FREE NIGMA

I'm doing this now

2009-02-19T14:51:00.001-06:00

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"He's the hero we deserve, but not the one we-" "PIIIIIIIKAAAAAA!!!"

2009-01-02T17:20:00.001-06:00

A shared superhero universe has a lot of inherent problems you have to explain away. DC is the best company to use for illustration since it’s basically like 6 superhero universes accrued over time, not counting all the alternate realities that have sprung up since then. And to examine this problem in microcosm one need only look at the superhero team. Let’s look at the roster of regulars on the Justice League: you have two extraterrestrials, an Atlantean, a Greek demigoddess, a space cop, a blue-collar superhero, a stretchy goofball, a handful of magicians, a criminal in futuristic football pads, a millionaire with a flying cockroach plane, a billionaire with a Li’l Hiawatha archery kit, and a multi-billionaire without any powers styled after a gothic horror novel. Telling stories with these characters seems like a brilliant idea; let’s get the biggest or mightiest or most powerful heroes we publish together, bounce their personalities off one another, see if they can beat up a starfish. It looks great until you look at it.

Whatever analytical edge Batman provides can be gleaned from a phone call. The League has access to Kryptonian, Apokoliptan, Thanagarian, and Martian technologies, among others, so it’s not like his little gadgets or Oracle’s (Batman’s personal make-plotting-this-story-easier OnStar button) “super-owning of a computer” are going to turn out vital to a mission except through extreme contrivance. He’s a gifted fighter but so is Wonder Woman and she can survive in outer fucking space. The League teleports everywhere these days and if GL really felt like it he could whip up a space shuttle to drive everybody around. What does the League gain with Batman? Other than a sales boost and somebody to talk down to everyone else, they don’t get much. Access to the Joker, maybe. What does Batman gain by being in the League? Complications. Because now you’ve got to explain why all of Gotham City has been razed in an earthquake and Batman has to handle it all himself, instead of placing just one thirty-second phone call and asking the Flash to pretty-please put it back together, by hand, in like a day. Fuck, call Kyle or Hal and they’ll finish it even faster, possibly using a team of plasma dwarves and Destructicons to do all the heavy labor. It forces the writers of Batman and these other characters to bite a serious bullet and say, frankly, that nobody cares. Using the backdrop of chaos to tell your story is more important than these heroes not seeming like raging dicks. Batman’s a dick for not asking for help (because even when he’s on a super-team suddenly he’s too private and too much a loner to ask for help because this is his town, damn it, and it’s a point of pride) and Superman (who works for a Newspaper, so never mind the fact that a major city on the Eastern seaboard and major shipping outlet has crumbled to dust and would be on every channel in the free world, Kal has really less excuse than anybody here because he’s going to be getting updates on the AP wire every three minutes) is an asshole for not just coming anyway. The Gotham quake is an extreme example but it’s far from the only one.

If you’re writing the team book you have to come up with not just a logical reason for these people to be in the same room (ok they’re friends and they hang out in little outfits in space instead of bowl, fine) or fight crime together (ok they were there at the time the call came in, that makes sense) but you also have to make sure that you don’t do anything that’s going to negatively impact the writers of an individual book (say the Flash) while at the same time incorporating every change made by the writers of that same book. And of course if you get any kind of major company crossover or skip-week event you have to work that in, too. And let’s not forget that with Batman and Superman having close to 20 titles between them some months counting mini-series that becomes a lot of stuff to write around. Or that if you’re writing the solo book for one of these team members you have to bite the bullet and write your scene where Bane beats up Batman anyway without regard to the fact that last month he just punched out Darkseid or blew up an Amazo robot with only Robin to help.

There’s also an issue of redundancy. These days Wonder Woman has the same powers roughly as Superman, only to a slightly lesser degree and minus heat vision. Martian Manhunter has a never-ending list of abilities dampered only by a readily available weakness. Captain Marvel is as powerful as Superman or, hell, anybody else of that caliber and has no pesky chink in his armor as long as you don’t make him say “Shazam!” Who is the most essential member of a strike force? Without weighing out pros and cons some writers and many fans would just say “Why, all of them!” That’s bullshit. Then you have Michael Holt, DC’s Mister Terrific, being described these days as the “world’s third smartest man.” See, they would occasionally call him one of the smartest men on the planet, but then they had to physically rank him so that we’d know for sure he wasn’t smarter than Lex Luthor or Batman. You have how many characters out there in the DCU called the greatest martial artist? Bronze Tiger, Lady Shiva, Green Arrow’s bastard child, Batman, Batgirl…it goes on, I’m sure. Detectives? You’ve got the Question, Doctor Mid-Nite, the Sandman, Plastic Man, Elongated Man, Martian Manhunter’s civilian ID is a detective with the cops, the Riddler’s doing the detective for hire bit now, Batman of course, Batman’s various protégés, hell during James Robinson’s Batman run recently he had Batman sub-contract to some other detective. Over in Marvel Comics you have two characters, the Taskmaster and Bullseye. Taskmaster can duplicate any fighting form or move he sees making him unbeatable in hand-to-hand and Bullseye never misses. In very short order naturally you have them become targets, punching bags for the NEWEST greatest fighter ever, or foils of some new hero that Bullseye just CAN’T HIT. They all keep coming.

