Tuesday, June 09, 2009
I'm looking forward to the new run of Detective Comics, in which Batwoman takes over while Batman deals with a case of being dead (this being comics he'll get better in a few months time). I plan to actually buy the comics, as opposed to downloading them as I do with most of what else I read (although with Jeph Loeb, which I read just for his Ed Wood quality, I still feel that I should receive an apology afterwards for wasting my time, if not my cash). I'm a little concerned with this article, in which writer Greg Rucka claims that when the character was announced several years ago then pretty much didn't show up in comics that was all because of naughty newspapers misinterpreting press releases, leaving DC high and dry (not mentioning the cancelled Devin Grayson series). Not so much for that but for a couple of quotes that caught my eye.
Batwoman is the highest profile queer character in mainstream, genre fiction ever. As a lesbian, she’s possibly an easier sell to the still mainly straight, white, male comic readers. "If I have to PT Barnum you a bit to get you into the tent then it might be worth it. But then the flip side is if somebody is going to open up these pages hoping for some hot girl-on-girl action then they will be sorely disappointed."
which seems mostly positive, and
"Batman is a demon, he’s a gargoyle. And I wanted Kate to be more seductive and consequently I would think more likely to take people by surprise... Their reaction to Kate is, yes, surprise and alarm, fear. But the way I see it is she’s more like a succubus when she wants information. She will coax it out of you, tease it out of you...."
which seems less so. Those ole' feminine wiles again. I guess the proof will be in the pudding.
Batwoman is the highest profile queer character in mainstream, genre fiction ever. As a lesbian, she’s possibly an easier sell to the still mainly straight, white, male comic readers. "If I have to PT Barnum you a bit to get you into the tent then it might be worth it. But then the flip side is if somebody is going to open up these pages hoping for some hot girl-on-girl action then they will be sorely disappointed."
which seems mostly positive, and
"Batman is a demon, he’s a gargoyle. And I wanted Kate to be more seductive and consequently I would think more likely to take people by surprise... Their reaction to Kate is, yes, surprise and alarm, fear. But the way I see it is she’s more like a succubus when she wants information. She will coax it out of you, tease it out of you...."
which seems less so. Those ole' feminine wiles again. I guess the proof will be in the pudding.
Labels: Batman, Batwoman, comics, DC comics, lesbians, queer
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
"Badgers? We don' Need no Steenkin' Badgers!"
Labels: Bryan Talbot, comic artists, comics, YouTube
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
The Internet Have Broke me Agains!
Go to Rich Johnson's Lying in the Gutters column for the 27th of April 2009, then scroll down a quarter of the page to the item 'Devil Woman'. It's Barack Obama as Conan, fighting an elephant being ridden by a barbarian Sarah Palin. This is apparently from an upcoming comic series. I have not yet worked out whether I think this is the BESTEST thing ever or the WORSTEST.
Labels: Barack Obama, comics, Sarah Palin
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Meanwhile, in Woot City...
Monday, April 06, 2009
I've never found Judge Dredd that interesting of a character seeing as he's pretty much defined as a sci-fi Dirty Harry who actively refuses any attempts to make him even two dimensional. Any story involving him that I pick up makes even a Jeph Loeb story look like War and Peace or Proust by comparison. Still, D'Israeli has written about different artists and how they've drawn MegaCity One, the home of Dredd, down the years. Worth reading even if you don't like comics.
Labels: comic artists, comics
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Monday, January 19, 2009
Stan Lee 'to create world's first gay superhero'. Presumably all the other gay superheroes don't count.
Lee developed the idea of a gay character from the award-winning novel Hero by Perry Moore, the Sun reports.
Hmmm, okay. Most of the rest of us would have got the idea of a gay superhero from the comics that have gay superheroes in. Or from, you know, being queer ourselves. (Waves to the Comic Book Queers)
If the order in which things happens doesn't matter any more then I announce now that, within the next few years, I intend to invent 'the wheel', a device that is circular like the sun and which I feel confident will become the backbone of the entirety of civilisation.
Lee developed the idea of a gay character from the award-winning novel Hero by Perry Moore, the Sun reports.
