alexandraerin | Entries tagged with superheroes

...the big story is that (co-publisher) Dan Didio has announced that in the new continuity, the "Crises" never happened. There's some confusion about what exact events he's referring to when he's also said that Identity Crisis did happen. Rather than "Any Storyline Which Involves The Word 'Crisis'", I assume he means Crisis on Infinite Earths, Zero Hour, Infinite Crisis, and Final Crisis... the big wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey events that were meant to utterly remake continuity, usher in new eras, etc.

Identity Crisis did "soft retcon" things and explain some continiuity snarls involving the wildly differing portrayals some characters had received over the decades, but it didn't involve somebody literally stepping outside the timestream (i.e., the story) and remaking things.

And my response to this is pretty much "meh"... I pretty much thought that was the upshot of the reboot. One Retcon To Rule Them All. So many of the central characters of the universe are so different from who they were on either side of those events. People are saying this is confusing, but I find the idea that I'm supposed to reconcile what I know Old!Superman did in the original Crisis or Zero Hour with who New!Superman is way more confusing.

Also, the age of superheroes is supposed to be 5-6 years old at this point. So the multiverse is destroyed and remade every year and a half now? That could actually make a decent premise for a superhero story with cosmic-level characters... every time they come together and have a big fight, the whole world changes and they have to be aware of that... but as background for a story that's not about remaking the universe over and over again, it would verge on ridiculous.

If the backstory for this version of the universe is that it was made by the actions of Barry Allen trying to set things right after breaking the previous timeline, it makes perfect sense to me that there was no Crisis on Infinite Earths. I mean, if he could remove one thing from continuity, don't you think it would be the thing where he and a bunch of other people died?

Crossposts: http://alexandraerin.livejournal.com/325668.html

...that Scott Lobdell, the writer credited on Red Hood & The Outlaws, also wrote Teen Titans, which I liked just fine. The writing was decent and I thought it was pretty well put-together.

I suggested in both my reviews of RH&TO and Voodoo that bad writing flows directly from the decision to pornify these comics, and here's some evidence of that phenomenon. Give Lobdell a book that requires a story to carry us from the first page to the last and bring us back next month and he delivers a story. Give him a book that relies on the promise of SEXY SEXUAL SEX to keep things moving and that's what he delivers.

The thing about Starfire's portrayal is we deserve better. And when I say "we", I don't mean sexless humorless feminists. I don't even just mean women. I mean anybody who wanted to read a fun and engaging superhero book. Even people for whom the appeal is "I want to imagine I'm a globetrotting/weapon-slinging badass who gets to have sex with Starfire." deserves better than they got. A good book could be written where Starfire has little concern for human modesty and is implicitly sexually active with both the male protagonists. But DC's not bothering to turn out a good book because as far as they're concerned they have you ("you" here meaning "the kind of person we expect to read comics) at sex.

We know Lobdell can turn out a decent story. We know that he can turn in a decent book. This means that he, too, ultimately deserves better than what he's done for himself.

Crossposts: http://alexandraerin.livejournal.com/324631.html

I don't really know if any of these are up to the nerdiness standards of my previous reviews, but it works as a tagline.

Teen Titans

I started reading DC Comics when Tim Drake was already Robin, so for me the moment when he first crystallized as a *particular* Robin and not just Robin was during the Zero Hour event when he met a time-displaced Dick Grayson and his more analytical, Encyclopedia Brown "fun fact"-based style stood out from Dick's two-fisted chase-the-bad-guy approach. When I later learned Tim's origin story (plucky boy detective deduces Batman and Robin's secret identities), that sort of coalesced into part of my image of Tim as the thinking boy's wonder... the one who apprenticed himself to Batman to be the next master detective rather than the next Batman.

My fondness for Tim evolved into love in the recent-ish incarnation of Teen Titans that was basically a Young Justice/Titans mash-up, with Perez/Wolfman-era Titans standing as mentors to the new generation of teen sidekick heroes, including Tim. When the teens were ordered to stand down while the more experienced heroes went to fight veteran capekiller Deathstroke, Tim played the part of the good soldier that everyone expected Batman's sidekick to be and promised Starfire that he and his friends would stay put. Once the older team left, Tim promptly cut a Bat-shaped hole in a window and led the others into battle, prompting this memorable dialogue:

"You lied to Starfire?"

"Why not? I lie to Batman."

(Let's pause for a moment to mourn the passing of Starfire as a character that anybody would be afraid to lie to, or would even need to.)

There was some great dialogue that came out of that series ("Why does the telemetry show one of my Batmobiles in San Francisco? And why is it upside-down?"), and the blending of multiple generations/incarnations of a team into one was pretty great. So I had kind of mixed anticipation for the new series.

So far, so good.

