Ritesh Babu

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Articles

Ritesh Babu on The Good Asian #1

Jul 26, 2023 | shelfdust.com | Ritesh Babu

By Ritesh BabuLook at the history of Western constructions of Asian identity. Look at the history of Western constructions of Asian masculinity. Look close, and look carefully at that word: constructions. These constructions are often shaped, shepherded and spread by a White Hegemony. They are not real: they’re far more about the White Hegemony and its projects, its fears, fantasies, and fetishes than any actual realities of the Asian people.
Infidel: The Terror of White Neutrality

May 18, 2023 | tcj.com | Ritesh Babu

Everybody at some level believes in it. It's a deeply seductive image. The image that we all want, as oppressed people, is an image of our masters finally loving us and recognizing our humanity. It is this image that keeps prostitutes with their pimps, the colonized with their colonizers and battered women with their batterers. Everybody dreams of one day being safe. -Anthony Farley, legal scholar, quoted in Silent Covenants: Brown v.
The legacy heroes and horrors of Mark Waid's DC

Apr 27, 2023 | thepopverse.com | Ritesh Babu

Mark Waid is one of the biggest names in American superhero comics. He loves the superhero deeply, and has done so for over 50 years. But his most impassioned vision of the superhero is represented best in his work at DC Comics. And while he would depart from the publisher in the late 2000s, only to return just recently in the 2020s, Waid's legacy there is quite revealing, and worth unpacking.
Pax Americana and The Infinite Loop Of Imperiums

Mar 25, 2023 | comicbookherald.com | Ritesh Babu

——————————————————————————————————It is often said that Watchmen is the most influential comic ever to be released. That comics wouldn’t be where they are without it, for good and for ill. But how did we get here, exactly? More to the point, just what influence did Watchmen provide to the larger world of comics? What, ultimately, is the legacy of Watchmen? Who watched the Watchmen? Rebirth hadn’t yet happened. Doomsday Clock was not a thing. Rorschach and the Watchmen TV show didn’t exist.
Creed III Reinvents the Greatest Rocky Villain

Mar 1, 2023 | denofgeek.com | Ritesh Babu

Lang does not simply suffer from a bruised ego like Apollo in Rocky II, and nor is he the inhuman death-machine and cyborg that Dolph Lundgren’s Ivan Drago would later prove to be in Rocky IV. No, Lang represents something real and meaningful, which casts a shadow of doubt over Rocky and everything he’s come to represent. Lang has an ethos and a belief system, which neither the cheery Apollo or the grunting Drago do. They have no point to make or prove, they’re just figures for Rocky to beat.
Grant Morrison's Judge Dredd, Part III

Feb 28, 2023 | comicbookherald.com | Ritesh Babu

What on earth was Morrison’s take on Judge Dredd? And why is it something that seems to almost never come up when people talk about their work? Why is it almost buried and forgotten? What did they even try to do there? We’ll explore that here, picking up where we left off…. Book Of The Dead- The Dredd Of Two Worlds!Morrison’s second Dredd story was to be a collaboration with writer Mark Millar, alongside artist Dermot Power, and letterers Tom Frame and John Aldridge forming the creative team.
Grant Morrison's Judge Dredd, Part II

Feb 26, 2023 | comicbookherald.com | Ritesh Babu

What on earth was Morrison’s take on Judge Dredd? And why is it something that seems to almost never come up when people talk about their work? Why is it almost buried and forgotten? What did they even try to do there? We’ll explore that here, picking up where we left off…. Inferno– The Prototypical Dredd EpicMorrison’s first Judge Dredd story would also be their biggest.
Grant Morrison's Judge Dredd, Part I

Feb 25, 2023 | comicbookherald.com | Ritesh Babu

Grant Morrison has done pretty much everything. In a career spanning 4 decades, starting from their late teens into their now early-sixties, Morrison has trekked across most of the Western comics landscape. They’ve done a great deal of work, both big and small.
Who Watched the Watchmen? Watchmen and The Darkness Within

Feb 23, 2023 | comicbookherald.com | Ritesh Babu

There is a great lie about Watchmen. They repeat the lie over and over again, pretending it says a lot, when it says very little. It is not a lie of malice, but a lie of ignorance. It is a lie predicated on omission of truth. It is a lie that only emerges when one understands history. It is a meaningless statement presented as meaningful to those who don’t know better. It is the first lie of American comics that every new reader is confronted with, when surveying the scene of the superhero.
DC and The Matter Of Crisis, Part V

Feb 18, 2023 | comicbookherald.com | Ritesh Babu

You’ve heard the word. You know the story. Crisis. The iconic, defining, definitive word of DC stories. The word Crisis feels inseparable from the fabric of DC. It holds sway over its past, it informs its present, and it will certainly influence the future. You can’t think of DC and not think of Crisis at some point. The very idea of it has been bound to the very idea of DC that tightly. And the response to the word and its invocation is intense as well. It comes with a lot of assumptions and baggage.