Hmmm, okay. Most of the rest of us would have got the idea of a gay superhero from the comics that have gay superheroes in. Or from, you know, being queer ourselves. (Waves to the Comic Book Queers)
If the order in which things happens doesn't matter any more then I announce now that, within the next few years, I intend to invent 'the wheel', a device that is circular like the sun and which I feel confident will become the backbone of the entirety of civilisation.
Labels: comics, gay, queer, Stan Lee
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Thinks
I've been reading a couple of Warren Ellis's latest collections. Doktor Sleepless: Engines of Desire is a collection of the first eight issues of one of Ellis's ongoing series that hasn't disappeared from the face of the earth (I suppose we're never going to hear from Desolation Jones again huh?). Someone who may, or may not be, John Reinhardt, returns to the sleepy town of Heavenside and sets himself up as 'Doktor Sleepless', figuring he'll only be able to achieve what he wants in life if he becomes a larger-than-life mythic character rather than just a fallible human. This collection does little more than set the scene, individual issues being sometimes little more than an essay with pictures based on whatever Warren saw on the internet that week. Which is not to say they are bad, but other than a confrontation with a police inspector who is confident he has John Reinhardt locked up in prison and a confrontation with his ex-girlfriend in which he possibly explains the gruesome and strange way in which his parents died, not a huge amount happens.
Basically the comic is about Grinders. In real life Grinders tend to be men who enjoy hammering things into, through and around their testicles and then send pictures of it to Warren. In the mythos of the story they are transhumans who are less about digitally uploading into the superfuture and more about dicking around with technology in clever but ultimately pointless ways. By the end of this collection they are a faceless mob willing to dance to the Doktor's tune. Indeed this shouldn't work as a story, there are few characters, little plot and no reason to care about anything. Anyone sceptical about Ellis's work may well find this collection contains all they dislike about him the most and yet, I suspect it's the fact that it's a collection that makes me happier reading it than buying the individual comics would. While the Doktor has a masterplan and has predicted many of the things that happen it's clear he has not seen all the variables and that chaos may derail things for him.
The art of Ivan Rodriguez doesn't particularly grab me. It's frequently flat but, when characters do little than stand around dishing out exposition it's unavoidable.
A tastier treat is Black Summer, in which superhero John Horus executes the President of the United States for starting an illegal war in Iraq for personal and private gain. The surviving and retired members of his former superteam, the Seven Guns, have the whole US military coming after them as national security threats before they can decide whether they support Horus's action or not. And so we get eight issues of ultraviolence and high-tech goodness, punctuated by speeches. Most comic companies, in pursuit of realism, tend to have problems dancing around the issue of why their superheroes will fight space-squid trying to take over Nebraska but not deal with nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. The Authority, which Ellis created, tried to address this after he left the title but it was swiftly killed off after being handed to an author who was happier directing men in colourful costumes to punch one another rather than debate global politics. But though this is the very opposite of those books in interventionist terms it is equally unsatisfying, Horus seems to have no plan for what to do after killing off the head of the United States Government as though no-one would mind what he did. That the rest of the book consists of lovingly rendered pictures of death and destruction suggests that maybe Ellis is himself aware that there's not really anywhere else you can take the story after you've decided that that's your opening trick.
So, as a high-concept book, hell, as any-kind-of-concept book it's a bit of a misfire. But as another showcase for the kind of tranhuman, extropian ideas that excite Ellis's cold, cold heart the book is quite fun, Juan Jose Ryp's gorgeously detailed artwork is the polar opposite of Rodriguez's, giving a real sense of depth to each scene. So this will be a fun throwaway read for a wet afternoon which, lets face it, is not something we're short of at the moment.
Basically the comic is about Grinders. In real life Grinders tend to be men who enjoy hammering things into, through and around their testicles and then send pictures of it to Warren. In the mythos of the story they are transhumans who are less about digitally uploading into the superfuture and more about dicking around with technology in clever but ultimately pointless ways. By the end of this collection they are a faceless mob willing to dance to the Doktor's tune. Indeed this shouldn't work as a story, there are few characters, little plot and no reason to care about anything. Anyone sceptical about Ellis's work may well find this collection contains all they dislike about him the most and yet, I suspect it's the fact that it's a collection that makes me happier reading it than buying the individual comics would. While the Doktor has a masterplan and has predicted many of the things that happen it's clear he has not seen all the variables and that chaos may derail things for him.