It's another gathering of heroes story, but one that shows us that this kind of story can be done right. We're given a fantastic opening sequence of Kid Flash being reckless and daring, which leads us into the high concept of this book: kids with superpowers are trying to be superheroes and failing in dangerous ways. They don't understand their powers, they don't understand the consequences of their actions. A shadowy multinational organization called N.O.W.H.E.R.E. (old Doom Patrol foe who basically wanted to save the world by murdering anything weird... here, for all intents and purposes, the initials might as well stand for Ncheckmate Ocheckmate Wcheckmate Hcheckmate Echeckmate Rcheckmate Echeckmate) has started scooping them up for some mixture of protecting the public, teaching them some control, and turning them into weapons.

Tim Drake comes in because of his analytical nature, which naturally gets good marks from me. In this book, his Red Robin persona seems to have come about because he wanted to step out of the limelight and become less hands-on as a hero. His costume is more stealth-and-infiltration friendly than the traditional Decoy Wonder garb. It seems like he's been running a one-man "Bird of Prey" outfit (again, pause to mourn what's passed) for a while when we catch up to him; he's squatting in splendor in a luxury suite in a Luthor-owned building, connecting the dots on both the metas gone wild and the metas gone missing. There's an interesting side bit where he blames Batman (or possibly the Robin persona that he participated in) for the problem of young heroes, but he's mostly focused on the solution.

The story ends in the same place that Superboy #1 ended, with N.O.M.A.T.E. deciding to unleash their own homegrown superhero as a mole in Tim's new operation, after their more direct attempt to co-opt it failed. It's a much better way of tying the stories together and sewing up the universe than the bizarre little aside in Superman where it cuts to the Himalayas for a few panels so we can watch some kind of alien fish-beast blow a horn and we're told to pick up Stormwatch if we want to understand what it's all about.

By the issue's end, we have met Kid Flash, Red Robin, and a Cassie Sandsmark who doesn't want to be called Wonder Girl, we've seen them all in action, and we have a pretty good idea of their personalities. We've also glimpsed the other members of the team. Even if we haven't reached a destination yet, we can see the wheels are in motion.

Voodoo

I really only read this one ~~for the articles~~ because I was curious if it would tie into Grifter, and how.

Well, the jury is still out there. There is no resemblance between Priscilla's alien monster form and the "demons" that possessed people around Cole. The alien race that Priscilla belongs to is said to be scoping out the earth for invasion, so if they split the Daemonites into two separate things for the surviving Wild C.A.T.s then that means there are two different flavors of pod people/bodysnatchers infiltrating the earth at the same time which could lead to awkwardness and hurt feelings down the line, or an embarrassing game of "assimilated you last".

However, at the end of the book we do see Priscilla shapeshifting into another human form, which I don't believe was among her powers in the Wildstorm version. If she can assume any form she wants, this could mean that the "battle form" she assumed is not actually her "natural form", just something that's useful for combat with all the scales and claws and things. This not only leaves open the possibility that Priscilla is related to the aliens that are chasing Cole, it strengthens the possibilities that the White Martians are standing in for/merged with the Wildstorm Daemonites.

As for the book itself...

I hope the writer sends Scott Lobdell a cake or something for making him look good. Here there is at least a plausible reason for why the scantily clad alien sexbomb acts and dresses the way she does; if the male agent (of N.O.W.H.E.R.E.? I don't recall if they said, but that's the impression I got) is right about her mission, then putting a mildly telepathic shapeshifter in a nudie bar near a sensitive military base makes a kind of sense. Less risk of exposure than infiltrating the base itself, men get drunk and focus their attention on the visuals, etc.

But something can be an in-universe reason and an out-of-universe excuse at the same time, and there can be no doubt that this is very much an excuse for spending half the book drawing an edited-for-TV strip club. What could have been done with a single establishing panel or page is lingered over. The most interesting part of the book is the backstage conversation, which is the only place we get an actual glimpse of the title character's personality, any sense that there's anything to her but boobs and scaly death... a hint of an internal conflict, which tells us there is motivation lurking inside her head, even if we're being kept in the dark as to what that motivation is.

And to be fair, it's valid to keep us in the dark. She's been positioned for us as the vanguard of an alien invasion. Naturally the truth should be something more complicated than that, or we should be left thinking it might be if they're going to fake us out and yes she really is a bad guy.

But the problem is she's such a cypher because we have like five panels showing us anything of her in terms of real characterization amid about fifty panels of her operating her cover identity, which happens to be a stripper. Those panels aren't great. They happen backstage among her co-workers who are given even less characterization... they're pure ACME Instant Respectful Portrayal of Exotic Dancer 101; i.e., Young Women Working Their Way Through College and Single Mothers Just Trying To Get By. If the creators had been told they had to add two more panels to the comic and they had to be in the backstage scene, we'd have the Junkie Supporting Her Habit and someone would be draping a jacket over her shoulders.

