Dan Brown’s Pop-culture Column feat. Dan Brown
It’s a four-letter f-word that you see a lot. No, I’m not referring to the naughty f-word. I’m talking about a term you see in many a song title these days. It’s “feat.” and it’s short for “featuring.” As in song titles like “Low by Flo Rida feat. T-Pain” and “Can’t Hold Us by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis feat. Ray Dalton.” Used in the name of a song like those two examples, it indicates that a guest artist rapped or sang a verse or even shorter snippet, like providing backing vocals, on that particular single or album track. It’s a way for an artist to tip their hat to someone who helped them realize their musical vision. And it’s freaking everywhere. If you don’t believe me, just look at the streaming charts. Right now, the No. 5 song according to Billboard is TV Off, a Kendrick Lamar song featuring Lefty Gunplay. All told, there are currently four collaborations (or “collabs,” as they are now known) in the Top 10. So what’s the problem? Stick around for a moment and I’ll tell you. First, my credentials as a music fan: I’ve been listening to music for my entire life, 56 years now. I am a daily consumer of music on my three Alexas at home and the satellite radio in my pickup. My work week is spent in the company of university students, who are all in their peak years as music enthusiasts – they often bring songs I don’t know about to my attention. If it’s on their radar, it will make its way onto mine. It’s in my nature to listen to a wide variety of musicians, from Willie Nelson to Billy Joel to the Red Clay Strays to Murray Head. And with summer coming up I plan to see a few live shows, like Daniel Lanois’ two-night stand at the Aeolian Hall in August. I have covered music as a journalist for more than three decades, interviewing the likes of Don Henley, Gordon Lightfoot, and Howard Jones. I also met Lou Reed once. Anyhoo . . . I don’t know when “feat.” (or sometimes “ft.” or “with”) first appeared, but it has proliferated to the point where it’s self-defeating. If every song has a guest performer, then that’s just the way music is made in 2025 and the designation isn’t necessary. Maybe it was a prestigious thing in the beginning. It doesn’t set a song apart anymore. I know the music biz is a tough one, but the practice has exploded to the point where listeners can just assume the “feat.” part on any given song. Now, I don’t want to say everything was better when I was younger, but in this case it might be true. For example, when Neil Young recorded Harvest in the 1970s he didn’t feel the need to let his audience know Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor sang backup vocals on that album. If I have my music lore correct, they were working in the same studio at the time and they popped in to give the Canadian rocker a hand. He thanked them, and that was all the credit needed. No one insisted on getting a “feat.” credit in those days. And as a listener, you figured out whose voices were on a song with repeated listens. It was a fun way to grow your music knowledge. Back then, it was more a team approach to music than any one individual needing to feel special – which matters because now the name of every song is a platform for marketing and self-promotion.. The counter-argument, I suppose, would be that it’s better for everyone to get their due in a public way and it’s a question of equity. If that’s the case, then song titles are literally the only part of the music world that’s equitable. Sometimes I get to thinking I must be a strange music lover because the tunes I listen to generally don’t have a featured artist on them. If “feat.” had been a thing back in the day, then we would have had to get used to song titles like Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones feat. Merry Clayton. That’s a mouthful. So go ahead – call me a purist. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
I Recommend the Movie Version of Paying For It
