So, what is sexism anyway? The comics industry is taken as sexist by some people. Including me. I think there is active and institutional sexism in the comics industry, but if pressed to identify it...well, I might have a problem pointing it out.
Why?
Well, how can any industry be sexist. There are hiring practices. There is a dearth of women creators as compared to men, but Jeanette Kahn and Karen Berger are in positions of power. One would think they would give as much chance to a woman as a man. I don't know how many women want to write or draw or color or letter, but you can't force them if they don't wanna.
There are the outlets for selling comics. I've heard stories about evil comics stories where women walk in and men scream at them, pointing like Donald Sutherland in the 1978 version of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." Sadly except for when I bought comics from the original Friendly Frank's comics, just about every stores Ihave bought comics from has been run by women or married men. (Well, 20th Century Five and Dime in Bloomington was run by a colleague, but it was sort of weird for everyone, not just women.)
Then there are the worlds within comics. That's partially a marketing issue, but there is not a lack of female characters. The Marvel mutant titles have a lot of women. It's true that the big deal huge characters are mostly guys, but Lois lane is in Superman. Spiderman has a boatload of women. Batman, well, not so much, but he has a lot of women in somewhat important roles. Catwoman, Spoiler, Poison Ivy, Silver St. Cloud, etc. Archie has Betty and Veronica, Lois, Betty, veronia, and some of the others have all had there own titles at one time or another.
Strips of course have no issues with women that I can see. There are female character, creators and newspaper editors. (In my years in the newspaper business, I worked for exactly one, count'em, one man.
I'm not even going to pretend I know anything definitive about this issue, but since I was defending elmo against a somewhat bizarre charge of sexism, I thought I should try to frame the issue in more specific terms.
Occasionally I run across a website that makes it look like we can move into a comic book. This site tells people how to disappear in America..
Mike Chary has suggested I need to post a topic every now and then to remind everyone that I, too, am a Curmudgeon, and that I, too, howl with the best of them. Ralf Haring has suggested that somebody do a post on comic book heresies. Ever one to kill two birds with one stone, I present (after the jump) a couple of comic book heresies that I believe in:
I think the definitive Spider-Man artist was John Romita, Sr. I do not really care for Steve Ditko's art, although I think it worked pretty well for Dr. Strange. But for Spidey, give me Jazzy John any day of the week.
I think Grant Morrison writes self-indulgent twaddle. His narratives are rambling, and he seems to be more than willing to sacrifice story and characterization in the service of throwing some half-baked idea onto the page -- an idea which, nine times out of ten, he doesn't seem to have any interest in developing.
I'm sure I have more heresies, and I will certainly post them as I think of them, but in the meanwhile, I throw the floor open to the rest of you -- which of your tastes challenge the comic community's orthodoxy? What do you believe about Jack Kirby's oeuvre or Jim Shooter's works or the Silver Age Superman that would make your fellow fans reach for the tar and feathers?
Just because I've been reading posts by people explaining how they got into comic books and that made me wonder: what comic books really influenced my love for the medium? What books got me hooked, what creators helped drag me screaming into this morass I find myself in today?
I think my first comic book was a series of paperback collections of Classics Illustrated. If not that, then possibly my father's attempt to get me to enjoy religious fanaticism with Bible comics. After that, I remember a whole lot of old Superboy comics collected in digest form (I still remember the surprisingly good Aquaboy story, which made no sense from a continuity angle but which was still pretty well handled) including a lot of the old Legion appearances, old EC comics in an old box left behind when my uncle Douglas died, and the paperback collections of Marvel books like Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four and The Hulk (I have this image of the Silver Surfer about to cure the Hulk of, well, being the Hulk only to have the Hulk wake up and punch him in the head stapled to the walls of my brain for some odd reason). I don't know why, but somehow DC, especially Superman, won the battle for my heart and I stuck with preferring DC over Marvel for most of the rest of my comics reading career, with the exception of the wildly surreal runs on Iron Man and The Hulk by Bill Mantlo, which I've already gone over in detail.
I have a lot of memories of the old Eclipse comics and First comics, especially the work of Mike Baron: Nexus and my favorite non-Superman comic book character ever, Badger. I'd list the Badger graphic novel Hexbreaker as one of my favorite comic books. I didn't really like Mike's take on the Flash, but for Nexus and Badger he's right up there with Alan Moore in my book. Oh, and yes, you should just throw everything Alan Moore wrote on the pile: standouts are his run on Swamp Thing, his Superman stories, Watchmen, From Hell, and the oft-surprisingly good Supreme, but I should also mention that I actually liked his run on Jim Lee's Wildcats comic, and no, I'm not doing the acronym.
There's probably a lot more that I'm forgetting, so I'll mention that I'm deliberately omitting anything Frank Miller did after Daredevil: I don't really like his later work, although I can recognize the talent in it. Sin City is okay, I guess, but it never really grabbed me. I forget exactly when Ronin was published, but I thought that was kind of interesting.
Okay, I guess that's enough. What about you?
Another website has decried Greg as sexist for daring to suggest that Phil Foglio's output has been negatively impacted by his creative partner. The website decries this criticism because this partner happens to be a woman. Now, Greg did not write "Phil Foglio, former comics genius, recently died of estrogen poisoning, but sadly this did not deter his comics output which is now utter crap." That is of course what Lester Bangs wrote about John Lennon after he started performing with the Plastic Ono Band. (Okay, I made that up, but I defy anyone to listen to John's later stuff and not blame Yoko. Hell, just listen to the White Album. Number 9, number 9, number 9...)
Personally, I think it is sexist to assume that women are so fragile that they can't take criticism.
Apparently, I'm in a bad mood.
BRPD: The Dead 1-5: When Mike Mignola started Hellboy, he was sufficiently frightened of his own writing to co-opt John Byrne as co-writer, a position Byrne rapidly repudiated as unnecessary. Mignola went on to write competently alone a number of interesting Hellboy projects, each widening his moody world. At long last, that world has converged on, well, a standard shared superhero universe, subtype exclusive magic basis. The accompanying mediocritization should surprise no one. The general process of watering down a singular creative vision until it is reliably replicable is well known in areas from comics to cuisine. If Hellboy: Seed of Destruction was an herb-crusted filet with garlic butter, BRPD: The Dead is a Double Whopper with Cheese. Neutral recommendation.
G.L.A. (Great Lakes Avengers) 1: Entertaining. I'd've been happier with it if it wasn't parodying "Avengers Disassembled" by also killing the team's members. Otherwise, however, Slott clearly recognizes what's worthwhile about a shared superhero universe and exploits it. If Slott were writing DC's "Idiotic Crisis" books, I'd be considerably less predisposed to reject them.
Legion of Super-Heroes 1-4: Waid clearly gets the Legion of Super-Heroes. As long as he continues to get it, I will eagerly await the next issue. This is the first time I've really been enthusiastic about the Legion since 1989.
LSH fans, of course, have their favorite eras of the team, usually based on when they started reading it. People who read it in the 1960s prefer the Adventure era. People who read it in the 1970s like the Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes period (Bates, 2nd Shooter, 1st Levitz). People who read it in the 1980s prefer 2nd Levitz. People who read it in the early 1990s are insane. People who read it in the late 1990s--a vanishingly small number--like the reboot, with the majority preferring pre-Coipel and a minority preferring post-Coipel.