Understand, I'm not criticizing the idea of a single mother trying to get by. I'm critiquing it as a sole character point, as the sole point of a character. This is all we know about any of the characters we see in the strip club, and the fact that we're basically told that everyone there except Priscilla is a single mother trying to get by or the equivalent makes it feel a bit like a bit from one of those horrible "______ Movie" parody movies where people stand up and explain what stereotype they represent as they're representing it.

As I did with Red Hood & The Outlaws, I'd like to highlight again how bad writing arises organically from the creative choice. By committing to spend as much page real estate as possible on asses and boobs, there is less space left over for things like plot and characterization.

I'm not complaining that she's a stripper or even that we're treated to the mainstream comic version of pornography. I expected that. At this point I'm pretty sure that the fact that she's a stripper is one of the reasons she of all the Wildstorm characters was tapped for a solo book, because while DC is not catering their entire line to the "core audience" of 18-34 heterosexual men who like sex with women they are definitely making sure there are books "for them".

But the thing is, the people who wanted to see her boobs would have bought the comic for one page focused on her boobs and then enjoyed seeing those same boobs popping up again in the course of 19 pages of story. At the end of the day they're not getting anything more out of the pages and pages that linger on "sexy" imagery. This is the strength of sequential art: you show that she's a stripper, you show her boobs, and the imagination does the rest. We understand that it happens, and adding a bunch more of disconnected panels along the way doesn't actually improve the experience. In fact, the more panels you show without showing anything, the more you just drive home the fact that you're not showing anything.

There is actual plot here, intercut with the boobs. It's just hard to care about it or engage with it. The only real exposition is shoehorned into a lapdance in a way that makes no sense, and I mean it fails to make sense in a way that goes beyond shoehorning exposition into a lapdance. The guy who's telling Priscilla (and the audience) that he knows she's a shapeshifting alien infiltrator reading the minds of the strip club patrons says he's telling her this because he's a "results guy, not a rules guy"; well, the result is that he blew his cover, got killed, and now the target knows she's being tracked and has gone on the run.

We get it. He took a cocky gamble and paid the price. But it's a gamble that made no sense and wasn't even necessary given that the whole idea is that she can read the minds of the men she dances for, and this is the second time she dances in front of him in the issue and we're given to understand that he's been stationed watching her for a while.

Better way to do it?

He and his (female) partner have a conversation about their training in resisting psychic probes. The partner mentions the importance of concentration and warns him against getting too close and letting his guard down. (This jibes nicely with one of Priscilla's few lines.) He gets cocky and/or horny, and slips up. There's a moment where she freezes or gives him a look, and he's like "OH SHIT". But then she recovers her cool leaving him to wonder if he imagined it. She invites him back for a private dance; his cockiness leads him to accept it, either to see what move she makes or to not risk blowing his cover as an appreciative club patron or whatever.

And then it turns into an interrogation... her interrogating him, of course.

We get the same information, but you know what the difference between this version and what actually happened is? Agency, for one thing. It makes the title character an active participant in the story bearing her name... which here is a stage name that doesn't even belong to her, it's just awarded to the highest-earning dancer in the club at the moment.

So again, I'm not complaining that the character is a stripper. I'm complaining that a shallow and exploitative version of "sex appeal" has once more been used as a substitute for good writing. There could have been so much more here, in the space otherwise occupied by lovingly rendered porn poses. "Priscilla Kitaen" is a dark-skinned woman who refers to herself as biracial. She's also an alien or alien/human-hybrid. Did she choose the form, or does she have mixed-race (mostly) human parents? Does the form mean something? Does it say anything about how she feels? I wouldn't feel cheated that they didn't explore this or any other particular thing in the very first issue, if said issue had a lot of other things going on.

But it doesn't.

It just has a lot of stripping.

I have a prediction about Priscilla's actual motivation/situation that arises from those tiny glimpses we get, but I'm not going to share it because that would suggest I'm invested in what happens next and I'm not. I don't want to skim another 20 page comic for 5 pages of story. At this point I'm actually hoping that she has nothing to do with Cole's "demons" because I might like to see what happens to him next and I don't want to reach a point where I have to follow her to keep up with him.

Batman: The Dark Knight

I don't have much to say about this one. It's another "Now Back To Your Batman Already In Progress" book, with a sexy White Rabbit, a lot of talk about fear and confronting fear in the midst of a bunch of Arkham inmates having a berserk freak-out that doesn't thus far lead to Dr. Jonathan Crane, a hulked-out Harvey Dent, and narration boxes that feel a bit like The Tick is talking to Bruce. This book seems to zig where Detective Comics zagged. If I cared about it more I'd do a side-by-side comparison explaining that, but suffice it to say that it just doesn't work for me, and the reveal at the end is everything that the splash at the end of Detective Comics wasn't. It's a cheap "dun DUN DUNNNN" rather than a visceral "WHAT THE FUCK?"

