And only 107 minutes! All these trudging three hour epics in theaters these days could learn a thing or two from it...lookin' at you, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Saturday, December 24, 2011
The Adventures of Tintin in One Sentence
Most fun I've had at the movies in a long, long time.
And only 107 minutes! All these trudging three hour epics in theaters these days could learn a thing or two from it...lookin' at you, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
And only 107 minutes! All these trudging three hour epics in theaters these days could learn a thing or two from it...lookin' at you, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Saturday, December 17, 2011
A bad month in comics history.
As with Jerry Robinson, I had a chance to see Mr. Simon at Comic Con, although by then his health was waning considerably. He and Robinson were living legends, two of the last the great Golden Age creators. Soon there will be no one left, and the last vestiges of that amazing period of imaginative realization will be gone forever.
It's been a sad seven days for comics fans, and in general for all lovers of literature and visual art. Rest in peace.
Thursday, December 8, 2011
A Letter to Brain Michael Bendis
Dear Mr. Bendis,
Your new series Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man was one of the most talked-about things going on in comics when it debuted in September. Miles Morales had gotten a lot of media attention due to both his position as the new Spider-Man and his race; he is a character many, many people are following closely. So far, the cover of every issue released (four months worth of comics) has featured Miles in the new Spider-Man costume, which itself has received an enormous amount of attention - it's already a t-shirt. And yet, in the comics themselves, Miles has so far appeared in-costume a total of...zero times. Yep, as of issue #4, he has not even received or made it yet.
It is our humble suggestion, then, that you get Miles Morales in that fucking costume already.
Your notoriously slow - sorry, decompressed - writing style has hemorrhaged - sorry, deterred - many people in the series' short run, but it seems to have settled at a steady readership of about 50,000. Surely Miles finally - sorry, finally - donning the costume, and the quickening in pace that would logically accompany it, would help restore sales to a fraction of the series' debut level. So let's get on with it already, Mr. Bendis. Give the people what they want, what those who still haven't jumped ship are so desperately waiting for. Because if you don't do it soon, there will be no one left to read about it when he does.
At the very least people would no longer be able to accuse Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man as false advertising.
Hugs and kisses,
Everybody
Your new series Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man was one of the most talked-about things going on in comics when it debuted in September. Miles Morales had gotten a lot of media attention due to both his position as the new Spider-Man and his race; he is a character many, many people are following closely. So far, the cover of every issue released (four months worth of comics) has featured Miles in the new Spider-Man costume, which itself has received an enormous amount of attention - it's already a t-shirt. And yet, in the comics themselves, Miles has so far appeared in-costume a total of...zero times. Yep, as of issue #4, he has not even received or made it yet.
It is our humble suggestion, then, that you get Miles Morales in that fucking costume already.
Your notoriously slow - sorry, decompressed - writing style has hemorrhaged - sorry, deterred - many people in the series' short run, but it seems to have settled at a steady readership of about 50,000. Surely Miles finally - sorry, finally - donning the costume, and the quickening in pace that would logically accompany it, would help restore sales to a fraction of the series' debut level. So let's get on with it already, Mr. Bendis. Give the people what they want, what those who still haven't jumped ship are so desperately waiting for. Because if you don't do it soon, there will be no one left to read about it when he does.
At the very least people would no longer be able to accuse Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man as false advertising.
Hugs and kisses,
Everybody
Jerry Robinson Died Today
He was 89 years old. His is the third passing of an industry giant this year, the other two of course being Dwayne McDuffie last February at a tragic 49 and the criminally under-appreciated Gene Colan this past June. Both prooker and I had the honor of meeting Mr. Robinson twice. He was a man of matchless presence, emanating an overwhelming sense of calm and civility - I remember when prooker and I were outside the convention center at Comic Con 2010, and I turned around and recognized the face right next to us as none other but Mr. Robinson's; in that moment, a serene aura enveloped us. It was as if we were in a timeless bubble, the three of us sheltered in the eye of the storm, pure composure amidst a raging chaotic sea of cosplayers. Many who make the pilgrimage describe Comic Con as a magical experience. During that encounter, I saw that magic at work.
A great man whose contributions will never be forgotten. Rest in peace.
A great man whose contributions will never be forgotten. Rest in peace.
Sunday, December 4, 2011
King of Komics, Interlude: Trust Me, I'm a Doctor
So I've been thinking about the last post I wrote, the first part of my big ol' essay on how Jack Kirby is responsible for the way the DC and Marvel Universes turned out -- for the operating principles that guide each of them, the big thematic differences we clearly see when we juxtapose the two. The end of that post - where I sort of threw all these other heroes into the equation - certainly seems rushed, and my desire to finish the fucking thing before 4 am and not have it explode into a 40 page thesis paper could easily be misread as a seeming inability or frustration on my part to soundly fit the bulk of Marvel's characters into my theory of how the MU "works." Recently I finished reading Dr. Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto, which recounts the author's experiences as a surgeon over the course of his innovative, pioneering career. Dr. Gawande peppers the book with little nuggets of wisdom, one of which reminded me of my argument. It applies to Doctor Strange, one of the heroes I rather egregiously glossed over toward the end of my big post. I'll let Gawande help me fill in the missing gaps I was unwilling to properly address:
"The most common obstacle to effective teams, it turns out, is not the occasional fire-breathing, scalpel-flinging, terror-inducing surgeon, though some do exist...No, the more familiar and widely dangerous issue is a kind of silent disengagement, the consequence of specialized technicians sticking narrowly to their domains. 'That's not my problem' is possibly the worst thing people can think...but in medicine, we see it all the time."
Yup, that's crotchety Doc Strange to a T.
Quick back-story dump: Stephen Strange was an enormously talented, world-renowned surgeon whose skill was matched only by his greed, ego and callousness. Imagine Dr. House but even more curmudgeonly and without any redeeming qualities. I mean the guy didn't even have the human decency to treat patients without insurance, I'm pretty sure that's a felony. To him the Hippocratic oath meant nothing; he was in the business of helping people and all that mattered to him was the money and acclaim. Which is not to say he didn't help people - he was the best at what he did (and what he did was very nice!) if you could foot the bill - but the point was...well I'll let the panels speak for themselves:
What kind of doctor smokes outside the operating room?! Inevitably, Strange learns a traumatic lesson in humility - he gets into a car crash that subtly damages the nerves in his hands, meaning he can never pick up the scalpel again. Too proud to accept positions as a consultant or assistant, the good doctor searches all over the world for a way to mend his hands, eventually finding himself at the doorsteps of a mysterious temple in the Far East. From there things go pretty much how you'd expect them to: he becomes a pupil of a wise Oriental mystic known as the Ancient One and reevaluates his life while learning Zen and magic and shit. Or whatever. When he completes his training, he re-enters the business of helping people, but this time he's got the right attitude...and magic powers. So yeah Doctor Strange! Master of the Mystic Arts, Sorcerer Supreme, all that cool stuff! Whooo!
For a quick reminder, the big point I made in my last post was that the Marvel Universe represents not the dichotomy of good vs. evil, but selflessness vs. selfishness; essentially, it's about mankind's struggle against its own proclivity toward inaction. All of the MU's major heroes are proactive figures fighting against indifference, and most of them (Spidey, Strange, et al) were impelled toward do-goodery as repentance for great wrongs their own indifference caused in the past.
So before I leave you here, hopefully having convinced you that I at least know what I'm talking about, let's take another look at that quotation: "The most common obstacle to effective teams, it turns out, is not the occasional fire-breathing, scalpel-flinging, terror-inducing surgeon, though some do exist...No, the more familiar and widely dangerous issue is a kind of silent disengagement, the consequence of specialized technicians sticking narrowly to their domains. 'That's not my problem' is possibly the worst thing people can think...but in medicine, we see it all the time."
Doctor Strange's origin story clearly supports the idea at work in the greater fabric of the Marvel Universe, especially when bearing Gawande's insight in mind. If nothing else, his words should remind us all how relevant a lesson it truly is, and affirm the intrinsic value superhero comics have to offer.
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
King of Komics, Part I: First they came for the mutants...
First off guys - all what, one of you? - I'm sorry to say the Thor review I was talking about just ain't happening. My film major friend Dom, who was gonna guest-blog the review, is too busy with all his stuff to get it done (you can catch his most recent short film, The End, here) and since by now a review would be so far past the point of relevance anyway there's no reason to bother. I'll say it was definitely my favorite superhero movie of this past summer, and I loved how it didn't give two shits about its romance sub-plot, because who the fuck does in a superhero movie? The production design was spot-on, it totally captured the cosmic,
sci-fi tech aesthetic Jack Kirby endowed the original comics with. Seeing those fantasy realms so fully realized was refreshing change of pace, considering how disappointingly earthbound the genre usually is, and I was surprised by how well they meshed with the sequences on our humble planet. Some people thought all the bird's-eye shots were distracting, but it's a movie where Gods look down at earth and pay us a visit from their astral plane, so to me it was a clever cinematographic choice; Kenneth Branagh is the man when he's following an internal logic instead of randomly adapting As You Like It to 19th century Japan. Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston were outstanding as Thor and Loki, respectively, even when the writing occasionally failed them (particularly the latter, who would have been better off written in the vein of those great Shakespearean rat-bastards). All in all, Thor is a well put together, thoroughly satisfying superhero flick that pulled off an epic scope with just the right mix of humor, action and mythological gravitas. Also Anthony Hopkins was in it and he was wearing an eye-patch. And there was a black dude in a suit of shining gold armor. It was awesome.