One of the many flaws of the insane period was that the writing team consisted of an audiohallucinatory nihilist and a pair of Adventure-era fanatics, with the result that there were no advocates for anything in Legion history after 1st Shooter. All that history was mined only for derision and destruction. Mark Waid was editor then, at least for a time.
Oddly, however, Waid's LSH displays a very strong scent of the 1970s Superboy and the LSH period. LSH 2, for example, rehashes a Dream Girl backup from either the early Superboy issues or the Action run. LSH 4 has both a main and a backup story like many S/LSH issues. Even the larger page count per issue recalls the S/LSH giants.
I'm a 2nd Levitz partisan, but I started reading (and collecting back issues) during the S/LSH period, so I'm in accord with the new direction.
Still no Wildfire, though. I suspect Wildfire is awaiting a time late enough in the series' run that the "X Lad/Boy/Girl/Lass" naming structure is firmly established in order that he can flout it.
The plot structure recalls Levitz's ABC structure, as well, an invaluable and possibly necessary technique for maintaining a large cast. I am bored by the "Parents Just Don't Understand" main theme, but Waid is rapidly evolving past it. I am mildly wary of Waid's stated rejection of supervillains, but then the LSH has only had a handful of really notable supervillains, concentrating on other sorts of antagonists; no superteam ever intervened in so many disasters or stopped more simple crime. The building B plot of the impending galactic invasion shows promise of the sorts of story the LSH does in fact do well.
Recommended.
Omac Project 1: Blech. I will have to check my pile more carefully next time to make sure that pflargh like this doesn't sneak in on a cross-pull. Anyway, I read it, and it continues the pshtyragiy started in the mononeuronically-named "Countdown to Infinite Crisis". I actively dislike its premise; I actively dislike what it has to do to the DC universe to make itself work. Because of that dislike, I'm primed to notice idiotic bits like Booster not wearing his flight ring--why would you ever not wear a flight ring? We have basically two options in order to make what happens in these books forgotten as fast as possible: Don't buy these books, and tell DC why we're not buying these books.
I recommend you wear flip-flops to a high society event and so antagonize a fashionista that she stomps your unprotected foot with her spike heel, breaking two metatarsals and severing a couple of significant pedal ligaments, instead of buying or reading this comic.
Note to DC: Crisis on Infinite Earths was named "Crisis on Infinite Earths" because of a twenty-year tradition of naming JLA/JSA crossovers "Crisis on Earth-3" or Earth-A or Earth-X or at the end of time, and so on. "Infinite Crisis" sounds kinda dopey, like you were too cheap to spring for the extra couple of words to put it into a prepositional phrase.
Promethea 36: Beautiful art, as usual. Extremely clever construction, since it can be read in two directions simultaneously. Ultimately, however, an utter waste, possessing no narrative at all and instead a stultifying amount of bidirectional babble about belief systems, about which philosophy this may be said: Alan Moore is quite likely the best superhero comic book writer ever, but there are people who spend lengthy academic careers thinking very hard at an advanced level about this sort of thing, and Alan Moore is not one of those people. It is admirable and good to practice philosophy, but when addressing a lay audience, it's probably more productive to disguise it within catchy technique and clever narration. On account of I am a picky lowbrow nogood. Neutral recommendation.
Rising Stars 24: A series finale no less obvious for its protracted arrival: The ultimate end of the Pederson Flash is to catalyze perfection on Earth and then reproduce itself again elsewhere in the universe. "Obvious" is not bad, per se. The Pederson Flash is a transparent metaphor for the Enlightenment ideal of the perfectability of society, an ideal that is supposed to lie at the heart of American society. In a time where our rulers are so convinced that government can produce no good that they got themselves elected in order to prove it, I will not completely reject any reminder of our nobler national dreams.
However, that being said, this phase of Rising Stars has been so detached from its drama, expressing transcendence through stoic narration, that it has lost an essential connection to human emotion. For all its sincerity, there is nothing human left here. Even Poet's paean to the dead Chandra falls limply to the floor, its telling a bare recitation with nothing left to reach the heart of the audience.
When read in a non-serial format, these remarks may be mooted. However, I read Watchmen serially, and the increasing gaps between chapters did nothing to diminish their intensity. Diminishment of emotional power is not an inherent feature of the serial format. Neutral recommendation.
Seven Soldiers of Victory 0
The Manhattan Guardian 1
Zatanna 1
Klarion 1
Shining Knight 1
Respectively: Interesting but the storytelling's a little too obscure; interesting but a bit too stylized; why does every single Zatanna book have to start out depowering her; mildly interesting but unrelated to the existing character, the DC Universe, or anything except the accreting metastory of these series, which cuts against how compelling it could be; and you KILLED THE HORSE you bastard?
Overall, Grant's using the mosaic (or tapestry) technique in telling a bunch of interrelated stories and we're at the early days, well before the overall picture could be visible. I predict that it will be ignored by subsequent DC universe writers despite Morrison's interview-stated aims; its threads are going to converge back on the body of story rather than bind it into the DC universe. It's going to be large enough that it'll be too big for subsequent writers to integrate into smaller stories and and tightly-enough bound that subsequent writers will find it too difficult to tease an individual thread loose enough to use.
At the moment, this is recommended for people like me (if any) and at best mildly recommended for anyone who's not a Grant Morrison superhero/DC Universe fanboy.
Shaolin Cowboy 1: Dern, thet Geoff Darrow kin draw perty. I'm not sure a ten-page spread is exactly warranted, however, especially when it ends in an outhouse gag. I am for sure that I've got nothing invested here, not really any notable anticipation for what happens next, and no burning desire to know what happened before (not even unanticipated pterodactyls are enough for me these days). I wouldn't turn down the next issue if it were offered me; in fact, I'd read it pretty happily. I'm just not especially inclined to seek it out or pay for it. I recommend you have a look at it to see if it's the kind of thing you might be willing to pay for.
Superman-Batman 15-18: This arc may illustrate a difference between pre-Crisis and post-Crisis DC. Here, Superman and Batman visit a variety of alternate presents and futures as a result of a plot by the adult Legion of Super-Villains. At the end, writer Loeb picks a fight with Mark Waid by having the Kingdom Come Superman morph into the "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" Superman with a remark that "this was how it was meant to be". (Loeb's focus on the last two pages of that story facilely elides that the previous forty-two pages were in fact as steeped in tragedy and death as Kingdom Come, so that he ends up looking fairly foolish.)
Post-Crisis, these alternate worlds and futures exist only as long as you look at them, after which they fade away. Pre-Crisis, alternate worlds and futures had an independent existence. They persisted of their own existential momentum. Their details remain constant. When revisited, they were the same as before. Post-Crisis, because a reality is transient, its details don't remain fixed even when it is revisited. Is this story consistent with Kingdom Come? No, because under current DC rules, it doesn't have to be.
This is not a feature.
Tom Strong 31-32: I mention this only because Michael Moorcock wrote it and some of you might be interested to note that it overtly crosses over with the Elric-verse. For some people, that might be your bag. Moorcock's prose is apparently like Escape from New York; if you don't experience it in the Golden Age of Twelve, you're not going to be impressed with it. I didn't and I wasn't. Otherwise, y'know, pirates and apes, and if Moorcock's arguable prose talent is a bit stilted or clumsy in this medium, it's a dancing-dog phenomenon. (It isn't that the dog dances well, it's that the dog dances at all.) Mildly recommended.