Now, if the Scarecrow showed up every time Batman's narration mentioned "fear", the book would be called Batman and Scarecrow. But the prevalence of the theme and the fact that it's overlaid on the scenes of a panic at the asylum makes it feel like this isn't just a heavy-handed rendition of Batman's usual leitmotif, all this talk about "fear" means something.

And then it doesn't.

And then there's Giant Harvey, screaming "CALL ME ONE-FACE".

DC Comics, what did I just read, and why should I want to read the next issue?

Crossposts: http://alexandraerin.livejournal.com/323991.html

Justice League Dark

I'll say one thing for the reboot: it really makes me appreciate en media res openings. This "gathering of heroes" thing is a lot to sit through again and again. One doesn't notice it so much when reading a collected edition, but it makes the month-by-month method seem a little slow. At least none of the books other than the prime Justice League seem to feel the need to do it one hero at a time, issue by issue.

As a die-hard Constantine fan, I'm disappointed that he's neither the mover nor the shaker behind the team's formation. This is a character, after all, who spent his first major story arc trying to micromanage the spiritual reverberations of the Crisis on Infinite Earths. I won't say it's sad to see him reduced to a con man, because that's what he's always been. But having Zatanna pressing him into service means that there needs to be an explanation for why one of the world's most powerful actual wizards thought she needed a hustling street mystic for back-up, whereas if the story involved him noticing a pattern of mounting weirdness (something he's good at) and then assembling more powerful players (another thing he's good at) to deal with it...

The actual storyline involves the real Justice League trying to stop a world-threatening mystical threat and coming up short. Zatanna's involvement comes from her connection to Batman. It's nice to see that they're still close enough post-reboot for her to be in the cave, but to me, the whole thing feels a little "Simpsons Spin-off Showcase"... you know, "Maybe her old pal Batman will show up to wish her well!"

It feels like Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman are in the book to establish the Justice League connection and justify the title, as well as to sell this book full of weird characters written by weird British men to people who want to read about superheroes. The presence of Cyborg on the away mission gone awry feels like it's there to serve a similar purpose... as a JLer, DC wants to put him on the same level as the iconic seven. I think DC is yet again underestimating the Teen Titans fanbase. They should be positioning Cyborg as a tentpole to bring in people who don't normally read comics about the "traditional" Justice League.

Another problem is that I don't feel like anything's happened. A character called The Enchantress has gone insane and is causing world-wide havoc involving doppelgangers and unexplained phenomenon and a flying swarm of teeth that eat Superman. Okay, you know what? Unless she's trying to sleep with Thor, I don't know who The Enchantress is. I gather she's been important in some recent-era comics, but she's not iconic like Zatanna or Constantine. Heck, I've never read anything with Shade: The Changing Man in it, but I've been hearing about him since the 90s. When you say The Enchantress has gone mad, I just don't care... I have no investment in her as a character and I don't know what her madness means for the world, and the fortean times stuff isn't really selling me on that.

(Edit: Apparently I've read stuff with The Enchantress in it, but she didn't make enough of an impression on me to retain any awareness of her. That might just be me, but still, I think they might have done a bit more to introduce the character who is at the center of the action.)

The opening scenes in Swamp Thing showing the mass animal deaths in Gotham, Metropolis, and the stretch of water around Aquaman conveyed "weird, bad shit is happening" muuuuuuch better, in a way that rooted the events in the DC universe, connected them to better-known and more popular characters and Aquaman, piqued the reader's curiosity, and allowed for some narration boxes to give us a feel for Alec Holland's character. This whole issue doesn' accomplish as much as Swamp Thing did in those (checks) three pages.

Actually, I want to digress to talk about Swamp Thing more. I mentally filed away the opening sequence as a series of two-page spreads, one for each location. I just went to do a reality check there, because you can't open a comic with a two-page spread. What we get is one page of pantomime in Metropolis. The unfolding scene shows a zoom-in on the Daily Planet building towards the window where Clark is working with pigeons sort of incidentally there, and then Clark reacts to something and then everybody else notices it. Then you turn over to a two-page spread, divided between the three locations: dead pigeons in Metropolis, dead bats in the cave, dead fish in the water. The sequence loses some of its impact from the fact that those pages were circulated pretty widely as a preview, but still it's a pretty great scene.

It's a marvel of sequential art storytelling economy. We don't have to be given the whole sequence with Batman and the other guy after we've seen the lead-in with Clark. And the first page is just like a fairly normal Superman story opener, great Metropolitan Newspaper and all, but it starts to go wrong halfway through. Classic horror technique: start with something familiar, and twist it until something pops off. ALL THE PIGEONS DIE. This doesn't look like a job for Superman, and that's the point. There's nothing here he can punch, lift, or even understand so he can be as horrified and out of his depths as everyone else.

