Ultimates #6: Cementing the title's status as Authority Lite, Mark Millar couldn't even wait a year before revealing that the Ultimate Hank Pym is even more of an asshole than his mainstream version, as the Pyms have themselves a cozy little traditional wife-beating scene.
I would mind less if I had even a scintilla of hope that Millar was interested in seeing his characters grow, change, and overcome their flaws. Instead I expect stasis, and, every so often, the less-able writers to come seeking to re-invigorate the title by wallowing in the canonical, and abhorrent, faults that Millar is inculcating now.
It is heroic for a character to have grotesque failings as a person and nonetheless accomplish great and good things.
A superheroic character, however, has no such grotesque failings. He may be tempted, he may ache to let himself be weak, but he doesn't give in to those temptations.
Barry Allen was a saint. He would never be so angry as to be tempted to hit Iris. Peter Parker is a superhero. He might become furious with Gwen or M.J., but he'd never strike them, he'd barely even let himself say something hurtful or hateful.
Hank Pym's not a superhero. He's an asshole. The Ultimates is the worse for that.
I have appallingly pedestrian tastes in pop music. Avril Lavigne's new single, unfortunately spelled "Sk8er Boi", from "Let Go", is a smartly-written and catchily-performed piece of pop. It is remarkable in its self-awareness, but it's even more remarkable in one important way. Every so often, somebody writes a song which is about nothing less than the soul of rock'n'roll. "Sk8er Boi", however improbably, is in the tradition of "Juke Box Hero", "God Gave Rock'n'Roll to You" and "Born to Run". It's about a boy and a girl, the struggle for your own soul, and the siren power of rock'n'roll.
It's still just a basic pop tune, but it laid a finger on the tail of the dragon. Give it a listen.
The GenCon crop of RPG material is hitting stores and there's a monstrous heap of it. I picked up Gary Gygax's Necropolis as the most interesting-per-dollar, but I was sorely tempted by a bunch of products. Necropolis is a mega-adventure, like, but probably larger than, Monte Cook's Banewarrens (also now available in print, but I got the PDF when it first came out), set in an pharaonic Egyptian campaign. I haven't read it yet, but the maps are good and it's got a bunch of crunchy bits--critters, spells, prestige classes, and whatnot.
There's a "historical Wild West" supplement which I glanced at, but I'm more than satisfied with my Cowboys & Dragons setting.
Nyambe: African Adventures looks really good, but the price tag ($37.95) daunted me. Heaping gobs of crunchy bits. Including, of course, mokele-mbembe, and you just can't go wrong with my favorite cryptozoological critter.
Silver Age Sentinels has converted itself to d20 to compete with roughly a dozen other superhero d20 systems, but, eh. I'll stick with Champions.
I finished Jane Lindskold's Wolf's Head, Wolf's Heart the other day. New from Tor, it's the sequel to Through Wolf's Eyes. The second volume suffers a bit. What was novel in the first is no longer novel in the second, and the story is a bit thin to take up the slack.
Not that it's a bad book; I read it quickly and will read it again anon. It's just a perfectly understandable step down.
A few things to say about it. Those of you who know me know that I loathe the Giant Fantasy Trilogies that are devouring every crumb of nourishment in the genre. George R.R. Martin is a good writer, and he owes his talent something considerably more ambitious than the stunningly generic Game of Thrones. Lindskold's Wolf books are not yet a GFT. The first is exemplary in having a complete story, with beginning, middle, and quite definite end, and yet laying out enough threads so that it's evident that there's more story to come. The second volume similarly houses a complete story, albeit one most of whose characters derive their strengths from matters found only in the first. This self-contained nature, seen also in Lindskold's Athanor duology, is a great service to any reader of brick-shaped fantasy tomes.
There's something lurking under the surface which is probably going to get some play in the next book, and that's menarche. The lead character, Firekeeper, is a young girl, about fifteen, raised by noble wolves. She has the traditional strength, skills, and senses of a jungle lord, but she's skinny. Wolves fight for their food, and youngsters like Firekeeper get just enough to keep them alive.
A few remarks here and there, especially in the second book, indicate that she hasn't yet realized that human women don't come into season the way wolves do. But her body is enough awash in human gonadatropic hormone (the PubertyMakerTM) that she begins growing breasts as soon as she has access to a few extra calories. Less than a year has passed in the two books, but it's going to be less than a year before Firekeeper has her first period. I hope Lindskold gives it some attention when it happens. Firekeeper's character arc is dominated by her dual heritage, so when her biology shows her that her two selves are even further apart, it will mark another turning point in her life.
Amusingly, Tor's art director made a bit of an error with the cover to Lindskold's book. The cover's by Julie Bell, who also did the cover to the first volume. It's a fine piece. There are three figures, one centered and basically unmoving, and one each with lines of motion to either side. It's a good design and well-executed.
In the original, Firekeeper had the line of motion to the left. In general, since English reads left-to-right, there's a slight preference for the primary line of motion to be to the right. You'd tend to associate the primary line of motion with the lead character. No problem; flopping the art left-for-right is easy and it's done all the time. How do I know they did this here? Well, the artist is Julie Bell, who is the wife and protege of Boris Vallejo, and she signs her name in big bold letters, just like he does. In fact she signed right in the middle of the picture, below the central figure. And, since the image on the book cover is reversed, the signature is backwards. Bwah-ha-ha.
And speaking of bwah-ha-ha, Cartoon Network's Sunday night Adult Swim lineup of "Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law", "Aqua Teen Hunger Force", and "Sealab 2021" is nose-spurtingly funny. The shows are necessarily short, since they are parades of non sequiturs and pure absurdism (descending from Space Ghost Coast to Coast, which I rarely watched). It's difficult to sustain absurdism, since it's inherently disruptive to narrative. Q.v., Sealab regularly blows up. I think they're terrific.
Posted by Greg at August 22, 2002 3:19 PM
