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    Did a TV Show Hurt You? ‘Fix-Its’ Offer Justice

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    This article includes spoilers for “Daredevil: Born Again,” “Severance,” “The Last of Us” and “The White Lotus.”As a longtime player of the Last of Us video game series, Sam Gaitan knew the death was coming. Still, the brutal murder of Joel in a recent episode of the HBO adaptation hit her hard. It was already midnight when she went on Tumblr to read fan reactions. Then, in a fit of inspiration, she started writing.“I was a wreck, and I needed to get those strong emotions out,” Gaitan, a tattooist and artist, said in a recent phone interview. By 5 a.m., she had written 3,761 words featuring Joel and Red, an original character Gaitan had previously created, and an alternative scenario that spares Joel from his onscreen fate.Writing under the alias oh_persephone, she posted the story on AO3, an online repository for fan fiction and other fan-created art, and crashed until her dogs woke her up the next morning.“It probably wasn’t the most coherent thing I’ve written,” she said, laughing. “But I figured other people could use it as much as I did.”In this alternative plot to “The Last of Us,” Joel, the beloved male lead played by Pedro Pascal, avoids being detained and murdered by a rival group.He is saved by Red, an invented heroine who convinces the gunmen that Joel is already dead and sends them off.“Joel’s eyes were on her, watching, a breath away from being up and ready to fight if needed,” oh_persephone writes. “They were both tightly wound coils, waiting to explode.”

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      in Television

      The Darker Side of Japan’s Love of Cuteness

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      From Hello Kitty to Pikachu, the country changed what the world considers adorable. But do these characters represent joy — or rage?To accompany this essay, three Japanese artists created (and named) seven mascots exclusively for T, all inspired by or representing The New York Times in some way.HELLO KITTY STANDS on the balcony like Eva Perón, framed by two great stone pillars and a blue-green dome. At least theoretically she is standing: Save for the round, claw-free paws on the balustrade, she is all giant head, white as a lit-up lamp with sun ray whiskers and the slash of a red ribbon at her left ear, mouthless, her eyes wholly pupils. This little girl — she is not a cat, although not not a cat either (more on this in a bit) — presides over an exhibition at the Hyokeikan, part of the Tokyo National Museum complex in the city’s Ueno Park, celebrating her 50 years of existence and global domination. More

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      in Television

      Jay North, Child Star Who Played ‘Dennis the Menace,’ Dies at 73

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      Mr. North was best known for playing the towheaded Dennis Mitchell on the television series, which ran on CBS from 1959 to 1963.Jay North, who played the well-meaning, trouble-causing protagonist of the popular CBS sitcom “Dennis the Menace” from 1959 to 1963, died on Sunday at his home in Lake Butler, Fla. He was 73.His death was confirmed by Laurie Jacobson, a friend of Mr. North’s for 30 years. The cause was colorectal cancer, Ms. Jacobson said.Mr. North played the towheaded Dennis Mitchell, who roamed his neighborhood, usually clad in a striped shirt and overalls, with his friends, and often exasperated his neighbor, a retiree named George Wilson, who was played by Joseph Kearns. Herbert Anderson played Dennis’s father, and Gloria Henry played his mother.Dennis winds up causing lots of trouble, usually by accident.In one episode, a truck knocks over a street sign, and Dennis and a friend stand it up — incorrectly. Workmen then dig a gigantic hole, meant to be a pool for a different address, in Mr. Wilson’s front yard.The show, which was adapted from a comic strip by Hank Ketcham, presented an idyllic, innocent vision of suburban America as the 1950s gave way to the tumultuous ’60s.But things were not easy for Mr. North behind the scenes.Many years after “Dennis the Menace” ended, Mr. North said that his acting success came at the cost of a happy childhood.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      John Peck, Underground Cartoonist Known as The Mad Peck, Dies at 82

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      Among many other accomplishments, he illustrated a scholarly work on the history of comic books and wrote record reviews in four-panel comic-strip form.John Peck, a cultural omnivore known as The Mad Peck whose dryly humorous style as an underground cartoonist, artist, critic, disc jockey and record collector was accompanied by an ornate eccentricity, died on March 15 in Providence, R.I. He was 82.The cause of his death, in a hospital, was a ruptured aneurysm in his aorta, said his sisters, Marie Peck and Lois Barber.Mr. Peck was not as well known or acclaimed as underground cartoonists like Robert Crumb or Art Spiegelman. That was perhaps in part because his interests were so broad, Gary Kenton, who edited him at Fusion and Creem magazines from the late 1960s into the ’70s, said in an interview.“To me, he would be a Top 10 cartoonist, a Top 10 D.J., a Top 10 rock critic,” Mr. Kenton said.Mr. Peck illustrated one of the first scholarly works on the importance of comic books. And he was perhaps the first cartoonist to write record reviews in four-panel comic-strip form.He also wrote an academic paper in 1983 with the literary commentator Michael Macrone about the evolution of television; its title, “How J.R. Got Out of the Air Force and What the Derricks Mean,” playfully referenced phallic symbolism in the oil-soaked prime-time soap opera “Dallas.” Mr. Peck once called it his “crowning achievement.”His comic-strip music critiques appeared in Fusion, Creem, Rolling Stone and other music publications, and in The Village Voice. He worked in a retro style repurposed from the 1940s and ’50s and wrote with sardonic humor (“Is There Life After Meatloaf?”), while offering trustworthy criticism.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Charlie Cox Thought He Missed His Superhero Shot. Then Came ‘Daredevil.’