Justice League Dark just doesn't work like that. When Cyborg, Superman, and Wonder Woman approach The Enchantress's shack(?)... it looks like any other time the Justice League has gone up against a magic-wielding supervillain and so it feels like they give in too easily. They've been here before. Batman complains about magic (Cyborg does so here), someone reminds the audience that Superman's invulnerability doesn't protect him from magic, and then the Flash traps the bad guy in the United States tax code.

That last part may have only happened once, but the point is they complain, they dig in, they adapt, they win. This time they just give up.

So we spend pages on establishing the threat and presenting it as something The Real Justice League Can't Handle and then we spend pages introducing the individual characters and getting them together-ish... they're still in individual clumps at the end of this issue... and again, it just feels like nothing's happened.

This is not a bad book. But I suspect it's going to be hard to say it's a good book until a few more issues out. I like longer stories, but if DC really wants to boost monthly circulation they need to stop writing exclusively for the trades. The individual issues need to be entertaining on their own. Paul Cornell could lead a writer's workshop about this, to judge by his work on team books Demon Knight and Storm Watch.

All-Star Western

I'm not sure if setting the first story in a book called "All-Star Western" in Gotham City is more Spin-Off Showcase nonsense ("Keep your eyes open. Maybe his old pal Gotham City will drop in to wish him luck!") or trying to have their cake and eat it, too, by giving us a cowboy book that's freed of many of the markers of that genre. I can understand doubts as to the marketability of western comics in general, but there's been a fairly steady stream of Jonah Hex material lately. I'm not surprised they made him the first star in an all-star book, but I am surprised they're not leading with him more strongly.

The thing that drew me to this book was the premise of teaming Hex up with a pre-asylum, pre-insanity Amadeus Arkham. The problem is that both characters are written terribly.

Hex's drawl is written in the worst attempt at a phonetic dialect transcription this side of a Looney Toons comic. Ah hate, ah say, ah hates that. All sense of taciturn menace drains out of your mysterious scarred bounty hunter when he says things like "Ah wuz comin' fer ya." Mention is made in the book of how little he talks, which is weird given that I think he has the most line of dialogue of anyone.

The book receives narration in the form of Dr. Arkham's journal, which contain some embarrassingly generic dimestore psychoanalysis. The character was originally something of a Lovecraft pastiche, which means that purple prose is to be expected but here instead we get beige. I was expecting shades of The Alienist and Sherlock Holmes, but apart from confirming that the word written above the fifth dead prostitute is also a word for "fear" like all the others were, he adds absolutely nothing to the proceedings. He deduces nothing, he discovers nothing, he contributes nothing.

At one point Arkham having an invitation to a party full of uppercrust high society types is... sort of important, but given that Hex is not invited, and it's clear that Arkham's presence doesn't change the fact that he's not welcome and that he doesn't care, he's still superfluous.

The plot of the book looks to be a shockingly unoriginal remix of elements from From Hell and the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes... ancient order, serial killer, etc. The book likes its women the same way Frank Miller likes his coffee: in the form of mutilated prostitutes.

So far the darker, more Vertigo-ier books have fairly consistently been among the best offerings of the new DC Universe. This is the first one I really can't recommend.

Superman

There is some really interesting stuff going on here in the demolition of the old Daily Planet building with historic-looking architecture and the opening ceremony of the new Daily Planet, under new ownership and housed in a gleaming tower of steel and glass. The old Planet was a newspaper; the new Planet is a multimedia entity owned by a giant corporate conglomerate. Are we seeing the out-with-the-old, in-with-the-new parallel here?

And to DC's credit, this isn't simply a Who Moved My Cheese?-style rebuke of people who dare to question change. Clark and Superman are positioned as the last champions of the old Planet, and the Planet's new owner is Morgan Edge, who DC readers know to be a "legitimate businessman" with the very scariest of scare quotes.

The villain buying the Planet is a story DC has done before, but it's never been as relevant as it is right now on both a meta and a real world level. The references to wiretapping scandals and other questionable business practices by Edge's Galaxy Media leaves us with little doubt what void these entities would slot into in our world.

By the end of the issue, Clark has apologized to Lois for being a dick about the whole change thing, Lois has used new media savvy to deliver what the new boss wants without compromising her morals, and Superman defeated a flaming space monster by throwing the globe from the wreckage of the old Daily Planet at it, which is one of those things that feels symbolic but it's hard to say what it's a symbol of.

I doubt this is going to be anyone's favorite book, but it's a well-executed one and a better concept for a first issue than a lot of the books DC has shipped this month.

Except for the thing that I haven't mentioned so far.

At the same time the action starts, we're treated to a new series of narration boxes that stay for most of the rest of the issue. The newsprinty colored background and the font choice leave us with little doubt that we're supposed to be reading newspaper copy, but it doesn't read like reporting... not the sort of reporting that would be done on an actual super-crime. It vacillates between the sort of "Bart's People"-type (what is it with me and Simpsons references today?) human interest piece that Clark seemed to specialize in on TV's Lois and Clark and Old Timey Radio Show style narration.

