I read the Robin/Spoiler Special the other week.

Basically, the special is two stories. The a-side is about Robin and Spoiler catching up and going out vigilante-ing sometime after she revealed that she was back. They go out as Tim and Steph to hang out in an abandoned warehouse with a bunch of a kids in a rough crowd (where there are water guns, but somehow no drugs) and rescue a toddler from kidnappers together. There is also flirting and an examination of their relationship. The b-side is a story about what Spoiler did after she left Gotham. She went to Africa with Leslie Thompkins after the events of War Games. They stay there for over a year, doing charity work, when some… well, I don’t know what to call them. A mix of medicine men and a death squad come to the village they’re at and Spoiler has to dress up to save the day.

Both stories have pretty awesome art. Rafael (Blue Beetle) Albuquerque does the art chores on the first story, while Victor Ibañez gets it done on the second story. It’s a seriously handsome book. We all know how awesome Raf is, but Ibañez has a style that reminds me of the great work going on in Secret History of the Authority: Jack Hawksmoor. Rock solid and visually interesting.

It’s also basically the book that explains why Spoiler is back in Gotham after War Games. If you think of it as an apology or peace offering for War Games, which is basically the worst crossover I’ve read in years, you’d be more or less right. (this is a dope cover, though, and i own a print of it signed by dustin nguyen) She was done dirty there, so here’s what basically amounts to Spoiler: Rebirth.

Yeah, I gotta say, I didn’t feel it at all. I realize Chuck Dixon has had a hard week or whatever, but that comic was no good, man. I’ve got three reasons and I bought visual aids.

Leslie and Steph are in east Africa. Kenya, Somalia, I dunno. Maybe it’s Outer Heaven. I just know that they have to know Swahili to be there. They’ve been there a little over a year, according to Steph, and she’s had trouble with the language. The whole reason that they are there is that Leslie Thompkins faked Spoiler’s death after the torture and near-murder she experienced in War Games to rescue her from the life of a vigilante and give her a chance to start over.

from robin 174

Dr Thompkins felt that she’d suffered enough, and Stephanie agreed, so they left the country. She voluntarily went with Leslie to Africa in order to catch a break, but felt guilty about it. This makes sense, because Stephanie forgot about something important while she was skipping town.

Whoops.

So, think about it. Since War Games, Stephanie’s mom has had to go through 1) her daughter disappearing without a word or a trace, 2) finding out that her daughter is dead, 3) finding out that her daughter is Spoiler in War Crimes, which was inexplicably worse than War Games, and now 4) finding out that her daughter is not only alive, but faked her death and moved to Africa.

Why did Stephanie and Leslie fake her death? To protect Steph from being a vigilante. Essentially, she got in too deep and had to find a way out. That way out just happened to be going completely off the radar.

One problem with this is that I don’t think anyone knew who Spoiler was until War Crimes, which happened specifically because she “died.” She still had a secret identity. It’s been a while since I read it, though, so I’ll grant that I may be off, but I don’t think I am.

My other problem with this is actually also why I feel like the return damaged Spoiler as a character. Batman, more so than pretty much every character other than Peter Parker, has family as an important backdrop to his franchise. He does what he does to both avenge and please his parents. They are a constant specter over his work. He’s chastised other characters when they screw up their parenthood (Plastic Man) and respected others for their relationships with their parents (Superman). Family is important to him.

I can’t really imagine his reaction to Stephanie having faked her death just being a “Yeah, I figured.” If Batman is going to put Huntress on blast for almost killing Prometheus, or fire Dick Grayson for whatever reason that was years ago, he’d definitely put the boot to Stephanie, too.

Faking Stephanie’s death put her mother through a ridiculous amount of trauma. There’s the old saying about how no parent should ever have to bury a child– it’s true. What makes it worse is that Stephanie did it for reasons that boil down to “I had something horrible happen to me and I didn’t want to be a hero any more.” What was stopping her from just quitting being a hero and living with her mother? Why did she have to fake her death and leave the country? She could’ve told her mom she was Spoiler, explained what happened, and then moved to Metropolis. What would her mom say? No? Yeah, right.

That’s my breaking point with the character. I guess family is really important to me, too, because I just find this ridiculous. Anyway, Stephanie went along with all of this, save for maybe the faking, voluntarily. She felt guilty (“I kept feeling like I’d run away”), and with very good reason, I’d say, but didn’t do anything about that until after she’d tried to forget that feeling and over a year had passed.

