See You Next Week

Between work and taking care of The Child, who has now learned how to crawl somewhat and is getting into general mischief, I am swamped.  I'll be taking the week off to regroup, and I'll see you next week with... something.  You'll just have to see then.

Science! Week, Problematic Powers Edition: Super Intelligence

As I mentioned in my previous Problematic Powers post, this series is about the difficulties involved in writing for characters with various powers; it's not a "clever" attempt to point out the infeasability of a given power, because pretty much all of them are ridiculous. However, super intelligence is one of those ones that almost seems like it could exist in the real world.  We all know that guy who is far smarter than any of his peers, and we've all heard of kids graduating college at 16 with a doctorate in Things You'll Never Understand.  That's part of what makes a superhumanly intelligent character so hard to write.

Science! Week: Go Read Indestructible Hulk

This is the size of the of grin I get about this book

I have never been a big fan of the Hulk as a character, or of his alter ego, Bruce Banner. It's one of those cases where I got the concept of the character, but the themes most folks tried to explore with it always left me cold.  Maybe it's because Hulk was one of the last holdovers from the "monster" books that Marvel was putting out previous to their superhero resurgence, or because Bruce Banner always seemed like a hopeless sadsack, but the character just never resonated with me. I liked the occasional walks off the beaten path, like the Hulk-as-Conan riff in Planet Hulk and World War Hulk, but the character didn't really work for me most of the time.  That's all changed with the new series, Indestructible Hulk. Minor spoilers for the first story arc follow.

Science! Week: There's No Superscience In Marvel Movies (And That's A Good Thing)

Okay, so maybe "no" superscience is overselling it a bit.  You do have the engineering feats of the Stark family, and the biochemistry of Bruce Banner and Dr. Erskine.  There's even the dimensional science from Thor, based on Asgardian tech and investigated by Dr. Selvig.  But there isn't a Reed Richards- or Hank Pym-style polymath to be found anywhere.  And that's a good thing.

There are some minor spoilers for Iron Man 3 and what's been revealed about the second Avengers movie below.

Go Read Superior Foes of Spider-Man

Our protagonists, in all their glory

Seriously, it's great.  The first issue came out a couple of weeks back, and it's one of the funniest comics I've read in some time.  It focuses on a group of Spider-Man enemies called the Sinister Six (even though there's currently only five of them) and their day-to-day trials and tribulations, many of which are caused by each other.  If this sounds familiar, it's because it's basically Hawkeye, but re-tooled for supervillains.  And that's fine, because it works, really, really well.  Minor spoilers below.

Problematic Powers: Super Speed

Before I start, the Problematic Powers posts are not going to be "lol superhero physics don't work in the real world you guys." Thanks professor, I don't think we could have figured that out by the fact that there's, you know, no one in the world with superpowers. No, these powers are problematic in terms of story. The very thing that helps to make the character interesting and entertaining for the reader (besides all that "personality" and "drama" stuff) also makes them difficult to write. Near the top of the list, probably duking it out with telepathy, is super speed.

New Project

I'm working on a new, top secret project that I hope to announce in a month or so.  Unfortunately, because the planning went long last night, I didn't get a chance to write anything for the blog.  I'll try to avoid that in the future, but I'd rather just come clean this time instead of slapping something together.  See you on Wednesday, when we'll be discussing the Flash and why speedsters are so hard to write.

All The Golden Age Comics You Can Stand

While I was looking for some things for a work project, I stumbled across Comic Book Plus, a huge, legal archive of golden age comics. They've got tons of stuff in there, including early Captain Marvel family stuff, Black Terror, The Fighting Yank, a bunch of western, romance, and sci-fi comics and a whole lot more. A word of warning: they're golden age comics, and that means there's a whole lot of stuff that is racist and sexist in there, so be aware that you are almost certainly going to stumble across some pretty vile things in there once in a while.  And they're golden age, so the art and writing is often... not so great.  But there are worse ways to spend a bit of your weekend than looking at some sterling examples of the history of the medium.