By Dan Brown The movie version of Chester Brown’s Paying For It is a well-crafted, warm, funny film. If you’re a fan of Canadian graphic novels, as I am, you should see it. The best part is Ottawa-born actor Dan Beirne’s portrayal of Chester, the cartoonist who seeks out sex workers after he gets dumped by his girlfriend. In real life, the dumper was one-time MuchMusic VJ Sook Yin-Lee, who directed the adaptation. Where the book focuses on Chester, the movie gives equal airtime to Lee’s side of the story, although on the big screen her character’s name is Sonny. You may know Brown as one-third of the Toronto cartoonist troika that also included Seth and the late Joe Matt. Brown is widely known for his graphic-novel history of Louis Riel. Paying For It (the graphic novel) came out in 2011 and relates his search for sex without any strings attached, which he finds with the city’s prostitutes. It’s one of those personal stories that typify the autobiographical Canadian graphic novel school of cartooning. I think it’s fair to say Brown wrote Paying For It to demystify sex work and johns. The book’s happy ending occurs when Brown finds one particular sex worker to patronize exclusively, eventually working out an arrangement in which he is her only customer. So yeah, it’s not the same old love story. “Romantic love is bullshit, and I’m not wasting any more time chasing it,” Beirne-as-Brown tells his friends. I saw Paying For It when it played in London for less than a week earlier this year. The good news is you don’t need to rush to a theatre because there’s no real reason to see it on the big screen. Seek it out when it comes to TV or streaming. Granted, Lee has some amazing compositions – the opening shot of Beirne at the drawing table is patterned after a 1668 Johannes Vermeer oil painting – but otherwise it’s not an overtly cinematic piece. Its strength lies elsewhere. I would never have picked Beirne to play Chester Brown. Clearly, Lee understood he could nail the shy comic creator, holding the whole movie together with his nebbish charm. He goes through his many encounters with sex workers with a kind of refreshing earnestness, an eager naif who wants to decode the mysteries of how to be a paying client, His circle of friends includes three other Toronto cartoonists who meet regularly to chat. There’s a lot of humour that comes from Brown’s attempts to explain his prostitution journey to his pals. The movie also does a really good job of evoking 1990s Toronto. Lee filmed scenes in the same apartment where she and Chester lived together, so you can’t get more authentic than that. Sonny, her stand-in, works for MaxMusic, which is run by an annoying/inspiring entrepreneur who is a lot like Moses Znaimer. The only element that seems missing is, although there is one scene of the aftermath of police violence on a sex worker’s apartment, we don’t see much of them outside Chester’s visits. As a viewer, I wanted to know more about their lives when they’re off the clock. I won’t spoil the ending too much, but a sad event momentarily reunites Chester and Sonny, bringing them full-circle – they are no longer the people they were at the start of the film, even if they still care for each other.. If Canadian graphic novels are your thing, you should check it out. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
Robert Pattinson Versus Himself
NOTE: Dan Brown’s column will now be appearing twice a week on the website of L.A. Mood Comics & Games; on Tuesdays, he’ll write about graphic novels, and on Thursdays he will cover other pop-culture topics. By Dan Brown You know a movie star has made it when he faces off against . . . himself. The latest example is Robert Pattinson who – through the plot device of cloning – is his own worst nightmare in the movie Mickey 17, which landed in theatres March 7. But not just any actor can do battle with his own mirror image. A Hollywood star has to earn the right to trade blows with a doppelganger by achieving a certain stature first. He has to overcome every other possible enemy – gangsters, terrorists, Nazis, aliens – over a number of earlier movies for this career avenue to open up. The earliest example I can recall of the trend is when the character played by Jean-Claude Van Damme in 1991’s Double Impact pounded on his twin brother. Arnold Schwarzenegger fought his clone nine years later in The Sixth Day. Then Tom Cruise got in on the act in 2013 in the film Oblivion. Gemini Man in 2019 featured Will Smith hunting . . . Will Smith. Strangely, veteran tough guy Sylvester Stallone has never gone up against himself on the big screen. But I have to believe that at some point during the 1980s Stallone contemplated doing a project involving Rocky Balboa trying to punch John Rambo’s lights out. At that time, it would have been easy to get it greenlit. Even relatively young stars are going this route. Next month will see the release of Sinners, the Southern gothic vampire flick in which the ascendant Michael B. Jordan plays identical siblings. The smart money says it will include at least one scene of a scrap between them. You may also be aware Robert De Niro is currently playing two roles in Alto Knights, released last week; the two gangster characters are childhood friends, not twins, and critics have slammed the picture for being confusing for that reason. That’s how accustomed