And you know, when it veers towards the latter I really like it. I got excited about it a couple of times. I wished they would even out the tone and make it a regular part of the book. This sort of thing is an authentic part of the Superman mythos:

Up in the sky! Look! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Superman! Yes, it's Superman--strange visitor from the planet Krypton who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Superman, who can leap tall buildings in a single bound, race a speeding bullet to its target, bend steel in his bare hands, and who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great Metropolitan newspaper, fights a never-ending battle for truth and justice.

That's the opening to the Adventures of Superman radio show. Look at how many phrases from it have cropped up in my reviews. Look at how many you recognize.

But the problem with the narration in the comics--apart from the uneven tone--is that we're meant to take this as Clark Kent's award-winning journalism. He turned in a story that narrates Superman's deeds and even thoughts in the third person, allegedly after getting an "exclusive interview" but including no direct quotes. And for a lot of it, there's nobody to corroborate what Superman told him. As a journalist, Clark could report what Superman told him in the form of "According to Superman...", but he's repeating it as unvarnished fact.

There was a great story in Kurt Busiek's Astro City where a grizzled veteran journalist who was sort of a Perry White/Ben Urich mash-up takes a cub reporter's story about a mini-Crisis that happened in the subway involving shark cultists and superheroes and a time-displaced legendary hero of a bygone era and cut everything that he can't prove, that he can't verify, that he can't corroborate. In the end he's left with a brief item for the back pages about a shark's corpse found on the subway tracks. I wouldn't expect Perry White to hold Clark Kent to quite this exacting of a standard, but the lesson here is that journalists don't write comic books. They write news.

The narration boxes occasionally work as retro narration. They don't work as journalism. The inclusion of bad writing/reporting as award-winning journalism is something that happens a lot in fiction; comic book writers don't write news, they write comic books. The problem here is that it's allowed to be distracting. By its placement, it's required to be distracting.

It's a small misstep with a large impact.

Crossposts: http://alexandraerin.livejournal.com/323766.html

...during my lunch today, after having re-watched both Thor (on DVD) and Captain America (which is still hanging on at one of the local cineplexes) last night. The show wouldn't even be on my radar if I hadn't seen it being discussed by professed Steve/Tony shipper, the mighty

ktempest.

It's interesting. The first several episodes apparently aired as minisodes which were then pieced together into full-length episodes. This sort of thing was not all that uncommon during the golden age of TV As Toy Advertisements... the Inhumanoids started off in this format, for instance. But where the Inhumanoids minis fit together to make one epic overarching plotline, the first episodes of Aengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes follow an anthology format, which four minisodes fitting together into a story that focuses more or less on a single hero at first, with the baton passing to a different character near the end. So right now it feels like I'm in the middle of a miniseries about various characters doing different things in different parts of the Marvel Univese.

It's an interesting choice. None of the stories are origin stories so far, though they all work fairly well as entry points/introductions for the characters. They're also all fairly... representative? Typical? Iconic? I'm not sure which word is the best fit. The show is a definite retro throwback to the Kirby era in a lot of (good) ways, but also very in keeping with modern aesthetics in a way that I wouldn't really believe possible if I hadn't seen Thor.

I've seen this show talked up for its character dynamics, something I really haven't seen yet. I've liked what I've seen so far but I'm sure I'll have more commentary once I reach that point.

Crossposts: http://alexandraerin.livejournal.com/323131.html

...but after viewing the first episode, I'm struck by ~~a fierce desire to call Summer Glau's character "Orwecle"~~ how much the part of the title character's gimmick that isn't tied up in the cape matches the original concept behind my character of Ray Vallenzio/The Fire-Eater. I didn't play it up so much in any version of the Star Harbor stories that actually got written, but the idea that someone had the whole package of crimefighting skills packaged as circus/carnival performer training is where the character came from.

I can't claim credit for the idea (and I certainly wouldn't claim that they got the idea from me), because I didn't come up with it. I lifted it wholesale from The Phantom of the Opera. I mean, Erik wasn't a superhero, but that's where I got the idea of using that particular battery of skills to simulate/replace superhuman abilities.

I'm glad I didn't start watching The Cape before I started writing Gift of the Bad Guy, but I'm glad I'm aware of it now... they're two very different takes on the genre/milieu of superheroic fantasy, but the themes of showmanship underlying things in The Cape could be fertile ground for inspiration as the GotBG storyline moves forward.

I used to play one of those clicky "games" on Facebook, one that revolved around superheroes. Not Superhero City, but another one.

It's dressed up as a superhero game, but it could be anything. The real point of the game is for you to come back and click on things several times a day so you can earn the right to click on more things more often. There isn't much to it for someone who wants to actually develop and create a superhero character and there isn't much of a fantasy element to it. There really isn't much to the game at all. But it takes seemingly so little time and effort to keep up with a game like that, so I kept up with it, though at some point I stopped paying attention to any of the specifics.