The art of Ivan Rodriguez doesn't particularly grab me. It's frequently flat but, when characters do little than stand around dishing out exposition it's unavoidable.
A tastier treat is Black Summer, in which superhero John Horus executes the President of the United States for starting an illegal war in Iraq for personal and private gain. The surviving and retired members of his former superteam, the Seven Guns, have the whole US military coming after them as national security threats before they can decide whether they support Horus's action or not. And so we get eight issues of ultraviolence and high-tech goodness, punctuated by speeches. Most comic companies, in pursuit of realism, tend to have problems dancing around the issue of why their superheroes will fight space-squid trying to take over Nebraska but not deal with nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. The Authority, which Ellis created, tried to address this after he left the title but it was swiftly killed off after being handed to an author who was happier directing men in colourful costumes to punch one another rather than debate global politics. But though this is the very opposite of those books in interventionist terms it is equally unsatisfying, Horus seems to have no plan for what to do after killing off the head of the United States Government as though no-one would mind what he did. That the rest of the book consists of lovingly rendered pictures of death and destruction suggests that maybe Ellis is himself aware that there's not really anywhere else you can take the story after you've decided that that's your opening trick.
So, as a high-concept book, hell, as any-kind-of-concept book it's a bit of a misfire. But as another showcase for the kind of tranhuman, extropian ideas that excite Ellis's cold, cold heart the book is quite fun, Juan Jose Ryp's gorgeously detailed artwork is the polar opposite of Rodriguez's, giving a real sense of depth to each scene. So this will be a fun throwaway read for a wet afternoon which, lets face it, is not something we're short of at the moment.
Labels: comics, Warren Ellis
Saturday, October 04, 2008
Monday, September 08, 2008
For Linkmachinego, here's an Alan Moore documentary from the end of the 80s that covers Swamp Thing and Watchmen. He does sound like Richard O'Brien at times though.
Labels: Alan Moore, comics, DC comics
Thursday, August 07, 2008
Alan Moore en Los Simpsons
Labels: Alan Moore, comics, humour, The Simpsons, YouTube
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
... Oh, and when they make Iron Man 2, wouldn't it be interesting if it's Pepper Potts in the War Machine armour, rather than Rhodey?
Labels: comics, Marvel Comics, women
Monday, May 05, 2008
Iron Man
I went to see Iron Man today and thought it a satisfactory movie. Not great, it wasn't X-Men 2 but it certainly wasn't Fantastic Four or Hulk. Robert Downey Junior was probably the best thing in it but he didn't get too many chances to shine, though he did have the best line of the entire film, when Pepper catches him taking the proper Iron Man armour off for first time.
The story is also okay. This is probably because it is the same story that they have used in Spiderman and, broadly, Hulk. Peter Parker/Tony Stark meets his friends father/has his father's friend Norman Osbourne/Obadiah Stane. Unfortunately Norman/Obadiah have nefarious plans of their own and when they discover our heroes secret Peter/Tony/Bruce is forced to fight his patriarchal figure who uses an enhanced version of our heroes invention/ability against them. Iron Man also makes the same mistake as the first Fantastic Four movie in that 90% of the film is the origin story, with the last ten or fifteen minutes being saved for the final confrontation with the baddy. Certainly the Tony/Obadiah face-off is a better fight than the Four/Doom tiff but it's hardly epic. I don't know whether it's the danger of being into comics, I've never read Iron Man but already know the basics of where he comes from. So my heart sinks when we have another origin film. It's perhaps unavoidable with the other characters but I'm not sure it's needed with Iron Man. I think the first film could have happened presenting Iron Man as more or less already being around, having Obadiah as a forgotten face from his past that turns up in a second film, making Tony deal with self-doubt (we don't see substance abusing Tony in this film, so no doubt as War Machine is not so subtly mentioned, we've got those two things to look forward to inSpiderman 2 Iron Man 2) and then explain how he was captured by Al Qaeda, working for Obadiah. Marvel comics always have to work as though the company will fold tomorrow because there's a chance they will, and Hulk was probably them doing what they thought was an experiment and it failed but if they keep regurgitating the same few stories for each film then the cash fillup from the movies will be gone.