See, every book is its own universe. It’s hard to tell one story well, much less a whole slew of stories using the same characters and settings over seventy years. You have to build an entire logical milieu to play around in. Sometimes complicating that can be a story in itself; having Superman show up in Gotham one day can make for a great story as Batman comes to terms with whether or not he’s really needed in a world of gods, or whether the gods can be trusted to care about his fellow man as much as Batman does, or what have you. But then you end up with Superman and Batman being BFFs. So now any time Batman faces down Mr. Freeze you know that if things get really hairy he can always call Superman to help. Even if Freeze kills Batman justice will still be served by Superman or Robin or Azreal or Deathstroke even…It takes away some drama. For that matter, it takes away some drama seeing Batman get brained by a mugger when he just took down Mr. Freeze; if he beat up an entire science fiction movie he can surely beat up Oscar and Orwell the Rape Twins.

I bring all this up because playing Smash Bros. Brawl and watching all these Nintendo characters hanging out in cinematics is really off-putting to me. Here you have all these different characters created with almost entirely different design aesthetics and somehow the animators have to both unify them under a core aesthetic without significantly altering any character’s contours or silhouette. So everything is textured like hell to make it look like it matches but you still have Samus Aran running down the hall with Pikachu and you just want to peek under her helmet to see if she’s wearing a what-the-fuck expression so giant it could be a special move of its own. As strange as it is, like the superteam thing, it looks good until you look at it. On the surface it becomes this kind of thing I’ve been inured to in my life. From Hannah-Barbera cartoons like Blue Falcon and Dynomutt, to the Laff-A-Lympics, to an all-star PSA movie featuring Pooh and Slimer and Donald’s nephews, or something like Captain N…It’s something I saw a lot growing up and eventually you just learn to accept it. I think it goes even deeper than that, really. As a kid there’s no good reason you can’t have He-Man and Donatello team up to fight Serpentor. You might make up a scenario to explain it all away or you might not. I remember once staging a gigantic battle using a team of generic looking toys I had given new superhero identities, including Rufio from Hook. The roster must have looked about as mismatched as a graffiti-covered overpass but I hardly cared; I was bored and this killed time. But when you’re looking at a single comic book costing as much as a fucking meal at Wendy’s then killing time isn’t enough; this better be one damn fine comic. And it’s hard to juggle everything necessary to make your Batman or Deadpool or Punisher story make sense when, say, Unicron is right around the corner.

Obviously all this is a little easier when your book is self-contained. The Savage Dragon has his own little universe and he doesn’t get affected by what happens in Invincible; even though they’re in the same shared universe conceptually, in practice they have everything they need to sustain their stories within one another and almost never overlap except to acknowledge that, somewhere in the world, the other exists. Another good example is the New Teen Titans. While all the original Titans were sidekicks they hardly brought any baggage with them; it’s not like Robin or Wonder Girl had all these other story threads to get in the way, as they were characterized as “boy adventurer” or “girl adventurer” and that was as deep as things got for a while. Hell, before she joined the Titans Wonder Girl didn’t even exist; she had just been flashbacks about Wonder Woman’s extremely retarded childhood cooked up to fill magazines in the Silver Age. (Marv Wolfman dealt with this to some extent later and it’s haunted the character ever since as she drags the convolution of her origins and personae behind her like Jacob Marley, atoning for her sins against the continuity gods.) For more on this subject see the internet, where painstaking efforts go on trying to explain how the hell Wonder Woman continuity works. It makes my head hurt more than reading a Marvel UK comic. But yeah, the New Teen Titans…Each new member was designed to let Marv tell a different kind of story depending on what he felt like doing that month and it worked for exactly as long as the book was treated like its own little universe. Nobody second-guessed why Zatanna wasn’t helping stop Trigon or whether Batman could help track down a HIVE base; this was just Teen Titans. Late in the series and in every subsequent revival people have forgotten that.

Bill Willingham and Matt Sturges are excellent writers. Fables and Jack of Fables are fantastic and people tell me Shadowpact turned out pretty great, too. But now they’re taking over Justice Society, the original super team. JSA was one of my favorite books for a long time. It was its own little universe for the first fifty issues there. Where it pissed on continuity and violated characterization I was unaware, being that all these characters were mostly from the fucking thirties. I just knew it was one kick ass superhero book where all these really cool characters could meet up and interact in any way they chose, AND face the consequences, because nobody was tied into a solo book. The writers could go wild. Eventually the book sold so well enough BECAUSE of these reasons that it all changed; it became an Important Book and everybody knows that Important Books have to be staging grounds for plot points in summer crossovers, or need summer crossovers for themselves with their spin-off books, and gah burs fargle….I was READING that, you dicks! Give it back! The book got so continuity-heavy and masturbatory and incestuous in its plotlines that I abandoned it and while I tried picking it back up it’s no use…The JSA is a part of something bigger, and that something is something I want no part of. I hope Willingham and Sturges enjoy the book. I hope it makes them even bigger stars so that they can wave their dicks around and get projects approved on the strength of their names alone like Warren Ellis can (not saying he phones it in, just saying that a cult of personality supports him to the extent that he COULD; thankfully, he may be a bastard but he’s never been that big a bastard). I hope JSA becomes a book you can just read and enjoy without having to give a shay fuck about Double Secret Probation Crisis. Mostly I just hope it helps they two and DC get enough credit in the bank that I never have to worry about Jack or Fables shipping late or getting canceled (unless they wanted to end Jack after 50 issues and start some new spinoff, starring say Cinderella).

