Stephen Bobbett – Page 2 – Stephen Bobbett

Peacemaker Season 2 Review

Promo artwork from the Peacemaker series.

I’ll admit, I’m a sucker for James Gunn. Yeah, there’s some valid criticism of his cinematic crutches: his reliance on licensed music, the gratuitous shock factor he employs, and the repeated trope of mercenaries and their found families. But his movies and TV shows often have strong character arcs and lots of emotional fidelity—the meat and potatoes of a satisfying narrative, which most superhero properties fail to bring to the table.

That said, Peacemaker Season 2 left me a little malnourished.

It’s a bummer, because Season 1 was fun and poignant in a lot of unexpected ways. I love stories about lesser known comic book characters. Peacemaker is unencumbered by any preexisting fandom, which lets Gunn tell an original story, with a nuanced take on masculinity and generational trauma—that is, in between alien butterflies hollowing out people’s brains and piloting them like undead meat mechs.

On that note, it’s interesting how often Gunn’s stuff centers on angry, zombified masses—a reasonable obsession for someone who became the internet’s Villain of the Month, exiling him from Marvel and forcing him to wander the DC deserts for a while. From Starro commandeering the Corto Maltese army in The Suicide Squad, to Lex Luthor’s brigade of shitposting monkeys in Superman, the man is understandably getting some catharsis after tangling with the terminally online mob.

Anyway, in comparison to Season 1, Peacemaker Season 2 felt very uneven. Half of the episodes felt interstitial at best, the characters slowly ambling towards the next plot device while volleying some very hit-or-miss barbs. The action sequences were energizing but also very sparse for a superhero story.

I will say, the multiverse angle of Season 2 had more pathos than anything Marvel has done with its entire Multiverse Saga (save perhaps Loki). Early in the season, Peacemaker gets swept into an adjacent dimension where his father and brother are still alive and they’re a trio of celebrated, kaiju-slaying saviors. In some ways, it’s James Gunn continuing to digest the perils of internet culture: the idea that if you just walk through the right portal, you can live in a small but perfect world where nothing is wrong and you’re always the hero.

Of course, nothing in a Gunn story is that clean. Peacemaker’s perfect world turns out to be one in which the Axis powers won the war, and he’s the unwitting beneficiary of a Nazi-run America. But this big reveal is a blip on the radar, glazed over with a single flurry of heartbreaking violence that Peacemaker is forced to flee. The show never burdens him with processing what it meant to feel at home in that world, a missed opportunity given that Peacemaker’s entire arc is about him escaping the legacy of his white supremacist dad. In a show about taking a macho douchebag through a journey of emotional complexity, what did it mean to Peacemaker that his alternate universe dad was not a Nazi but unwilling to fight it with the full force of his heroism? Guess we’ll never know.

All that said, I could’ve watched a supercut of Freddie Stroma’s trivia-loving psychopath Vigilante and still gleaned the best parts of the season.

Does Peacemaker need a Season 3? Probably not. But as long as the Gunn keeps aiming for the heart, I don’t mind if he misses now and then.

Skellyfish

This October’s drawing obsession: drawing skeletons for things that don’t actually have them. I think it’s inspired by wandering through a Spirit Halloween one year and seeing a plastic figuring of an octopus skeleton. If you have non-skeletal skeletons you’d like drawn, just leave them in the comments or join me for the FancySchmancy Creature Feature.

Skeleton Tavern Keeper

This month I’m drawing spooky, scary skeletons for the FancySchmancy Creature. This is the first, a skeleton tavern keeper requested by my Twitch mod Harukio. From here on out, I think we’re going to draw the skeletons of things that don’t usually have skeletons. It reminds me of seeing an octopus skeleton figure at a Spirit Halloween: biologically unfeasible, but seasonally awesome. More to come!

Broken and Known

A digitally illustrated mandala of telescopes, agave shrubs, and socks in a tumbling laundry

Of all the places to be seized by revelation, I didn’t expect it to be the Wash & Go Laundromat in Redondo Beach, California.