Also, she went back to being a hero before telling her mother she was alive. Slick move, that.

Now, it’s like, why should I care about this character? She hasn’t had the wealth of stories that’d let you skip past a negative character development. Is the terrible return going to be played down like Spider-Man trying to kill his pregnant wife was? I figure yes, because it frankly makes Stephanie look like the worst kind of selfish idiot.

They could’ve easily New Earth-ed it– Infinite Crisis had the Earth come back with little minor changes all over. One of which was Stephanie didn’t die after all, she was just convalescing before coming back! People act like the One More Day/New Earth retcons don’t work, but they do and have for decades. That’d be much better than the faked death that we got, if only because Stephanie comes out of it smelling like roses. She almost died, but she fought through and recovered and did therapy and now she’s back. Easy.

My second problem– those were some idiot Africans in that b-side. I mean, I realize that thugs are generally portrayed as slow-witted idiots and stumblebums, but seriously. You don’t exactly get to be a witch doctor feared throughout the region by being stupid. Case in point:

Ayo.

At least the stupidity is shared, though, yeah? Leslie has her own dumb thing to say, I’m sure because she doesn’t want to be shown up by African Joker.

“Medicine goes back to the Greeks.”

Leslie obviously forgot about Imhotep, who predates Hippocrates by a couple thousand years or so, and the fact that Hippocrates studied Greek medicine. She’s too busy bringing light to a blighted region to worry about minor worries like that. You keep on fighting that good fight, Les.

(Ha, does this make medicine the original rock & roll?)

So, anyway, African Joker gets all het up and straight up orders the murder of Pinkeye. His men turn on Leslie just in time for Spoiler to reappear… wearing the goods that she and Leslie were traded in exchange for medicine in what is apparently an accurate representation of Katavi, the village’s protector. Google tells me that Katavi is also a national park in Tanzania. Maybe that’s where they are.

Anyway, she dresses up like Katavi and does the ooga-booga Batman thing and scares the death squad/witch doctor/militiamen/whatever. There’s some firing into the darkness and then she beats all of them up. Let me rephrase– the sixteen or seventeen year old girl from the suburbs of Gotham, whose skill set as a hero amounts to “adequate” or “needs improvement,” puts on some scraps that were given to her, such as animal heads and skins, to make a costume of the village’s boogieman to scare away some grown men with guns who have terrorized the region for years.

Like I said before, you don’t get positions of power by being stupid. (If you really think that Bush is as stupid as you think he is, you’re just as stupid as you think he is. Dude got into office twice. That’s no accident.) You can’t sustain that power by just sheer thuggery. It’ll work for a while, but eventually, sense and desperation are going to win out. You’re gonna keep telling people “I’ma kill you!” and then you’re gonna find that one dude that’s like “Well, shoot me!” and then you got a martyr on your hands.

So, you’ll pardon me if I don’t quite buy that scene at all. That’s an entirely different class of criminal Spoiler is going up against.

Finally, my third point. This is a short one.

If Tim leaves another girlfriend for Stephanie, I’m gonna be pissed. He’s already lying to Zoanne about where he’s going to be so that he can hang out with his ex.

Tim, seriously though? Why are you hanging out with your ex-girlfriend, who let you think she was dead for over a year, like things are all good? That’s at least twice as bad as getting cheated on. You’re looking like a sucker. Don’t get caught up and have to explain yourself.

Do you really want to have to beg to be taken back after Steph fakes her death again?

I’m a huge fan of Metal Gear Solid. It’s probably my favorite series, though I’ve undoubtedly put more time into Madden NFL than MGS by virtue of having played Madden for 14 years now to MGS’s ten. I got to help out on the guide for Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence, which was a really cool thing to do.

MGS4: Guns of the Patriots is out and it is quite honestly game of the decade for me. I beat it over the course of a weekend. Not because I’d planned to, mind you– I just got wrapped up in the story and enthralled and suddenly it’s Sunday and I have to be to bed in two hours and I’m just now finishing the hour long ending and oh man I want to start over and do it all again but I can’t I have work really I can’t okay maybe just a little before bed.

If I had to make a comics comparison, MGS4 is to the Metal Gear series what All-Star Superman is to Superman comics, only even more comprehensive and even better.