audiences have grown to this convention. The closest Bruce Willis ever got was when he played an older and younger version of the same bounty hunter in 2012’s Looper, so I don’t count that one, even if the two versions of the character were enemies.Nor do I include the 1988 Jeremy Irons movie Dead Ringers, since it was a thriller, not an action film. Also out is Mark Hamill’s brief encounter with his own dark side in 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back – that case was a single scene, not the entire premise. As I mentioned above, not every actor has the necessary drawing power to play on a double bill with themselves. In Hollywood, you have to earn the right to be your own opponent by building up your filmography over a number of years and motion pictures. For that reason, starring opposite himself would make no sense for an actor in his debut film – he wouldn’t be that well-known. That’s why you have to work your way to the top, fighting other types of bad guys, before you can trade blows with your twin or clone. At a certain level of fame, a star is the only one audiences will buy with the necessary strength to go toe-to-toe with himself. By process of elimination in all his previous movies, he becomes the next logical adversary. I leave it up to you to decide if Pattinson fits that bill. I tend to give him a break since he has followed an unusual career trajectory, alternating smaller projects with blockbusters.You will notice I have used the male pronoun throughout this column, a choice I made from not being able to come up with any examples of women action stars being part of this trend. I would argue Linda Hamilton long ago had enough action cred to fight herself, perhaps in the form of a Terminator version of Sarah Connor. I would pay to see that.And we know from previous instalments that androids and cloning are part of the Alien universe. Who doesn’t want to see Sigourney Weaver star in Alien: Ripley vs. Ripley? Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
Read Local, Shop Local, Attend Local Cons
By Dan Brown I’ll be honest with you: I don’t know how the Trump tariffs are going to affect the price of comics, if at all. But if you’re looking for ways to put your comic-book dollars back into the local economy, be it Southwestern Ontario or Canada, here are a few ideas for how to do so. For starters, you can patronize local comics stores like L.A. Mood, which employs Londoners and supports the local pop-culture ecosystem by hosting events like Godzilla Day. The Forest City has always been blessed with more than its share of places where you can pick up your favourite comic titles, and the same goes for all of Southwestern Ontario. Here’s a fun road trip idea for when the warm weather arrives: Make it your goal to visit all the comic stores in this corner of Canada, which will mean travelling to such communities as Sarnia, Windsor, Chatham, Kitchener, and Guelph. I did so a few summers back and it was a blast! Along the same lines, when convention season starts back up, you don’t need to go all the way to San Diego (or even Toronto) to hang out with other comic enthusiasts.London has cons aplenty, including Forest City Comicon – which this year moves to a new date (November 2) and venue (the Lamplighter Inn). Other shows to keep in mind include the Chatham Kent Expo, which happens April 26 and 27. I realize bigger cons get bigger names. That doesn’t necessarily make for a better experience, though. For example, almost every DC or Marvel panel I’ve attended at Fan Expo in previous years can be summed up in one sentence: “Our company has such cool stories coming out soon, but if we told you the details it would spoil them.” The difference at a smaller event is the friendlier vibe, which is much warmer. There is no substitute for meeting comic fans or cosplayers in your own backyard! And what’s that, you say you also want to read local at this moment in our country’s history? It’s easy to make that happen by throwing your support behind specific creators and publishers. There are guys like Byron’s Derek Laufman, the graphic novelist responsible for Bot 9, RuinWorld, and Crimson Fall. Fans can buy his books and art directly from his website. Laufman also has a Patreon page, which offers exclusive first looks at the projects he is working on. Other Forest City creators to check out include Diana Tamblyn, A Jaye and Alison Williams, Scott MacDougall and D.S. Barrick (who publish under the banner of River Donkey Adventures), Sam Maggs, and don’t forget Bryan Lee O’Malley. Among the cartoonists with connections to the wider Southwestern Ontario scene are Jeff Lemire, Seth, Scott Chantler, and Joe Ollmann. Or perhaps you want to support Canadian publishing houses. Done. There’s always Drawn & Quarterly in Montreal, the East Coast’s Conundrum Press, and Chapterhouse Comics (the publisher of Captain Canuck). They all do compelling work. If you don’t like my ideas and you need more suggestions, just consult with the staff at your comic-store or the nearest librarian. When it comes to comics, and pop culture in general, our dominion punches way above its weight. So if you have any other suggestions of other creators to support, or different ways to keep your pop-culture dollars circulating close to home, I would love to hear all about them in the comment box below! