Mark Millar’s much-ballyhooed Ultimate Avengers is introducing two new characters to the Ultimate universe: “Nerd Hulk,” which is pretty self-explanatory, and something he’s been calling “African-American Hulk.”
CBR just released advance solicits for the June Ultimate books, which covers Ultimate Avengers 2, Ultimate Spider-Man, and Ultimate X. Check out the Ultimate Avengers 2 solicitation:
ULTIMATE COMICS AVENGERS 2 #3 & #4
Written by MARK MILLAR
Pencils & Cover by LEINIL FRANCIS YU
Nick Fury’s Avengers have assembled: Black Widow, The Punisher, a new Hulk, War Machine and Hawkeye are souped-up and ready to face Hell…literally. Evil’s emissary comes in the form of The Ghostrider, a mysterious new villain sent to collect Satan’s debts: human lives. But how do you fight the devil and his men? With big guns and even bigger cojones. Who lives, who survives? Who knows? But it’ll be one hellish ride!! Join superstars MARK MILLAR and LEINIL FRANCIS YU in another heart-pumping adventure!
32 PGS./Parental Advisory …$3.99
I’m calling it: Tim O’Neil wrote the review of the year with his review of the whole Rise and Fall and Rise of Green Arrow and Red Arrow Merry Christmas crapfest. A quote:
regardless of your best intentions we all get kind of rudderless and wish we could depend on some rock-jawed daddy figure like Hal Jordan to tell us what to do but really Hal Jordan is and has always been a douchebag and his rebelliousness never struck me as particularly principled so much as just erratic and kind of willful
It’s not hard to see that Mohiro Kitoh’s Bokurano: Ours is going to end horribly for everyone involved. The book opens with pictures of fifteen characters, eight boys and six girls. They are the main characters of the book, the ones who will be piloting the giant robot against whatever threats care to invade Earth. Save for one younger girl, they’re all in the seventh grade.
The cast feels distressingly large. Not helping matters any is the way that the characters fade into a vague blur shortly after they each deliver personal introductions. We know their names, we know their ages, we know their relationship to each other (friends, with a sidebar for family), and that’s it. We’re instantly faced with a cast that means nothing to us.
Generally, large casts can mean a couple of different things. In the case of Lord of the Rings, a large cast is an opportunity for an author to tell several stories at once by splitting the cast into smaller, more manageable pieces. In Uncanny X-Men or Legion of Superheroes, a sprawling cast allows for serial storytelling that has a fresh, but regular, cast. In Bokurano: Ours, the cast is so large because basically all of these children are going to die.
The story should sound familiar to fans of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. Fifteen young kids sign a contract to play a game with a giant robot. They soon find out that the robot is real, the threats are deadly, and the robot is powered by their lives. After the threat is defeated, a person’s life force is sapped and they fall down dead. Later, when another threat appears, another pilot is chosen and the process is repeated.
Bokurano: Ours feels like a counter-shonen comic. A lot of shonen comics, like American adventure comics, revolve around wish fulfillment. The scrawny nerd gets powers, the village idiot finds out that he’s the most important person of all, a fighter becomes the best in the world, and a dumb kid no one likes ends up being the only person who can save the world. Read the rest of this entry �
William Munny, as played by Clint Eastwood, spends most of Unforgiven stumbling around, missing shots, and falling off horses. Eastwood, the prototypical Western hero and a guy who has starred in a majority of the good ones, is used to disassemble the myth of the gunfighter. He’s old, he’s slow, he’s tired, and he makes you wonder if he was ever really all that. He’s washed up and broken, shaken in body and in spirit.
The rest of the movie works similarly. The violence is ugly and awkward, with none of the style and swagger of Fistful of Dollars. There’s no “My mistake: four coffins,” to be found here, just a man bleeding out on the sand and desperate for a drink of water to quench his thirst. There is only an old man who has outreached his grasp and outlived his own usefulness.
And then Morgan Freeman, his friend, dies because of what Munny did and is trussed up in the town square as a warning. After that, Munny takes his first drink of liquor in years, and then he goes and proves that gunfighters do exist, but they are cruel, evil men, and God help you if you get in their way.
“Well he should have armed himself if he’s gonna decorate his saloon with my friend.”
Another good example is in The Bourne Ultimatum, or possibly The Bourne Supremacy. At one point, Jason Bourne is arrested and taken to an embassy. He’s meek and silent throughout the scene, despite having displayed the ability to mow through trained soldiers with ease. However, he waits, and when an agent gets too close, he explodes into the action we expected to see.
I don’t know the term for this sequence of events. It’s different from the normal action movie move, where the hero is beaten down before getting a second win or new motivation. The best way to describe it is to describe a boiling pot. It is the conscious avoidance of explosive action on the part of a character who, by all rights, should be knee deep in it until the anticipation reaches a certain level, critical or not, and then the pot boils over and we’re in the thick of it. It’s always done for a specific storytelling reason.
Call it “suspended expectations,” maybe?