Hideo Kojima is a director who doesn’t skimp on the details. This shows in the attention paid to the story and what you can do in the game itself. One of the things that interests me the most about MGS4, other than the functioning in-game iPod which you can apparently rip your own music to, is The Beauty & The Beast Unit.

One of the overarching themes of the MGS series is that war makes monsters of men. No matter how honorable, good, evil, or whatever you are, war is going to ruin you. It’s the nature of the beast. The Beauty & The Beast Unit are the embodiment of this idea. They are four women who, while they were still young, encountered war and suffered under its boot. The girls ended up with post-traumatic stress disorder and were turned into war machines by an unknown party.

They became The Beauty and The Beast Unit, SNAKEHOUND, and were given special code names: Screaming Mantis, Laughing Octopus, Crying Wolf, and Raging Raven. Each prefix is a reference to a certain unit from Metal Gear Solid 3, while the animal tags are taken from FOXHOUND and the unit from MGS1. The Beauty represents what they once were– attractive young women. The Beast represents their outer appearance– monstrous war machines.

“They are humans that have been transformed by battle. They are the ultimate casualties of war.” According to Kojima, he chose to base these characters on beauty from the real world. “The world created these ugly beasts, but underneath they are gorgeous women. These ladies — this beauty — is real.”

Hideo Kojima, 1up.com

Where it gets even more interesting is their origins. Kojima wanted them to represent the real world. Lyndall Jarvis is from Cape Town, South Africa, and Laughing Octopus is ethnically Scandinavian. Yumi Kikuchi is from New York, and plays Raging Raven, a woman from Indonesia. Scarlett Chorvat’s from Slovakia, but Screaming Mantis was born in South America. Mieko Rye, Crying Wolf, is from Brooklyn, but reps Africa in-game.

It isn’t a 1:1 correlation, but it’s a step in the right direction. Their nationalities aren’t a huge part of the game. They’re pretty much literally one line in an audio conversation per boss. It isn’t a big deal, but it is at the same time. It’s a great move. War affects everyone, no matter where they are or who they are, and having the Beauty and Beast Unit be multicultural is a sharp way to represent that.

The Metal Gear Solid series has always been about storytelling. Its themes of war and its effects on life reflect throughout the entire series. The B&Bs are an obvious parallel, with their innocence being twisted and malformed into violence. There are plenty of other examples, as well, but this is one that leaped out at me.

It’s smart world building. It’s the kind of thing I’d like to see more often in comics. Let the little details do the work for you. You don’t have to have characters hop up on a soapbox and blah blah blah about their motivations or what they mean. Let the reader infer some things. MGS4 is amazingly unsubtle about basically everything on a certain level, but sometimes it slips in these little touches that make you pause.

In case you were wondering, the girls are all delightfully creepy bosses.

Shots below are ripped from Kotaku and various places on the internet.

Also, just for fun– Kojima and Frank Miller.

Now imagine Kojima making a Hard Boiled or Rusty the Boy Robot game.

Yes.

Don’t act like you wouldn’t wear it.

And don’t act like I wouldn’t wear this.

All I need in this life of sin,
Is me and my girlfriend
Down to ride to the bloody end,
Just me and my girlfriend

Honestly, I don’t generally like the Joker. He’s a one note villain– his gimmick is that he’s crazy and kills people. That isn’t really what I want out of my villains. It’s a flat motivation and part of why I’m not really digging on Batman’s rogues gallery. How many of them have the gimmick of “I’m just plain crazy” or “I hate Batman?” That’s boring.

So, yeah, generally, I don’t like the Joker. When I do like him, though, is when Harley Quinn is around.

They have an interesting dynamic. Harleen Quinzel was a psychologist who pulled some strings to get assigned to Arkham Asylum specifically to meet the Joker. After they meet, she falls for him hard and tries to seduce him. Joker, unsurprisingly, finds this hilarious and decides to go along with it. What follows is a whirlwind romance of old-fashioned violence, laughs, and whatever you call spousal abuse when you aren’t married.

Harley is kind of spectacularly damaged goods. She’s in love with a mass murderer and takes the abuse he dishes out with nary a complaint, nine times out of ten. She dresses up like a jester and kills people for fun. Her best friend mind controls and kills dudes for fun. She breezes through life doing exactly what she wants, how she wants, to who she wants… actually, that list bit ain’t so bad.