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
Movie Mentors Inspired Me
NOTE: Dan Brown’s column will now be appearing twice a week on the website of L.A. Mood Comics & Games; on Tuesdays, he’ll write about graphic novels, and on Thursdays he will cover other pop-culture topics.By Dan Brown It’s the movies that made me the mentor I am today. If it wasn’t for motion pictures like To Sir, With Love, The Empire Strikes Back, and Stand and Deliver, I’m not sure I would be one. It was the movie mentors – Sir, Yoda, Jaime Escalante – who showed me how I could inspire young people. Those characters also provided proof of how rewarding mentorship could be not just for the young person, but the mentor, too. Some background: In my day job, I work as the editorial-support manager for the Western Gazette, the student-owned and-run newspaper here in London. What does that mean, exactly? I like to think of it in these terms: Each new academic year, a recent grad serves as editor-in-chief. I, on the other hand, am the paper’s “mentor-in-chief.” (I could, and will, write a column another day about how I love the Gazette’s mentoring culture, every student gets in on helping newsroom newbies.) I’m also a journalism instructor at the same university, so have served as a mentor to students I meet through my classes. But my interest in mentoring started decades ago, long before I got my current position and long before I began teaching at Ontario universities. I was still a student in grade school. The original spark might very well have been when I watched Sidney Poitier’s To Sir, With Love for the first time, likely on afternoon TV in the 1970s one summer. It might have been Channel 10 or Global or even TVOntario that aired it. As you may recall, Poitier plays an engineer who can’t get a role in his own industry, so he turns to teaching as his Plan B, winding up tutoring a bunch of tough kids in 1966 East London. The unruly group of working-class teens initially gets the better of their teacher. In a fit of desperation he decides to throw out the curriculum so he can impose his own structure on the class, which allows him to school the motley crew about the facts of life they will need to survive. Gradually, they warm to his brand of tough love, and just as the students start to fall in love with him, he returns the affection. All that and a heartbreaker of a song by Lulu! It still brings tears to my eyes. Skip ahead a couple years. When The Empire Strikes Back comes out in 1980, George Lucas replaces acclaimed actor Alec Guinness (who played Ben Kenobi in the original Star Wars) with a green muppet as the new spokesman for the Force in Luke’s training scenes on the swamp planet Dagobah. To this day, I still ponder Yoda’s lessons. Is there really only a “do or do not” and no “try”? Isn’t that a tad harsh? When Yoda uttered the word “unlearn” it blew my mind. I knew what learning was, I was doing it at Valleyview Public School, but “unlearning” opened up all kinds of possibilities I had never thought about before. My favourite scene in all of Star Wars comes from that sequence, when Yoda describes the nature of the Force to a maturing Luke and tells him people are “luminous beings,” not just crude flesh and blood. Stirring stuff. As a teen, I would be riveted by Edwards James Olmos’s turn as real-life calculus teacher Jaime Escalante. His determination to help a class of young Latinos in L.A. reach their potential was inspiring. I marveled when he told them the Mayas invented the concept of zero, adding “You burros have math in your blood.” Olmos says he asks only one thing of his students: A desire to learn: “If you don’t have the ganas, I will give it to you because I’m an expert.” Math was never my thing. But I could see how he lit the fires in the eyes of his students.And there were others: Ben Kenobi himself, Joe Clark (as played by Morgan Freeman in Lean on Me), Robin Williams in Dead Poet’s Society (it was the book, not the movie, which introduced me to Miss Jean Brodie when I was a student at a British high school for a year). By the way, it wasn’t apparent to me until years after I became an instructor at Western that what I was doing was mentoring. One day, after helping a student from one of my classes, I got an email that said, “You’re a great mentor.” I had never thought of it in that way before. So that made it official. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
