Isaac Cates
“Lecturer” (UVM English) in poetry, comics, writing, etc.; sometime drawer and editor of comics, sometime writer of poems; trying to return to the world
Some projects here:
#DailyKrazyDetail
#FourActorFactor
#OrwellVsChatGPT
#NearbyNature2025
- I watched Black Widow to get ready for Thunderbolts*, and something struck me that I haven’t seen anyone talking about. Red Guardian talks about having FOUGHT CAPTAIN AMERICA DURING THE COLD WAR. IIRC Natasha even challenges his facts on this, and he reasserts it. This raises four possibilities:
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- This is an even more interesting solution, though I’m not sure about the canon of when Bradley was active
- Has Uncle Ben taught us NOTHING?
- This might not be a story Marvel wants to tell, but I think it’s actually got some potential. Cold-War super-spies? There’s a What If? episode that suggests an ‘80s alternate-MCU Avengers (with Bill Foster and T’Chaka and Mar-Vell) but I’m imagining something more subtle, something retconnable …
- Imagine, let’s say, Steve alongside Hank and Janet and … maybe a sorceror cast out from Kamar-Taj? Maybe an Inhuman (or a mutant) with mental powers, like a young Charles Xavier? On a covert, urgent trip into Afghanistan? How many of them would Alexei have recognized as “super” opponents?
- … Maybe this Cold-War Cap was unsuccessful. Maybe he was killed somewhere the US wanted to deny it even had its forces in. Maybe, in fact, several men slung that merely-steel shield, all died, and Alexei thinks he was still fighting the same guy. This leads to the most interesting possibility:
- 4. MAYBE IT WAS STEVE. Specifically, maybe it was Steve during the ending of Endgame, coming out of retirement during his Mr Peggy Carter trip through the time loop. We know Hank Pym and Janet were superheroing covertly during the ‘80s. Maybe a secret (real) Captain America worked with them.
- (We could have additional fun with this idea by populating his false memories with a Soviet super-team — Darkstar, Crimson Dynamo, Ursa Major, Vanguard — and animating them like X-Men ‘97, or like Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends.)
- 3. A FALSE CAPTAIN AMERICA. If the US was willing to recast Captain America after Steve retired, why wouldn’t a nation hoping for a symbol start a casting call during the Reagan era? Maybe this Cap isn’t remembered because he was a flash in the pan, or only did proxy-war missions (Honduras, etc)…
- 1. ALEXEI IS JUST BOASTING. It’s not totally out of character for him. Maybe he has convinced himself that someone he did fight might have been Captain America, or maybe he is so committed to communism that he thinks of everything he has done as fighting that other singular national symbol.
- 2. IMPLANTED MEMORIES. Although reading #1 has Occam’s Razor on its side, this one strikes me as quite plausible. The Soviet Super-Soldier program might simply have programmed him with memories of cartoonish derring-do that he still believes. It seems well within their means and methods.
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- I could do that. I’m not likely to play Blue Prince
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- Ask a bootlegger
- Only the criminals will have porn
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- YEEEEEEEEAAAAHHHH
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- One loves to see it
- can i ask my followers here perhaps too earnestly - if you hate AI or find it utterly worthless, why?
- The harper's letter crowd is pretending the real threat to free speech is the same as the fake one they spent years panicking about. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...
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- I heard the other day that filming a movie partly in Canada or Australia is a National Security Threat
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- It’s one of the all-time greats!
- If you see this, post a sword. (My drawing of Trondheim & Sfar’s Hyacinthe and Herbert, from the Donjon series.) satisfactorycomics.blogspot.com/2012/07/alph...
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- I need 250 pencils. Or at least 25
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- Snails definitely have an appeal
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- Isopods? I’m trying to think about small critters that are weird in their niches
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- This is a simple American-made wrestling picture. Don’t overthink it
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- “Mute inglorious Miltons,” as Thomas Gray put it at the end of the 18th century
- You would want the President to know what “national security” means, and to be able to rationally distinguish between things that are and aren’t threats to national security. Just seems like, y’know, a good skill for someone to have in that job
- Lynda Barry once told me that I draw “kickass demons!”
- Also, good luck charging a fucking TARIFF on a movie Who imports them? Which port do they move through?
- Handing over academic institutional leadership to a roving class of elite administrators, none remaining in place long, just climbing ladders and cashing checks … was a mistake,
- 🔥🔥🔥
- Just listened to the new @natedimeo.bsky.social Memory Palace, and I have never been more moved by the word “ballast.” It’s so good. Memory Palace is always so good. thememorypalace.us/on-dexter-av...
- I think this might be the most Starwars I’ve drawn. Just a little drawing of an IG-88 toy that never really existed. Gotta love those IG droids
- Post a meme made by you
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- The Fellowship of the Rig The Two Owers The Return of the Kin
- WE ARE VAIN AND WE ARE BLIND I HATE PEOPLE WHEN THEY’RE NOT POLITE
- Remove a letter, ruin a movie: John Carpenter’s The Thin
- Puppets…
- You should be proud of the expression on Elmo’s face. That’s some quality cartooning, for real
- If you see this, post your getaway vehicle
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- Somewhere I have a poem in which the guacamole gods demand blood Oh, wait. Here it is. Early pandemic vibes.
- I had a similar dumb method for pitting avocados until a few years ago when I needed stitches in my palm
- Halfway through my last day of classes; about to go offer my graphic-novel students a “second semester syllabus” to read over the summer
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- It’s always the closest of our enemies
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- Happy birthday, as they say in English, I think
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- Maybe also the tariffs starting to take effect
- Quote with a comfort film
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- I really like the scapes admiring themselves and the enjambment in “so far / away”
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- I keep telling myself, like a parent passing a McDonald’s, “We have games at home.”
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