Then one day I happened to look at what I was clicking on, and realized that the mission I was returning to the site every hour to click on a few times was labeled "Prevent a mass genocide in Africa."

Oh.

This mission exists alongside things like super-soldiers going rogue, humanity being beset by zombie plagues, rebuilding the earth following a "global earthquake", and preventing a 4th World War. All of these labels are just that: labels. There's no actual difference between any of them, or the street crimes that you confront in the earlier levels of the game. You click a button and it tells you if you succeed or fail. And then you do it again until you've mastered the mission or run out of energy.

Yes, not only can you solve the humanitarian crisis in Darfur by clicking a button, you can do it so often that you become a real pro at it.

I don't play that game anymore.

That was back in December, a bit over a month ago. I'll come back to this whole thing in a bit.

The subject line on this post is one of my favorite lines of dialogue from a superhero comic, and I was very glad to see it make it into the animated adaptation (Superman/Batman: Public Enemies) It's sort of the meditation at the center of Gift of the Bad Guy, which employs a different approach to the superhero genre than I've taken before.

The story's not ready for public consumption, but Jack's been reading it as I go because I'm useless without an audience. In discussing it with him, I've been trying to figure out where exactly the story had its genesis, as it (like Tales of MU before it) started off with no plan and no forethought. DCUO seems like an obvious suspect, especially as I've mainly played the villain side, but there really aren't a lot of similarities I could point to. Having watched all of Venture Bros. just before the holidays probably made a bigger contribution to the story's birth.

I don't think there's much of the same "vibe" as Venture Bros. has, or a really similar sense of humor. I'm certainly not going for a VB-style story.

I believe that Kick-Ass has something to do with it, too, though I've neither read the comic nor seen the movie. But there was a conversation on somebody's LJ revolving around it, and the related phenomenon of "real-life superheroes". I stumbled across a forum of the same when I was first writing the first version of my Star Harbor stories... someone had copied and pasted some of my stories to the forum, which might have been bothersome enough on its own even without the fact that they'd presented them as educational/inspirational materials.

And of course, I also feel that the Facebook game I describe above and my sudden disillusionment with it helped the story come into being.

I consider superhero stories to be a subset of fantasy. My preferred term for the genre, in fact, is "superheroic fantasy". It doesn't matter if the character has no powers, like Batman or the Punisher, or if all the powers and high tech stuff are carefully couched in scientific terms. It's a fantasy story by its very nature.

It's a fantasy to imagine that you could fly by flapping your arms, even though humans do have arms and there are animals that can accomplish flight through the use of their forelimbs. It's a fantasy to imagine that Batman could go out and do what he does, even if armored cars and computers and martial arts and detective skills are all real things. Batman is not more grounded in reality than arm-flapping flight is. Not even if Christopher Nolan is directing him.

Gift of the Bad Guy is fantasy, to be sure. It's a low-powered and down-to-earth sort of superhero story, but it's not about "real-life superheroes", and it isn't founded on the conceit that a story is automatically more interesting for depicting things that could really happen. I'm not even trying to depict the way things would really happen if superpowers were really real. But in some ways, its writing is a reaction to the fantasy of the superhero, to the idea that solving bloody civil wars and humanitarian crises can be as easy as the push of a button. Not a deconstruction, but a reaction.

In some ways, Gift of the Bad Guy is a story about a villain, as the title suggests. But in other ways, it's a story about the stories we tell about superheroes.

So, I kind of expected to spend most of the day today (Tuesday, that is.. or was) playing DC Universe Online or watching it be played, since it launched in the morning. Owing to the circumstances alluded to in my preceding post, I'm just barely getting my toes wet. I'll be making a post about what I think about it in more detail, but I wanted to make a separate post to address its character creator, which has some disappointing aspects.

It's definitely more limited than I would like. I doubt it will ever go as far in the way of character customization as the other two superhero MMOs have gone, both because they kind of made customization their "thing" in varying ways, and because DC has a brand to protect. They tapped Jim Lee to not just create a consistent look for all of the iconic DC Legends, as they're referred to, but to ensure that the PC options all add up to something that doesn't look too out of place.

Sidenote: The fact that it's Jim Lee designs gives the world a bit of a 90s vibe to me, but not in a bad way. I know he's still in comics, but I associate his lines with the 90s.

Anyway, the point is that in City of Heroes or Champions Online, you're creating your own character... in DCUO, you're creating your own character who fits into this alternate DC Universe. So you have a more limited range of options available. Much fun can still be had within that range. It really helps if your vision for your character's look is as general as possible, or if you're just paging through the options and seeing what looks cool, rather than trying to bring a specific vision to life. But just as an example, we whipped up a Tamaranian in under five minutes.