I hope all these things but I’m sure it’ll take three issues tops for Wildcat to have to face off alone against a menace that J.J. Thunder could just wish away. And for some reason Pikachu is there too and nobody seems weirded out by that…

Slyde the Teflon Man.

2008-10-05T22:38:00.003-05:00

Something Stan Lee gets made fun of for is how any new character or threat would get played up whether they strictly deserved it or nor. This is how you get people talking about how awesome Mister Fantastic and Giant Man’s powers are when Thor and the Human Torch are also in the room. It’s how you get characters like Stilt Man or the Mandrill being played up as major threats. The reason for this is simple: dramatic equity must be invested in these characters in order to lend any credibility to the suspense necessary for the kind of action-adventure soap opera superhero comics are. Because nine times out of ten the entrée of conflict isn’t the fight between Spidey and the Grizzly; it’s that Aunt May Is Dying and Spidey’s late to the hospital, or a busload of kids is about to fall off a bridge, or Spidey is powerless or poisoned or something. There’s some personal investment that drives the drama and the Grizzly is just in the story to advance the plot, to move the action. But you have to act like these guys are a major threat or else people write you off at the beginning of the story: “Oh, it’s just the Spot, Spidey could beat him with one hand tied behind his back. Lame.” That was how Stan saw super-villains…You wanted a good villain, sure, and some villains like Doom are awesome enough that people would read about him by himself but that’s not the purpose of the antagonist in a story; Stan saw the villain’s job as being to reveal something about the hero. That’s how you get characters like the Torch’s rogue’s gallery, Asbestos Man and Paste Pot Pete, characters designed to specifically counter the Human Torch’s abilities so he would have to overcome that challenge, act in a new way, think creatively in using his powers.

Not wanting to focus just on the villains, all odds have to be stacked against the hero to create any sense of drama and the readers have to believe that each hero can rise to the challenge. Readers can be picky about that when it comes to superhero comics…So many victories are one-in-a-million chances or so we’re told. It’s entirely possible for Thor to save the day but it’s also possible for Rick Jones to shut down the force field holding the Avengers captive, or something. Somewhere in the middle, though, we’re back to Giant Man. Readers go into the story saying “Our only hope is Giant Man? Against Kang? We’re fucked.” Hank Pym is a great example of this because he, like Hawkman, had amazing powers by the standards of his earliest contemporaries but seemed less and less awesome as time went on. And let’s not just put this at the feet of Stan, Jack, Steve, Don, and Larry; DC always did this, too, but Stan gets a lot of shit for this kind of thing because he was the first and best face of comics.

It’s funny because at the end of the day DC’s heroes always get by on their ingenuity (from knowing obscure science or from making science totally up) and Marvel heroes often succeed because of their human perspective as often as their humanity hobbles their crime-fighting career. Everybody knows Reed Richards is brilliant and will build a trans-dimensional graviton checker just to give Ben Grimm something to hold up. People still need to be reminded today that being a third rate Plastic Man is not a useless power in itself, and especially in addition to being a genius with a ray gun. They certainly needed to be reminded of it back in the day, when expected turnover for comic magazines was so high and you had to re-cap all the high points whenever possible…

But yeah, Peter Parker defeats the bad guys with knowledge gleaned from his day job drawing strength from the thoughts of his loved ones and Superman defeats the bad guys with godlike powers from a yellow sun and some science he got from the internet. And out of this first theory of villains, that they most let the hero shine, comes an extension that is the modern attitude: a hero is defined by his villains.

Batman fights villains because he is a hero. The fact that his villains are double mocha bananas doesn't increase his courage or selflessness any. What it does do is give way, way crazy new ways to show off facets of Batman's personality and provide a near infinite litany of story ideas to run around in...They extend the life of the serial. This attitude can present itself as a huge problem, though. I remember watching old Batman reruns on the local UHF as a kid and getting frankly sick of all the fucking Joker episodes. There was a while there where Doctor Doom and Galactus were more of the focus of the book than the Fantastic Four. I don't need to even mention how Venom's influence spread like herpes...I even think the Clone Saga was a pretty inevitable result of Venom's invention, but I'll get to that around 1996 or so...