Although it had a pretty positive consensus, a number of celebrated writers and critics had some big problems with Thor. I couldn't help but find most of these cases to be astonishingly petty and spiteful, as if they disliked it for no other reason than they had to dislike the summer's biggest blockbuster. It was interesting to see such respected figures react with such personal bile and glibness; I wonder what going on in their heads as they saw the movie belied such insecure, venomous lashings-out.
Did I mention it had Anthony Hopkins with an eye-patch and a black dude in gold armor? 'Cause
that happened. It was awesome.
And now onto what this post was supposed to be about: the King of Comics.
If you know anything about superhero comics than you're familiar with Jack Kirby. He is perhaps the single most acclaimed and influential figure in the medium (the only person I can imagine coming close is Will Eisner) - Grant Morrison has equated him to the William Blake of comics. There's a reason he's called the King. I'm not going to delineate his incredible accomplishments or how he formed, innovated, REVOLUTIONIZED!! everything about the industry; hundreds of others have done a more comprehensive job at that than I ever could. But I am going to touch on one thing that I feel most people have missed.
Jack Kirby defined the DC and Marvel Universes.
Okay, so that's a very flippant way of putting what I'm trying to say, let me explain. We all know that Kirby created or co-created most of the Marvel Universe, and we know that his groundbreaking Fourth World saga became a cornerstone of the DC Universe, but I'm talking about something bigger. When people debate why Marvel is better than DC or vice-versa, they're not really arguing whether or not the Hulk is cooler than Superman; both worlds themselves are utterly distinct on a foundational level, and have their own unique aesthetic properties. These two worlds appeal to people in very separate ways, and I'd argue that is what fanboys battle over in the greasy, pathetic cesspools below the Android's Dungeon.
So what makes Marvel and DC so fundamentally different, and how did the King shape those fundamental differences? It all comes down to the baddies. What makes villains so important in superhero comics (besides the whole causing the story's conflict thing) is that they illuminate some aspect of the hero that would otherwise be left obscured. They serve to contextualize the hero, providing added dimensions to the ideas they embody: all great supervillains riff off of and further explore an element of the superhero's thematic core, either as twisted parallels or antitheses. We learn more about what Batman represents by juxtaposing him with the Joker or Two-Face; pitting Spidey against the Vulture and Doc Ock helps shed light on what our hero's all about. Kirby was the first to advance the conceit that superheroes and villains - like the figures of classical mythology - are heightened, abstract personifications of universal ideas, their battlegrounds the stages where they play out grand debates...WITH PROTON BLASTS!
It's Spring, 1966 and the Marvel Universe is still getting bigger and bigger, ever-expanding after the Big Bang that was Fantastic Four #1 five years ago. Stan Lee is content with things the way they are, with simply continuing to add new faces and circumstances to Marvel's ever-increasing batch of (lucrative!) icons. The rest of the bullpen, however, feels confined under Lee and have trouble reconciling their current situation with their loftier artistic/philosophical ambitions. Steve Ditko's starting to devote himself to Objectivism in all its forms; he'll leave Amazing Spider-Man in August. Kirby's work now can barely contain his cosmic imagination, which pushes the medium past what it was capable of at the time to craft a Space Age mythology. He wants to give a greater meaning to this universe he has created, and he thinks to himself, "if I can use a supervillain to contextualize a superhero, I can create a supervillain big enough to go up against all the heroes and contextualize their entire world!"
AND LO, MORTAL, SO DAWNS THE COMING OF GALACTUS...!
In Fantastic Four #48, Kirby introduced Galactus, the Big Bad of the Marvel Universe. He ain't the final boss of MvC3 for nuthin'. The fabulous image above is from Lee/Kirby's Thor #169 (Oct. 1969), and it pretty much lays out Galactus' shtick. He's the Devourer of Worlds, a tremendous Godlike being above myth, a legendary force of nature beyond reproach or opinion, beyond our mortal conceptions of good and evil. He survives by eating planets, so he comes back again and again to menace the heroes of Earth when it comes time to feed. What's important is that he's not doing it out of malicious intentions - he's not some diabolical monster like Loki or the Red Skull - it's just that a guy's gotta eat, right? You can't fault him for being self-interested and not wanting to starve to death, can you? Lee puts it really well in this splash page: "The puny survivors flee! I shall make no move to stop them! For I am indifferent to their fate!"
There it is, Galactus as the embodiment of indifference, of our natural inclination toward selfish inaction and apathy. That's the archenemy of the Marvel Universe. The MU isn't really concerned with the dichotomy of good vs. evil (which is why Mephisto feels so out-of-place in it), nor is it particularly conscious of it's own myth-making or iconography. Marvel was always considered the more naturalistic and grounded of the Big Two - that's what differentiated it from boring old DC Comics in the 60s, the flawed characters and real-world problems and all that revolutionary jazz - so it's appropriate that the MU is framed around a social reality affecting our society. The Marvel heroes stem from a tradition of social activism; at their very essences, all of them are taking a big stand against indifference.
Let's start with Spider-Man, since he's both the most obvious example and the most enduringly popular Marvel character. After he gets his powers, Peter Parker uses them to rake in cash as an entertainer. Selfish, perhaps, but...well yeah it's a pretty damn selfish way to use superpowers. Then he witnesses a robbery and, thinking there's no reason to get involved, does nothing to stop the burglar as he runs by Peter. This is something the movie screwed up big time: it gave Peter a reason to let the burglar get away. In the comics, he is simply predisposed to inaction, and that was the entire point. He pays for it when that same burglar ends up murdering dear old Uncle Ben that very night. "With great power there must also come -- great responsibility!" From that point on, Peter abandons his selfishness, vowing to never make the same mistake again - as Spider-Man he now fights against the pervasive apathy that led his uncle's death.
Next we have...how about Captain America? He was the first Marvel superhero after all, barring Namor and the original Human Torch. Cap punched Hitler in the jaw a full nine months before the US entered World War II, at a time when public sentiment was entrenched in isolationism. While the rest of America sat idly by, choosing not to intervene in the systematic execution of millions, scrawny Steve Rogers enlisted in the Army and volunteered for an incredibly dangerous super-soldier experiment. He refused to be crippled by the same inaction that plagued his beloved country, and inspired others to do the same (both in the comics and out of them). The Cap movie messed this up, too, but that movie messed a whole lotta things up. He and Bucky thwarted Nazi saboteurs and spy rings long before Pearl Harbor allowed them to thwart actual Nazis on the front lines.
We find a similar thread in the Fantastic Four's origin story. In the original tale, we're at the beginning of the Space Race. Those damn dirty Soviets got the heads-up on us and we've got a lot of catching up to do. In the Marvel Universe, America just can't get its act together, we're all too listlessly complacent to get anything done while those zany communists are up there making a space cannon or something. It's up to Reed Richards to build his own private rocket and put our flag on the moon before the cosmonauts get there. The story's been updated again and again, but every time the principle is still the same. Now it's Reed discovering an anomaly in space heading towards earth and saying, "hey these cosmic rays I'm seeing could be pretty dangerous, we should probably take a closer look at this or something," to which his colleagues, the government and the general public respond with a resounding "meh." As we know, Reed and his true believers get the last laugh when those cosmic rays give them all cool powers.
It's interesting to note that, at the climax of Galactus' first appearance, the Four scare him away with the threat of mutually assured destructing, bringing the greatest social concern of the Cold War to the attention of cosmic beings. Just sayin'.
The Hulk came next in Marvel's publication history; he, too, fits the mold. We're introduced to Bruce Banner as the head physicist for a modern-day Manhattan Project -- think of him as Oppenheimer without the humanity. He's aloof, reserved, emotionally withdrawn; about as indifferent as a person can get. He's also the man behind the gamma bomb, a WMD that makes Fat Man look like a spitball. And. He. Doesn't. Give. A. Fuck. So it's poetic justice that, after he's suddenly struck with conscience, Banner gets blasted with his own doomsday device and transforms into a furious, angst-ridden monster, a giant green cautionary tale on indifference toward human suffering. The same idea applies to Tony Stark, who didn't care that his career amounted to providing the world with tools for death and destruction...until it got him kidnapped and stuck with a battery for a heart. So to save the world from his own disinterest he becomes Iron Man! As Stark put it in the movie, which this time got it completely right, "I saw young Americans killed by the very weapons I created to defend them and protect them. And I saw that I had become part of a system that is comfortable with zero-accountability...I came to realize that I had more to offer this world than just making things that blow up."
Alright, who's left? Thor? Yeah, he definitely needed a lesson in humility, but the real reason daddy banished him was because he was set against the status quo (great link, btw): a non-aggression pact with the fucking Frost Giants, fer Chrissake! When Thor comes back he's no longer arrogant, but set against the complacent order of things more than ever. Doctor Strange? Same deal as Tony Stark, but with medical billing instead of weapons manufacturing and magic instead of a robot suit. The X-Men? For all the people who sling hate-filled "muties!", there must be many more who simply aren't invested in the issue enough to bother with mutant equality; it's a lot like the big problem facing gay marriage legislation outside of the South, I imagine. Daredevil? Indifference enshrouds his world like a fog. The Kingpin became as powerful as he is simply because no one bothered to try and stop him, and now his omnipresent influence can only be casually accepted as The Way Things Are. No one really cares about anything Daredevil does because they know he can't be anything more than a nuisance to the Kingpin's untouchable crime empire. Yet in spite of it all he continues to fight the good fight...and if anyone arsed themselves to look, including ol' Mr. Fisk, they'd discover what a difference he's actually making. It's all spelled out pretty explicitly in Born Again.
