Woke up this morning and saw that Robot 6 had the good stuff: a brand new trailer for Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca’s Afrodisiac, published by AdHouse Books.
I want this book. C’mon, y’all, this book is right up my alley. I’m the guy that talks about black people and comics all the time and this is a comic about a black guy. 2 + 2 = Real Talk!
If you’ve been reading for a while, you know that I like my comics to be more variety show than epic tale. Although there are a few long stories I adore, most of which I’ve gone on about already, there is nothing I like better than an eclectic bunch of simple stories. Gotham Knights, Superman/Batman, Legends of the Dark Knight, Batman Confidential, Tiny Titans, all of these are the kinds of things I like.
This love of the well-told episode extends to other forms of media. I prefer The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings. I hate when they artificially extend a storyline by making the season finale end on a cliffhanger. And I generally like one-off stories better than overall arcs. The episode of the Justice League Unlimited in which Wonder Woman got turned into a pig, or the time that Buffy had to take on a mind-control creature that came out of the eggs that students had to carry around for sex-ed.
So it’s strange to me that Dollhouse entirely flips my preferences. I don’t care what assignment that Echo has this week or how well she completes it. I want to see more of the sub-plots, the foreshadowing, and the ongoing undercurrents that color every episode. I want to see the grander story.
I’m not sure what it is that is different about the series. I’ve seen a lot of criticism of Echo/Caroline, but while I don’t find her a particularly interesting character, she carries the stories along and makes me believe she can be both creatively clever while being clueless to larger implications.
Maybe it’s because the Dollhouse itself is evil. When the show is about heroes, I don’t like to see them hit trouble. When it’s about villains, I welcome a chance to make them miserable.
But I think there’s a larger reason. So many shows give us meaningless plot-twists and clever set-ups that reveal themselves to be just that – clever set-ups, with payoffs to be filled in by the writers if its necessary. Dollhouse is planned, from first to last. There aren’t any dropped story lines or hollow explanations or rushed justifications. I know that if I see something strange, it was because I was meant to, and I’ll get a satisfying pay-off if I wonder about it.
Take note, Lost. Oh wait. That show actually did well.
Please watch Dollhouse, you guys. If the show gets cancelled because the world ends I will go freaking crazy on someone and I can’t be sure it won’t be myself. So.
“Oh, no. No no no. That’s—that’s Venom. That’s Venom as me. That’s—and it’s not even the good one. It’s Mac Gargan.”
— Spider-Man, New Avengers #50
Due to popular demand, I guess I have to dedicate one of these installments towards Mac Gargan, the current Venom. First, a quick refresher on who Mac Gargan is and what he was up to before donning the hungry goo spandex.
Mac Gargan used to be a greedy private investigator, doing just about any job as long as the price was right. Jonah Jameson hired him to figure out the link between Spider-Man and Peter Parker. Mac wasn’t getting anywhere due to Peter’s spider-sense indicating when to slip away, so Jameson pulled out the big bucks for more desperate measures. Using an experimental serum and a cybernetic suit, he transformed Mac into the Scorpion. On the plus side, he was granted strength and agility to counter Spider-Man, along with a cool tail that shoots stuff. On the minus side, it drove him completely mad.
I think we need more villains who are only evil because whatever gave them powers also made them fucking crazy. A lot of the early Spider-Man villains had that going for them.
Scorpion existed for decades as a B-list Spider-Man villain. He was one of the many, many villains who in some way existed as the dark shadow of Spider-Man. Due to his insanity and his insatiable hatred for Jameson, Gargan tended to fail as a team player. Also, some of his insanity came from his inability to remove his costume.
Mark Millar reinvented Gargan for the better during his run in Marvel Knights Spider-Man, which I covered earlier in this series. At some point, Gargan had become a top henchman for Norman Osborn. His armor was gone, though with many operational scars left behind, and his sanity had been more or less restored. Sure, he was still a bad guy, but he was a coherent bad guy. Under Osborn’s orders, he orchestrated the kidnapping of Aunt May as a way to mess with Spider-Man and get Osborn out of prison.
As we know, the Venom symbiote – having skipped on its latest host – decided that Gargan was ideal. Perhaps it was how Gargan’s Scorpion powers are notably comparable to Spider-Man’s. Perhaps it was Gargan’s hatred of Spider-Man, spiked with his lack of Eddie Brock’s morals. But by the end of the day, Mac Gargan had become Venom.