I’ve dug Harley ever since she first appeared on the Batman cartoon. She was a fun twist on the Joker’s style– more concerned with the comedy than the killing. She’s simultaneously playful and menacing. She’s just as likely to give you the joy buzzer as the bang gun. The joke is that both will kill you.

Harley is one of my favorite characters to read about, in part because of the stellar job Karl Kesel and the Dodsons did on her solo series. They spun a tale that combined both her latent guilt, her issues with the Joker, her desire to become her own woman, her desire to have fun, and her belief in love to create something both compelling and entertaining. There are times when I even like the Dodsons’ rendition of Harley better than Bruce Timm’s. They draw her with a smile that’s infectious.

I enjoy the fact that she makes the Joker interesting again. Suddenly, he’s got a foil. Sure, she’s crazy, but she forces him into new areas beyond just “Hee hee hoo hoo look how ZANY and CRAZY and EVILLLL I am!” The opening arc of Harley Quinn involved him faking an injury while living with Harley. Harley was planning this big get-back for Batman while the Joker grew increasingly threatened by how efficient and trustworthy she seemed.

It’s really fun, despite all the murder, and an interesting relationship. Joker, as befitting his supersanity, flipflops between hating her and loving her. One of my favorite scenes between the two is in Emperor Joker. This is after Joker has gained almost infinite power.

I dunno, I dug it.

I really like Harley is what all this boils down to. I actually have four pieces of Harley related art. The first sketch I ever bought was of Harley Quinn, in fact, by Mike Huddleston.

From left to right, top to bottom– Mike Huddleston, Rob Reilly, Dustin Nguyen, and Art Baltazar. Pardon the poor scan on the Gotham Girls print, it was too big for my scanner and I couldn’t find an image of it online. It’s also the only one that isn’t an original.

NRAMA: And so you were left with a handful of continuity issues as result – – why didn’t the Guardians call a 1011 when all the other New Gods died? Why didn’t Superman recount his experiences in Death of the New Gods when he was talking about the New Gods to the JLA? How did the villains capture J’onn? Obviously, if you dealt in all the minutia of every storyline since Identity Crisis or earlier, you’d go nuts – so what was your personal line in the sand that you used in writing Final Crisis in regards to what “mattered” and what didn’t?

GM: What mattered to me was what had already been written, drawn or plotted in Final Crisis. The Guardians didn’t call 1011 when Lightray and the other gods died in Countdown because, again, Final Crisis was already underway before Countdown came out.

Why didn’t Superman recount his experiences from DOTNG ? Because those experiences hadn’t been thought up or written when I completed Final Crisis #1. If there was only me involved, Orion would have been the first dead New God we saw in a DC comic, starting off the chain of events that we see in Final Crisis. As it is, the best I can do is suggest that the somewhat contradictory depictions of Orion and Darkseid’s last-last-last battle that we witnessed in Countdown and DOTNG recently were apocryphal attempts to describe an indescribable cosmic event.

To reiterate, hopefully for the last time, when we started work on Final Crisis, J.G. and I had no idea what was going to happen in Countdown or Death Of The New Gods because neither of those books existed at that point. The Countdown writers were later asked to ‘seed’ material from Final Crisis and in some cases, probably due to the pressure of filling the pages of a weekly book, that seeding amounted to entire plotlines veering off in directions I had never envisaged, anticipated or planned for in Final Crisis.

The way I see it readers can choose to spend the rest of the year fixating on the plot quirks of a series which has ended, or they can breathe a sight of relief, settle back and enjoy the shiny new DC universe status quo we’re setting up in the pages of Final Crisis and its satellite books. I’m sure both of these paths to enlightenment will find adherents of different temperaments.

Grant Morrison, 2008

Oh, Grant. This sounds like trouble in paradise. Let’s see what wrong, okay? We’ll talk you through this.

I met her last week, this insane tart
We been swimmin’ in each other with the same heart
I mean, I think we might be sections of the same part
And we don’t separate at all until the day’s dark

–El-P, “Oxycontin Pt 2”

I remember back when you and Marvel broke up. It was explosive– Marvel turned around and undid some of your plots and twisted others. Joe Q didn’t take it well at all. He just couldn’t understand that your first love had looked in your direction and batted her eyes. Guys make strange decisions for love. These things happen.

Your first move when hooking back up with the DCU was to see about getting her some nice things. Some new stories, a new character or two, and most of all, self-awareness.