Have I covered all the bases yet?
As you can see, this theme always lurked just underneath the surface of Marvel's foundations. But that's all it was, a recurring idea buried deep within each individual mythos, only loosely connected to a greater whole. Kirby was perceptive enough to recognize this thread and, with the introduction of Galactus, brought it to light. Solidified it. Through Galactus, this cosmic God of Indifference constantly in the back of every other character's mind, Kirby was able to thematically unite the shared universe in a way never before seen; solely by the virtue of the character's existence he formally cemented the struggle against inaction as the core, fundamental tenet of the Marvel Comics world.
Tune in next time for Part II, when I do the exact same thing with DC. Fun stuff, I know!
Although it had a pretty positive consensus, a number of celebrated writers and critics had some big problems with Thor. I couldn't help but find most of these cases to be astonishingly petty and spiteful, as if they disliked it for no other reason than they had to dislike the summer's biggest blockbuster. It was interesting to see such respected figures react with such personal bile and glibness; I wonder what going on in their heads as they saw the movie belied such insecure, venomous lashings-out.
Did I mention it had Anthony Hopkins with an eye-patch and a black dude in gold armor? 'Cause
that happened. It was awesome.
And now onto what this post was supposed to be about: the King of Comics.
If you know anything about superhero comics than you're familiar with Jack Kirby. He is perhaps the single most acclaimed and influential figure in the medium (the only person I can imagine coming close is Will Eisner) - Grant Morrison has equated him to the William Blake of comics. There's a reason he's called the King. I'm not going to delineate his incredible accomplishments or how he formed, innovated, REVOLUTIONIZED!! everything about the industry; hundreds of others have done a more comprehensive job at that than I ever could. But I am going to touch on one thing that I feel most people have missed.
Jack Kirby defined the DC and Marvel Universes.
Okay, so that's a very flippant way of putting what I'm trying to say, let me explain. We all know that Kirby created or co-created most of the Marvel Universe, and we know that his groundbreaking Fourth World saga became a cornerstone of the DC Universe, but I'm talking about something bigger. When people debate why Marvel is better than DC or vice-versa, they're not really arguing whether or not the Hulk is cooler than Superman; both worlds themselves are utterly distinct on a foundational level, and have their own unique aesthetic properties. These two worlds appeal to people in very separate ways, and I'd argue that is what fanboys battle over in the greasy, pathetic cesspools below the Android's Dungeon.
So what makes Marvel and DC so fundamentally different, and how did the King shape those fundamental differences? It all comes down to the baddies. What makes villains so important in superhero comics (besides the whole causing the story's conflict thing) is that they illuminate some aspect of the hero that would otherwise be left obscured. They serve to contextualize the hero, providing added dimensions to the ideas they embody: all great supervillains riff off of and further explore an element of the superhero's thematic core, either as twisted parallels or antitheses. We learn more about what Batman represents by juxtaposing him with the Joker or Two-Face; pitting Spidey against the Vulture and Doc Ock helps shed light on what our hero's all about. Kirby was the first to advance the conceit that superheroes and villains - like the figures of classical mythology - are heightened, abstract personifications of universal ideas, their battlegrounds the stages where they play out grand debates...WITH PROTON BLASTS!
It's Spring, 1966 and the Marvel Universe is still getting bigger and bigger, ever-expanding after the Big Bang that was Fantastic Four #1 five years ago. Stan Lee is content with things the way they are, with simply continuing to add new faces and circumstances to Marvel's ever-increasing batch of (lucrative!) icons. The rest of the bullpen, however, feels confined under Lee and have trouble reconciling their current situation with their loftier artistic/philosophical ambitions. Steve Ditko's starting to devote himself to Objectivism in all its forms; he'll leave Amazing Spider-Man in August. Kirby's work now can barely contain his cosmic imagination, which pushes the medium past what it was capable of at the time to craft a Space Age mythology. He wants to give a greater meaning to this universe he has created, and he thinks to himself, "if I can use a supervillain to contextualize a superhero, I can create a supervillain big enough to go up against all the heroes and contextualize their entire world!"
AND LO, MORTAL, SO DAWNS THE COMING OF GALACTUS...!
In Fantastic Four #48, Kirby introduced Galactus, the Big Bad of the Marvel Universe. He ain't the final boss of MvC3 for nuthin'. The fabulous image above is from Lee/Kirby's Thor #169 (Oct. 1969), and it pretty much lays out Galactus' shtick. He's the Devourer of Worlds, a tremendous Godlike being above myth, a legendary force of nature beyond reproach or opinion, beyond our mortal conceptions of good and evil. He survives by eating planets, so he comes back again and again to menace the heroes of Earth when it comes time to feed. What's important is that he's not doing it out of malicious intentions - he's not some diabolical monster like Loki or the Red Skull - it's just that a guy's gotta eat, right? You can't fault him for being self-interested and not wanting to starve to death, can you? Lee puts it really well in this splash page: "The puny survivors flee! I shall make no move to stop them! For I am indifferent to their fate!"
There it is, Galactus as the embodiment of indifference, of our natural inclination toward selfish inaction and apathy. That's the archenemy of the Marvel Universe. The MU isn't really concerned with the dichotomy of good vs. evil (which is why Mephisto feels so out-of-place in it), nor is it particularly conscious of it's own myth-making or iconography. Marvel was always considered the more naturalistic and grounded of the Big Two - that's what differentiated it from boring old DC Comics in the 60s, the flawed characters and real-world problems and all that revolutionary jazz - so it's appropriate that the MU is framed around a social reality affecting our society. The Marvel heroes stem from a tradition of social activism; at their very essences, all of them are taking a big stand against indifference.
Let's start with Spider-Man, since he's both the most obvious example and the most enduringly popular Marvel character. After he gets his powers, Peter Parker uses them to rake in cash as an entertainer. Selfish, perhaps, but...well yeah it's a pretty damn selfish way to use superpowers. Then he witnesses a robbery and, thinking there's no reason to get involved, does nothing to stop the burglar as he runs by Peter. This is something the movie screwed up big time: it gave Peter a reason to let the burglar get away. In the comics, he is simply predisposed to inaction, and that was the entire point. He pays for it when that same burglar ends up murdering dear old Uncle Ben that very night. "With great power there must also come -- great responsibility!" From that point on, Peter abandons his selfishness, vowing to never make the same mistake again - as Spider-Man he now fights against the pervasive apathy that led his uncle's death.
Next we have...how about Captain America? He was the first Marvel superhero after all, barring Namor and the original Human Torch. Cap punched Hitler in the jaw a full nine months before the US entered World War II, at a time when public sentiment was entrenched in isolationism. While the rest of America sat idly by, choosing not to intervene in the systematic execution of millions, scrawny Steve Rogers enlisted in the Army and volunteered for an incredibly dangerous super-soldier experiment. He refused to be crippled by the same inaction that plagued his beloved country, and inspired others to do the same (both in the comics and out of them). The Cap movie messed this up, too, but that movie messed a whole lotta things up. He and Bucky thwarted Nazi saboteurs and spy rings long before Pearl Harbor allowed them to thwart actual Nazis on the front lines.
We find a similar thread in the Fantastic Four's origin story. In the original tale, we're at the beginning of the Space Race. Those damn dirty Soviets got the heads-up on us and we've got a lot of catching up to do. In the Marvel Universe, America just can't get its act together, we're all too listlessly complacent to get anything done while those zany communists are up there making a space cannon or something. It's up to Reed Richards to build his own private rocket and put our flag on the moon before the cosmonauts get there. The story's been updated again and again, but every time the principle is still the same. Now it's Reed discovering an anomaly in space heading towards earth and saying, "hey these cosmic rays I'm seeing could be pretty dangerous, we should probably take a closer look at this or something," to which his colleagues, the government and the general public respond with a resounding "meh." As we know, Reed and his true believers get the last laugh when those cosmic rays give them all cool powers.
It's interesting to note that, at the climax of Galactus' first appearance, the Four scare him away with the threat of mutually assured destructing, bringing the greatest social concern of the Cold War to the attention of cosmic beings. Just sayin'.
The Hulk came next in Marvel's publication history; he, too, fits the mold. We're introduced to Bruce Banner as the head physicist for a modern-day Manhattan Project -- think of him as Oppenheimer without the humanity. He's aloof, reserved, emotionally withdrawn; about as indifferent as a person can get. He's also the man behind the gamma bomb, a WMD that makes Fat Man look like a spitball. And. He. Doesn't. Give. A. Fuck. So it's poetic justice that, after he's suddenly struck with conscience, Banner gets blasted with his own doomsday device and transforms into a furious, angst-ridden monster, a giant green cautionary tale on indifference toward human suffering. The same idea applies to Tony Stark, who didn't care that his career amounted to providing the world with tools for death and destruction...until it got him kidnapped and stuck with a battery for a heart. So to save the world from his own disinterest he becomes Iron Man! As Stark put it in the movie, which this time got it completely right, "I saw young Americans killed by the very weapons I created to defend them and protect them. And I saw that I had become part of a system that is comfortable with zero-accountability...I came to realize that I had more to offer this world than just making things that blow up."