Ultimates 2 2-3 and 4-5: Honestly, I like the ending of the trial of the Hulk; I can hear the theme music in my head, and if you've managed to evoke something like that, you've succeeded as a creator. The trial is legal hash, of course, and I don't like a lot of the details of the team dynamics. And we'd be international pariahs if we detonated an open air nuke as depicted here; there are tunnels in Nevadan mountains for that sort of thing.
The Thor story also is surprisingly effective. Normally I loathe "what is real" stories with the same intensity I bring to despising Giant Fantasy Trilogies, but this one is somehow working for me. I think it's because both possible realities are being portrayed with omniscient certitude. There's no doubt; no one is actually questioning what is real. Most of the details still bug me. The Captains Europe are yutzes. The only way you avoid serious questions about distribution of Iron Man technology is by never bringing it up, and giving Black Widow armor is therefore suboptimal. It continues to bug me that Thor has an axe instead of a hammer. The intensity level of the storytelling is a little too low, so that when things get exciting, people seem histrionic, not dramatic.
Overall, mildly recommended.
Ultra 8: Judging from their next project, I suspect the Luna Brothers are believing their press a little too much for their own good. Nonetheless, this was a surprising, solid little story with some unexpected depths. And despite a low-contrast palette, Jonathan Luna manages to use color to enhance the storytelling, a refreshing novelty in modern comics. Give this a try. Recommended.
MGM is releasing The Pink Panther on DVD. The five disc set will have 124 shorts on it. This cartoon was my favorite as a kid.
New movie costume picture released.
The S-shield is too small.
See accompanying blurb as well:
Singer decided to keep the cape, the blue body suit, the red tights and even the V-cut opening of Superman's boots.
Gee. Phrased like that, it sounds pretty insulting, like he's a design impresario deigning to keep the inferior efforts of years past, like it's somehow possible to have a Superman uniform that isn't the red-and-blue cape-and-tights. (Blueperman merely reiterated that point firmly.)
Ian McKellen and Al Molina have joined the cast of _The DaVinci Code_. I guess the thinking is that Magneto and Doc Ock would give the story more of a kick.
Herein will reside my story by story dissections of the various issues of the old Marvel Comics Conan the Barbarian comic book as collected in Volume 1 of The Cronicles of Conan by Dark Horse Comics. Why am I doing this at this point? Is it out of some stubborn sense of obligation? A desire to actually do what I said I would do? An attempt to jumpstart the ol' writing about comics thing? Who knows? At this point, it could be all those things.
We begin, as always... behind the cut. Not of an axe against a neck, although there'll be plenty of that, but of a website against an insanely long entry.
Volume 1 - Tower of the Elephant and Other Stories
First up we have The Coming of Conan, which opens as follows:
Come with us to the Hyborian Age! Come with us, back to the dark centuries which sprawl between the sinking of Atlantis and the dawn of recorded time - - to the days when the now-forgotten land of Aquilonia was the mightiest of nations - - and a man's life was worth no more than the strength of his sword-arm! Come with us to the raw, untamed world of - - CONAN THE BARBARIAN!
Next up is Lair of the Beast-Men which is, in my mind, the worst issue of Conan collected in these three volumes. It's as if Roy took the worst elements of the L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter Conan stories, threw them in a blender with the worst aspects of Stan Lee's run on Fantastic Four and told Barry to skimp on the art while he was at it. Imagine Conan fighting the Red Ghost's Super-Apes and you'd have a better story than this. The speech Conan gives at the end goes on way too long for the Barbarian: he could talk, and talk well in the original REH stories, but this just doesn't quite work for me coming out of Conan's mouth: Yes, thralls... you are free now, and long may you remain so. But let your legends say of this day that a king led you to victory - and that his name was Kiord. For he was the last of the manlings, but first among men. I'm just not buying it.
However, we're immediately plunged into a much better story with The Twilight of the Grim Grey God, with its elements of the weird and uncanny mysticism that so permeate the REH Conan stories, the vastly improved art (BWS takes a big step forward with this issue) and the writing tones down the dialogue which seemed so clunky coming out of a teenage barbarian's mouth before. Even Conan himself seems to downplay the events of the previous issue when talking to a young Brythunian on the way to joining up to make war against the hated Hyperboreans who imprisoned him: I was trying to get home after a battle with some - apes - when Hyperborean slave traders waylaid me. This story, the tale of a God's passing along with his worshippers, the fickle fortunes of men, the shifting alliances and treacheries of the battlefield, and Conan striding through it all like an avatar of ill fortune is excellently done (it's a very loose adaptation of an REH story, but Roy personalizes it well) and sets us up for one of the best issues of the Roy Thomas/Barry Windsor-Smith run on the book, another REH adaption done exceedingly well.
The Tower of the Elephant takes the progress of the previous issue and redoubles it: this is by far one of the best issues of Conan ever put into print. Roy and Barry successfully take Howard's print tale and capture all the weird, brooding menace of the Tower of the Elephant and the evil wizard-priest Yara, the tainted yet still present majesty of the imprisoned Yag-Kosha, and the dilapidated reek of Arenjun. Barry's Conan here contains nary a whiff of Kirby, but is rather a lean young barbarian-thief on the search for a big score, his piercing blue eyes and lithe build rather less bull-like than the Cimmerian would appear under other artists. (Not criticizing them for it... Buscema and Kane both drew excellent Conan tales, just pointing out the differences and how Barry made the character his own.) Roy's decision to start the tales with a young Conan and gradually move him towards his older exploits works well here, as Conan both looks and under Roy's scripting acts like a young man, more bravado than sense. The fourth page of the issue, with Conan battling a Kothian to death in a darkened room and then casing the Tower itself is one of my favorite pages, with excellent uses of light and shadow, close-ups and perspective shots, but the whole issue is like that, one where the art is used almost flawlessly to tell the story: it could do without the editorial captioning, merely using art and dialogue, in my opinion. This isn't a knock on the captions, however, as Roy seems very adroit at using them to help capture the REH 'voice' without having to waste time with all the descriptions of things Barry is already drawing. The scenes in the garden against the lions, the fight with the man sized spider, the confrontations with Yag-Kosha and Yara, it's all very well done.
The next issue, Zukala's Daughter, was such a backslide to the level of quality seen in Lair of the Beast-Men that I was relieved to see it was written first and then switched around later by Roy. It's a marginal improvement over that previous story, if only because the wizards and demons aspect seems less out of place in a Conan story than a city of intelligent gorillas with advanced technology. Although if Conan fought an ice skater and her evil brother who liked to freeze things, I guess I'd be okay with that. Anyway, this one: Barry draws like Kirby again, except when he draws Zukala, who he makes look like an extra from a Ditko Dr. Strange. Conan fights evil wizard, makes out with his weretiger daughter, fights a demon, and in the end escapes with his life and the stolen gold of a village he'd originally signed on to help. Not great, but passable.
