out. Maybe I’m overstating the case, but August may be the one month when I feel my mortality most acutely. As Don Henley once sang, “There are just so many summers, babe” so it’s incumbent on me to make the most of them. What makes this impulse even more urgent to me is the fact my mother died unexpectedly at the beginning of 2025. As a result, I’m painfully aware time is the only thing you can’t buy more of. I know what you may be thinking: “Sheesh, Dan, relax! Just enjoy the rest of the summer the best you can! Stop being so morbid!” Fair enough. But you know what? I actually turned my mental list into a real one. I got my journal out last week and jotted down what I’ve been up to. To my pleasant surprise, it turned into a long list. I discovered that I have actually acquitted myself well so far this summer, in the past 90 days I HAVE done my duty to myself to spend my limited time well. And the funny part is, I always feel the same regret and then the same relief in August. I AM doing my best. I always do. I keep forgetting that. What about you? Are you feeling any August regrets? What summer promises did you make to yourself that are unfulfilled at this point? What do you plan to do this month that you haven’t made time for yet? I would love to hear all about it in the comments! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
GNG investigates The Private Eye
By Dan Brown SPOILER WARNING: This column contains plot details from the graphic novel covered by L.A. Mood’s comic book club last weekend. If you value surprise, scroll away now! This is your first and final warning. The L.A. Mood Graphic-Novel Group met Saturday, August 8. The book: The Private Eye, which was written by Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated by Marcos Martin with colour artist Muntsa Vicente. The Private Eye is a future noir that takes place in Los Angeles, just like another future noir you may know, the landmark film Blade Runner. This graphic novel continues the tradition of hard-boiled detective fiction with the creative team putting its own spin on the genre. (I haven’t had a chance to read the back-of-the-book material yet, so bear that in mind.) GNG member Gord said he felt it’s an underperformer compared to another Brian K. Vaughan-written tale of the future. “It’s no Y: The Last Man,” he said, referencing the speculative series about a dude living in a world of only women. Gord thought the worldbuilding in The Private Eye is good but felt the story is weak. One of the points brought up in our discussion was the format of the book. It’s wider than it is long, and is hard to hold, even the hardcover edition. The glossy paper flops in your hands when you try to read it. GNG member Amanda felt there was no panel in The Private Eye that couldn’t have been rendered in a standard comic format. In other words, it could have been a regular comic without any impact on the storytelling. I agree, the shape is kind of a pain. Giving it the title The Private Eye conjures up images of Humphrey Bogart and Jack Nicholson. The title is also a nod to the book’s central theme, personal privacy. It takes place in a post-internet world. At some point before the events of the book, all the information stored in the cloud leaked to the general public. As a result, there are no superheroes but everyone has a secret identity because staying anonymous is everyone’s central concern in this milieu. The investigator of the title wears a low-tech cloak that makes it hard for people to identify him. Others wear holographic masks. To be known is to be in danger. For my part, I enjoyed it. I thought The Private Eye contains some intriguing ideas. The future it depicts makes sense to me. It feels like Vaughan took current trends and explored how they might play out 50 or 100 years from now. One aspect of this future world – journalists taking on the functions of law enforcement – struck me as interesting. How did that happen? I wanted to know more about this society and the characters who inhabit it. But I’m a journalist, so perhaps I’m the only one who was enchanted with the idea of reporters turning into law enforcers. The members of the group also discussed how David Cronenberg (Gord’s pick) would be the ideal choice to direct a movie adaptation of this comic. The Canadian filmmaker would bring just the right touch of weirdness. I could see it working as not a movie, but a miniseries. The bottom line? The full range of reactions was represented Saturday morning. GNG member Carol didn’t find The Private Eye compelling enough to finish reading the thing, so at the risk of putting words in her mouth, I’ll call that a thumbs down. GNG member Gord gave it a thumbs sideways, neither up nor down. GNG member Amanda gave it a thumb slightly inclined upward, but not fully up. I give it a solid thumbs up. To me, it’s a thought-provoking and worthy future noir. L.A. Mood’s Graphic-Novel Group meets the second Saturday of every month. Next month’s selection is Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira Volume 1. It’s a cyberpunk manga. We’re set to meet September 12 at the gaming tables in the store at 11 a.m. You’re more than welcome to join the discussion! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
POP-CULTURE COLUMN: Reruns Left Us Feeling Burned
By Dan Brown The word “rerun” as it applies to a repeated episode of a network TV show is quickly disappearing from the English language. Yet viewers have never watched more reruns, meaning old content. There are entire channels now devoted to repeats. There was a time, in the 1970s, when viewers hated them. Cast your mind back to an era before streaming, before satellite TV, before cable, when the schedule for network sitcoms and dramas ran roughly parallel to the school calendar. The new season of a show would debut in September, there would be a Christmas episode, things would wrap up in May as summer approached. This was my childhood. Shows didn’t just start up any old time. There were no full seasons dumped at once. Back then, the unspoken contract the networks had with the audience at home was, there would be a new episode every week of a series like, say, Happy Days. For whatever reason, sometimes a new episode wouldn’t be available. Production delays was the most common excuse. One of the options available to programmers was to broadcast an episode that had previously aired. But they did so at their peril. That’s because viewers hated, hated, hated when this happened. The refrain you would hear is, “I’ve already seen this episode! I know what happens!” No one wanted to see the Fonz date the same girl twice. I do realize all of this must sound like an ancient-history