Alright, who's left? Thor? Yeah, he definitely needed a lesson in humility, but the real reason daddy banished him was because he was set against the status quo (great link, btw): a non-aggression pact with the fucking Frost Giants, fer Chrissake! When Thor comes back he's no longer arrogant, but set against the complacent order of things more than ever. Doctor Strange? Same deal as Tony Stark, but with medical billing instead of weapons manufacturing and magic instead of a robot suit. The X-Men? For all the people who sling hate-filled "muties!", there must be many more who simply aren't invested in the issue enough to bother with mutant equality; it's a lot like the big problem facing gay marriage legislation outside of the South, I imagine. Daredevil? Indifference enshrouds his world like a fog. The Kingpin became as powerful as he is simply because no one bothered to try and stop him, and now his omnipresent influence can only be casually accepted as The Way Things Are. No one really cares about anything Daredevil does because they know he can't be anything more than a nuisance to the Kingpin's untouchable crime empire. Yet in spite of it all he continues to fight the good fight...and if anyone arsed themselves to look, including ol' Mr. Fisk, they'd discover what a difference he's actually making. It's all spelled out pretty explicitly in Born Again.
Have I covered all the bases yet?
As you can see, this theme always lurked just underneath the surface of Marvel's foundations. But that's all it was, a recurring idea buried deep within each individual mythos, only loosely connected to a greater whole. Kirby was perceptive enough to recognize this thread and, with the introduction of Galactus, brought it to light. Solidified it. Through Galactus, this cosmic God of Indifference constantly in the back of every other character's mind, Kirby was able to thematically unite the shared universe in a way never before seen; solely by the virtue of the character's existence he formally cemented the struggle against inaction as the core, fundamental tenet of the Marvel Comics world.
Tune in next time for Part II, when I do the exact same thing with DC. Fun stuff, I know!
Monday, October 3, 2011
At da moofies: Drive: A Real Hero and a Real Human Being
Wow, guys. Now THIS was a pleasant surprise. What was advertised as some B-list action thriller turned out to be - thanks to mesmerizing cinematography, outstanding performances from the entire cast, a killer story, a propulsive euro-synthpop soundtrack and striking art-house direction from Bronson's Nicolas Refn - hands-down the best movie of the year. If you haven't, now is the time to go out and see it. If you're reading this odds are you have time to kill. Also lots of spoilers, so there's that.
Drive at first seems to defy classification; it blends genres and styles as diverse as splatter, chase, crime drama and neo-noir with 60s antiheroes, David Lynch send-ups and 80s burnout aesthetics. The result is highly stylized, existentialist thrill ride...but trust me, it's a lot less pretentious than I'm making it sound! Anyway, what surprised me most about the movie - and this is something many people have picked up on - was the one genre that cohesively united all of Drive's disparate elements; it's totally a superhero film. It doesn't look like a superhero film at first (it hardly plays out like the dime-a-dozen origin stories on the screen these days) but if The Dark Knight showed us there could be a movie about a superhero that wasn't a superhero movie, this film has now proven the opposite. This is a superhero movie that is not about a superhero...or, more accurately, not about a superhero we instantly recognize as such. Refn, for his part, has commented extensively on the genre's influence on Drive. QUOTE BOMB:
"...Drive was essentially an allegory of a superhero in the making. He became a superhero at the end of the movie and that's why it's a happy ending...In the beginning, he is there for her as a human being and when she needs him as a hero, he's there as a hero. He is what you need him to be. It's why he will continue to roam the landscape being a driver of the night, the superhero with a scorpion sign on his back as he protects the innocents against injustice."
"By day, he was a human being, by night he was a hero. And the movie is about his transformation into this superhero, by bringing his human morals into the hero role, so that he does what he does for the right reasons."
"You can kind of say that the Driver is a man who is caught between two worlds. At night, he is a man in costume who roams the streets of L.A., wanting to protect the innocent. And in the day, he's a car mechanic and a stuntman. And through the course of the movie, he realizes he's schizophrenic in a sense that he doesn't have two personalities, but he's two people. And he, through the course of the movie, becomes the superhero that he plays in films, and saves the innocents against the evil … it's mythological storytelling, which is what superhero stories are."
Riding (OR SHOULD I SAY DRIVING HURHURRR) on Refn and Ryan Gosling's words, I want to take a closer look at how the aesthetics, symbols and conventions of the superhero genre have informed Drive. For starters, our protagonist is referred to only as the "Driver," a superhero-esque codename relating to his persona and abilities; the alias wouldn't feel out of place among one of the X-Men. Like all the great superheroes, the Driver is very much an archetype - he's that same antihero stock character as the Man With No Name or Frank Bullitt or any of the samurai Toshiro Mifune played, you've seen him in various media dozens of times before. Of course the Driver's a bit of a deconstruction of that trope too - his stoicism, rather than making him seem tougher, primarily softens him, his unassuming toothpick a stark contrast Clint Eastwood's gruff cigarillo. But this still plays into the superhero dynamic, because when in the last 25 years have superheroes not been all about deconstruction?
By day, the enigmatic Driver is a stunt...uhh, driver for Hollywood action films. Meta right? It's like this was written by Grant Morrison or something. By night, though, he's a wheelman-for-hire, the best at what he does (sound familiar?). But when innocent people - his neighbor/love interest Irene and her young son Benicio - are put in danger by the mob, the Driver abandons this selfish use of his skills and becomes a superhero (also sound familiar?), striking against organized crime from the darkness with impeccable combat prowess (also also sound familiar?). What most soundly cements the superhero analogy is the fact that he dons a costume during his nighttime exploits: a white satin jacket with a gold scorpion embroidered on the back. It may be more subtle than the capes and tights we're used to, but it is still quite clearly a superhero costume as it is utterly unique, it is worn solely when he asserts his extraordinary abilities and, most importantly, it invokes an animal totem.
Historically, animal totems have played an enormous role in the creation of superhero identities. Bruce Wayne was inspired to take on the archetypal qualities of a bat in what is perhaps the most iconic origin story. Peter Parker famously had the characteristics of a spider thrust upon him, and the best Spidey stories in recent memory have meditated on the totemic nature of Spider-Man's world and of superhero comics in general. Like these heroes and so many others, the Driver is conscious of his emblem, and when he puts on his jacket he takes up the mantle of the scorpion. It hearkens back to that cornerstone of all great superheroes and superhero stories, mythology. Specifically, the fable of the scorpion and the frog, which the Driver paraphrases to his archenemy. And here's where things get deeeeeeeeeeep...
You know the story. Scorpion needs to make it over the river so he tries to hitch a ride on top of a frog. Frog is afraid scorpion will sting him. Scorpion explains that if he did that they would both drown. So frog ferries scorpion along and wouldn't you know it, just before they reach land scorpion stings him in the back, dooming them both. Frog asks why scorpion would pull that shit, to which scorpion responds, "that is my nature." The question of human nature is what Drive is all about: are individuals predisposed to behave by a certain irreversible nature? Are they predisposed to conflicting drives struggling for dominance? Are they able to transcend or change their nature? Can they transform or elevate themselves by embracing their drives? Are people capable of understanding or recognizing what they even are? Can we be a real human being and a real hero? It's a regular Jodorowsky, this one.
There's a great scene that perfectly sums up the question Drive poses. The Driver and Benicio are watching a cartoon together early in the film, and Driver asks the boy if a shark in the cartoon is the bad guy. Benicio says yes. "How can you tell he’s the bad guy?," Driver asks. "He’s a shark," the boy casually rationalizes. The Driver inquires, "Are all sharks bad?" and the young child nods his head. The scene could easily be (read: IS) referring to a number of characters in the movie, the most obvious being the Driver himself. It's also referencing Benicio's father, whom the audience is predisposed to hate until he actually appears onscreen and turns out to be a great person thrown into awful, inescapable circumstances. And to Driver's mentor (his Alfred, if you will), Shannon, another good guy who makes a bad choice that leads to disastrous consequences. Perhaps even to the antagonist Bernie Rose, a ruthless mobster who seems to genuinely regret the measures he must take to protect himself. Are any of these people intrinsically good or bad? Are any of them conscious of their individual human natures, if they even exist? Are their actions and behavior, their drives, determined by innate, instinctive characteristics? At first glance the Driver seems to serve as a profound 'YES' to these questions, but that's the beauty behind his lack of backstory and dialogue. We have no idea what he's thinking or feeling or how his environment may have shaped him; he's a total mystery to us. He's Rorschach without the caption boxes telling us his thoughts.
Compelling stuff, no?
Believe it or not, this digression I've taken ties in perfectly to the superhero stuff I'm supposed to be talking about. But first we have to take one last detour. Remember at the end of Batman Begins, when Bruce and Rachel are talking at the ruins of Wayne Manor? Rachel feels up Bruce's face (if I'm remembering the scene correctly) and declares "This is your mask. Your real face is the one that criminals now fear. The man I loved, the man who vanished...he never came back at all." Well all that is obviously a load of bullshit; it's not a simple dichotomy between Bruce and Batman. Batman is clearly not his true persona, just as his actual voice isn't a constipated chain smoker's. The Batman identity is just as much a mask as millionaire playboy Bruce is, and although Rachel may think otherwise for some ill-defined reason, that is not the personality she is addressing right now. The real person behind these facades, the man you loved and you think vanished, is the one you're fucking talking face-to-face to you dumb bitch: the highly disciplined, driven, perceptive, introspective, resourceful and self-reliant Bruce Wayne. The man who has devoted his life to a higher ideal and uses "Batman" as a tool to realize it.
Alright, now to get back on track. We're at the final lap, folks! To finish his transformation, the Driver dons a mask to hide his identity near the end of his origin story, completing his superhero costume. Crucially, the mask is taken from his day job, when the Driver needed to look like one of the actors for a car crash scene. It belongs in the realm of secret identity, not superhero. Drive knows better than Rachel, you see; it recognizes that a man's identity, his true nature, is much more nebulous than any clear-cut duality, especially between hero and secret identity. The entities are not so clearly defined - far from it - nor are they completely separate from one another. Perhaps there are elements of both in one another. Perhaps one morphs into the other. If human nature is an unanswerable question, than any attempts to explain it by ghettoizing its aspects into two definitive, opposite camps will ring as false as Rachel's half-baked analysis.