And if a hero's stable doesn't have at least a dozen of these ubervillains they're considered lame by a large body of fanatics. I mean for a while there Daredevil was fighting a whole fucking ninja army every issue but he also had Stilt-Man, the Jester, the Matador, Purple Man, the friggin Owl...FUCK that guy! Which is why every writer beats the bejeezus out of Elektra, Bullseye, and the Kingpin. Every other damn issue is these guys.

So we get burned out. So they introduce knockoffs *cough*Carnage*cough*. When this fails they try to "redeem" some other villain. Geoff Johns got a lot of props and press for "redeeming" Flash's Rogues Gallery when under the Stan Lee theory of supervillainy there was nothing wrong with them to begin with. This is where we get the idea of second and third tier characters, by the way. Top tier are the stars, second tier can be in good comics but don't have their own fans, third tier are lame. Basically, a first tier character like Doctor Doom can hold up to having eight issues in a row with the focus on him but maybe the Wizard can't.

That's really where all this comes from, though: focus. Johns didn't reinvent or rediscover Captain Cold. He just focused on him. He focused on making him a fully fleshed character using everything that was there (which turned out to be a lot) and then devoted focus to him in the stories. Which made the readers focus on him, get inside his head. Ten years ago I would have had to ring up Carmine Infantino to find somebody whose favorite villain was Captain Cold. Now he's probably got his own fan club. So it's not like only sweeping, operatic villains like Doom or Magneto or Darkseid can be considered superstars...it's just a matter of focus. The Joker is perhaps the perfect example of this because all he starts out as is a hook: he is a sort of creepy clown who murders instead of amuses. It was lending him focus, investing dramatic equity in him, that helped make him the force of nature he is.

What this leads to is whole issues and mini-series devoted to these villains, which is fine. To me, though, the Flash should be about the Flash and Batman should be about Batman, rather than Cold or the Joker. I say if you want to write stories about suprvillains go right ahead. But all you're really doing is swapping your protagonists. You still have to make up compelling antagonists for your villains...obstacles to the achievement of their goals. So you go from having to create compelling supervillains every month to creating compelling superheroes every month. Same problems, same rules, same theories. Make no mistake, though; when your hero is eclipsed by the villains in the story you're telling you're not doing well. You're lost. You've traded Character for Plot. Character means Story; Plot itself leads to...the end of the plot. Very bad for a serial. If you're relying too much on the what you have to pay off constantly, but if you rely more on how and why you can keep going forever.

Basically all this brings me to Slyde: The Teflon Man.

Spidey CD Project: A Prologue

2008-09-06T23:22:00.002-05:00

Fuck, I wish I could write as much on here as I like. I just get so damned tired...

Okay: I bought this DVD-Rom Marvel put out a couple years back. On it is every Amazing Spider-Man issue and annual from January 1987 to June 2006. I'm going to read them all in order and post about each of them here in turn.

Before this project begins proper there's some observations I wanted to make, the first being that even a cursory glance at the contents of this thing shows that nobody is supposed to do this. The second issue on the CD crosses over with Secret Wars II. Then we get Kraven's Last Hunt, of which the ASM issues represent one third; remember, at this time Marvel's publishing multiple Spidey titles. That will become readily apparent once we move further into the nineties and through the clone debacle, countless interconnecting storylines, on through to Spidey's identity crisis where he runs around in like 6 different outfits and Civil War and argh...

Just saying: take any 20 Spidey comics from this CD and read them in order. Now read any ASM Essentials volume straight through. See what happened there? How one made way, way more sense than the other? This shit drives me out of my fucking mind. Any nerd who ever complains that other people don't understand his love of comics has to realize that this is part of the reason they don't understand: it's not important for Comics as a business to make any kind of sense to people outside of Comics, except when there's money to be made. This is an ass-backwards way of thinking because there is always money to be made and gee willickers it'd be nice if some of that money came from selling comic books. But no: enjoy 1/4th of this Mysterio story that even I did not ask for.

I also have to ask: who is the target audience for this product? Casual readers have written off the nineties; newer, younger readers want the new stuff; "hipsters" aren't flocking to Spidey comics anyways no matter how much the comics press talks about comics' increasing popularity; hardcore fans have all these issues anyway...I mean, who did they think would see this and go, "Wow, I need that?" The internet. That's the market: message boarders, bloggers, talk-backers. It exists as reference material and little else, even as an artifact.

That said there is some stuff in here I absolutely adore. I remember some of these storylines when Spidey went twice monthly and I would actually buy them in a drug store like it was the forties, Spidey and FF every two weeks not because they were the best comics but because they were there and that's what I had. Round Robin: Sidekick's Revenge, the Return of the Sinister Six, the Assassin-Nation Plot, that was gold to me. And everything from Slyde to the Tri-Sentinel, the first-through-thousandth appearance of Venom....there's a lot of lovely craziness in here. There's a conception that bronze age craziness is inherently worth less than silver age craziness but let me tell you, for every insane Blackhawk cover there's Slyde the Teflon Man.

I'll do some articles here and there devoted to the high points and low points, best and worst villains, covers, et al. But I am determined to get through this project, maybe not in chronological order but...I will review every Spidey comic on this CD. Enjoy.