lesson to younger readers who can’t imagine a time when repeated episodes were a big problem. That’s likely because the idea of appointment viewing isn’t a thing anymore, except for some reality shows. This was a period when your favourite show was on at the same time, same day, every week. And you had to be home in front of your boob tube to see it. Then a strange thing happened in the 1990s when specialty cable channels proliferated. They needed a cheap way to fill out their schedules. Suddenly, there were entire channels devoted to nothing except reruns – Three’s Company, Soap, the Simpsons, you name it. I joked at the time that we only hated reruns when they were free. Once we had to pay for them, they became a legit viewing choice. Fast-forward through the eras of grey-market satellite dishes, legal satellite dishes, and now streaming and YouTube. In a sense, everything we watch is a rerun of one stripe or another. Some of the most popular shows are old, whether it’s Breaking Bad or the Sopranos or Mad Men. The difference is, programs such as these were made with a radically dissimilar mindset. In the network-dominated television world of the 1970s, any single episode was an ephemeral thing, expected to live only for a week in the public’s imagination. These shows were made as cheaply as possible. But just look at a typical episode of, say, the Sopranos. The production values aren’t the same as when Gilligan’s Island first aired, no, the way the Sopranos was shot has more in common with a feature film than a series of old. That stems from today’s producers understanding their creations will automatically have an afterlife, even on a format or channel or service that doesn’t exist yet. I don’t know what comes after streaming. In his graphic novel The Private Eye (which L.A. Mood’s Graphic Novel Group is discussing this Saturday), set decades from now, writer Brian K. Vaughan anticipates a future format of ceiling-to-floor television called tee vee. And sure enough, in one scene there are characters watching an old episode of The Big Bang Theory on the tee vee. Maybe holograms are the future? If that turns out to be the case, be prepared to watch a lot of holograms of old shows you’ve seen many times before. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
The Mirthful Man Behind the Mystery Men
By Dan Brown It was August 6, 1999, when Mystery Men was released in movie theatres. As a superhero parody, I believe it stands the test of time all these years – and superhero movies – later. The idea of celebrating a motion picture’s 27th anniversary may seem absurd because journalists are supposed to write stories on the big anniversaries of a film’s debut, like the 10th, the 25th, the 50th – not a nonsensical one like No. 27. But if there’s one person who would appreciate the randomness of a 27th anniversary column, it’s the guy who created the Mystery Men, Bob Burden. I’ll be absolutely candid up front: I can’t, in a column like this, possibly do justice to Burden’s eccentric sense of humour – either in his comics, or in real life. His wit is so sardonic it approaches the poetic. I’ve interviewed him only once, when I was an arts writer at the National Post and did an explainer on the Mystery Men – the B-list comic characters who inspired the movie. “My life goes between total undisciplined mayhem and the discipline of a surgeon having his brow wiped as he’s in the 11th hour of a very touchy operation,” he told me over the phone from Atlanta. Maybe you recall Mystery Men. If not, let me refresh your memory: It stars a group of working-class schmoes who aren’t ready for the superhero big time. They don’t belong in the MCU or the DCU or any other respectable universe. They include the Bowler (Janeane Garofalo), who tosses a mystical bowling bowl with her father’s skull embedded in it. The Shoveler (William H. Macy) is armed with King Arthur’s shovel. The Spleen (Paul Reubens) has only one power: Being able to generate really toxic farts. And Mr. Furious (Ben Stiler) is able to get . . . really angry. They were a direct contrast to glamorous characters who had made the transition to the big screen by the late 1990s, like Batman and Superman. My favourite of the lot was their mentor, the Sphinx, who spoke in aphorisms like: * “He who questions training only trains himself at asking questions.” * “When you can balance a tack hammer on your head, you will head off your foes with a balanced attack.” * “When you care what is outside, what is inside cares for you.” * “You must be like wolf pack, not six pack.” Burden co-wrote the Mystery Men script, infusing the dialogue with his skewed humour. As funny as the picture still is, though, it doesn’t compare to the comics. There are only four issues of the title (which is officially Mysterymen, not Mystery Men, like the movie title). If you really want to understand his characters, and Burden’s ironic view of the world, it’s worth your while to hunt them down. In fact, the very best way to experience Burden’s storytelling is to find the title where the the less-than-super team originally debuted, Flaming Carrot Comics. Burden created Flaming Carrot long before the Mystery Men. That’s where they first appeared, then were spun off from the Carrot’s adventures and seized upon by Hollywood. As the name suggests, Flaming Carrot is a crackpot superhero with a huge carrot mask that has a flame on top. He became simple-minded after his brain was damaged from reading 5,000 comics in one sitting, which means his solution to most situations is to shoot everyone in sight. In their first adventure together, Flaming Carrot teams up with the Mystery Men to fight an army of Nazi boots cloned from the feet of Hitler. I asked Burden where he got the idea for a hero disguised by a giant carrot mask: “It was probably the dumbest idea anybody’s ever come up with for a comic character, so I said, ‘Let’s run with it.’” I was also curious back then about how much of his own personality comes through in Flaming Carrot. “That’s something that a lot of people ask, and I would ask, ‘How much of Flaming Carrot is potentially in all of us?’ I think we all need to go wandering with no direction some day on a sunny afternoon like a baby with his diaper falling off.” That, my friends is Bob Burden in a nutshell. If you dig square superheroes like the Avengers or the Justice League, Mystery Men won’t be your cup of tea. But if you’re in the mood for taking a walk off the beaten path, check them out! Let me know in the comments if you’ve seen Mystery Men. Do you agree it stands up as a spoof of the superhero genre? Is there one you think is better? Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