Captain Canuck is the Right Hero, Right Now
By Dan Brown This is my love letter to Captain Canuck, who in 2025 celebrates 50 years of battling aliens, evil businessmen, radiated monsters, neo-Nazis, and street-level crooks in the True North. First appearing in 1975, Canuck has had a sporadic publishing history in the decades since but that didn’t stop the superhero from making a deep impression on me, as well as an entire generation of young comic fans in Canada. I came on board when issue No. 4 showed up on the spinner rack in the variety store at Westown Plaza Mall (now Cherryhill Village) on Oxford Street. That would have been 1979. Captain Canuck co-creator Richard Comely, who still appears at fan gatherings (most recently Toronto Comicon last weekend), has said the red-and-white-costumed do-gooder filled a niche that Marvel and DC weren’t addressing back then. When I close my eyes and think about the Canuck of my childhood, what jumps out at me is . . . the colour. Captain Canuck popped off the page. It was the first comic I had found in which the skin of white characters wasn’t a flat pink; it was pink mottled with all kinds of purples and reds. And I wasn’t a kid who read comics for the colouring or quality paper. Yes, I was also a fan of Wolverine over in the pages of the Uncanny X-Men. But there was something about Canuck. Perhaps it was his modest powers – Tom Evans, struck by an alien ray, gains the strength of two, count ’em two, mortal men. Logan may have been an unstoppable killing machine, but Canuck was a real Canadian in that he was much more modest and realistic. I grasped that, even as a kid. Even the odd touches wormed their way into my imagination. When Canuck is imprisoned by the underlings of the dastardly Mr. Gold in that fourth issue, he does what any superhero would do: He prays to God for help. In the ensuing panels, he spots a loose brick in the cell he’s housed in, and targets it to gain back his freedom. I also loved the science-fiction look to the whole thing. Captain Canuck took place in the futuristic world of the 1990s, when Canada has fulfilled Wilfrid Laurier’s prediction that it would own the 20th century by becoming the most important country on the planet How important was Captain Canuck? So much so, his series was the only one I got a subscription to, that’s how much I loved the George Freeman-drawn action. I couldn’t chance missing even one issue. Smarter people than me have pointed out how Canuck seems to have a sense of occasion, with his 50th birthday coming at this particular moment in our nation’s history, when the U.S. president has been musing aloud about his wish for Canada to become part of the United States. Comely has seized on the revulsion many Canadians are feeling right now, offering a variant cover with Canuck telling Donald Trump firmly to back off – not by smashing him in the mouth, just forcefully squeezing his arm. Another cover on offer at Toronto on the weekend by Ty Templeton goes a step further, showing a reluctant Canuck giving a solid punch to Uncle Sam. “Please don’t make me fight you!!” he pleads as he lays out the star-spangled symbol of the American people. Since those early days, there have been several different versions of Canuck. The character got stranded in the past just as the series went on hiatus, leaving us diehards moping about the fate of our favourite homegrown hero for decades. But he came back, keeping the faith with his now grown-up fans who still remember the glory days. Captain Canuck had originally appeared in the Me Decade in the afterglow of Canada’s year-long centennial celebrations. The hardscrabble 1970s, a decade of disillusion, brought Canadians back to Earth. Canuck captured our hearts with his essential decency – even in the future time of 1993, Canadians were still the envy of the world, fighting for decency, using their influence to forward the cause of goodness. So maybe his 50th anniversary is coming at just the right moment in the history of our dominion. Perhaps everyone here and abroad needs a reminder of all the good things Canada has brought, and continues to bring, into this world. That’s why Captain Canuck is always the right hero at the right time. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