Devil-Wings Over Shadizar is a good deal better. Not quite up to The Tower of the Elephant standards, but in it, Conan definitely sounds and looks like Conan (the Stan Lee on Roy's shoulder isn't saying much in this one), and the plot, while standard enough, is full of nice touches: Conan fights and robs a pair of thieves clearly patterned on Fritz Lieber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, meets a young lovely in a tavern and in the process of trying to get to know her better is ambushed by evil cultists who kidnap the girl, who he then rescues from a gigantic bat monster only to be knocked unconscious in the process, and to wake up to find that the girl he rescued has in turn stolen all his stolen gold. Chagrined but somewhat wiser for all the night's events, Conan heads forth into the desert to escape Shadizar's clutches, finding the clean brutality of the wastes more to his liking than the backstabbing of the cities. For an original story it does a good job, both in tone and in action, of presenting the barbarian along the lines Howard himself presented him: impetuous, impatient with guile, easily attacted to a pretty face (and more) and ultimately more accepting of the hard knocks of fate than most. Barry's art, now fully established in his own style, continues to improve.
The Lurker Within, an adaption of REH's 'The God in The Bowl' is another example of Roy and Barry managing to take an adaption into interesting new places. By expanding out how Conan got into Numalia in the first place, placing a woman into the story (Roy's adaptions tended to flesh out the women considerably over Howard's originals, I have to admit, even as a fan of REH) as the one who sends Conan to burgle the Hall of Relics and thus become embroiled in the story, which is a straightforward one about a monster entity from before the fall of Valusia used as a murder weapon to punish the enemies of the Stygian wizard Thoth-Amon. Barry's art is well suited to the story, capturing well a host of expressions from the Cimmerian's disdain to Lady Aztrias' hauteur, and the battle scenes with the god of the 'cursed long neck' are exceptionally well laid-out and rendered. Best of all is the four panel strip atop the last page of the issue, wherein Conan slowly turns to discover the demonic eyes of Thoth-Amon burning in the base of the bowl and gives vent to his native horror of the supernatural in a scene that I'd rank among Roy and Barry's best on the series. Again, while not quite as good as The Tower of the Elephant it's still damn good.
Closing out this volume is The Keepers of the Crypt, one of many stories Roy would create based on a synopsis left behind by REH. This one's no better and no worse in terms of art than the previous one, nor is the writing any great shakes, but it's still leaps and bounds better than the first two stories or Zukala's Daughter and it serves Roy well by allowing him to reintroduce the character of Jenna, who would serve well to help tie together several stories in the second volume. The long and the short of it: Conan is being chased for the deaths caused by the God in the Bowl, and kills most of his pursuers with a landslide. He and the former Captain of same, a Gunderman mercenary, eventually team up to loot a deserted tomb-city of its wealth only to be chased away by mummies, giant lizards and earthquakes which separate them. Eventually Conan meets up with Jenna again, only to find that his looted riches have transformed into a real serpent which bites and kills a magistrate seeking to arrest the Cimmerian, who must flee along with his treacherous but lovely companion. Standard enough fare, but still well executed, and the bombast is at a minimum.
That's it for this volume, not counting the really excellent commentary at the end by Roy. Next up when I get to it, Rogues in the House and other stories, wherein Roy and Barry hit their creative peak as a team.
I know personally a writer who is going to be writing a Doc Samson limited series.
Just thought I'd say that. Anyway, while thinking about how best to write up that damn Conan entry I keep promising myself I'll write, I figure I'll actually contribute something to this website (gasp!) and at the moment, since all I have is stories for comic books that I'll never write, I shall thereby unleash them upon you.
Behind the cut, though. Just so as to not be mean.
Okay, this one requires a bit of explaining. I was talking to my friend Leonard about the Fantastic Four wherein Len revealed a real dislike for Reed Richards as a person. His arguments were pretty sound, although he and I disagreed a touch about the interpretation. Leonard seems to see Reed as a callous jerk who is willing to risk his family and friends merely to feed his own intellectual vanity and ego whereas I see Reed as simultaneously intelligent and somewhat detached from the way most people think: I recall a classic exchange between Ben and Reed when a set of stone manacles fell from the ceiling to pin Reed's arms down and Reed began musing about their formation, whereupon Ben said "If a martian was clobbering you the whole time you'd be wondering how he got there and what his culture was like!" or words to that effect. Our debate aside, one thing was clear: we both agree that Doctor Doom is in fact smarter than Reed Richards. It's a hard thing to really argue... was Einstein smarter than Niels Bohr? Would you give it to Richard Feynman or Stephen Hawking? However, I'd give it to Doom on the basis of his invention of a working time machine, artifically intelligent robots so sophisticated they can pretend to be him and fool even people intimately familiar with him, and devices that can siphon the power cosmic out of the Silver Surfer and even Galactus himself. Doom has even created a computer program complex enough to motion capture spellcasting and emulate it. Reed is no slouch himself... the negative zone, unstable molecules... but I'd have to give the edge to Doom, even without taking his edge in understansing alien mind transferal techniques or sorcery. (I'm not really going to address Mark Waid's take on Doom, because I think it's understood that further use of the character probably requires him to get back into the classic mode, and that's where I'm going with him: I find the idea of a Doom groveling for sorcerous power from demons to be one who has failed to learn from his mother's ultimate fate, and I don't think that takes the excellent Doom/Strange team up story Triumph and Torment into account, which is a shame.)
Anyway, all of this is merely to explain how I came upon the theory that will form the basis of this idea: what if the ultimate heart of the Doom/Richards rivalry is a fraud? In the origin of Doom, we learn that he'd been hard at work trying to invent a device to breach the boundaries of reality, a device we later learn was intended to help him rescue his mother's soul from Mephisto's hell itself. Reed walked into his room, looked over his equations and tells Doom on the basis of ten seconds reading that the math's all wrong, Doom tosses him out of his room and goes ahead and the gizmo blows up, either ruining his features or leaving one single scar to blemish them depending on who you talk to. Doom is thrown out of college for his crazy experiments, blames Richards for sabotaging his device (rather than accept that his math was wrong) and goes to Tibet to become Doctor Doom and swears vengeance against Richards.
So far, okay. Except what if Doom's math wasn't wrong? I mean, Reed's brilliant and all, but he's made his share of mistakes, he's hardly infallible... his insistence on taking an unshielded rocket up on an unsanctioned flight comes to mind, as does his utter failure to cure Ben over the years... it's possible to imagine that Reed came in, took a cursory glance at Doom's equations and since they involve the fusion of science and sorcery, didn't understand them. Reed's got no understanding of magic. So he tells Victor his math's off, Victor blows up at him and throws him out of his room (I didn't say Vic isn't a jerk) and marches off to start up his device, which then blows up.
How do we know that was because it didn't work? Maybe it worked just fine. After all, it's a gizmo intended to punch a hole in hell and steal a soul from a demon lord's grasp... it's just possible said demon lord would notice someone working on that kind of thing and take steps to prevent it. In fact, let's imagine that said demon lord, that selfsame Mephisto who would prove so intractably corrupt and evil in various Stan Lee penned stories later, comes upon a plan. Rather than risk Doom and Richards becoming friends and allies, he'd make sure to set them at each other's throats, simultaneously diverting much of young Doom's energy away from getting his mother's soul freed while also setting him on a course that would surely damn the young man, and possibly also set Richards up. After all, pride's a sin: after the explosion, Richards would smugly assume that he'd been right about Doom's math and his intellectual arrogance would only grow, leading him to his doomed rocket flight where he turned his best friend, his fiancee and his future brother in law into freaks.