It's funny how similar the ending of Drive is to that of The Dark Knight; both have the protagonist speeding off into the darkness, with the screen cutting to black. The difference is that the ending to The Dark Knight is ominous, because by the picture's end Batman is not supposed to be a hero, while the ending of Drive is hopeful for the opposite reason. We started out with a man without any drive and saw him self-actualize. We saw him fall in love, transcend and become a real hero.
If Drive is any indication, we may soon be seeing a comparable transformation in the superhero film genre. I was once afraid that in the near future the superhero flick would over-saturate the market and go the way of the Western, that the genre would devour itself as people flocked away from the same formulaic origin stories over and over again. We saw a hint of that this summer: Thor, X-Men: First Class and Captain America all did very, very well at the box office (not so much Green Lantern), but they nevertheless failed to meet studio expectations by a great deal. There was no Iron Man among this crop of new franchises, and the only one to come even somewhat close was the first released. In light of seeing the formula applied with such ingenuity and unconventionality in Drive, I'm now confident that the superhero movie will not just survive, but will thrive in ways we have now only begun to see as it is freed from the constraints that once bound it. Yeah, the superhero movie will be fine.
It's just the superhero comic book movies that are gonna be fucked.
Drive at first seems to defy classification; it blends genres and styles as diverse as splatter, chase, crime drama and neo-noir with 60s antiheroes, David Lynch send-ups and 80s burnout aesthetics. The result is highly stylized, existentialist thrill ride...but trust me, it's a lot less pretentious than I'm making it sound! Anyway, what surprised me most about the movie - and this is something many people have picked up on - was the one genre that cohesively united all of Drive's disparate elements; it's totally a superhero film. It doesn't look like a superhero film at first (it hardly plays out like the dime-a-dozen origin stories on the screen these days) but if The Dark Knight showed us there could be a movie about a superhero that wasn't a superhero movie, this film has now proven the opposite. This is a superhero movie that is not about a superhero...or, more accurately, not about a superhero we instantly recognize as such. Refn, for his part, has commented extensively on the genre's influence on Drive. QUOTE BOMB:
"...Drive was essentially an allegory of a superhero in the making. He became a superhero at the end of the movie and that's why it's a happy ending...In the beginning, he is there for her as a human being and when she needs him as a hero, he's there as a hero. He is what you need him to be. It's why he will continue to roam the landscape being a driver of the night, the superhero with a scorpion sign on his back as he protects the innocents against injustice."
"By day, he was a human being, by night he was a hero. And the movie is about his transformation into this superhero, by bringing his human morals into the hero role, so that he does what he does for the right reasons."
"You can kind of say that the Driver is a man who is caught between two worlds. At night, he is a man in costume who roams the streets of L.A., wanting to protect the innocent. And in the day, he's a car mechanic and a stuntman. And through the course of the movie, he realizes he's schizophrenic in a sense that he doesn't have two personalities, but he's two people. And he, through the course of the movie, becomes the superhero that he plays in films, and saves the innocents against the evil … it's mythological storytelling, which is what superhero stories are."
Riding (OR SHOULD I SAY DRIVING HURHURRR) on Refn and Ryan Gosling's words, I want to take a closer look at how the aesthetics, symbols and conventions of the superhero genre have informed Drive. For starters, our protagonist is referred to only as the "Driver," a superhero-esque codename relating to his persona and abilities; the alias wouldn't feel out of place among one of the X-Men. Like all the great superheroes, the Driver is very much an archetype - he's that same antihero stock character as the Man With No Name or Frank Bullitt or any of the samurai Toshiro Mifune played, you've seen him in various media dozens of times before. Of course the Driver's a bit of a deconstruction of that trope too - his stoicism, rather than making him seem tougher, primarily softens him, his unassuming toothpick a stark contrast Clint Eastwood's gruff cigarillo. But this still plays into the superhero dynamic, because when in the last 25 years have superheroes not been all about deconstruction?
By day, the enigmatic Driver is a stunt...uhh, driver for Hollywood action films. Meta right? It's like this was written by Grant Morrison or something. By night, though, he's a wheelman-for-hire, the best at what he does (sound familiar?). But when innocent people - his neighbor/love interest Irene and her young son Benicio - are put in danger by the mob, the Driver abandons this selfish use of his skills and becomes a superhero (also sound familiar?), striking against organized crime from the darkness with impeccable combat prowess (also also sound familiar?). What most soundly cements the superhero analogy is the fact that he dons a costume during his nighttime exploits: a white satin jacket with a gold scorpion embroidered on the back. It may be more subtle than the capes and tights we're used to, but it is still quite clearly a superhero costume as it is utterly unique, it is worn solely when he asserts his extraordinary abilities and, most importantly, it invokes an animal totem.
Historically, animal totems have played an enormous role in the creation of superhero identities. Bruce Wayne was inspired to take on the archetypal qualities of a bat in what is perhaps the most iconic origin story. Peter Parker famously had the characteristics of a spider thrust upon him, and the best Spidey stories in recent memory have meditated on the totemic nature of Spider-Man's world and of superhero comics in general. Like these heroes and so many others, the Driver is conscious of his emblem, and when he puts on his jacket he takes up the mantle of the scorpion. It hearkens back to that cornerstone of all great superheroes and superhero stories, mythology. Specifically, the fable of the scorpion and the frog, which the Driver paraphrases to his archenemy. And here's where things get deeeeeeeeeeep...
There's a great scene that perfectly sums up the question Drive poses. The Driver and Benicio are watching a cartoon together early in the film, and Driver asks the boy if a shark in the cartoon is the bad guy. Benicio says yes. "How can you tell he’s the bad guy?," Driver asks. "He’s a shark," the boy casually rationalizes. The Driver inquires, "Are all sharks bad?" and the young child nods his head. The scene could easily be (read: IS) referring to a number of characters in the movie, the most obvious being the Driver himself. It's also referencing Benicio's father, whom the audience is predisposed to hate until he actually appears onscreen and turns out to be a great person thrown into awful, inescapable circumstances. And to Driver's mentor (his Alfred, if you will), Shannon, another good guy who makes a bad choice that leads to disastrous consequences. Perhaps even to the antagonist Bernie Rose, a ruthless mobster who seems to genuinely regret the measures he must take to protect himself. Are any of these people intrinsically good or bad? Are any of them conscious of their individual human natures, if they even exist? Are their actions and behavior, their drives, determined by innate, instinctive characteristics? At first glance the Driver seems to serve as a profound 'YES' to these questions, but that's the beauty behind his lack of backstory and dialogue. We have no idea what he's thinking or feeling or how his environment may have shaped him; he's a total mystery to us. He's Rorschach without the caption boxes telling us his thoughts.
Compelling stuff, no?
Believe it or not, this digression I've taken ties in perfectly to the superhero stuff I'm supposed to be talking about. But first we have to take one last detour. Remember at the end of Batman Begins, when Bruce and Rachel are talking at the ruins of Wayne Manor? Rachel feels up Bruce's face (if I'm remembering the scene correctly) and declares "This is your mask. Your real face is the one that criminals now fear. The man I loved, the man who vanished...he never came back at all." Well all that is obviously a load of bullshit; it's not a simple dichotomy between Bruce and Batman. Batman is clearly not his true persona, just as his actual voice isn't a constipated chain smoker's. The Batman identity is just as much a mask as millionaire playboy Bruce is, and although Rachel may think otherwise for some ill-defined reason, that is not the personality she is addressing right now. The real person behind these facades, the man you loved and you think vanished, is the one you're fucking talking face-to-face to you dumb bitch: the highly disciplined, driven, perceptive, introspective, resourceful and self-reliant Bruce Wayne. The man who has devoted his life to a higher ideal and uses "Batman" as a tool to realize it.
Alright, now to get back on track. We're at the final lap, folks! To finish his transformation, the Driver dons a mask to hide his identity near the end of his origin story, completing his superhero costume. Crucially, the mask is taken from his day job, when the Driver needed to look like one of the actors for a car crash scene. It belongs in the realm of secret identity, not superhero. Drive knows better than Rachel, you see; it recognizes that a man's identity, his true nature, is much more nebulous than any clear-cut duality, especially between hero and secret identity. The entities are not so clearly defined - far from it - nor are they completely separate from one another. Perhaps there are elements of both in one another. Perhaps one morphs into the other. If human nature is an unanswerable question, than any attempts to explain it by ghettoizing its aspects into two definitive, opposite camps will ring as false as Rachel's half-baked analysis.
It's funny how similar the ending of Drive is to that of The Dark Knight; both have the protagonist speeding off into the darkness, with the screen cutting to black. The difference is that the ending to The Dark Knight is ominous, because by the picture's end Batman is not supposed to be a hero, while the ending of Drive is hopeful for the opposite reason. We started out with a man without any drive and saw him self-actualize. We saw him fall in love, transcend and become a real hero.
If Drive is any indication, we may soon be seeing a comparable transformation in the superhero film genre. I was once afraid that in the near future the superhero flick would over-saturate the market and go the way of the Western, that the genre would devour itself as people flocked away from the same formulaic origin stories over and over again. We saw a hint of that this summer: Thor, X-Men: First Class and Captain America all did very, very well at the box office (not so much Green Lantern), but they nevertheless failed to meet studio expectations by a great deal. There was no Iron Man among this crop of new franchises, and the only one to come even somewhat close was the first released. In light of seeing the formula applied with such ingenuity and unconventionality in Drive, I'm now confident that the superhero movie will not just survive, but will thrive in ways we have now only begun to see as it is freed from the constraints that once bound it. Yeah, the superhero movie will be fine.