Remember that, Grant? You wanted your girl to look her best and able to stand on her own two feet. What followed was Seven Soldiers, Batman, and 52. You got Final Crisis kickstarted. You know what? It worked. Your girl was strutting down the street, all eyes on her like it was the Silver Age all over again.

Then, the troubles started. Batman ended up late enough to need a four issue fill-in. All-Star Superman’s schedule went a little rocky and you caught some heat for it. 52 went off without a hitch… almost. It would’ve gone perfectly without Bulleteer, who kept showing up in the series and flying around.

“Wait,” you said. “Guys, really. She can’t fly. She wouldn’t join a superteam. What’s going on?” No one knew. It just happened.

Weird things kept happening. Your Batman run featured a fairly ill-received crossover. It seemed to go nowhere. Your big Final Crisis plans involved the New Gods being put on ice for up to a year to heighten the tension of the first issue. Instead, they were, in your own words, “were passed around like hepatitis B to practically every writer at DC to toy with as they pleased.”

You weren’t happy about that, were you? It’s like your girl is being unfaithful to you. So, you went to get back at her. You went to Virgin Comics and helped them create a new cartoon. That’s big bucks right there, plus better exposure than comics. You started writing movie scripts. Yeah, that’s right– we know about you and We3.

Your relationship is looking a little sour, Grant. It’s a rough patch, you say? I’m not so sure.

You see, your girl, your sentient DC Universe? It woke up, took a look around, and decided you weren’t treating her right. No more lobster for dinner. You might bring home some Popeye’s, but that was about it. The champagne was replaced with box wine. And man, what happened to all the fun you two used to have? Seven Soldiers was over. You kept saying that Final Crisis was coming soon, but it always felt far away.

She got fed up, Grant. She left you.

And we made love to the thought that life’s ill
And how it’s crazy that through all of this swill
How you can bump into the beautiful while jumpin’ from sills

–El-P, “Oxycontin Pt. 2”

She found somebody else. Who was it?

It’s your homeboy Geoff Johns, Grant.

Think about it. He went from Infinite Crisis, which was a little rough to say the least, straight into 52. 52 was where he met you, wasn’t it? What came after 52? Oh… it was the Sinestro Corps War. That’s the beginning of a mega-arc that basically sprang out of what, an eight page story from twenty years ago?

That’s continuity at work, Grant. The DCU is whispering her secrets into Geoff’s ears and telling him exactly what to do. Remember that?

It’s cool, Grant. You’re still amazing. It’s just that you’re destined for bigger and better things. I heard that you’re all topsy-turvy for Vertigo. That’s good for you, man. Keep it moving. You’re technically going back to your ex, but she was good to you, wasn’t she? You guys parted amicably, I think. Maybe it’ll work out this time.

Don’t let the DCU get you down. She’s found a good man in Geoff. He’s going to treat her right, so don’t worry about that. You just do you. Go ahead and get Final Crisis done and out of the way so that you and JH Williams III can get the Vertigo series jumping off. Impress her as soon as you get her, Grant. You don’t want to get your feelings hurt, man.

You can do it, man. You’re a handsome dude with big ideas. You’ll be fine. Keep it 100, man, and you’ll have everyone out there, not just Vertigo, checking for you.

(You know I’m back, right? You can find this re-debut simulcast on Funnybook Babylon, my Black Comics Cartel family.)

The “Will they? Won’t they?” over Batwoman is basically over. Todd Klein (accidentally?) confirmed it on his revamped Current Projects page.

Rucka on words, JH Williams III on art, Todd Klein on letters.

Courtesy of the digitalfemme Cheryl Lynn:

Torchbearers: Destiny Ajaye

Torchbearers is her spotlight on black women in comics. Destiny Ajaye is the heroine of Genius, and is drawn by Afua Richardson. Jon from PCS reminded me that it was coming out.

Who’s psyched?

Me, right here. It’s got two things I want– black female heroine and revolution. Yes, please. More.

Summer of Love is on hold– I’ve got a grip of paying work to get done, and I’m also kind of exhausted. I’m gonna take this weekend to write and start posting on Monday, M-F.

I’d apologize, but I promised I’d stop lying*.

Back to listening to T.I. and writing.

(*that is a lie)

One post a day for as long as I can manage it. Let’s get it in!