I mentioned this elsewhere and our own Greg pointed out That's an interesting take on the Richards/Doom dynamic, now tell me a story with it and so, now I shall, to justify that long chunk of text you just read. My story idea is simple enough: Doom, festering over his initial failure and the burning sensation of his oft-thwarted vengeance (possibly smarting over being humiliated by three demonic pedants, who he would of course have ultimately taken revenge upon) decides it's time to investigate exactly what Richards did to his device to sabotage it all those years ago. So he constructs another one, calibrates it, fires it up... and it works fine. (Mephisto has no need to prevent Doom's ingress to Hell now, since there's no one there Doom would attempt to free.) Reeling, the ex-monarch of Latveria (maybe he'll have become king again, doesn't matter for the story) tries to understand what's happening. If the device works... then Richards didn't sabotage it in the first place, since Doom will have reconstructed it exactly as it was that fateful day. (I assume Doom has a perfect eidetic memory, since he's Doctor Doom and all) Experimenting further with the device, Doom discovers he can breach any dimensional plane with it, not just those leading to infernal realms.
Soon, the Fantastic Four get a visit from an ashen Agatha Harkness. Since Agatha is dead, this is pretty unsettling. She's begging the FF to protect her... and then in a swirling vortex, strange ephemeral spirit-drones, robots made out of pure ectoplasm, pop out and grab Agatha, evading the FF's attacks or simply not being affected by them. Reed, not entirely sure what's happening, tries to analyze the disturbance but it doesn't register on any of his devices. Before Reed can get his bearings or think to call Dr. Strange (which they often don't ever remember to do in comics anyway) Doom contacts the FF.
"I let Harkness' spirit reach you so that you'd know this is real... I know how close-minded you can be, Richards. I've been experimenting. I have some very interesting results to share with you." Moving to the side, Doom reveals a series of tubes.. tubes containing the trapped spirits of Agatha Harkness, Dr. Franklin Storm, Evelyn Richards (Reed's mother), Dan Grimm Jr. (Ben's older brother) and possibly some others, whoever would be needed to sway the FF more than that. "Come find me, Richards. I recommend you hurry. I intend to release their spirits soon... the next test is to see what results when an uncorrupted soul is released into the hell-prison of Mephisto." Now, Doom happens to know exactly what would happen if he did that, but Richards doesn't know that.
This would probably lead to some argument among the various members of the FF as they track Doom down... although he's not being particularly hard to find, so let's assume that he's actually retaken his castle in the Adirondacks for this one. Reed is probably the most skeptical, although not actually dismissive, of Doom's claims, but while they know it could be a trick they don't want to risk leaving the immortal spirits of their friends and loved ones in Doom's hands. They raid the castle, fight the usual assortment of death traps (I admit, I'm lousy at coming up with those cool death traps that force the FF to push their powers and smarts to the limits, my apologies... if I ever wrote the story I promise I'd devote more time to that aspect of it) and finally confront Doom in his soul-trap chamber. The usual blustering confrontation results, and an enraged Ben moves to smash the machinery and free the trapped souls within.
And as he does, Doom smiles, because the soul traps are a trick. It's all been lies generated by a swarm of microscopic image inducer drones. Doom wanted the FF angry and off-balance when they barged into his castle, because the real trap is a modified version of the device he used to siphon the power cosmic out of the Silver Surfer: a device that siphons the cosmic rays out of the FF and channels that stolen power into a much larger version of the device that breaches the bounds of reality. As Ben reaches the trap, his enormous strength is stolen from him, as is Johnny's flame, Sue's force fields and invisibility, and finally Reed's malleability... and a hole is torn in the fabric of reality using their stolen power, and Doom's entire lab is ripped screaming into Mephisto's Hell.
Once there, Doom gloats for a moment about how easy it was to manipulate their emotions. After the device has fired, their powers begin to slowly reassert themselves, and Reed wants to know why Doom would trick them into the lab and create such a perfect trap for them only to fail to escape it himself. Doom, still somewhat pleased with himself, chuckles. "Richards, the trap hasn't been sprung yet. And you're not the one it was baited for."
Soon, Mephisto's demons arrive to investigate the breach, and the FF, their powers still weak and not even reliable in the alien hell dimension, require Doom's help to fend them off, help which he provides willingly enough. After the demons are driven back, Doom begins fiddling with the controls of the device, and cheerfully admits that he doesn't expect it to work in Mephisto's realm. Ben angrily growls "So ya banished us all ta hell without a way out? That don' sound like the crummy Doom I remember!" and Reed himself muses that Doom is too glib and pleased with the situation to not have an escape plan ready. Soon enough, however, the towering soul-juggernauts come into view, each a writhing pile of the damned, and between them they drag the black iron palace of Mephisto as he comes to survey this interruption into his demense. Appearing in his most titanic form, Mephisto expresses pleasure that Victor's come to finally accept his place in Hell, which Doom blandly declines having any intention of doing. The FF, not really having a dog in this fight, would be happy to leave Doom to Mephisto's mercies but the demon lord has no intention of letting any of them go, and when Reed attempts to argue his way out of it the lord of lies laughs in his face. "Oh, but why would I let you go, when I've made such good use of you in the past?"
Mephisto then reveals how he caused the door to open (A simple gust of wind...) and Reed to stumble upon Doom's work. "A seed, planted by you, a single statement that I knew would flower into hate and thoughts of vengeance... I knew Victor well already, you see. Did you really think you could grasp so complicated an artifice so quickly? A device that used principles you don't even believe in? But being wrathful, I knew Victor would never question it when I stopped him from entering my realm forcefully. I knew what his ego would demand, what it always demands: vengeance. And so I fed your pride and his wrath... two sins for the price of one. And look at where your pride took you, after all... your pride, your vanity, that led those you love to suffer on the altar of your genius. Bravo, Doctor Richards. Some of my best work." Both Richards and Doom would be somewhat taken aback by this announcement, although neither would be really frozen by it, the stakes being what they were. As Mephisto's demons swarmed over the five intruders, Doom would play his trump card... the soul of Agatha Harkness, which indeed was captured by his ectoplasmic robots. Mephisto would chortle at this: "Her soul's hardly pure, Victor. I can hold onto her if I so choose."
"Oh, I know that." Doom would smirk. "But does Franklin Richards?" Mephisto stops and pulls back his soldiers. Doom spells it out for Mephisto: does he want a being so powerful he's created entire universes to come looking for his parents, his uncles, and the deceased spirit of a powerful witch who used to be his governess and who could probably get a message out to him in the brief moment after Doom breaks the chamber? After a brief standoff, Mephisto snarls and banishes the lab back to the Adirondacks, leaving the Fantastic Four to face Doom. Sue demands that Doom free Agatha's spirit. Doom reveals he never had that, either... he sent a swarm of image inducer drones to the FF headquarters to project the image, which is why Reed didn't pick up on anything. There wasn't anything there. He hadn't dared to use the reality breach before the FF arrived because he wasn't sure it would hold up to multiple uses.
"So all of that was to trick the Devil?"
"You needn't sound so shocked. I've done it before. You can go now. We'll resume our battle later." With that, Doom activates a smaller time displacement platform wired into his cowl and projcts himself into the past just before the FF arrived in the lab, making his escape.
So yeah, there's a comic book that will never be written.