It's just the superhero comic book movies that are gonna be fucked.
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
DC New 52 and YOU!
prooker: Welcome to DC 52 and YOU! mommy_made_of nails and I will be discussing all the nooks and crannies of DC's new 52 and I'm making my triumphant return to this here ol' blog.
mommy_made_of_nails: Woo yeah!
So let's see, right now the only title taking place in the rebooted DCNU is Justice League #1, right? This Wednesday we'll get a fresh batch of stories from the new 52 (like Morrison's Supes!), but for now we really don't know too much of the reboot/relaunch's ramifications yet (also bonus points for alliteration).
prooker pointed out something real interesting about a connection between the old DCU and the DCNU in Flashpoint #5. Take it away!
prooker: Spoilers Beware! The big twofer splash page of Flashpont #5 had a mysterious lady that (to the best of my knowledge) is a completely new character.
mommy_made_of_nails: She's sort of like a cosmic Madame Web, telling the Flash as he reshapes reality that a new 'Verse is being made with slight variations.
prooker: She makes her big deus-ex-machina turning the old DCU into the new by fusing together the 3 former imprints of DC's line: Vertigo, Wildstorm, and the DCU while also inexplicably placing Grifter right next to Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman.
mommy_made_of_nails: And cyborg as a leading man in the Justice League.
prooker: It's a very strange move by DC to specifically make an old strand of the old universe to be continued into the new. It's really counter-intuitive. Isn't their goal to create a new universe? Why drag this new deadweight along with it?
mommy_made_of_nails: I imagine it's for 2 reasons.
1) It's a convenient - kind of cheap, but this kind of thing always is - way out if this if the whole reboot falls flat, a holdover that would allow the writers to restore the DCU to it's old state if things just don't work out.
And more importantly 2) it's a way for the writers to impose a stricter regard for continuity on themselves, because historically that's been a big problem over at DC. As prooker pointed out to me, this space lady appears in the background of Justice League #1, at a high school football game featuring a pre-Cyborg Cyborg as star quarterback
prooker: It would be really great if she was just a really huge high-school football fan.
mommy_made_of_nails: Wouldn't it though?
Having her appear in some function - most likely as a kind of behind-the-scenes seer/prophet - in each of these new titles may help establish interconnectivity and structure to the DCNU, which to us (and probably the writers) is a wild, uncharted territory. OR it could just be really imposing and off-putting.
prooker: Yeah, she's also in a few other previews I've seen (Animal Man for one).
mommy_made_of_nails: Maybe she's Grant Morrison.
prooker: Wouldn't surprise me a bit.
I'm not gonna lie I think that part of it, inserting her into every 52 #1 is pretty cool. Has anything been so unitive among so many titles before?
mommy_made_of_nails: I doubt it, maybe for a crossover event but never in something actually important.
prooker: That was a sick backhand burn.
mommy_made_of_nails: They better get some ointment for that burn, son.
prooker: But yeah, I know they're just gonna end up resolving her mysterious appearance in the next event title, but wouldn't it be really cool if she just stayed in the backgrounds of every DC comic for years to come?
Just a voyeuristic spectre (is he still in the DCU?) that really likes comics, JUST LIKE US. Even the bad ones.
mommy_made_of_nails: Oh man I never thought of it like that, though. She'd be like Bat-Mite from Brave and the Bold.
prooker: OH SNAP, BREAK TIME.
10 MINUTES.
ADVENTURE TIME IS ON.
mommy_made_of_nails: GODDAMN IT I HAVE NO TV.
prooker: Gender bending episodeee! Cake the cat and Fionna the human!
mommy_made_of_nails: #greenwithenvy.
This is going in the post, right?
prooker: Totes.
*10-15 minutes later*
Ok back, that was a great episode. Highlights include: Neil Patrick Harris as Prince Gumball and Fionna wearing Sailer Moon's Dress.
AND LORD MONOCHROMICORN.
Seriously f DC wanted to totally sell me on the new 52 they should really release an Adventure Time Comics #1
mommy_made_of_nails: GAAAAH. I want it. Both the episode and the comic.
prooker: Away from cartoons and back to comics though. So since we only have one issue of the new DCU out, what did you think of the Justice League?
mommy_made_of_nails: It had some nice moments, the buddy cop dynamic between Green Lantern and Batman was nice, but honestly it seemed pretty inconsequential. It didn't feel like what the flagship of the DCNU should be.
It lacked gravitas, y'know?
prooker: Yeah if their mission was to be big and bold and different they completely miffed on that one. I can see a small amount of new readers wanting to read this after the first issue, specifically those who saw the GL, Batman, and Supes movies though. But honestly it's also a problem of the monthly serial format, with not every writer being capable to fit what feels like a full story into 20-30 something pages.
mommy_made_of_nails: It doesn't take a master craftsmen to make a big, exciting story under those parameters though.
I was gonna use Mark Waid's Daredevil #1 as an example of something feeling new and fresh but I remembered that Waid is a master craftsman. You get the idea though.
prooker: Well anyways that's one of the big problems with being a newcomer to comics, in an industry that relies on creative talent over marketing. Wait did i just say that ahahaha.
mommy_made_of_nails: HAHAHA, because that's not what the DCNU is at all.
I do like the prospect of this mysterious lady bringing the ol' fashioned omniscient narrator back to comics. The internal monologue caption box is criminally overused. But I didn't see that in Justice League #1. It was same-old-same-old in every respect.
prooker: What I did like from JL #1 was the overall lighthearted tone. Geoff Johns does not shy away from gore in his work, and his biggest success Green Lantern is based on the premise of a huge, dark, operatic cop gun battles.
IN SPACE.
So it's good to see that he is taking a conscious shift from that, and also his obsession with continuity which he just can't mine from anymore.
mommy_made_of_nails: Yeah it'll be interesting to see what Johns does now that he can't fall back on the obscure continuity references that have defined his comics, it's uncharted land for reader and writer alike.
Something that has surprised me for a while now is how hush-hush the DC editorial has been about the ramifications of the reboot. Like what exactly is changed? I thought initially that they were just maintaining a secret well, but now we're officially in the new 52 and we still really don't know what's different
prooker: Sure we do, Superman has no underwear.
mommy_made_of_nails: I wonder if that's true under his costume too...
prooker: That's the Superman for this new generation. But i think they've said a lot about whats new and different in the DCU.
mommy_made_of_nails: Fill me in! I don't know these things.
prooker: It's not a total reboot because some elements do stay the same. Batman and Green Lantern being the biggest ones to stay almost completely untouched. But other than those notable two it's almost a complete scratch really.
Also Barbara Gordon got her legs back.
mommy_made_of_nails: How Barbara Got Her Legs Back.
But the editorial said that many previous stories are still in continuity - one of them being The Killing Joke. How is that reconciled?
prooker: That's whats been hush-hush, but I'm sure the new #1's will fill us in soon enough
mommy_made_of_nails: Honestly the impression I get is almost that they themselves don't know, that they're making it up as they go along. Which can definitely be a bad thing, leading to the same kinds of continuity messes that partially necessitated this event. But it can also be a good thing, leading to a looser, more interesting mode of storytelling than we've seen in comics for at least two decades. And I'm sure just as Post-Crisis gradually reincorporated the erased Silver Age elements, so too will the DCNU bring back stories theoretically booted from the current canon.
prooker: I don't know if you're giving them enough credit on this, the way I hear these new stories that were picked were specific pitches from writers about stories they really wanted to tell.
mommy_made_of_nails:
Writers like JT Krul.
prooker:
Yes.
I'm sure they've at least got a certain foresight for at least a year.
mommy_made_of_nails: One would hope so. I can see this reboot lasting for a long time, perhaps as long as the first Crisis and now. Certain things will change - I'm betting that within 2 years all the major players (read: Supes) will be back to their iconic costumes - but this could have staying power if the fanboys are down. With all the negative internet feedback, one has to wonder, though. Will they be? And will that be enough? Because DC editorial's goal of attracting new readers will definitely not be met. Not with this as a business model.
prooker: It's really disheartening to see so much pessimism about all this though. Wouldn't it be awesome if this all just turned out all right?
mommy_made_of_nails: I'm not so much pessimistic about the content, my only complaints so far are the shitty Jim Lee costumes. And Grifter. Hell Cyborg on the Justice League could be pretty cool. My beef is with what this reboot was really about, the whole readership is dying thing. If this is the best they can do than superhero comics are fucked. I mean of course not really, Warner Bros and Disney will keep them afloat for the intellectual property, but don't you wish the industry could actually sustain itself? And let's pray to god Superhero movies don't eventually go the way of the Western, because then WB and Disney might actually consider letting them go under when the publishers can't pull their weight.
prooker: I think we're drifting off into another larger and broader conflict that could take hundreds of pages to really get into, even if it is extremely relevant to this new initiative.
mommy_made_of_nails: THE AVENGERS INITIATIVE.
Sorry I had to.
prooker: That's ok, I'll just pretend Samuel L. Jackson found his way into our discussion.
mommy_made_of_nails: In a perfect world, in a perfect world.