The first post is not even on my blog, and therefore means that I lost before I even started. JK Parkin of Blog@Newsarama asked me to do a guest blog for their I Heart Comics summer piece. I wrote I Heart The Middle Tier. It went live today. My partner-in-crime Matt Silady (of MattSilady.com, natch), did one last week. It is on the new Golden Age.

An excerpt from mine:

Can you imagine a Superman comic where Clark Kent hangs up the cape and simply decides to chill out on the farm in Smallville for a few months and do nothing? Or a Batman comic where Bruce Wayne pours his Batmobile budget into the Martha Wayne Foundation? What if Tony Stark hung up his armor and we got twelve issues of Tony Stark brokering business deals, picking out thousand dollar suits, and trying to appease his stockholders– how about that?

Those books would feel weird. We’re used to getting a certain kind of story out of the top tier comics. Superman’s gotta punch people, Batman’s gotta scare people, and Spidey’s gotta make bad jokes. The stories usually need to have some kind of attention paid to continuity or something to do with shake-ups or lasting changes. If you’re writing a character who doesn’t have these expectations, though, you can get away with a lot more.

Go check it out.

While I’m here, if you’re a video game fan, go visit SOCOM.com and see what part of my day job is like.

Let me start this off with a quote from Common’s “Sixth Sense,” just so that you don’t get what I’m saying twisted.

Some of that shit, y’all pop to it, I ain’t relating
If I don’t like it, I don’t like it, that don’t mean that I’m hating

Plain talk: Racists and sexists make for terrible villains.

Wonder Woman’s next big story arc is about the Manazons. They were introduced in DC Universe Zero over the course of three pages where a couple gods are sitting around and watching Wonder Woman. They reveal the Manazons and say something along the lines of “Never send a woman to do a man’s job!”

Lame.

The thing with villains these days is that we basically have two types. One type has two or fewer dimensions. They cackle and kill and are basically evil. Depending on the writer, this is the Joker and Magneto. Their gimmick is that they are evil. If they are part of a group that once called itself “Evil” or “of Doom” or something like that, they are probably part of this group. This is a holdover from the days when (bang, pow) comics were for kids.

The other kind of villain is the kind who is more three dimensional. He has a goal beyond just wrecking shop, or at least some kind of personality that makes him more than someone who just wants to kill everything ever for whatever reason. Claremont’s Magneto pretended to be this guy, Lex Luthor is this guy, Two Face is this guy when written popularly, and Prometheus started out as this guy. They aren’t evil for evil’s sake– they are evil for a (occasionally good) reason.

Which one of these villains do you prefer? The nuanced one or the black & white one?

I don’t mind evil villains. Joker is frustrating, but fun when Harley Quinn is around to take away from the “RARR EVIL” stuff. But, I think that evil villains are a cheap writer’s trick at this point. With the skill of writers these days, we should be able to have villains that don’t instantly inspire revulsion in the reader. We should be able to mix it up.

I’m only picking on the Manazons because it’s the most recent example. Their gimmick is that they were put into action by two gods who straight up say that women are less capable than men. What decent person is going to be able to say “Hey, this guy is really interesting. I wonder what would happen if they win?”

What happens if the Manazons win? A bunch of women are banished to the kitchen, and even then, they know that men cook better, anyway.

What’s the point? Where’s the depth? Racist sexist villains are cheap. When’s the last time you were like, “Boy, the Red Skull sure is an interesting character! His methods suck, but I can understand where he’s coming from!”

Racism and sexism are bad words. This is partly why people who are (rightly or wrongly) accused of sexism or racism get so upset at the very idea of being such. The only people who accept those labels are people who will never change. Everyone would like to be past the use of them. Racists and sexists are Bad People. Who wants to be a Bad Person?

Tossing these traits onto a bad guy is just another way to make him more unlikeable without actually writing scenes that illustrate that. It’s telling, not showing, and it is cheap like a dinner at a friend’s house or a date at the communal TV room in your dorm. It’s lazy.

Seeing a brand new villain immediately go into “mulatto” or “whore” talk immediately kills any connection I might have had. Now, he’s just a regular old bad guy. A regular, old, uninteresting, boring, cliched, terrible bad guy.

Give it a miss. You can have bad guys without using these shortcuts. I can’t believe how tired I am of seeing cheap cookie-cutter villains. It takes me out of the story instantly. and it just feels hilariously lazy.

I’m not asking for a moratorium, but at least give me another reason to hate these dudes beyond “Ha ha, he said nigger.”