Great Comics You May Have Missed: Taskmaster: Unthinkable

A lot of people's favorite villains are the heavy hitters. Dr. Doom. Darkseid. Magneto. But I've always had a fondness for the working class villains, the ones that just want to rob a jewelry store, get out without hurting anyone they don't have to, then go blow their paycheck upgrading their gear or gambling or paying their child support. There's a lot of guys like this, from the Flash's Rogues to Batroc the Leaper, but one of my consistent favorites is Taskmaster, and they finally gave him a miniseries a few years back. And it's great.

Hoedown Breakdown: Do Movies Positively Influence Comic Sales?

Not in any major way, no.

Cutting Back A Bit

Work has gone crazy, and I'm going to be cutting back for the next couple of weeks.  Expect stuff generally Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for the next few weeks.  Monday's post next week should be about whether comic book movies actually influence sales of comic books.  See you then.

Happy Independence Day, America!

"Dissent is the highest form of patriotism."

Howard Zinn

Awesome Losers: Aquaman and Hank Pym

Before anyone loses their mind in the comments section, let's be clear here:  I like both of these characters a whole lot.  But they are kind of problematic, often in some very similar ways.  They're both awesome characters, and they each had something happen to them in the 70s or early 80s that made them losers, whether that's in the eyes of comics readers, the general public, their own universe, or some combination.

Bad Art Theater: Injustice #17

Michael Richards IS Stanley Spudowski IN Batman Attacks a Telephone Pole

They couldn't even bother to have the 'U' in 'THUD'

Hoedown Breakdown: Diversity in Marvel and DC Titles

An interesting question came up on /r/comicbooks last night:  does Marvel or DC have greater diversity in its books?  I decided to do a quantitative and qualitative analysis of each company's projected superhero output for July 2013, and while I can't say I was terribly surprised overall, there were some interesting bits of data. The TL;DR for those of you that just want the good stuff is that, percentage-wise, Marvel blows DC away on race, DC wins on GLBT representation, and Marvel barely noses out DC on gender.  However, the qualitative analysis mostly goes Marvel's way.

Making Sense of Injustice

The video game and the comic book series, not the philosophical topic.  I could try the other one, but we'd be here for a while.  Spoilers below the cut.

Off-Topic: Introductions

Since I'm hoping to be blogging (and that is a weird verb) again regularly, I might as well introduce myself. Also, I'm slammed at work, and I couldn't come up with anything fun and/or thoughtful today, so I'll fall back on one of many crutches for lazy writers:  the origin story!

I'm a 38 (almost 39) year old software developer, living in a suburb of Dallas, TX with my wife and our five-month-old daughter.  I was born in Texas and have lived here most of my life, and I've been enjoying sci fi and fantasy, playing videogames, reading comics, and playing role-playing games for as long as I can clearly remember.  I've always loved the heroic ideal, and the way that superheroes personified that.  That's not to say I don't like other types of comics, because I do.  Some of my favorites have been titles like Preacher, Sandman, Fables, and Walking Dead.

But my first love in the medium is superheroes, especially those that hold themselves to a higher ideal.  While my list of favorites shifts pretty regularly, Captain America and Superman are always near the top.  I've drifted from the medium at times, notably during the dark days of the mid-90s when neither of the Big Two seemed to be able to put out a decent book, but I have a pretty good knowledge of the medium and its stories and characters, along with its real-world history and business practices, even from those dark days. I'm most familiar with books from the late 70s through today, but I'm at least somewhat knowledgeable about comics stretching  as far back as the original Superman and Batman stories, and of pulp heroes that came before them.

As for this blog in general, I plan to keep trying to make the stuff I've made for this first week: a little humor and hopefully some thought provoking criticism or analysis.  If you have any particular requests, I'd love to hear them.

Hoedown Breakdown: Ghost

Just so we're clear here, I'm talking about the Iron Man villain, not the Patrick Swayze movie.