PROOKER YOU THINK YOU'RE THE ONLY SUPER-HERO
prooker: So let's leave it be and say we'll see. I honestly hope all 52 books kick so much ass.
mommy_made_of_nails: Me too. Except Grifter. Fuck that noise.
prooker: I would write a Grifter ongoing.
mommy_made_of_nails: Also, Static Shock should have his own comic. With his old costume. Written by Spike Lee.
prooker: I may hate Spike Lee more than Grifter.
mommy_made_of_nails: Grifter written by Spike Lee.
prooker: The Perfect Storm.
Alright to wrap this thing up, which books in the new 52 are you gonna be picking up?
mommy_made_of_nails: I'm looking forward to Animal Man, Action Comics, Wonder Woman, Batwoman, ummm...
I need a list...
prooker: Hawk and Dove.
mommy_made_of_nails: LIEFELD ALL DAY ERRYDAY.
I was thinking Milligan's Red Lanterns but after Secret Seven I'm not sure.
prooker: The thing about Milligan is he's extremely hit and miss in his mainstream work.
mommy_made_of_nails: Umm what else is there? What are you looking forward to?
prooker: Well my pull list for this coming month are:
Animal Man written by Jeff Lemire and Travel Foreman which is looking to just be a gorgeous book
Action Comics which you really don't need to say anything more than Grant Morrison writes Superman, but Rags Morales doesn't hurt
Swamp Thing by Scott Snyder and Yanick Paquette
mommy_made_of_nails: Oh I forgot all about that one. Snyder's a real up-and-comer.
prooker: Yeah his run on detective comics will be one of those books in bookstores that just everyone will sit down and read all the way through.
mommy_made_of_nails: Need dat trade.
prooker: And Paquette's work on batman Inc was rad.
Batwoman by J.H. Williams and Amy Reeder, which really has nothing to do with the reboot
Oh Batman as well also written by Snyder and drawn by Greg Capullo, one of those Image guys, but his work as of late looks pretty great.
mommy_made_of_nails: Oh man! I'm gonna be so broke.
prooker: Yeah! who said the new 52 didn't do it's job? I'm already getting more comics than I used to.
mommy_made_of_nails: Neckbeards.
prooker: Also I might - MIGHT - pick up Hawk and Dove.
mommy_made_of_nails: Too much Matt Seneca trying to convince you Liefeld is good.
prooker: ahahaha no way man, I hate seneca most of the time. He can be such a douchebag. He fucking smoked an issue of the new Punisher comic. That is so dumb.
mommy_made_of_nails: Hahaha that's dangerous. Silly Matt.
prooker: Anyways what's on your "Stay away, FAR AWAY" list, also known as the "Burn it with Fire" list.
mommy_made_of_nails: GRIFTER.
TEEN TITANS.
The Krul stuff.
prooker: Watch all those things become DC's flagship properties for the next century.
mommy_made_of_nails: Wait Johns isn't doing Flash anymore is he?
prooker: Nope Manapul is on it with both art duties and writing.
mommy_made_of_nails: I could get into that.
prooker: So I'll check it out because i DESPERATELY want to like a Flash comic.
mommy_made_of_nails: Ummm what other comics are there? I'm kind of ignorant...
Superboy. Don't like the art.
prooker: What?? R.B. Silva is on it! The guy who did the brilliant Jimmy Olsen backups in Action Comics
mommy_made_of_nails: Don't like the cover.
OH DUDE. DUDE. WE FORGOT FRANKENSTEIN. That looks awesome.
prooker: Frankenstein leads an elite taskforce of monsters. SOLD.
Jeff Lemire doesn't hurt either.
mommy_made_of_nails: Exactly.
prooker: Ok just to add, I just saw some preview pages of Justice League International. And apparently the whole 80's JLI is TOTALLY REBOOTED.
NO BLUE AND GOLD BOOSTER AND BEETLE
NO MARTIANS LOVING OREOS
NO BWAHAHAHAHA
NO ONE MORE PUNCH
mommy_made_of_nails: I'm so sorry, prooker. So so sorry.
prooker: While I cry into my pillow, I think this is a good point to end at. I really hope that these new comics will be absolutely phenomenal and I wish all the creators the best of luck.
Especially you Mr. Liefeld.
mommy_made_of_nails: I'm looking forward to more DC Comics than I have in a long time.
Except Grifter.
mommy_made_of_nails: Woo yeah!
So let's see, right now the only title taking place in the rebooted DCNU is Justice League #1, right? This Wednesday we'll get a fresh batch of stories from the new 52 (like Morrison's Supes!), but for now we really don't know too much of the reboot/relaunch's ramifications yet (also bonus points for alliteration).
prooker pointed out something real interesting about a connection between the old DCU and the DCNU in Flashpoint #5. Take it away!
prooker: Spoilers Beware! The big twofer splash page of Flashpont #5 had a mysterious lady that (to the best of my knowledge) is a completely new character.
mommy_made_of_nails: She's sort of like a cosmic Madame Web, telling the Flash as he reshapes reality that a new 'Verse is being made with slight variations.
prooker: She makes her big deus-ex-machina turning the old DCU into the new by fusing together the 3 former imprints of DC's line: Vertigo, Wildstorm, and the DCU while also inexplicably placing Grifter right next to Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman.
mommy_made_of_nails: And cyborg as a leading man in the Justice League.
prooker: It's a very strange move by DC to specifically make an old strand of the old universe to be continued into the new. It's really counter-intuitive. Isn't their goal to create a new universe? Why drag this new deadweight along with it?
mommy_made_of_nails: I imagine it's for 2 reasons.
1) It's a convenient - kind of cheap, but this kind of thing always is - way out if this if the whole reboot falls flat, a holdover that would allow the writers to restore the DCU to it's old state if things just don't work out.
And more importantly 2) it's a way for the writers to impose a stricter regard for continuity on themselves, because historically that's been a big problem over at DC. As prooker pointed out to me, this space lady appears in the background of Justice League #1, at a high school football game featuring a pre-Cyborg Cyborg as star quarterback
prooker: It would be really great if she was just a really huge high-school football fan.
mommy_made_of_nails: Wouldn't it though?
Having her appear in some function - most likely as a kind of behind-the-scenes seer/prophet - in each of these new titles may help establish interconnectivity and structure to the DCNU, which to us (and probably the writers) is a wild, uncharted territory. OR it could just be really imposing and off-putting.
prooker: Yeah, she's also in a few other previews I've seen (Animal Man for one).
mommy_made_of_nails: Maybe she's Grant Morrison.
prooker: Wouldn't surprise me a bit.
I'm not gonna lie I think that part of it, inserting her into every 52 #1 is pretty cool. Has anything been so unitive among so many titles before?
mommy_made_of_nails: I doubt it, maybe for a crossover event but never in something actually important.
prooker: That was a sick backhand burn.
mommy_made_of_nails: They better get some ointment for that burn, son.
prooker: But yeah, I know they're just gonna end up resolving her mysterious appearance in the next event title, but wouldn't it be really cool if she just stayed in the backgrounds of every DC comic for years to come?
Just a voyeuristic spectre (is he still in the DCU?) that really likes comics, JUST LIKE US. Even the bad ones.
mommy_made_of_nails: Oh man I never thought of it like that, though. She'd be like Bat-Mite from Brave and the Bold.
prooker: OH SNAP, BREAK TIME.
10 MINUTES.
ADVENTURE TIME IS ON.
mommy_made_of_nails: GODDAMN IT I HAVE NO TV.
prooker: Gender bending episodeee! Cake the cat and Fionna the human!
mommy_made_of_nails: #greenwithenvy.
This is going in the post, right?
prooker: Totes.
*10-15 minutes later*
Ok back, that was a great episode. Highlights include: Neil Patrick Harris as Prince Gumball and Fionna wearing Sailer Moon's Dress.
AND LORD MONOCHROMICORN.
Seriously f DC wanted to totally sell me on the new 52 they should really release an Adventure Time Comics #1
mommy_made_of_nails: GAAAAH. I want it. Both the episode and the comic.
prooker: Away from cartoons and back to comics though. So since we only have one issue of the new DCU out, what did you think of the Justice League?
mommy_made_of_nails: It had some nice moments, the buddy cop dynamic between Green Lantern and Batman was nice, but honestly it seemed pretty inconsequential. It didn't feel like what the flagship of the DCNU should be.
It lacked gravitas, y'know?
prooker: Yeah if their mission was to be big and bold and different they completely miffed on that one. I can see a small amount of new readers wanting to read this after the first issue, specifically those who saw the GL, Batman, and Supes movies though. But honestly it's also a problem of the monthly serial format, with not every writer being capable to fit what feels like a full story into 20-30 something pages.
mommy_made_of_nails: It doesn't take a master craftsmen to make a big, exciting story under those parameters though.
I was gonna use Mark Waid's Daredevil #1 as an example of something feeling new and fresh but I remembered that Waid is a master craftsman. You get the idea though.
prooker: Well anyways that's one of the big problems with being a newcomer to comics, in an industry that relies on creative talent over marketing. Wait did i just say that ahahaha.
mommy_made_of_nails: HAHAHA, because that's not what the DCNU is at all.
I do like the prospect of this mysterious lady bringing the ol' fashioned omniscient narrator back to comics. The internal monologue caption box is criminally overused. But I didn't see that in Justice League #1. It was same-old-same-old in every respect.
prooker: What I did like from JL #1 was the overall lighthearted tone. Geoff Johns does not shy away from gore in his work, and his biggest success Green Lantern is based on the premise of a huge, dark, operatic cop gun battles.
IN SPACE.