That said, the graphics are as you would expect, you can't tell where the props end and CGI starts, so as a near brainless way to pass an afternoon the film just about passes muster. And after waiting through the interminably long credits for the final scene we're left to wonder whether they can do the fairly unlikely and rein in actors egos long enough for an Avengers film. I always assumed that either that or a Justice League of America film would be impossible without replacing the A-list stars with C or D-listers. Would Downey sign up for an Avengers movie? Would Bana or Jackman?
The story is also okay. This is probably because it is the same story that they have used in Spiderman and, broadly, Hulk. Peter Parker/Tony Stark meets his friends father/has his father's friend Norman Osbourne/Obadiah Stane. Unfortunately Norman/Obadiah have nefarious plans of their own and when they discover our heroes secret Peter/Tony/Bruce is forced to fight his patriarchal figure who uses an enhanced version of our heroes invention/ability against them. Iron Man also makes the same mistake as the first Fantastic Four movie in that 90% of the film is the origin story, with the last ten or fifteen minutes being saved for the final confrontation with the baddy. Certainly the Tony/Obadiah face-off is a better fight than the Four/Doom tiff but it's hardly epic. I don't know whether it's the danger of being into comics, I've never read Iron Man but already know the basics of where he comes from. So my heart sinks when we have another origin film. It's perhaps unavoidable with the other characters but I'm not sure it's needed with Iron Man. I think the first film could have happened presenting Iron Man as more or less already being around, having Obadiah as a forgotten face from his past that turns up in a second film, making Tony deal with self-doubt (we don't see substance abusing Tony in this film, so no doubt as War Machine is not so subtly mentioned, we've got those two things to look forward to in
That said, the graphics are as you would expect, you can't tell where the props end and CGI starts, so as a near brainless way to pass an afternoon the film just about passes muster. And after waiting through the interminably long credits for the final scene we're left to wonder whether they can do the fairly unlikely and rein in actors egos long enough for an Avengers film. I always assumed that either that or a Justice League of America film would be impossible without replacing the A-list stars with C or D-listers. Would Downey sign up for an Avengers movie? Would Bana or Jackman?
Labels: comics, DC comics, Marvel Comics, movies
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Alan Moore, Alan Moore...
Oops, done that one.
An interview from last month, mostly stuff that fans know already, has a few bits of Moore reading from his various works, a reminder that he's still working on that novel 'Jerusalem' and a few seconds of dancing.
An interview from last month, mostly stuff that fans know already, has a few bits of Moore reading from his various works, a reminder that he's still working on that novel 'Jerusalem' and a few seconds of dancing.
Labels: Alan Moore, comics, YouTube
Monday, April 07, 2008
Dick Grayson and/or Harvey Dent ..in a story where amnesia leads to sex
DC Universe Characters - Clichéd Porn Situation Generator. I swear they are using this to write the comics these days.
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Comics Are Sometimes Shit... It's Official (Part Two!)
You may remember that some four weeks ago I started talking about why comics were shit and had two reasons for which, the first of which I only got part way through explaining before losing too much enthusiasm to carry on.
So Spidey makes a deal with the devil to save his hundred-year-old granny, bloggers frothed and Joe Quesada sits back and waits for the quality of the stories to magically improve.
What really irritates me is that the inbuilt resistance of comics to change. Soap operas try to restrict change to when an actor wants to leave or drops dead, having no such constraints comics can go round in circles until the publisher turns the lights out. It's a valid argument that Spidey was married so long that breaking it up goes against this point but by and large most comics have tinkering around the edges with hasty back-steps (or 'retcons') when something proves unpopular, they actually killed off Aunt May many years ago, only to reveal a while later that that Aunt May was an imposter and the real one was safe and sound. A few years ago they published a very well done issue where Aunt May finally discovers that Peter is Spiderman and, rather than fainting and/or having a heart attack, as had been the working assumption for years as to her response, dealt with it. A bonus of the Mephisto deal is that no-one remembers Peter is Spiderman, undoing that little story.