Men of Steal, part 1

2008-08-30T18:26:00.001-05:00

Everybody knows Superman. There are cultures that communicate exclusively with clicks and whistles who know what Kryptonite is. The whole reason the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor is because they thought Superman was catching some rays. But for as much as Superman is THE superhero to most of the world it could be argued that he’s not a very good one, that he’s not all that interesting, or even that he was a massive dick. Over the years DC and other publishers have made many attempts at reinvigorating the Man of Steel, throwing crazier and crazier variations on Superman into the mix. And after almost 80 years of continuous publication you had better believe they’ve tried some wild shit, from evil Supermen to parallel Supermen to “grim and gritty” superheroes that are just Superman with a coat of paint. What follows is part of a series of posts dedicated to all the wonderful, weird, crazy, and fucking desperate ways people have tried to make the Action Comics lightning strike twice.

Meet Joe. Joe was a gifted athlete desperate for attention, so he tried to re-create the high dive routine from a Bugs Bunny cartoon and jump off a building into an empty tank. Luckily, Superman prioritizes his schedule around helping gigantic morons and Joe was rescued. Superman the gets Joe a job as a janitor in a museum...dedicated to Superman. It seems like less a "I'm a swell guy" move and more of a "I own you now, worship me and toil for my edification" sort of move, especially considering that a phone call or visit from Superman to, say, the Daily Planet could have gotten Joe a job on the sports beat. Frankly anywhere in the city would have given Joe a hell of a better job than Janitor based solely on Superman's recommendation.

Joe's luck took another...let's say "unexpected" turn when he was working late during a thunderstorm. Stay with me: First, a bolt of lightning politely lets itself in through the museum window. Then it strikes miniature statues of perennial Superman hangers-on the Legion of Superheroes. The statues are actually the tiny dead bodies of the real LOSH due undoubtedly to some other, earlier stupidity. They then give off a second energy bolt that strikes Joe, giving him every superpower ever and several super-powers more than twice. Even for comic books, fucking wow, huh?

Now he owes his (admittedly shitty) career and life to Superman so it's not surprising that, upon becoming a small god, Joe decides to murder the fuck out of him and rule the world. That'll teach you to interfere with Darwinian processes, Supey. Since Joe debuted in World's Finest he also took up the proud tradition of "villains who develop an instant, tremendous hard-on for killing Batman for no other reason than his tendency to hang out with Superman." Using Saturn Girl's telepathy he learns their secret identities and proceeds to wage a campaign of terror against them using the most fearsome image he can conjure (a drawing from every kid's 2nd grade notebook) and a super-scary moniker: um, The Composite Superman. Tip: never pick a world-conquering supervillain name that needs explaining. Call yourself Killcrush or Omnipoto or Destroyator; get your point across efficiently. Spend less time talking, more time killcrushing.

Composite Superman sounds like a much better idea than it turns out being, and it doesn't sound all that great to begin with. Joe's motives seem murky and his logic either confounding or not present. Also every single story ends the same way: he absolutely dominates Superman and Batman, destroying their lives and chasing them to the ends of the earth, and then his powers magically vanish and he forgets ever trying to kill anybody. After the first time this happened one would thing the world's greatest detective would have suggested Superman do something about those statuettes, but no: Joe goes back to custodial duties and in a short amount of time an alien comes back and gives Joe his powers again. This alien would eventually go back in time and steal Joe's powers and blah blah blah.....the alien sucks, don't pay attention to him.

While Composite Superman was a great example of the Good Crazy of the Silver Age it definitely comes under the heading of "What the fuckity fuck were they thinking?" As far as that goes it comes down to a few things. The first, something that you'll see as a pattern in these columns, being that it's really hard to keep coming up with enemies to throw at Superman. This is why any random Superman story from the era is an alien coming to earth and turning Superman into a hamster...you run through credible threats quickly and after that it's about filling pages, so you turn to craziness. While it's hard to confirm in this instance this is also the era when Julie Schwartz would basically entreat his creators to design their stories attention grabbing covers that are crazier than a shithouse squirrel, rather than the other way around. It's hard to fault the logic of this particular reverse-engineering; the only way to make the Composite Superman more eye-catching is to give him seven titties. Nor is it particularly surprising that he kept coming back; in addition to being on the short list of credible threats as indicated above, this was also a time when the feeling was that the readers of these comics rotated out 100% every few years as kids got older, so why not just do essentially the exact same story two years later?

Next time on Men of Steal: Omni-Man!

AMID controversy

2008-08-14T18:46:00.004-05:00

Putting aside the whole issue of the validity of the Spider-Man marriage and the validity of the ending to One More Day I think we can all agree that the story itself suffers because the whole thing hinges on that wonderful old trope; that Aunt May Is Dying (herein referred to as AMID). If we agree that Mephisto would make such an offer for whatever reason we have to question why NOW; after all, had this pitch been made back during the dawn of the Venom era, couched as a way to save his wife's life and secure safety for all his friends and loved ones, and what the hell in the process let's wipe Brock's memory of Peter's identity and make Harry Osborn un-crazy...It still probably wouldn't have been a much better story but it would have accomplished as much as One More Day did and it would have made a lot more sense. But to save Aunt May?