So it's good to see that he is taking a conscious shift from that, and also his obsession with continuity which he just can't mine from anymore.
mommy_made_of_nails: Yeah it'll be interesting to see what Johns does now that he can't fall back on the obscure continuity references that have defined his comics, it's uncharted land for reader and writer alike.
Something that has surprised me for a while now is how hush-hush the DC editorial has been about the ramifications of the reboot. Like what exactly is changed? I thought initially that they were just maintaining a secret well, but now we're officially in the new 52 and we still really don't know what's different
prooker: Sure we do, Superman has no underwear.
mommy_made_of_nails: I wonder if that's true under his costume too...
prooker: That's the Superman for this new generation. But i think they've said a lot about whats new and different in the DCU.
mommy_made_of_nails: Fill me in! I don't know these things.
prooker: It's not a total reboot because some elements do stay the same. Batman and Green Lantern being the biggest ones to stay almost completely untouched. But other than those notable two it's almost a complete scratch really.
Also Barbara Gordon got her legs back.
mommy_made_of_nails: How Barbara Got Her Legs Back.
But the editorial said that many previous stories are still in continuity - one of them being The Killing Joke. How is that reconciled?
prooker: That's whats been hush-hush, but I'm sure the new #1's will fill us in soon enough
mommy_made_of_nails: Honestly the impression I get is almost that they themselves don't know, that they're making it up as they go along. Which can definitely be a bad thing, leading to the same kinds of continuity messes that partially necessitated this event. But it can also be a good thing, leading to a looser, more interesting mode of storytelling than we've seen in comics for at least two decades. And I'm sure just as Post-Crisis gradually reincorporated the erased Silver Age elements, so too will the DCNU bring back stories theoretically booted from the current canon.
prooker: I don't know if you're giving them enough credit on this, the way I hear these new stories that were picked were specific pitches from writers about stories they really wanted to tell.
mommy_made_of_nails:
Writers like JT Krul.
prooker:
Yes.
I'm sure they've at least got a certain foresight for at least a year.
mommy_made_of_nails: One would hope so. I can see this reboot lasting for a long time, perhaps as long as the first Crisis and now. Certain things will change - I'm betting that within 2 years all the major players (read: Supes) will be back to their iconic costumes - but this could have staying power if the fanboys are down. With all the negative internet feedback, one has to wonder, though. Will they be? And will that be enough? Because DC editorial's goal of attracting new readers will definitely not be met. Not with this as a business model.
prooker: It's really disheartening to see so much pessimism about all this though. Wouldn't it be awesome if this all just turned out all right?
mommy_made_of_nails: I'm not so much pessimistic about the content, my only complaints so far are the shitty Jim Lee costumes. And Grifter. Hell Cyborg on the Justice League could be pretty cool. My beef is with what this reboot was really about, the whole readership is dying thing. If this is the best they can do than superhero comics are fucked. I mean of course not really, Warner Bros and Disney will keep them afloat for the intellectual property, but don't you wish the industry could actually sustain itself? And let's pray to god Superhero movies don't eventually go the way of the Western, because then WB and Disney might actually consider letting them go under when the publishers can't pull their weight.
prooker: I think we're drifting off into another larger and broader conflict that could take hundreds of pages to really get into, even if it is extremely relevant to this new initiative.
mommy_made_of_nails: THE AVENGERS INITIATIVE.
Sorry I had to.
prooker: That's ok, I'll just pretend Samuel L. Jackson found his way into our discussion.
mommy_made_of_nails: In a perfect world, in a perfect world.
PROOKER YOU THINK YOU'RE THE ONLY SUPER-HERO
prooker: So let's leave it be and say we'll see. I honestly hope all 52 books kick so much ass.
mommy_made_of_nails: Me too. Except Grifter. Fuck that noise.
prooker: I would write a Grifter ongoing.
mommy_made_of_nails: Also, Static Shock should have his own comic. With his old costume. Written by Spike Lee.
prooker: I may hate Spike Lee more than Grifter.
mommy_made_of_nails: Grifter written by Spike Lee.
prooker: The Perfect Storm.
Alright to wrap this thing up, which books in the new 52 are you gonna be picking up?
mommy_made_of_nails: I'm looking forward to Animal Man, Action Comics, Wonder Woman, Batwoman, ummm...
I need a list...
prooker: Hawk and Dove.
mommy_made_of_nails: LIEFELD ALL DAY ERRYDAY.
I was thinking Milligan's Red Lanterns but after Secret Seven I'm not sure.
prooker: The thing about Milligan is he's extremely hit and miss in his mainstream work.
mommy_made_of_nails: Umm what else is there? What are you looking forward to?
prooker: Well my pull list for this coming month are:
Animal Man written by Jeff Lemire and Travel Foreman which is looking to just be a gorgeous book
Action Comics which you really don't need to say anything more than Grant Morrison writes Superman, but Rags Morales doesn't hurt
Swamp Thing by Scott Snyder and Yanick Paquette
mommy_made_of_nails: Oh I forgot all about that one. Snyder's a real up-and-comer.
prooker: Yeah his run on detective comics will be one of those books in bookstores that just everyone will sit down and read all the way through.
mommy_made_of_nails: Need dat trade.
prooker: And Paquette's work on batman Inc was rad.
Batwoman by J.H. Williams and Amy Reeder, which really has nothing to do with the reboot
Oh Batman as well also written by Snyder and drawn by Greg Capullo, one of those Image guys, but his work as of late looks pretty great.
mommy_made_of_nails: Oh man! I'm gonna be so broke.
prooker: Yeah! who said the new 52 didn't do it's job? I'm already getting more comics than I used to.
mommy_made_of_nails: Neckbeards.
prooker: Also I might - MIGHT - pick up Hawk and Dove.
mommy_made_of_nails: Too much Matt Seneca trying to convince you Liefeld is good.
prooker: ahahaha no way man, I hate seneca most of the time. He can be such a douchebag. He fucking smoked an issue of the new Punisher comic. That is so dumb.
mommy_made_of_nails: Hahaha that's dangerous. Silly Matt.
prooker: Anyways what's on your "Stay away, FAR AWAY" list, also known as the "Burn it with Fire" list.
mommy_made_of_nails: GRIFTER.
TEEN TITANS.
The Krul stuff.
prooker: Watch all those things become DC's flagship properties for the next century.
mommy_made_of_nails: Wait Johns isn't doing Flash anymore is he?
prooker: Nope Manapul is on it with both art duties and writing.
mommy_made_of_nails: I could get into that.
prooker: So I'll check it out because i DESPERATELY want to like a Flash comic.
mommy_made_of_nails: Ummm what other comics are there? I'm kind of ignorant...
Superboy. Don't like the art.
prooker: What?? R.B. Silva is on it! The guy who did the brilliant Jimmy Olsen backups in Action Comics
mommy_made_of_nails: Don't like the cover.
OH DUDE. DUDE. WE FORGOT FRANKENSTEIN. That looks awesome.
prooker: Frankenstein leads an elite taskforce of monsters. SOLD.
Jeff Lemire doesn't hurt either.
mommy_made_of_nails: Exactly.
prooker: Ok just to add, I just saw some preview pages of Justice League International. And apparently the whole 80's JLI is TOTALLY REBOOTED.
NO BLUE AND GOLD BOOSTER AND BEETLE
NO MARTIANS LOVING OREOS
NO BWAHAHAHAHA
NO ONE MORE PUNCH
mommy_made_of_nails: I'm so sorry, prooker. So so sorry.
prooker: While I cry into my pillow, I think this is a good point to end at. I really hope that these new comics will be absolutely phenomenal and I wish all the creators the best of luck.
Especially you Mr. Liefeld.
mommy_made_of_nails: I'm looking forward to more DC Comics than I have in a long time.
Except Grifter.
Friday, August 26, 2011
At da hiatus! And the DCNU!
So now we've knocked out 3 out of the 4 superhero movies that came out this summer, and all that's left is my favorite of the bunch, Thor. My buddy Dom, NYU film student and professional youtube guy, wanted to write the piece on Thor for here, which is super great because he knows movie stuff that I don't and will offer his own unique viewpoint, something the ol' Junction needs more of. Since Dom is in the middle of post-production for his short film, The End, we're gonna take a brief hiatus on the At Da Moofies column until he's ready. Hopefully his post will turn up by the time Thor gets released on DVD/Blu-Ray/Netflix/brain injection on September 13, but it's gonna be tough to say.
Meanwhile, you've probably heard all the hubbub about the DC Universe relaunch coming into effect this Wednesday. What with this looking like the biggest comic book event in decades and all, prooker (it's his idea so you know he'll be posting!!) and I will start a series of posts offering an in-depth analysis on all things related to the New 52. We're your guide to the DCNU! And on top of all this I'm finally buckling down on that Jack Kirby post I kept talking about in my Spidey villain articles. You can expect it soon.
Here are the At Da Moofies articles for X-Men: First Class, Green Lantern and Captain America: The First Avenger. Your mileage may vary. You can watch Dom's cool youtube stuff here.
Meanwhile, you've probably heard all the hubbub about the DC Universe relaunch coming into effect this Wednesday. What with this looking like the biggest comic book event in decades and all, prooker (it's his idea so you know he'll be posting!!) and I will start a series of posts offering an in-depth analysis on all things related to the New 52. We're your guide to the DCNU! And on top of all this I'm finally buckling down on that Jack Kirby post I kept talking about in my Spidey villain articles. You can expect it soon.
Here are the At Da Moofies articles for X-Men: First Class, Green Lantern and Captain America: The First Avenger. Your mileage may vary. You can watch Dom's cool youtube stuff here.
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