So Superman saves the world, so why can he never get the girl? Even Grant Morrison thinks it was a bad idea to finally allow, after some fifty years, Superman to marry Lois Lane, though he doesn't say why. Again, why should a married couple lead to less interesting stories than an unmarried one? Thanks to the interweb you can see any number of the so-called Silver Age Superman stories where the two of them dance around each other, Superman not wanting to be 'ensnared' into marriage but not wanting Lois to give up hope either. It's not necessarily 'more adult' to have the two of them married but if you work on the assumption that it was going to happen some day why not make that some day today?
The worst and most egregious example of this is DC's caving in to HEAT. In the 90s, DC killed off (alright, turned evil, turned good and then killed off) one of their underperforming heroes, Hal Jordan the Green Lantern and brought in a new character. A bunch of fatbeards took umbridge and, a decade later, Hal was back. Never mind that he was got rid of because he was a consistently boring character who wasn't selling comics. But he was Green Lantern when the people complaining were kids, so he had to be Green Lantern now. Change is bad.
I suppose all that aggravates me is the superficial trappings around the story, I'm not suggesting that Superman/Spiderman/Whoever stop their eternal battle against evil, I suppose that really, I'm annoyed that the people making comics aren't making more effort to disguise the fact they are selling me today what they sold me yesterday. Which makes me as much of a fool as the next comics collecter, or would do if it wasn't for the fact that I don't buy more than a trickle of comics these days and, when I do it's stuff in limited series with a beginning, middle and end planned.
The other point I was going to use to argue that comics was shit, was one of the big black-and-white phonebook sized collections that DC are doing of their old stuff, in this case DC Showcase Presents Metal Men but it's not really worth the time. Most of all comics at any time are rubbish and these are no different. Of course the artwork is appalling and the stories are repetative, they weren't written to be read again in a month, let alone forty years later. So they could afford to have each story follow the same basic pattern, but why anyone would part with money for it defies common sense. Even dialing down my expectations as far as I could manage and reading it based on my memories of more recent appearences by the characters I couldn't last more than about a hundred and fifty pages beforetossing carefully placing the book aside.
What I would recommend is Good as Lily by Derek Kirk Kim and Jesse Hamm from DC's appallingly titled 'Minx' range of comics aimed at women. School aged Grace Kwon suddenly finds herself meeting herself at three different ages, one a brattish pre-teen, one a twenty-something and one an old lady. As she struggles to help put on a school play she and they come to terms with the history they all have in common. Unlike the samples of other titles in the series at the end of the book which all look like they are entirely generic stories with 'teenaged and female' pasted into the lead character's position this somehow manages to have an 'everywoman' feel about it, with each of the four ages of Grace's clearly defined. Where it does fall down is in the relationship of Grace and Lily, her dead sister. This gets all of a couple of brief mentions in the story and doesn't occupy Grace's thoughts much, I did wonder if Kim meant to beef that up in a later draft of the script and forgot, it's a plot point that could be excised with absolutely no harm to the story. The artwork is halfway between cartoon and 'realistic', but Hamm has a gift for expressing emotion through a character's body language. It's dei=finitely worth your time, unlike most of the rubbish out there.
So Spidey makes a deal with the devil to save his hundred-year-old granny, bloggers frothed and Joe Quesada sits back and waits for the quality of the stories to magically improve.
What really irritates me is that the inbuilt resistance of comics to change. Soap operas try to restrict change to when an actor wants to leave or drops dead, having no such constraints comics can go round in circles until the publisher turns the lights out. It's a valid argument that Spidey was married so long that breaking it up goes against this point but by and large most comics have tinkering around the edges with hasty back-steps (or 'retcons') when something proves unpopular, they actually killed off Aunt May many years ago, only to reveal a while later that that Aunt May was an imposter and the real one was safe and sound. A few years ago they published a very well done issue where Aunt May finally discovers that Peter is Spiderman and, rather than fainting and/or having a heart attack, as had been the working assumption for years as to her response, dealt with it. A bonus of the Mephisto deal is that no-one remembers Peter is Spiderman, undoing that little story.