It's hard to be too hard on Aunt May because some of the best things JMS did in his tenure was to try and redeem Aunt May as a modern woman and make her function as a character in her own right, rather than just as a plot device. However even in this capacity she only ended up saying the things to Peter that Mary Jane would have said ten years earlier. Or, hell, Matt Murdock. Let's remember, too, that Aunt May had been in the ground since the fucking Clone Saga only to be brought back comparatively recently before the start of JMS' run (in a totally fuckshit way, to boot). But she needed to be turned around, needed to be turned into a makeshift Mary Jane, because at the beginning of JMS' run MJ was not in the picture (for even more stupid reasons: kidnapped from her faked death on an exploded plane and held captive by this freaky dude, then leaving Peter to go to where she could get in touch with her true feelings: HOLLYWOOD!). Once everybody was on set, however, the question of "what the hell to do with them?" kept popping up, leading to them even wearing Iron Man armor at one point. JMS was injecting metaphysics into spare corners of the Spidey mythos and forgot to notice that his supporting cast were turning into Jimmy Olsen.

And there's no move more Jimmy Olsen than AMID. Spidey's cast has always filled this role to some degree, as has every superhero's family and friends and co-workers. Far be it from me to begrudge a writer the use of this tried and true device altogether but when presented as the crux of the argument for two people making a pact with the devil to change history I don't buy it. The solution to all the storytelling problems and sales issues with Spidey's comics is to A) pretend we're still in 1971 and B) hit "replace all" on Ghost Rider's origin in Word? Over Aunt May? Aunt May has been redundant as a character since Spidey and MJ got married. The only thing she's really accomplished since was to fall in love with a guy who got killed by the Vulture. For an even more ridiculous instance of AMID storytelling, see Doctor Strange: The Oath. Does Stephen Strange save Wong, or give the cure for all forms of cancer to everybody in the world? Wong, of course, because letting millions of others die is the heroic thing to do.

I dearly hope that when this song and dance is inevitably reversed Aunt May slaps the shit out of both of them. The one thing never discussed during the story is what May would want them to do, which is a selfish attitude in itself. The May Parker from JMS' run certainly wouldn't agree with this move or call this move heroic. Neither would Steve Ditko, frankly...Strange doesn't really tell Wong what happened either because from a storytelling standpoint Wong can't know. Strange is the sorcerer goddamn supreme and could have put Wong's soul in a Ben Grimm action figure, or summoned him every afternoon to chat, or gone into the afterlife to physically reclaim him like people in comics do all the time. No, better to squander the cure for all cancer, ever. Wong can't know because it would defeat the point of saving him: we couldn't respect Wong if he found out what Strange did and continued to serve him like nothing happened. Even worse, it wouldn't have mattered if he died; it's fucking Wong. Replace him with Wang or Weng and move on with your life, Strange. With Aunt May you can at least make the case for keeping her around thanks to everybody knowing her from the newspaper strip, cartoons, movies....but Wong? A very blind one armed shop teacher whose mother mainlined could count his favorite Wong story on one hand. Not to mention Steve Ditko, the guy who basically created Strange, would not have approved. Fuck, Mr. Spock wouldn't have approved. The needs of the many, motherfuckers!

Marvel seems to be all about pretending the last 40 years of comics never happened lately, have you noticed? Other than trading Captain America for Bucky (Who, oh by the way, was basically the granddad of Sam Fisher from Splinter Cell) their most headline grabbing stories of the last few years have been 1) AMID; 2) Superheroes distrust one another, fight; 3) Skrulls invade. Skrulls invade? Are you shitting me with this? This was your big plan? You...oh shit, you all watch Battlestar Galactica, don't you? Goddammit!

2008-08-01T18:24:00.003-05:00

With the release of some new posters we come once again to the question of just how excited we should all be about Watchmen. The truth is, not very.

Let me be clear: I'm looking forward to Watchmen but the last film I was genuinely excited about was Hot Fuzz (which did not disappoint). Saying I'm looking forward to seeing it isn't exactly a ringing endorsement either considering I'm also looking forward to seeing Bitch Slap. It's a movie and I'm a film grad...I'm going to see it, simple as that. And on that note let's all agree that calling Zack Snyder a visionary director is preposterous. He's a competent, maybe even good director, but his two biggest films are a remake of a George Romero film with all the subtlety and political commentary vacuumed out and 300. A lot of people were ready to crown Snyder comic-book-movie God after 300 but I maintained that a rip-snorting balls-out blood-and-guts sword-and-thong epic was no better a predictor of how he would handle something as complex and subdued as Watchmen any more than a career of caper films guaranteed a bang-up job by Matthew Vaughn on Stardust. A true visionary director blazes new trails and breaks new ground. Snyder has been all about adaptations so far and while there's nothing wrong with that it's a little early to start laying down palms for the guy. Watchmen, though, is like Lord of the Rings in that as a project a lot of people consider it an impossible task. Look for his stock to become meteoric if he gets close to pulling the movie off.