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      “I’m still pinching myself if I’m honest,” the actor said, before extolling the virtues of cold plunges, TSA PreCheck and avoiding social media.As Charlie Cox approached 30, he watched his friends become superheroes — Andrew Garfield was Spider-Man, Henry Cavill was Superman, and Tom Hiddleston was Loki — and made peace with his fate.“I just assumed that the Marvel call was not coming unless maybe for a villain in another 20 years,” he said.Then something crazy happened. The role of the blind vigilante Daredevil became available in a Netflix series in 2015, and Cox was the right age for it. But three seasons later, the show was canceled, and that was that. Or so he thought.Now Cox, 42, is back, this time on Disney+ in “Daredevil: Born Again,” a sort of reboot that finds the crime fighter at war over New York City with his nemesis, the gangster Wilson Fisk, played by Vincent D’Onofrio.“I’m still pinching myself if I’m honest,” Cox said of his return — and hoping for an extended run with the announcement of a new comic in which Daredevil is 60.“That’s excellent; it means I’ve got another 20 years of this, or as long as they’ll have me,” Cox said before elaborating on the virtues of Russian baths and cold plunges, TSA PreCheck and mastering the art of plowing snow.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse’ Review: Graphic Doom

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      In this straightforward documentary, the acclaimed cartoonist reflects on his Holocaust memoir, “Maus,” and other masterworks of subversion.A conventional documentary about a distinctly unorthodox figure, “Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse” has a lot going for it, mostly its title subject and his circle of cool pals and champions. Intimate if oddly unrevealing, it offers an overview of Spiegelman’s life, times and inspirations, charting how a Queens kid created “Maus: A Survivor’s Tale,” his 1986 graphic novel about the Holocaust. “Maus” and its equally lauded second installment are such an important cultural touchstone that the Pulitzer Prize board awarded it a special citation in 1992. It’s so powerful that it has been banned in some American school districts.Those schools, Spiegelman suggested in a 2023 interview, apparently wanted “a kinder, gentler, fuzzier Holocaust” to teach children. The interviewer, from PEN America, assured readers that Spiegelman was “darkly” joking, and maybe he was. Then again, perhaps it is the Holocaust that some want to jettison from minds and curriculums: Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl” has also been banned in American schools. Whatever the case, the framing of Spiegelman’s comments brings to mind some of the telling anxiety — about taste, history, propriety, ostensibly highbrow art and low — that at times runs through commentary on “Maus” and “Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began” (1991).“Making a Holocaust comic book with Jews as mice and Germans as cats would probably strike most people as flippant, if not appalling,” a reviewer for The New York Times wrote of the first book on its release, quickly and instructively adding that it’s “the opposite of flippant and appalling.” Writing about “Maus II,” another Times reviewer began his appraisal by reassuring readers of this installment’s cultural legitimacy and seriousness. “Art Spiegelman doesn’t draw comics,” the reviewer began, asserting that the book resists labels.Well, yes but no: “Maus” is, among other things, an illustrated masterpiece. (It’s since been published as a single edition, “The Complete Maus.”) It’s a history, a biography and an autobiographical howl as well as a milestone in the history of comics and a foundational American work about the Holocaust. It traces alternating story lines. One involves Spiegelman’s life, including his difficult relationship with his father, Vladek, and the painful death of his mother, Anja. The other story line tracks the family’s life in Europe before World War II, continues through the horrors his parents endured, the liberation of the death camps, an interlude in Sweden (where Artie was born) and a new, at times excruciating life in America.Directed by Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin, “Disaster Is My Muse” covers some of that same material, if more prosaically. Using a mix of archival and originally shot material, it wends between the past and the present to chart Spiegelman’s life, giving you a sense of both the man and the artist though without satisfying depth. His story begins in 1948, the year he was born, but more truly seems to have started when he was a boy in New York and accompanying his mother on errands. In a drugstore, he spied a copy of “Inside Mad,” a collection of Mad magazine work that featured a grotesque cartoon of a hyena-like woman by Basil Wolverton in the style of a Life magazine glamour girl. It was, Spiegelman says, “the cover that launched a thousand misbegotten thoughts and brains,” his obviously included.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      Move Over, Charlie Brown: Lessons From ‘The Boondocks’ Christmas Special

