#steve penfold

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Judge Moon by Steve Penfold

The illuminating superhero, The Moon dressed as Mega-City One lawman, Judge Moon! 

Have you ever looked up into the night sky and wondered what the Moon does when he’s not up there?  

What if I was to tell you that the Moon has dropped out of the sky early hours of every morning for the last 2000 years and most recently puts on a suit, takes out a gun and fights ridiculous crime?

Ar least that’s what artist Steve Penfold & writer Dan Thompson tell us in their highly recommended small press comic, Moon.

A great premise by this UK team, with typically dark & humorous art, which Steve likes to play with by choosing his fave comic book heroes, and giving them some of that ol’ lunar magic!

[proudlyhopelesslyoptimistic]

Sadly, there is no archive of the donut, no research institute devoted to fired snack foods that can be visited and mined.

Penfold, The Donut, 14.

[proudlyhopelesslyoptimistic]

[The connection between donut folklore and market saturation] speaks to the relationship between mass culture, imagined community, and authenticity in a consumer society. The donut shop became a touchstone for imagined community not in spite of its status as a mass institution, but because of it. That it sold a mass commodity, that it became one itself, that it crossed boundaries of geography, taste, class, and gender, that it seemed to unite disparate groups of consumers, that it served ‘everybody,’ was precisely the source of its authenticity and folkloric power. This was especially true of Tm Hortons, which had taken pride of place in donut folklore by the 1990s as it increasingly transcended particular local and regional economies.

Penfold, The Donut, 195.

[proudlyhopelesslyoptimistic]

Much of donut folklore played on irony and absence, poking fun at the unsophisticated hinterland and the pretentious metropolis, half-jokingly recognizing that few things united Canadians besides a coffee and donut . . . many observers have noted that this sort of double-edged, ironic posture seems endemic to Canadian cultural life, driven by a belief in our status as Other. ‘Canadian consciousness,’ writes Andrew Wernick, ‘is . . . an ironic duality that borrows the clothes but not the spirit of American razzle-dazzle, and . . . knows itself to be rooted in the dull daily experience of living in a peripheralized region in which nothing really happens.’ Perhaps, in this sense, both the donut (as a quirky snack food devoid of nutritional substance) and the donut shop (as a utilitarian commercial space with few cultivated pretensions) were perfectly suited to the ironic purposes of the Canadian popular imagination.

Penfold, The Donut, 188-89.

[proudlyhopelesslyoptimistic]

Like much official Canadian culture, early nationalist donut lore was simply the regional delusions of southern Ontario.

Steve Penfold, The Donut: A Canadian History, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 176.