Nothing in the trailer made me any more confident about the project but it didn't discourage, either. What's a little discouraging is that it seems like talking comics means talking movies these days (see Comic-Con news). As a lover of both this trend kind of pisses me right off. Divide the Watchmen budget by 50 and give it out to first time filmmakers for horror and comedy flicks. I already have Watchmen on my shelf. It's out there for anybody who is interested. I don't need a film version of "the best they can do"and I don't need to shell out another $29.99 for a DVD containing the book's supplemental materials. On the comics side this encourages maintenance of status quo in order to support cross-media marketing (which is nothing new, of course) and the kind of contract designed to fuck young creators out of total ownership of their properties, e.g. what happened with Alan Fucking Moore and Watchmen. See also: Tokyopop, Howard the Duck.

With viral marketing already hitting the web (and maybe the beaches?) it's getting hard to avoid the Hype Machine on this one. I guess when Warner Brothers shut down their Ledger-based virals the marketing department had to keep themselves busy and justify those budgets some other way so they decided to make us sick of fucking hearing about the movie three weeks after the trailer debuted. That's just the marketing department, never mind comic news sites and discussion forums. Watchmen may indeed end up being a surprise like Iron Man or a gift to Hollywood like 300 but right now I'm only getting flashbacks of Bee Movie.

What DID ever happen?!

2008-08-01T03:44:00.003-05:00

So Neil Scarypants Gaiman is heading over to do a two-part Batman story titled "What Ever Happened To The Dark Knight?" and it's got the internet, still foaming with caffeine and desperation from Comic-Con a week gone, abuzz with discussion about potential and implications. The title is an obvious tip to Alan Hairypants Moore's seminal Superman story "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" wherein just about every major plot element ever to appear in a Superman comic was trotted out one final time before Crisis of Infinite Earths told everybody to shut their eyes and cover their ears and pretend none of it ever happened. With Final Crisis going on (the latest in a long line of supposed crises) and such a high name talent involved it's no wonder people are chomping at the bit for more information but let's step back here and consider a few things.

DC already threw out all the more fantastic and Silver Age elements of Batman's milieu back in 1984 and they've been telling us for almost 25 years now that the true meaning of Batman is a grizzled loner who only associates with the Justice League to keep an eye on them in case they decide to kill everyone and who rules Gotham's vigilantes (of which there are about a thousand, it sometimes feels) with an iron fist even as the public is convinced he's an urban legend. Moore's story was bold because it made dramatic, dynamic choices for the benefit of a story without having to worry about maintaining a status quo but a Between-Crises Batman doesn't have nearly as much to play off of as a Pre-Crisis Superman. It's not like this model of Batman has caused any problems for DC lately, even. Quite to the contrary. So it's not like they're going to ball up the whole tapestry and throw it into the sun.

Don't get me wrong, I do wonder what ever happened to the Caped Crusader. I miss the Batman who could smile without fans saying it betrayed the core of the character. I miss a Bruce Wayne that was tight with Boston Brand. That doesn't mean I want him fighting Crazy Quilt with a television in his chest or anything. It just seems that once they decided to skip all the subtext and plot points from Dark Knight Returns and make Batman over in essentially Frank Castle's image DC has been bouncing between two story poles: Batman as the ultimate loner who pushes everybody away and Batman having to surround himself with a surrogate family to just not hurt inside. Both smack a little too Evanescence to me and while I'm not saying a dark, brooding Batman doesn't make for good storytelling I am saying that we've got Krypto, Kandor and Kara Zor-El all running around again while Batgirl's killing people and Leslie Thompkins has lost her ever-loving blue-eyed mind.

It's that supporting cast that this story will most probably end up dealing with. With rumors and supposed confirmations of Bruce's death, Dick's ascendancy, Jason's post-resurrection redemption, and Robin's...something...we may very well be looking at another major upheaval in continuity, this time in the form of changing the guard. Well how else better to get headlines post-The Dark Knight? A typical Batman story won't cut it now, it has to be Death of Superman big. Marvel proved fans would buy this kind of thing and Dick has filled in for Bruce Wayne before. Hell, everyone has. Alan Napier used to do it. The two biggest problems with this are A) at this point Dick Grayson has about as much baggage as Bruce Wayne if not more so, so other than grabbing for ratings I couldn't see the sense in the move, and B) shuffling all this around would involve a tearful farewell and celebration for the last few years of Batman continuity which is like celebrating Lethal Weapon 3.

It's not even as if this will be sure-fire awesome just because of Neil Gaiman. Not to jump on the bandwagon with a lot of people still up in arms over his Marvel stories but while they weren't bad they were fairly pedestrian. His character work is still strong but the plots were sort of samey and his Eternals book just fucking ends right when it gets interesting, like Luke and the X-Wing fleet all fall asleep during the final Death Star briefing so the director just rolls credits. He does fit the role of a lot of people's dream creators for...well, anything, but the point is it has gotten me thinking a lot about people's dream teams. I don't hear as much of this any more, not like I used to. I think exclusive-mania put cold water on the groin for a lot of these fantasies, so what's the point in talking about it? I don't have a dream team for a particular book but in the spirit of "What Ever Happened To The Caped Crusader?" I have another question.