So Superman saves the world, so why can he never get the girl? Even Grant Morrison thinks it was a bad idea to finally allow, after some fifty years, Superman to marry Lois Lane, though he doesn't say why. Again, why should a married couple lead to less interesting stories than an unmarried one? Thanks to the interweb you can see any number of the so-called Silver Age Superman stories where the two of them dance around each other, Superman not wanting to be 'ensnared' into marriage but not wanting Lois to give up hope either. It's not necessarily 'more adult' to have the two of them married but if you work on the assumption that it was going to happen some day why not make that some day today?
The worst and most egregious example of this is DC's caving in to HEAT. In the 90s, DC killed off (alright, turned evil, turned good and then killed off) one of their underperforming heroes, Hal Jordan the Green Lantern and brought in a new character. A bunch of fatbeards took umbridge and, a decade later, Hal was back. Never mind that he was got rid of because he was a consistently boring character who wasn't selling comics. But he was Green Lantern when the people complaining were kids, so he had to be Green Lantern now. Change is bad.
I suppose all that aggravates me is the superficial trappings around the story, I'm not suggesting that Superman/Spiderman/Whoever stop their eternal battle against evil, I suppose that really, I'm annoyed that the people making comics aren't making more effort to disguise the fact they are selling me today what they sold me yesterday. Which makes me as much of a fool as the next comics collecter, or would do if it wasn't for the fact that I don't buy more than a trickle of comics these days and, when I do it's stuff in limited series with a beginning, middle and end planned.
The other point I was going to use to argue that comics was shit, was one of the big black-and-white phonebook sized collections that DC are doing of their old stuff, in this case DC Showcase Presents Metal Men but it's not really worth the time. Most of all comics at any time are rubbish and these are no different. Of course the artwork is appalling and the stories are repetative, they weren't written to be read again in a month, let alone forty years later. So they could afford to have each story follow the same basic pattern, but why anyone would part with money for it defies common sense. Even dialing down my expectations as far as I could manage and reading it based on my memories of more recent appearences by the characters I couldn't last more than about a hundred and fifty pages before
What I would recommend is Good as Lily by Derek Kirk Kim and Jesse Hamm from DC's appallingly titled 'Minx' range of comics aimed at women. School aged Grace Kwon suddenly finds herself meeting herself at three different ages, one a brattish pre-teen, one a twenty-something and one an old lady. As she struggles to help put on a school play she and they come to terms with the history they all have in common. Unlike the samples of other titles in the series at the end of the book which all look like they are entirely generic stories with 'teenaged and female' pasted into the lead character's position this somehow manages to have an 'everywoman' feel about it, with each of the four ages of Grace's clearly defined. Where it does fall down is in the relationship of Grace and Lily, her dead sister. This gets all of a couple of brief mentions in the story and doesn't occupy Grace's thoughts much, I did wonder if Kim meant to beef that up in a later draft of the script and forgot, it's a plot point that could be excised with absolutely no harm to the story. The artwork is halfway between cartoon and 'realistic', but Hamm has a gift for expressing emotion through a character's body language. It's dei=finitely worth your time, unlike most of the rubbish out there.
Labels: comics, DC comics, Marvel Comics, Spiderman, stupidity, Superman
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Comics Are Shit... It's Official (Part One!)
You know how when you have a kitchen where the hob is next to the draining board and you think "Shall I put all this dry washing up back in the cupboard before I start making dinner?" and you're lazy and/or have testicles so decide you won't, and then you make something which spits a lot of oil everywhere so you end up not only washing up the dinner stuff but all of the stuff on the draining board which now has a lovely patina of grease? Mmm, yeah.
So, two things lead me to the conclusion that comics are shit. Neither are new. The first is One More Day, a clusterfuck of an 'event', what we old-timers used to call 'a bad story', that, in this case, ran through Marvel's Spiderman comics with all the care of Ian Brady in a children's ward with all the axes he can carry and a promise that the police won't be turning up until after they've had their breakfast. As with all things there's a bit of a back story to this. The universe began, the earth formed and then, a while later, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby made comics about superheroes that had issues and problems, except for the Fantastic Four who have always been teeth-grittingly anodyne and perfect it makes me want to vomit up the contents of both my, and several other people's stomachs. As time passed they started the speculator market by sticking an 'x' on any turd that came out of the office (The Astonishing X-Turd #1: 'If This be a Plumber!') until the turds left Marvel to set up Image comics and the company collapsed.