I’m on the West Coast for work, but also for reconnaissance. This past week, I’ve been trying to learn videography as rapidly as Neo learning kung fu. I’m attempting to give our company a healthy dose of modern digital marketing, filming the shoe wear testing process at our biomechanics lab in Los Angeles, and proving to our team we have the internal capacity for webinars, TikToks, and podcasting.

I’ve also been staying at a friend’s studio in the back of their house near Hermosa Beach, testing the waters of a move back to this side of the country.

I miss Southern California. Like, a lot. Yeah, the traffic sucks, and shit’s expensive, and the city sprawl is as thick as kudzu. But I have tried to replenish the word “home” in my brain with at least seven other states in the Union, and none of them fill it to the brim like this one does.

Last time I lived here was in 2008, right when the Great Recession was revving its engines. It was not a great time to be a college graduate in the City of Angels with only an inkling of a career path. I made the right choice at the time (that is, after a brief and impulsive move to the Pacific Northwest that led to a nervous breakdown, but I digress). I moved to the East Coast, where there was extended family and a semblance of stability. And for at least a decade, it remained the right choice.

But stability isn’t always growth, and historically, California is where I’ve come to grow. It’s where my first memories were forged, combing shells on Newport Beach as a little blonde-haired kindergartener when my family lived in Costa Mesa in the 80’s. It’s where I came back when I left home after high school in the Midwest. I got my bachelor’s degree in Azusa, had my first kiss in Pasadena, got hired for my first marketing gig in the Arts District. The decade or more I collectively spent in California was arduous sometimes, but it was nourishing, like how a shrub thrives in the desert.

And now, at the end of a long but fruitful week of shoe footage, I find myself doing laundry at the Wash & Go in Redondo Beach, getting ready to fly to a trade show in Portland. A song comes on the radio. It’s “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls.

This song. I think I first heard it when I was living in Indiana at 16, driving back and forth between home and my summer job as a kitchen manager at a youth camp. The last gasps of radio before MP3s nearly drowned it.

There’s a bit of trivia about this song that’s never left my brain’s disheveled archives. When it was written, the lead singer and songwriter John Rzeznik was suffering from a year-long case of writer’s block. Just when he thought his career might be withering, he got a call to produce a song for the movie City of Angels. And he determined that no matter what spilled onto the page, no matter what he felt about it, he would commit to it wholeheartedly.

He wrote the song in one day, like a primal scream. The song was so ubiquitous—and the word choices were so elementary—that it was easy to overlook the earnest tension on display in the chorus:

And I don’t want the world to see me‘
‘Cause I don’t think that they’d understand
When everything’s made to be broken
I just want you to know who I am

In the music video, Rzeznik swivels on a chair in a lonely tower above the city, peering through a series of steampunk telescopes at a world he either can’t or won’t participate in. In the context of the lyrics, he’s a man torn in two: anchored to his isolation to protect what he perceives as grotesque injuries to his soul, but wanting to risk exposure to people so his soul might have a chance to flourish. It’s not unlike a songwriter in the throes of writer’s block, torn between latching his heart shut or opening it up to the world.

And it’s not unlike a single man with no kids at a transitional stage of his career, torn between the two coasts that, respectively, now offer the same prospects of stability or growth they always have in his past.

The song ends. The washing machine comes to a standstill. The clothes stop tumbling. An empty dryer awaits them.

It might be time for a transfer.

Cuphead Noir

It’s been a hot minute since I sat down and did an intense illustration like this. “Cuphead Noir” was originally drawn in the run-up to TwitchCon ’19, where I shared a booth in artist alley with my friend Ashley Villers. Of any video game fan art I’ve done, I think this is my favorite. I like how the composition and color scheme turned out, not to mention Cuphead is one of those games I could easily play once a year and get just as much satisfaction out of it as the first time.