(An aside: Mark Millar and Steve McNiven bit the plot for their Old Man Logan, but never even came close to stepping out of Unforgiven‘s shadow, nor approaching the subtlety to be found in the film. When Eastwood starts gulping whiskey, there’s no clever callback to when his wife made him stop. It just happens and it is up to you to connect the dots. In Old Man Logan, Millar and McNiven pull the trigger on the violence too soon, save the turning point until after the violence, and then spend an entire issue bathing in blood. It doesn’t work because it has none of the pointed menace of Munny shooting an unarmed man and listing his sins, and hinges on excess, rather than precision and context. Millar, as ever, is derivative to the point that he cannot escape his influences.)
One of my favorite examples of this phenomenon is in Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece. OP is dumb boy’s comics, like Naruto or Bleach, but consistently maintains a higher level of quality over its several hundred issue run. This is due in large part to the fact that Oda often focuses on characterization over action, building a fairly tight cast who are funny, engaging, and most of all, fun to read about. We want to know about their quirks and their tragedies. Read the rest of this entry �
PS Wasp wasn’t raped. These guys were political torturers, but it wasn’t sexual. Sexual violence in Marvel books is a bit weird and I’ve avoided since I started (as far as I recall) as this stuff is all available to kids.
from ultimate avengers #5, words by millar, art by pacheco, inks by dexter vines
Political torture? What did they do, tie her to a chair and read her some Glenn Beck quotes? Did they get into a really, really heated debate over healthcare? Maybe diss her for voting Perot? Did they make fun of her for thinking that dead prez’s (bounce to this…) socialist movement was going anywhere?
Did they make her cry when they carefully explained that no one will ever spend as much on education as they do on war?
I’ve tripped and fallen across half a dozen links this morning about censorship and labeling and adult material and so on. I figure that’s a sign, so I’m throwing these out for you to check out. Keep in mind that various links may or may not be nsfw.
-Steve Bissette has been doing a great series of retrospectives on a comics controversy from 1986/1987. I came across it via a link to Colleen Doran’s blog, where she discusses her role in the controversy. Bissette has several (prologue, 1, 2, 3, 4) posts up currently, all of which are worth reading. Bissette’s got a really engaging style of writing and does a pretty good job of collating all this data. It’s a fun history lesson.
I usually hate empty linkblogging, but I’m still organizing my thoughts. I figure I’ll have something tomorrow or the day after. I will say that I am generally anti-labeling/ratings- I don’t think that you can apply a system with an objective scale to something as subjective as art, be it written, drawn, painted, scrawled, filmed, or programmed.
-I know Esther may not agree, but any list of the top Batgirls that does not include Cassandra Cain at #1 and Yvonne Craig at #2 is simply incorrect!
-6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental for the theme music.
-In honor of Girl Comics #1, we’re talking about… women and comics.
-It’s a pretty wide-ranging discussion, and we loop back around to Girl Comics pretty regularly.
-Lucy Knisley’s Doc Ock strip was a hit.
-Devin Grayson and Emma Rios’s Cyclops and Phoenix story was similarly well-received, if not as awwwwwdorable.
-Toward the end, I talk about Ann Nocenti some more, as I wonder what kind of reception she’d get in these days when feminists run wild all over the blogosphere.
-See you, space cowgirl!
I got a text from Gavin earlier letting me know that This Week In Panels was going to be late. He’s got no internet thanks to Storm, who is apparently running wild out in New Jersey. While Gavin waits to get his power and internet back (and I assume the arrest and trial of the weather witch), you guys are gonna have to wait about seven days for a super special This Fortnight In Panels.
Ron Wimberly’s been in Japan for the past few weeks, making me mad jealous. I’ve only been once, in the fall of ’08 for a work trip. All expenses paid was nice, but staying only a week was too short. But them’s the breaks! I did buy about five hundred bucks worth of clothes, though!
Ron’s been busy, drawing comics and making connects. He’s got a big deal coming up, so I’ll let him (and Benetton) tell it:
On Saturday, March 13th, Benetton Japan will be hosting a live paint show by an American artist, Ronald Wimberly, to celebrate Benetton Mega Store Shinjuku’s renewal opening. During the event, which takes place from 3pm to 9pm, the artist will be painting on a big screen in the window, which will be reported live on Ustream at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/benettonpress.
So, details:
Where: Benetton Mega Store Shinjuku‘s official Ustream channel
When: If you’re EST (where Brooklyn at), 0100-0300 Saturday morning. For those of us in PST (From Oakland to Sac-town, the Bay Area and back down), you can check it out from 2200-0000 on Friday evening. For those inbetween… do the math.
Who: Ron Wimberly, aka dπ
What: Live painting
We at Marvel have always worked to support the trend towards ultraviolence–our readers like it, we like it, and you’d have to be fucking terrified of money to put a leash on Mark Millar. But we’ve always tried to remember that, at the end of the day, we’re making a product, a bit of fun, and that if we take it too seriously, if we try to make some kind of philosophical statement about justice or heroism, we’re going to end up with a dour, boring slice of poorly written shit.
How do you like your brutish and child-like extreme violence? Do you like it to look deeply into your eyes, desperately asking if you get it? Do you understand what has to happen to make a good man do wrong? Do you see how he can’t stop killing, as if he’s developed a taste for blood? Did you see those bloody socks? Do you get it? This is horrible, do you finally understand the stakes?
Or do you like it to be off the cuff violent, an act done simply because That’s What Bad Guys Do, something borrowed from Crank 2 or the best of crime cinema? No message, and no meaning beyond, “Yeah, this guy? He’s a douchebag.”