I'd like to start a new feature in which Curmudgeons columnists and readers take in-depth, nuts-and-bolts looks at currently running comics series. Partially technical analysis and partially armchair quarterbacking, this feature will talk about what makes series tick, why they work or don't work, and what could be done to improve them.
And I'd like to start things off with New Thunderbolts by Fabian Nicieza, Kurt Busiek, Tom Grummett, and Gary Erskine. Partly because I know some Curmudgeons readers follow the title, and some of them aren't entirely satisfied with it, but mostly because I'm not entirely satisfied myself and the reasons for that nagged at me until I started writing them down. This is a series that aspires to old-school Marvel Comics soap opera in the style we were all raised on, but it often falls short of the mark. I'd like to figure out why.
The comic's major problem is that it attempts to include too many characters and too many plot points - leaving little room for much in the way of either characterization or plot.
With eight members (plus villains, supporting cast, and a constant parade of guest-stars) the team is simply too crowded. A Justice League or Avengers-style team can handle a large membership because we already know who Superman, Wonder Woman, or Captain America are; it's often the roster that gets us reading, independently of what the team does. A team of unknowns or small-time villains requires more focus on character and soap opera just to keep us interested, and necessitates a smaller group. There was a reason Claremont's classic X-Men hovered around five or six members.
The three original Thunderbolts are all fine, and I like the treatment of the Blizzard as a habitual loser who's certain he's going to crack under the pressure. Speed Demon is a little cliched, but I suppose it's necessary for a team of former super-villains to have at least one reprobate. Radioactive Man could work as the member who doesn't want to be there, and as the A-list powerhouse who doesn't want to slum with the small-timers, and as the villain who for reasons of ideology has never imagined himself as a villain.
I could live without Captain Marvel (or Photon, as he's now calling himself - continuity in-jokes are so cute), but at least he brings in a romantic triangle subplot in the Merry Marvel Manner. Scripting a romance between Photon and Songbird just because Busiek said it would happen in Avengers Forever is a pretty lousy motivation, though, akin in type if not degree to all the stupid things done to Batman in the late 80s because lesser writers wanted to make Dark Knight Returns "come true." But Photon's inclusion could lead and has already led to some interesting team dynamics, so I don't mind keeping him around. In fact, I like Atlas's guilty, desperate attempt to hide the fact of his brutal attack on Photon; it could lead to a nice little noir plot if it weren't all the fault of the freaking Purple Man.
The straw that breaks the camel's back here is Joystick, a character with nothing to offer besides a lame concept and a truly horrible name. She doesn't have much of a reason for joining the Thunderbolts, and the circumstances of her joining derailed the early issues right when they could have been advancing the first plot and laying the groundwork for more character development. Instead Nicieza threw in a completely unrelated group of villains. Gamer villains. Nineties Marvel gamer villains. I'm also betting Joystick doesn't have much in the way of a fanbase, even by the soft standards of the rest of the Thunderbolts line-up. This character takes away more than she adds; so far every panel devoted to her has felt wasted.
The plotting has been similarly cluttered. The major storyline of the first six issues revolved around a battle between the Thunderbolts, Hydra, and Hydra's proxies, an Atlantean terrorist movement. It was filled with surprises galore, as we'd expect from any Fabian Nicieza comic: the Thunderbolts were being funded by Hydra, Hydra placed a spy in their ranks, the Purple Man has been manipulating a mysterious new Swordsman, etc. (I can't be the only person who figures this new Swordsman is Nicieza's way of saving a spot for a possible resurrection of Hawkeye - in fact, it's almost so obvious I worry he may have to be someone else.)
None of these twists were given a chance to pay off. Baron Strucker never calls in his marker on the team; in fact, he never seems to have much of a reason for funding them. We get some nonsense about how he wanted to set them up as a diversion - a diversion from what isn't made clear. The threat of the spy is raised, forgotten for four issues, then brought up again in the finale just before the spy redeems himself.
This kind of story - a classic Stan Lee plot of betrayal and redemption - typicaly works in one of two ways. Either the identity of the spy is revealed late through some act of treachery as a surprise for the readers, or it's revealed early to create suspense as the readers wonder whose side the spy will finally come down on. Sometimes you get a double twist of treachery followed by redemption. But the redemption is meaningless if you don't already know the character is a traitor, the suspense nonexistent if the subplot is forgotten for four months (two-thirds of the story), and the surprise pointless if the spy never does anything treacherous.
The spy subplot needed a lot more development, but that space was occupied by the Evil Nineties Gamers and an ill-timed crossover with Wolverine. That issue focuses on a meaningless battle between a villain, a supporting character, and a gratuitous guest star while leaving the main cast and the main plot in limbo. Obviously it was done to increase sales, though I'm not sure how well such guest appearances do that these days. The Spider-Man cameo in the previous issue fit better into the ongoing story, yet he wasn't even featured on the cover.
Oh, and there's no way I'm getting out of here without mentioning the narration. Nicieza really wants to sell us on his high-concept takes on these minor characters, so baldly that I'd guess he's been recycling the language from his series proposal. The latest issue is mostly filler in which a media pundit (with this blog) offers his oh-so-cogent analyses of each of the members. Nicieza hasn't invested much time in dramatizing any of these character hooks, but he's more than happy to narrate them for us:
But the only person Janice has been hiding from is the one person she refuses to seek: herself.
Deep! It could use something more dramatic, though, something in italics. Wait, here comes Speed Demon:
But the deeper answer, perhaps, is that for someone who should be able to outrun the specter of failure, Speed Demon can't seem to run fast enough or far enough to avoid himself.
Awesomely deep! Still not quite melodramatic enough, though. We need something else... say... here's issue number... two...
James Sanders runs fast, but he can't run far enough to get away from... ...himself...
KICK ASS DEEP! Take that, Alan Moore!
These two hooks are particularly egregious since they use precisely the same cornball psychobabble. The other characters fare better, and good stories could be built around any of their hooks, in spite or perhaps because of their tried-and-true redemption arcs: that's what Marvel-style soap opera does best. But we need to see them put in action, and Nicieza's typically overcrowded plotting only leaves room for the hooks themselves, shorn of any story. I detest workshop cliches like "show, don't tell," but as one of my better teachers once told me, every cliche is a cliche for a reason, and this series gives new purpose to that old injunction. And please, trust your readers, Fabian and Kurt - let us work out the clever characterization for ourselves.
Despite my obvious dismay at this comic's execution, I still see a lot of potential. Maybe it's residual goodwill from the last Thunderbolts series - although that had its problems, too - or maybe it's because the comic fills a niche that Marvel has mostly abandoned. For all that Marvel's returned to the surface trappings of traditional superheroes, they're still pumping out a lot of comics written under the Bendis-and-Jemas model: begin the story as early as possible, don't show the main character doing anything, don't make any references to past stories. The result is in some ways the worst possible blend of Old and Nu-Marvel: don't do anything innovative or fun.
New Thunderbolts steps into that breach, offering traditional Marvel-style soap opera in a line that's been depleted of it. (Which, appropriately, is exactly what the original Thunderbolts did back in 1997.) And it follows that classic Marvel plot of redemption through heroism, with the additional threat of recidivism to complicate things. Last year I wrote that the Thunderbolts showed great potential as "dirty-cop superheroes, the Vic Mackeys of the Marvel Universe." Nicieza and Busiek chose not to go down that avenue, but they're stepping into equally interesting territory: superhero team as recovery group. So far there are signs that not every character is going to make the jump from villain to hero, lending an important element of uncertainty that this series absolutely must have if it's going to work.