Now, one limitation that's a little weird: you pick your character's "skin", an entry which combines body type (human, anthropomorphic animal, mineral thing, undead, etc.) and facial features into one selection. By which I mean, you can be angry or you can be a mummy, but you can't be an angry mummy... the "angry face" choice has the default human skin atached to it.

That's kind of a strange choice, but it goes beyond strange and into outright offensive territory... did you reflexively give the sentence where I said "default human skin" the side-eye? If you did, you're not being paranoid.

The game comes with three different human skins. They appear to each have different markers of ethnicity about the face, and while they can be recolored, they do each have a different default skin tone.

The white one is labeled "Human Skin 2", but it's also the default choice and at the top of the list. I'd kind of like to have been a fly on the wall when that decision was made.

Now, if you're following me here, you might have noticed the really fucked up part of all this: Asian and African features are being presented as variants on the white default at the same level as Angry or Youthful. Or having tattoos. If I pick any of those selections, I'm looking at the same model as the default Human Skin 2, with added detail. If I pick Human Skin 1 or 3, what I see is what I get. I can dress the model up in all the same gear and items of costumery as Human Skin 2 gets to play with, but I can't do anything about her facial features.

It's like, you can be a "regular human being" with any of these features/variations... or you can be a make-believe creature like a Lizardman, Mummy, Cyborg, or Asian.

I'm sure someone's going to pop up to say that I shouldn't be throwing around accusations of racism when there could be another explanation, like the time constraints and money (in artist-hours) it would take to make variant facial expressions for each baseline set of facial features. I'm sure this would happen even though I haven't even said the word "racism" before this paragraph.

Here's the thing, though: I don't think anybody behind the development of the game said something like, "Fuck the non-white players. They're lucky to get one face. They're lucky we let them play at all." No, I'm sure the decision came down to time and money. But you know what? It is an example of racism in action that this was considered an acceptable shortcut, if it was even thought of as a shortcut at all.

So anyway, that's pretty fucked up and I'm going to be sending them some more direct feedback at it. <Show Privilege>It's not a dealbreaker for me</Show Privilege>, but I'd want to make sure anybody who's thinking about checking it out knows about it. This is going in my feedback, too... the fact that I can't in good conscience give anyone an unqualified recommendation to buy this game as it stands now.

Via Websnark.

Apparently, in a fairly bizarre move, developer Cryptic Studios has outright sold the flagship (only) superhero MMORPH City of Heroes to publisher NCSoft and bought (not licensed but BOUGHT) the Champions RPG to adapt into their next MMO project. This is after their attempt to bring a Marvel-licensed game to the market apparently fell apart.

I honestly don't know how to feel about this. I'm not terribly invested in City of Heroes... I've got a lot of characters in it, but no higher than mid twenties because I have more fun creating characters than I do leveling. I've always had a sense that City missed out on a lot of opportunities by slavishly following models that evolved for typical fantasy gaming... like an overly rigid class system. You could cutomize your character's appearance on a level that seemed to approach infinity, but there were only a couple ways to be A Fire Guy or An Ice Guy, which misses the point of having superpowers.

They've taken a couple steps towards drastically improving the game in recent updates, including a system that lets you somewhat customize the models for your characters weapons (if you have a weapon power)... something that should have been in from the beginning and doesn't go far enough. I've long thought they needed to let you customize your power visuals. No, it wouldn't affect gameplay if some people had green fire and others had purple fire... but it would add so much to the ambience. And imagine if you could choose an energy type and color for the particle effects/trails used by your movement and other side powers? The Fire Guy could appear in a puff of flame when he or she teleported, and leave a flaming (or at least orange) contrail when flying or running at superspeed.

Eric Burns (Websnark) says that the intention for the new game is to allow the same level of customization that CoH had for costumes at every level of play, including allowing any character archetype to choose any power. I'm not immediately familiar with the Champions system, but my impression of it is that it's point based, which is always a good choice for the supers genre. He also says that the game is intended to include the option for secret identities (YAY!) and a system that lets you design your own NPC archnemesis (YAY!)... these are two features that everybody I know who is a comic/supers fan said "This game needs..." re: City of Heroes.

So on the one hand, it's awesome that there might be a superhero game out there that has what a superhero game needs. On the other hand, it's kind of sad that they feel they have to ditch City of Heroes (what's NCSoft going to do with it development-wise, I wonder?) and start again. Then again, if they pretty much relaunched it from the ground-up (which is about what it would take), the level 50 characters might feel a little miffed.

I suppose one way to look at it is that City of Heroes, being first of its kind, was more than a little bit experimental... Cryptic has spent this time learning how to make a great superhero game by making the only superhero (MMO) game. Better that they apply this knowledge, even it means such a radical departure (literally) for City of Heroes, then just continue plugging along with their existing product.

Of course, the Champions Online game still has plenty of time to actually suck.