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      One of the most beloved holiday traditions that doesn’t involve gift-giving is “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” The 1965 animated special, depicting the trials of the titular sad sack and a crew of kids wearied beyond their years by commercialism, has inspired repeat viewings and countless appraisals, including in The New York Times. But the genre of Christmas specials it inspired, including “How the Grinch Stole Christmas!” and “Frosty the Snowman,” largely leaned away from Charlie’s melancholy and toward a wholesome belief in the righteous power of the holiday spirit.Almost 60 years ago, “A Charlie Brown Christmas” dared to ask: What’s more Christmas-y than acknowledging the weight of the holiday? Four decades later, “A Huey Freeman Christmas,” a standout episode from the first season of “The Boondocks,” did the same.“The Boondocks,” Aaron McGruder’s satire about an aspiring young Black revolutionary and his rapscallion brother, was a comic strip I read every morning in junior high. It offered me a two-minute solace from the estrangement I felt from the rituals of Catholic school, the mainstream tastes of my classmates and the bits of mid-2000s culture that I was told I should like. I remember coming to believe that social and political critique was a way to understand that distance, and “The Boondocks” television series, which aired from 2005 to 2014 (with some long breaks between seasons), was just lowbrow hilarious enough for a 12-year-old loner to start giving form to that malaise.The chaotic satire that had captivated me also coursed through the show, so I dutifully tuned in when the Christmas episode debuted. It starts out like a sendup of “Charlie Brown”: Huey, a 10-year-old with outsize activist ambitions, tries his hand at directing a school play. When he finds his cast dancing instead of rehearsing, as Charlie Brown did, he immediately fires them with the backing of his teacher, a white man whose enthusiasm for Kwanzaa is a punchline. In another plot thread, Riley, Huey’s brother, writes a letter to Santa Claus. But it’s a threat: He didn’t get the car rims he had asked for, and the debt is due.None of the characters have a Bible passage memorized to sort them out when things inevitably get out of hand. Riley spends most of the episode waging a one-boy war against mall Santas with an airsoft gun, and Huey leverages the contract he finagled from his teacher to nab the services of Quincy Jones (voiced by Mr. Jones himself), Denzel Washington and Angela Bassett for his play, titled “The Adventures of Black Jesus.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      The Holocaust’s Grandchildren Are Speaking Now

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      Toward the end of “A Real Pain,” a movie written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg coming to theaters on Nov. 1, two first cousins played by Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin approach the house in a Polish town where their recently deceased grandmother had lived before the Holocaust.Eisenberg’s character, David, the more reserved of the pair, proposes the two leave stones on the doorstep, riffing on the Jewish tradition of placing stones on graves.“She’s not buried here,” says Culkin’s cousin, Benji.“Yeah, I know, but it’s the last place she was in Poland,” says David. “It’s the last place any of us were.”The improvised remembrance, the interruption of self-awareness, the confused sense of duty — all are characteristic of how American descendants of the Holocaust’s victims two generations removed today commemorate an event that, nearly 80 years after it ended, can feel like something that still governs their lives, not to mention the lives of Jews and everyone else.This cohort is known as the third generation of Holocaust survivors, and “A Real Pain” is representative of their output. Which is to say: It is often not about the Holocaust at all. The cousins go together on an organized tour of Holocaust sites and memorials in Poland, but much of it — excepting a visit to the Majdanek concentration camp — is lighthearted. David and Benji grieve mainly not for the Holocaust but for their grandmother, who survived it. They struggle with their own problems, including the dissipation of their relationship. They question why they are even there.Jesse Eisenberg on the set of his new movie, “A Real Pain,” about the grandsons of a Holocaust survivor visiting Poland.Agata Grzybowska/Searchlight PicturesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Holy Hollywood! Batman Is the First Superhero With a Walk of Fame Star.

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      The caped crusader, who debuted in 1939, joins other illustrious figures — including Adam West, the actor who played him on TV.It is hard to imagine something new happening to Batman after 85 years of adventures in comic books, television and film. But he has a new notch on his utility belt: He has received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.Batman is the first superhero honored on the Walk of Fame, which is administered by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. (Mickey Mouse was the first fictional character to receive a star, in 1978.) Batman’s recognition is the 2,790th since the first eight stars were unveiled in 1958.Comic book readers met the Bat-Man (the hyphen was soon dropped) in 1939, when they opened the March 30 issue of Detective Comics. Out of the costume the superhero is the socialite Bruce Wayne. They were also introduced to Police Commissioner Gordon, who would become the hero’s trusted ally and later gained the first name James.Burt Ward, who played Robin on the “Batman” television show of the 1960s, at the Batman ceremony on Thursday.Frazer Harrison/Getty ImagesBatman himself may not have been honored on the Walk of Fame before now, but he’s had ties there. Adam West, who starred in “Batman” on TV from 1966-68, has a star, as does Burt Ward, who played Robin, Batman’s trusted partner. (West received a star in 2012; Ward in 2020.) One of his creators, Bob Kane, was also awarded a star in 2015.Absolute Batman No. 1, which reimagines Batman’s origins, will be out on Oct. 9.DCBatman is also getting a whole new beginning in a new comic book series with Absolute Batman No. 1, from DC. The series, by Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta, presents a bigger, beefier and more menacing Batman: His chest emblem, for example, detaches to become the top of a battle ax. Holy anger management, Batman! The issue arrives in stores on Oct. 9.There is also currently a “Batman: Caped Crusader” animated series on Amazon, and his most recent live action film, starring Robert Pattinson in 2022, led to the new spinoff series “The Penguin,” on HBO. More