These day the company exists as a machine for letting Fox make really bad movies with the creating of comics as a license-fulfilling mad lady in the attic. Chief Mrs Bates these days is Joe Quesada who really should never have sought to become famous with hair like that (note to self: Destroy all photos of myself with long hair when I was under the misapprehension it made me look like Antonio Banderas in Interview With The Vampire and not a heavy metal fan who drank too much Diamond White). Joe spent his time as Chief Turd-Polisher by announcing that the turds had a much better consistency back when Peter Parker was single, he having got married so long ago that Mohammed supplied the booze for the bachelor party. After several years of going on about having Peter married to Mary-Jane Watson-Parker was a fucking sacrilege in a manner akin to your drunken uncle at family get-togethers never getting over the fact that his wife left him a decade previously and is now doing swimmingly with another man who knows how to give her orgasms, Joe finally issued a dictat that last year would be the year where the marriage was undone.
But it was complicated by reasons that Joe came up with in his brain. Despite the fact that the only people reading comics are overweight men in their mid-forties who still live in their parents basements (or in the UK loft-conversions) Joe harboured this strange delusion that the reason Spiderman comics are shit these days was not due to the writers but due to them having to write a married 'web-slinger' (ugh, I feel dirty). It seems that if there wasn't the frisson of the posibility of Spidey getting off with The Incredible Hulk then it really wasn't worth Joe coming to work in the morning. Joe thought kids of thirteen who read Spiderman wouldn't relate to a character who was married, although if the kids I know are anything to go by, his lack of a Wii, the fact that he never says 'fuck!' and doesn't shoot people he thinks are 'disrespectin' him blud' are probably bigger concerns. But he didn't want to have Peter and MJ divorce, because what child could possibly relate to two adults deciding that they lived different lives and no longer having anything in common?
So, due to the dictates of a company-wide storyline Spiderman revealed his identity to the 'imaginary world' that Marvel comics operate in. His Aunt gets shot a few issues later. While Peter Parker is a perpetual man-child aged in his mid-twenties his Aunt is about three hundred years old, showing that freaky genetics in the Parker family didn't start with his being bitten by a radioactive spider. So she's not doing well, and Peter isn't getting any help from the various superheroes he tries calling, sure they can travel through time and space but they can't help with his Aunt. And then Mephisto, the Marvel comics Satan-that-they-can't-call-Satan turns up and offers Spidey a deal. He'll save Aunt May's life, and he'll toss in making everyone forget that Peter is Spidey, but in return he gets to magically undo Peter and Mary-Jane's marriage, because that sort of thing gives him a massive hard-on for evil. The catch is that, deep in their souls, at a subconscious level, Peter and MJ will remember they were married, even if consciously they, and the rest of the Marvel Universe don't, and they'll feel a little bummed out and that will make Mephisto happy. Oh and to pad the story out Peter meets alternate versions of himself if he'd grown up without either super-powers or a wife (basically he turns out like the sort of man who reads Marvel comics) and 'the daughter that he and Mary-Jane will never have' who, due to some dodgy artwork looks like the sister of the butler from The Prisoner.
Anyway, I've momentarily run out of bile, so I shall return to this subject when I've refilled. Don't go away!
So, two things lead me to the conclusion that comics are shit. Neither are new. The first is One More Day, a clusterfuck of an 'event', what we old-timers used to call 'a bad story', that, in this case, ran through Marvel's Spiderman comics with all the care of Ian Brady in a children's ward with all the axes he can carry and a promise that the police won't be turning up until after they've had their breakfast. As with all things there's a bit of a back story to this. The universe began, the earth formed and then, a while later, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby made comics about superheroes that had issues and problems, except for the Fantastic Four who have always been teeth-grittingly anodyne and perfect it makes me want to vomit up the contents of both my, and several other people's stomachs. As time passed they started the speculator market by sticking an 'x' on any turd that came out of the office (The Astonishing X-Turd #1: 'If This be a Plumber!') until the turds left Marvel to set up Image comics and the company collapsed.