The Alternative Press Expo is October 17-18 here in San Francisco. I’m going to be attending, because why not, you know? but alt comics are still not quite my bag. I’ve got manga, crime, and superheroes on lock, but I don’t know my Jeffrey Browns from my Chris Wares from my Kevin Huizengas.
What do I need to look out for? What’s worth picking up? Who should I see?
There was a sequence early in The Boys that’s stuck with me. Two pages from The Boys Vol. 2: Get Some
His line about hate not being “lazy-ass fuckin’ bullshit” is something that betrays a deeper story, and it looks like we’re getting it with the new arc of The Boys. CBR has a nsfw preview of The Boys #35, with this text:
Origins time. In the first of the two part “Nothing Like It In The World”, Mother’s Milk tells Hughie the story of his life to date- his upbringing in Harlem, the secret of his massive strength, the catastrophe that struck his family, and the unforgettable boxing championship disaster that led him to join The Boys.
His name is apt. I’ll just leave it at that.
A few weeks ago, I looked over Dell’s Dracula. Due to the pressure to be a more wimpy, G-rated company back in the 60’s, Dell had to take its classic monster properties and reinvent them into a more superhero fare. Another one of these properties was The Wolfman, which received its own movie-to-comic adaptation in 1964.
When Dell made their attempt at superhero comics, they took the concept and made a series called Werewolf, which lasted for three issues. If it wasn’t for the name and the fact that it came out around the time of Dracula and Frankenstein, it would have fallen into even more obscurity. See, the Dell take on Dracula was still a guy from a European country who lived in a dark castle and could turn into a bat. Frankenstein was still a big, strong guy with a green face and flattop. Werewolf, meanwhile, has absolutely nothing to link him to being a werewolf.
When you hear “Werewolf”, you think of Warren Zevon songs, Michael J. Fox movies, Jon Talbain, superheroes by night, Jason Bateman sequels to Michael J. Fox movies, furries, Joe Estevez movies, nards, Rahne Sinclair, Sabrewulf, John Jameson, Adam Sandler covers of Warren Zevon songs, and that episode of Real Ghostbusters where vampires and werewolves started biting each other and becoming hybrids. That episode ruled. What you don’t think about is Noob Saibot punching out enemy soldiers alongside a wolf.
Again, there are no credits listed, but it’s assumed that the creative team was Don Segall and Tony Tallarico. At first I was disappointed in finding out that Werewolf is in no way monster related like its brother comics. Then I delved deeper into the title and discovered that it is balls-out insane. As you see on the cover, the guy is a super spy, which means we’re going to be getting all sorts of James Bond shit, only because it’s a comic book from the 60’s, it’s going to be absolutely ridiculous!
Check that out. One million hits to this here site since early 2007. Break out the champagne, Gav and Esther, because it’s party time. No raises, though, suckers.
Thanks everybody. Who knew that telling people that their opinions were wrong could be so worthwhile? You can check the history here. 1200+ posts for you.
Here’s the brief on Mark Waid and Neil Edwards’s new series from BOOM! Studios:
INCORRUPTIBLE showcases super villain Max Damage, who had an epiphany the day The Plutonian destroyed Sky City. That day, when The Plutonian turned his back on humanity, Max Damage decided to step up. Now Max Damage has changed his name to Max Daring and turned from his formerly selfish ways to become… INCORRUPTIBLE. The flip side to this year’s break-out smash hit IRREDEEMABLE, examining the hard, difficult road to changing your ways and making a difference in the world…
Irredemable turned out pretty good, after kind of a rocky start, and this has a hook I can get down with. Villains turned good is usually pretty fun. Full press release after the jump.
BOOM! Studios kindly sent over a couple previews of books that are debuting tomorrow. Die Hard: Year One is a Howard Chaykin/Stephen Thompson joint, while The Unknown: The Devil Made Flesh is by Mark Waid and Minck Oosterveer.
Die Hard first:
Devil Made Flesh:
Seems kinda light as a preview, since it more or less requires knowledge of the previous series. I dug the last book, though, and it’s interesting that Doyle doesn’t seem to remember what happened. What do you think?