The concept for this series is rock-solid. Now please, guys - give us more than just the concept.
But that's more than enough out of me. What do you think about New Thunderbolts?
As you probably already know, Phil and Kaja Foglio's Girl Genius has gone online as a tri-weekly webcomic.
An opinion that you may not want to read behind the cut.
This is a somewhat uncharitable opinion, but, y'know, I'm kind of a jerk.
Girl Genius is pretty clearly a joint project between Phil and Kaja Foglio. It's not nearly as good as Buck Godot, which was just by Phil. It's not as good as many of Phil's other solo projects. It's still pretty good, it's just not as good.
And, y'know, there's kind of an obvious variable that's different between Phil's solo projects and Girl Genius.
OK, other than the color.
Six discs. It has Captain Blood, The Sea Hawk, They Died with Their Boots On, Dodge City, and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex." Plus a boatload of extras. You can find it for the price of couple weeks worth of comics, this is relevant because the comics are mostly a discretionary purchase.
I assume everyone knows what a discretionary purchase is, but if you don't "discretionary purchases" are those pruchases which are totally within the buyer's jdugement. If you don't buy the comics book, maybe you'll buy a CD. Maybe you'll contribute to the new Ethshar novel or maybe you'll buy some of the greatest adolescent power fantasies ever. DC and Marvel appear to want you to buy these things, becuase their comics have gone beyond bad into the realm of antagonistic.
Remember in the TMK era of LSH whe the most popular request was to bring back Wildfire? I asked the Bierbaums about it, and they said that was their biggest request. They didn't like Wildfire. What was their response? Did they bring him back? No. Did they quietly ignore it? No. Did they deliberately publish a story with a cover saying "Guess Who's Back?" as a sort of big "Fuck You" to the BIGGEST SINGLE REQUEST THEY HAD FROM THE FANS. Sort of a "We hate you" note.
Now, I'm not saying I cannot imagine a well-written story which centered around Superman raping and murdering Tim Drake. I am saying that it would be a bad story. A bad comic. It could have Alex Ross art. It could have James Joyce and Sinclair Lewis writing it. It would still be a bad comics. Why? Because the audience does matter. I'm not a big fan of reader response criticsm, but one thing it gets right is that the audience response matters to the quality of art. Superman fans don't want to see him rape and kill Robin. Maybe the Invisible Man.
Publishing such a story would, I think, qualify as a deliberate attempt to antagonize the readership of Superman comics.
Recently DC started publishing the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League again. The original run of G/D JLA was the best comic book I have ever seen. Humor, action, great characters, and respect for those characters. It ran out of steam after awhile, but it was a magnificent comic book. The stories had humor but also action. They faught some serious badguys like the Grey Man, the Joker, Despero, the Extremists, and there were classic character moments and they even took some new characters and made them part of the league like Beetle, Booster, Fire, Ice and Rocket Red. Those issues even introduced Lobo, though he was lower key and better in the JL. It's been twenty years, and all anybody remembers is the humor.
Anyway, after twenty years DC has started making new comics on that premise with the original creative team. This was apparently an attempt to lull of into a sense of being REALLY SCREWED when they did the following: they started making comics using the creative team and characters of the old G/D JL. Sort of refresh our memories about it. Then they published stories which kill off those characters and in fact say they didn't really count. They turn some characters into villains.
Beetle and Booster were real league members. Max Lord was ultimately an agent of Metron's technology. He's not evil. Also, Guy Gardner alternated between being sweet and being mean, so I think we need to see the sweet version, and not the one who assaults teenaged girls.
I'm just saying.
And to remind people of the old comics, and then disreespect them is an insult to the fans of those comics.
So buy the Erroll Flynn collection.
Pulling together a player's introduction for my upcoming Champions superhero RPG campaign, I finally crystallized why I am so very disappointed in Countdown to Infinite Crisis:
Nothing these days makes me more pessimistic about a comic book than reading about an ongoing secret evil conspiracy led by an untrustworthy government official.
It is so Reagan-America, so clearly exemplary of mainstream superhero comics of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Identity Crisis didn't have the same clichés, but it did recreate exactly the same tone, leaving me feeling unclean, looking for a shower and a scouring pad to wash away the stain.
I don't want to read that, and I don't want it messing up the DC Universe I like with its indiscriminate fecal flinging. In a word, comics like that suck.
Via HC's darling webmistress, a pictorial history of the Batmobile.
From a Pulse discussion of "Best New Uses of Old Characters":
Recently, it's Purple Man without a doubt. He used to be the villain that all other lame villains were measured against. Now he's a major player.
I'm assuming this newfound appreciation for the Purple Man in the Marvel Universe is post-Alias, in which Bendis treated the Purple Man like he was dangerous and not a yutz, so that lo and behold, people think the Purple Man is dangerous and not a yutz.
In other words, a character is only as good as the last story he was in. Is that the same or opposite idea as the mantra "There are no lousy characters, only lousy stories"?
While I certainly understand that a good story can make a character a lot more interesting, I think I have a real problem with the implicit assumption that it's only a good story that makes a good character. There's a slicing problem, though, because characters are only instantiated in stories, so it is tempting and facile to say that any story with a good character is itself a good story.
But, I think, I knew Dr. Fate was a good character from just a single cameo appearance in Adventure Comics #461 well before I read any stories with the character. I liked Darkstar from her OHMU page, and I'm not sure I've ever read a story with the character (discounting her apparent death in New X-Men, which hardly counts). Mike W. Barr's character the Wrath (from a mid-80s Batman Annual) is deliberately a copy of Batman, as is Grant Morrison's Prometheus, but both are pretty bad characters despite being copies of a pretty good character and in pretty good stories.
Good or bad is getting kinda subjective here, basically reducing to "I am/am not inclined to want to read stories about this character".
I suppose my point is that I don't like seeing, and deeply discount, opinions about characters that simply agree with the quality of their recent stories. Anyone can think Purple Man is a yutz in 1995 and a major threat in 2003. I'm much more inclined to consider an opinion that is based in something deeper than yesterday. If you think Supergirl's an interesting character with a lot of potential in 1983, that means something. In addition, I think I'm also a lot more inclined to consider an opinion that a character has a lot of potential in general, because it implies that the opinion-holder has an interesting perspective on the character that maybe hasn't been explored yet.
On the other hand, if you try to tell me that Stilt-Man or Skateman has a lot of unexplored potential, then I'm probably just going to think you're an idiot fanboy....
[I was underwhelmed by Purply's Alias appearance, because it, frankly, pisses me off that Bendis gets credit not for anything interesting or innovative but for simultaneously ripping off Thomas Harris and Grant Morrison.]
I'm working on an idea. Read the below:
"Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings at a single bound! ... Superman ... strange visitor from another planet who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men! Superman, who can change the course of mighty rivers, bend steel in his bare hands, and who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way!"
Cogitate for a second about what meaning that has for you.