What ever happened to Ann Nocenti? Whatever happened to David Micheline and Len Wein? There are so many people in comics who give us truly gifted storytelling who never get mentions any more, and countless others who gave us merely good storytelling who are almost forgotten completely. I remember being at a convention some years ago with everybody clamoring for signatures from artist's alley while Irwin Hasen sat veritably unnoticed. Same thing with Judd Winick and Julie Schwartz. The Divine Fucking Julius. I know that's the way of things, though. Everybody wants the new. New writers, new artists, new Crisis, new Batman, new continuity...Even some people who are eagerly awaiting something new if only to rip into it for how it can't stand up to the older stuff. I'm not saying "Caped Crusader" won't be good, just like I'm not saying we should condemn it sight unseen. I just think watching the entire comics blogosphere prematurely ejaculate at once has been really hilarious and from a critical perspective temperance is called for. You may say it's just harmless buzz but buzz is never harmless. Look at the people, the industries, who feed off it like sweet, sweet nectar. They can't wait for you to see Madagascar 2.

To market, to market

2008-07-31T18:41:00.006-05:00

Remember Helix Comics? DC imprint. Back when some editor decided "Wouldn't it be a great idea to have some post-technopunk comics that were just like the Invisibles but not really?" Would've been a brilliant idea if Invisibles was selling like fucking gangbusters but it wasn't even really pulling in even Lobo numbers, from what I recall.

I remember the industry press making a big deal about it when it launched. The imprint originated Transmetropolitan and produced fuckall else. I remember Cyberella and Black Lamb and I remember a lot of the creators were pretty respectable. But this was a time in-between godawful Keanu Reeves cyberspace sci-fi action movie Johnny Mnemonic and decentish Keanu Reeves cyberspace sci-fi action movie The Matrix (in fact Helix was originally Matrix Comics before the impending film forced a name change). The valley of the shadow of death for cyberpunk when the best you could look forward to was the movie Hackers. Not to mention that many of the titles merely had futurist or mature elements to them and with a mature readers imprint in Vertigo already extant the Helix brand always seemed, to me, a little muddled from the start. Was there a great reason not to promote Vermillion as a Vertigo title, as opposed to slipping it under what ideally would have been a new marketing umbrella designed to boost line wide sales?

Marketing. Transmetropolitan comes in at the tail end of the line's life, survives it, and goes on to become a little success story. Before the first story arc is completed the fatal flaw in Helix is laid bare: artificially constructed marketing targeted at target audiences that are notoriously cynical about marketing. You can't say it was otherwise; when the good ship Helix went down it took all aboard with it, including Starcrossed which I always thought sounded awesome. Only Ellis' bastard survived. Roughly the same thing happened with DC Focus. Hard Time finished its first 12 issues and was around for another eight before all the critical acclaim in the world failed to justify its anorexic sales figures. Another unfinished masterpiece from Steve Gerber.

Casualties of marketing. Because whether you're talking mature comics, mature science fiction, or mature super heroes, you have to come back to the fact that maturity is not a marketing concept. It keeps being wielded like one in comics but it isn't. It's a psychological, intellectual, emotional, and biological concept, sure, but not a marketing concept. Work from the top down with "maturity" as a concept and you end up with comic books that say fuck or video games where people's bits get chopped off but you do not get maturity. What makes a work mature is the same thing that makes it cohesive and believable: the quality of the decisions of both the author and the main character.

As often happens in life, the truest words ever spoken on the subject were spoken by a comedian. "Every book is a children's book if the kid can read."- Mitch Hedberg. You don't wait until you magically blossom into readiness to accept mature concepts in life and in fiction. You become exposed to them, often forcefully, over time. That's how life works. And with that exposure you have to make some decisions in order to resolve your feelings about your experiences. You read 1984 in order to become the kind of person who's "ready" to read 1984.

"Mature" super hero comics are ones where there are no fights with super-villains. Heroes do battle with other heroes and their own inner demons which they are ready and willing to soliloquize for the reader at the drop of a hat for 3 issues out of 6. Truly mature superhero comics have depth that isn't measured by reams. The two aren't always mutually exclusive and this isn't a scathing indictment of Marvel's Civil War or decompression. I'm just saying that right now the legitimate press and comic book press are telling us that comics are more mature and complex than ever which, aside from being utter horseshit, always involves someone basically telling us what is and is not mature. That's top-down marketing. It's easy to say comic books are more serious if that's how you frame the debate: limit dialectic by establishing a definite for a relative concept. Because that's what maturity is at the end of the day: like ethics, a conversation, a debate. Putting a big M on your comic or video game means shit. It's telling us what you already told us we wanted to hear.