These day the company exists as a machine for letting Fox make really bad movies with the creating of comics as a license-fulfilling mad lady in the attic. Chief Mrs Bates these days is Joe Quesada who really should never have sought to become famous with hair like that (note to self: Destroy all photos of myself with long hair when I was under the misapprehension it made me look like Antonio Banderas in Interview With The Vampire and not a heavy metal fan who drank too much Diamond White). Joe spent his time as Chief Turd-Polisher by announcing that the turds had a much better consistency back when Peter Parker was single, he having got married so long ago that Mohammed supplied the booze for the bachelor party. After several years of going on about having Peter married to Mary-Jane Watson-Parker was a fucking sacrilege in a manner akin to your drunken uncle at family get-togethers never getting over the fact that his wife left him a decade previously and is now doing swimmingly with another man who knows how to give her orgasms, Joe finally issued a dictat that last year would be the year where the marriage was undone.
But it was complicated by reasons that Joe came up with in his brain. Despite the fact that the only people reading comics are overweight men in their mid-forties who still live in their parents basements (or in the UK loft-conversions) Joe harboured this strange delusion that the reason Spiderman comics are shit these days was not due to the writers but due to them having to write a married 'web-slinger' (ugh, I feel dirty). It seems that if there wasn't the frisson of the posibility of Spidey getting off with The Incredible Hulk then it really wasn't worth Joe coming to work in the morning. Joe thought kids of thirteen who read Spiderman wouldn't relate to a character who was married, although if the kids I know are anything to go by, his lack of a Wii, the fact that he never says 'fuck!' and doesn't shoot people he thinks are 'disrespectin' him blud' are probably bigger concerns. But he didn't want to have Peter and MJ divorce, because what child could possibly relate to two adults deciding that they lived different lives and no longer having anything in common?
So, due to the dictates of a company-wide storyline Spiderman revealed his identity to the 'imaginary world' that Marvel comics operate in. His Aunt gets shot a few issues later. While Peter Parker is a perpetual man-child aged in his mid-twenties his Aunt is about three hundred years old, showing that freaky genetics in the Parker family didn't start with his being bitten by a radioactive spider. So she's not doing well, and Peter isn't getting any help from the various superheroes he tries calling, sure they can travel through time and space but they can't help with his Aunt. And then Mephisto, the Marvel comics Satan-that-they-can't-call-Satan turns up and offers Spidey a deal. He'll save Aunt May's life, and he'll toss in making everyone forget that Peter is Spidey, but in return he gets to magically undo Peter and Mary-Jane's marriage, because that sort of thing gives him a massive hard-on for evil. The catch is that, deep in their souls, at a subconscious level, Peter and MJ will remember they were married, even if consciously they, and the rest of the Marvel Universe don't, and they'll feel a little bummed out and that will make Mephisto happy. Oh and to pad the story out Peter meets alternate versions of himself if he'd grown up without either super-powers or a wife (basically he turns out like the sort of man who reads Marvel comics) and 'the daughter that he and Mary-Jane will never have' who, due to some dodgy artwork looks like the sister of the butler from The Prisoner.
Anyway, I've momentarily run out of bile, so I shall return to this subject when I've refilled. Don't go away!
Labels: comics, Spiderman, stupidity
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
Alan Moore! Alan Moore! Standing in The Corner of the Store!
MJ Hibbett on the time he met The God of Comics.
Almost.
[via Lying in the Gutters]
Almost.
[via Lying in the Gutters]
Labels: Alan Moore, comics, humour, music, YouTube
Sunday, January 06, 2008
Sunday, December 02, 2007
The 40 Worst Rob Liefeld Drawings Ever! Liefeld is a comic book artist that has managed to maintain a career in the industry for over a decade despite being apparently untroubled by any sort of talent. Even if you have no interest in comics you should check this out for the sheer ugliness and stupidity on display, impossible geometry, ridiculous hatching, bad storytelling and a series of awful artistic tics. And this doesn't even mention the time he gave Captain America breasts.
[via LinkMachineGo]
[via LinkMachineGo]
Labels: comics