That description is of course the preamble to the old Superman tv shows. TV shows have preambles today but they all suck. "Veronica Mars" is a truly excellent show, but it has a horrible preamble. "The Odd Couple" had a great preamble. A few more: "Knight Rider," "Star Trek," "Highlander." My point? If you watched those shows, you probably remember the preamble. In fact, your strongest memory of the program might be the preamble.
Millions of people watched "The Adventures of Superman." I submit that of those millions, most of them think the basic realities of Superman are contained in the preamble. I also find it interesting that oodles of comics titles have come from those words. My favorite was always "And wwho, disguised as Clark Kent" but Byrne revoked that concept, and in my opinion castrated the concept.
So, am I right? Do people pick up Superman ands expect "change the course of mighty rivers?" Leap tall buildings in a single bound? Mild mannered reported for a great metropolitan newspaper? How about the fact that he never ends?
Prompted by John Scalzi's Reader Request week, I revisited the old question of Superman or Batman. I realize it's unanswerable in the sense of being non-objective, but hey, when has anything like a decent respect for the opinion of others mattered here?
It's Superman for me. Batman's the more interesting character, considered as a person, but Batman's just this guy. Superman's a superhero. Superpowers make the man.
There's also due consideration to the fact that when Batman was hopping around on giant appliances trading themed puns with bank-robbing villains, Superman was exploring the Scarlet Jungle and learning the rules of Red Kryptonite and hitting on (one way or another) everyone in sight with the initials LL. Mort Weisinger and his stable of SF writers, including Superman creator Jerry Siegel, put together the most creative and intricately detailed body of myth since L. Frank Baum took the last tornado to Oz. Meanwhile, Batman had an arctic weather Bat-suit.
OK, sure, in a lot of respects, it's a draw. Batman had the Batcave; Superman had the Fortress of Solitude. Batman had Frank Miller and Alan Brennert; Superman had Alan Moore and Elliot S. Maggin. Batman had the Joker; Superman had Lex Luthor.
But, still, at the end of the day, when I read superheroes, I read superheroes who are more like Superman than they are like Batman.
I just received an e-mail inquiry from someone who needs a citation for a scholarly work he's preparing:
I remember reading an X-Men storyline back around 1989-91 (sorry, can't be more specific) where two of the female members were fighting (I believe) in the Danger Room, retired to a locker room and one admitted to the other: I have cancer (perhaps it was ovarian cancer). Can you corroborate this memory?I drew a blank--I was reading most or all of the X-books then, but not closely. Can anyone help?
Rose & Thorn's appearance in Birds of Prey got me thinking (to the extent I can with tree pollen coating every exterior surface of Houston to a depth of 3 mm) about its overt concretization of the dual identity that's been a part of superheroes since the ur-time.
One of the reasons that Rose & Thorn probably has never been terribly popular has been that aside from the concretization of the dual identity, it really doesn't have too much to say about it; the strip's focus has always been on Thorn's bloody revenge, which would itself likely quite popular were it not for Thorn's being a complete nutter. Frank Castle is a mass-murdering sociopath, but at least he's rational.
Which brings me to larger questions, which I'll throw out to the audience to answer because my head is clogged with insufficiently-effective allergy medication:
What are the best secret identity stories?
What have we learned from the secret identity motif?
Is there anything left to say about duality?
What are the dualities we see in superhero secret identities? Clark Kent is who we fear we are; Superman is who we want to be in terms of power, who we aspire to be in terms of morals. Peter Parker is who we are; Spider-Man is how we want to escape that (with the lesson that we can't). Bruce Banner is intellect; the Hulk is emotion. What's the Bruce Wayne/Batman split?
I have a new blog that I have started, one devoted to game design and game design related issues. You can reach it at:
http://www.whiterose.org/butisitfun/
It covers all types of games -- tabletop, computer, sports, you name it -- so please come and check it out.
Now I suppose I need to tie this in to comic books somehow. Hmm...
Okay, I've got it. Introducing the "Countdown to Infinite Crisis Drinking Game!" (Individuals under 21 years of age should not drink alcoholic beverages. No one should drink and operate a motor vehicle or heavy machinery under any circumstances. Don't drink if you're one of those people who gets really belligerant and acts like a jerk when you're hammered, or if you're going to cry about the recent loss of your boyfriend/girlfriend -- believe me, no one cares and it's really annoying.)
So here's how this works: Get together with friends of the proper age under circumstances where no one will have to drive afterward. Each friend takes a turn reading the dialogue out loud and acting out one page from Countdown to Infinite Crisis. Anyone watching and listening who audibly laughs, or tries to suppress a laugh, has to drink.
Okay, that's not particularly highbrow, but tell me you wouldn't want to invite Abhay Khosla to play.
Anyway, my game design blog is a little more serious, so if you're interested in games or game design, please come check it out.
--Chris M.
I have a question about That Yellow Bastard, not the movie.
Spoilers to follow.
While you're waiting, Jessica Alba: damn good looking girl, blonde or brunette. But does she strike you as kinda dumb?
Hartigan rescues Nancy, whose name he knows, whose rescue is deliberate and well-known.
He agrees to the Senator's deal in large part to keep her safe.
He's let out of prison in order to lead the Yellow Bastard to Nancy, which he does. By looking her address up in the phone book.
In the end, he SPOILERS in order that Nancy can remain secret.
My question is: What the hell? How do the Senator and the Yellow Bastard not know Nancy's name, why do they need Hartigan to lead them to her? She was kidnapped! The Senator interfered in order to keep her out of court to keep Hartigan's frame-up together! She's in the fricking phone book!
My dirty secret? I really wanted to like DC Countdown to Infinite Crisis. My secret relief? I just couldn't.
I was willing to overlook the hype, the tie-ins, even the ludicrously overburdened title. (At some point in the past couple of weeks enough bloggers had made fun of it that it no longer felt ludicrous. Diminishing returns, people.) I liked some of the premises behind the story - premises that, by the way, the Justice League animated series is currently exploiting to considerably better effect - and was willing to see where the writers took them. As I bought the comic, I presumed my main objection would be to the casual waste of another perfectly viable, even distinctive character, and the further diminishment of the shared universe.
I even plotted out a somewhat highminded (and, as it turned out, entirely wrongheaded) post on the subject for some fine blog such as this one. The comic lays bare its own fundamental misapprehensions about the sacrificed character, I would say, my sagacity causing heads to nod in somber agreement all over the blogosphere. After all, if they can make an 80-page comic about him work, doesn't that prove that he's worth keeping around?
But they couldn't make it work, not by a long shot. I won't even try to do some sort of blow-by-blow snarkfest, because that crown has already been claimed. Abhay Khosla, ladies and gentlemen. (Okay... mostly gentlemen.) Look upon his works, ye fanboys, and despair.
Instead I'll just say that the execution is too much in the mode of Identity Crisis, namely that of a subliterate script angling for quasi-literary respectability. We get the same needlessly convoluted narrative timeline, the same litter of terse first-person narrative captions (although if there are lots of them they're no longer terse, just simplistic) telling us what the Blue Beetle thinks of himself and his fellow superheroes. Most of what he thinks is what we're supposed to think, the awe we're supposed to feel. It's more asskissing superheroes in the style noted here long ago; between Busiek and Bendis and now the mainstream DCU set, blatant audience programming seems to be one of the signal trends of modern superhero comics.
I liked it when they just killed the supporting characters without all the autofellation. Mark my words, the epitaph for this era of comics will be "Just the tip."