Ghost started out as a pretty typical Iron Man villain.  He's an industrial saboteur that made his own powered armor which gives him the ability to make himself and other objects intangible, as well as gain access to and control computer systems near him. He also usually has weapons that fire concussive blasts or electricity, but he's primarily a stealth character and avoids using them as much as possible.  As was typical in the era he was created, his origins were glossed over in favor of a simple "this is a bad guy doing bad things" story, but the thing is that, other than fighting Iron Man, he's basically a vigilante, except that he doesn't fight guys with superpowers.  He fights corporations.

Now, admittedly, he often does it for money, but that seems as much of a bonus as anything.  After all, the Punisher regularly steals from the criminals he kills, but he's not out there shooting drug dealers for the money; it just happens to be how he pays for his expenses.  Ghost (we never learn his real name) has an axe to grind with modern corporate greed and, in particular, the military industrial complex.  He's like that crazy conspiracy theorist who thinks that GE is building spy satellites to control you through the fillings in your teeth.  Given the world he lives in, however, that's not actually crazy.

In the Marvel universe, you've got the military industrial complex building giant robots to kill their own citizens for being genetically different, experimenting on people to try to make super soldiers, and actively engaging in corporate espionage to steal technologies from one company to give them to other, less scrupulous ones.  The Red Skull managed to get himself into a position of power in the United States government using the ridiculously obvious name Dell Rusk.  Shapeshifting aliens have stolen and replaced major players in every field from government to corporate to superpowered heroes and villains.  Tony Stark built a satellite that literally made everyone on Earth forget he was Iron Man.  Ghost isn't crazy for believing that the powerful people, and in particular the corporations, are out to get him and the rest of humanity; he's arguably one of the few sane people in the Marvel universe when it comes to his beliefs.

Ghost is a really interesting and fairly underused character.  He's usually cast as a villain, although he's also been used as an anti-hero in Thunderbolts and Dark Avengers, but none of that really seems correct.  If you really take a step back and look at his actions, he's often more of a hero than the heroes he fights.  In a lot of ways, he's like a superpowered version of Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden.

Burn Those Bridges, Kyle Baker!

I was done talking about Man of Steel, I swear.  But then something came to my attention this morning, and I had to make a post.  Kyle Baker is a fantastic artist and writer with a great, cartoony style who has previously done some great work for DC on their Plastic Man comics as well as other properties.  He also just posted a Flash game called Mass Murderer of Steel to his site.  It's not a very good game, but that's not really the point, is it?  Hats off, Mr. Baker.

Great Comics You May Have Missed: The Order

Marvel's Civil War event and its aftermath was problematic on a number of levels.  I'll probably get into all of that in a future post, but for now I'd like to focus on one of the really great things to come out of it:  The Order.  At the end of Civil War, every state had its own government sponsored super team, and California's was the Order.  What made them different from the typical teams was that each team member had powers that were given to them through a process that was designed in such a way that the folks running the program could flip a switch and take their powers away again.

The members of the Order normally had their powers for a year, and then they had to give them up.  If they were caught using their powers improperly, or doing things that could cause a loss of control (drinking to excess, drug use, etc.), they would have their powers stripped and a new person would replace them on the team with a new set of powers.  The core cast was a mixture of people from all walks of life, each with their own reason to want to be on the team.

Everyone on the team was a volunteer, which made it a really interesting idea from the start.  In comics, people that gained their powers voluntarily are very rare, primarily for story reasons, and those who do are usually cast as villains.  Civil War, in the beginning, was supposed to be about the conflict between personal freedom and civil duty, and The Order did a far better job of examining the issue than the main story ever did.  More importantly, it's a great, entertaining book, full of action, humor, and great dialog.  It unfortunately only lasted 10 issues, as Marvel told Matt Fraction he could either continue writing The Order or take over on Iron Man, and he understandably chose the latter, but the characters from the core team still show up from time to time elsewhere.  It's probably in my top ten of new books from the last decade, and it's cheap on Comixology right now.