Last time on We Care a Lot, I discussed Eddie Brock’s cancer retcon. Before that, I was talking about Daniel Way’s Venom on-going series. To refresh your memory, the Venom symbiote is on the loose up in Canada. It killed off all of army girl Patricia Robertson’s friends and is on its way to a more populated area. Robertson is allied with an alien life form named the Suit, who fights with a cell phone gun. They are being antagonized by a pair of spy chicks who want Venom for themselves. Although they have already been killed, another couple of them have popped up. Venom has finally settled on a host that he can live off of forever.

And that’s where we left off. Venom #10 begins with the Venom-controlled Wolverine attacking Vic and Frankie’s ship and forcing it to crash. The two suit up in their armor and reveal to the reader that they’re probably into each other sexually. Of course they are.

They don’t last a minute. Frankie is stabbed to death by Venom-Wolverine and Vic stumbles upon her doppelganger’s corpse from earlier. She realizes that she’s nothing more than a clone, puts her gun to her head and pulls the trigger.

The torso remains of the Suit give Patricia a new cell phone he has created. He says that he placed the original in a special place and that the new phone acts as a detonator. Venom-Wolverine busts in after her and she presses the button to activate the first phone. As we see, after Wolverine was knocked out by that nuke, the Suit tore open his chest and shoved his phone in there. Now the cell phone goes off, electrocuting Wolverine from the inside and forcing off the symbiote.

BOOOO!

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I find that when I have a difficult challenge to face, it can be overcome more easily if I think of the theme music from Terminator 2.  That lets me pretend I am a steely-eyed, nineties Linda Hamilton who is working to prepare for a post-apocalyptic society and who can do pull-ups and stab someone in the knee with a pen if they cross me.

Sometimes the theme music from the animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series works better if I’m feeling a little more jiffy.  Something about the exclamation of ‘Turtle Power!’ at the end just works for me.

Anyone draw inspiration from a similar source?

I wrote, a few posts ago, about selective continuity, the practice of admitting some parts of continuity into your vision of a character and setting other parts aside, and the way that that leads to wildly different visions of the same character.

At the end, though, I mentioned that often I will dismiss a writer’s version of a character, particularly if it is a character I like and want to keep seeing in a certain light, while being fine with that writer mucking up another character’s reputation.

I’ve seen this happen a lot in comics, and there seems to be a consistent excuse for it; that the writer him or herself is biased toward one character, or one type of character.

“Don’t read him, he always writes women as bimbos.”

“She hates that character and is using the comic to make them look bad.”

“He’s given an interview where he talks about how that’s his favorite character from when he was a kid.”

What better way to drown out continuity than with a resounding cry of “NO FAIR!”  There are, however, a few problems with it. 

The first is the way it tends to exaggerate creator’s preferences.  A casual mention of a character that a writer or editor liked or disliked as a child can lead to endlessly recurring denunciation by fans, who assume that any plot point is either meant to artificially build up or knock down that character.  I’m not a huge fan of Wonder Girl, but if I ever write Wonder Girl in comics, I don’t think I’d take a hit out on her just because of my lack of appreciation.  (And I’ve mentioned several times on this site that I think Batman is a jerk, a prick, and arrogant idiot, and a torturer.  I hate to see what kind of backlash that will bring about when I write Batman comics.  ((And I will.  I swear it.)))

The second problem with taking a writer out by questioning their intentions is that it often turns into a self-selecting point of view.  The few times when they did not adhere to their supposed pattern?  Flukes.  Fear of being mocked.  Or something prevented by the constraints of the story.  It’s never that their styles are more varied than critics will admit.

Finally, this view prevents readers from even considering a new take on their character.  You cannot imagine how much it pains me to write that last sentence, but it is true.  Characters often need to change or they stagnate, and seeing your character built up over time is a fun thing.

That being said, I do enjoy torpedo-ing a piece of bad, or obviously biased, writing from time to time.  Writers as well as characters can stagnate, and writers as well as characters can have bad habits.  (Of course I wouldn’t know about either.)  And fans are free, and often eager, to point it out.  Plus there is a air of good, old-fashioned village gossip to that kind of talk.  As long as it doesn’t escalate to torches and pitchforks, it can be a lot of fun.

I’m a huge Darwyn Cooke fan, and a big Richard Stark fan, and I was going to read and review The Hunter today. Except Amazon is sold out and I can’t get a copy until apparently August 10th.

So, yeah, don’t hold your breath on that one. I’d still kill a man for this dang book, but I guess I’ll have to wait.

If you see it, buy it. I’m positive it’s gonna be good.

It’s time to take another trip to the Graphic Audio well, this time for the audio book based on the novelization of Crisis on Infinite Earths. I’ve dealt with the Graphic Audios for Infinite Crisis and 52 on this site, which were both adapted by Greg Cox. I don’t think I’ve ever shown that guy the respect he deserves, since he’s done a rather good job with what he’s been given. He’s able to translate from art to text very well, while making the right decisions on what to cut for space reasons. I notice this mainly because he didn’t write the CoIE adaptation.

Rather, it was Marv Wolfman, the man who wrote the original comic series over twenty years ago. My feelings on Crisis is that it was average. It has its moments and the art is very nice, but it’s very boring most of the time and centers around some mostly mediocre characters. Still, it’s one of the first major epics of comic book storytelling and an important part of comic history.

You might think that having Wolfman adapt his own comic could only be a good thing. Who knows more about what was going on in Crisis than the man who wrote it? Sadly, this isn’t the case. The novelization of Crisis comes off like it’s being retold by a guy who read it once twenty years ago, but keeps getting it confused with how much he loves Barry Allen.

If you’ve read the original comic, you might be wondering what I mean by that. The Flash only got captured, died blowing up that machine and then inspired Wally West to take up the mantle. As important as the story is to him, he’s only a supporting character at best (which could also be said for Supergirl’s role).

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I’ve written before about how, when following a character, you generally have to throw out the continuity you don’t like and read the continuity you do.

What I’ve noticed, though, is this trend tends to cultivate pockets of people who see very different characters.  This depends on a lot of things.  One is when you got to know the character.  People who are used to the warm and cuddly Batman of the 70s, do not like the colder Batman of today.  People, on the other hand, whose first impression of Bats was The Dark Knight Returns, wonder at how cuddly he’s gotten in the past year.

There are also different incarnations of each character.  Catman started out as arguably one of the more noble Secret Six characters.  But in Legends of the Dark Knight he was introduced as a psychotic murderer who slashed up women.

But things get a bit contentious when people drop or keep continuity based on how much they like a character.  We are all inclined to give more credit to those we like, in fiction and in life, and serial fiction gives us a convenient excuse for bad behavior.  I’ve gotten into arguments in which I can write off a character’s fall from the path of righteousness with an airy, “Oh, that wasn’t X-character, that was Y-writer.  You can’t trust Y’s writing.”  If I don’t like the character, however, Y-writer’s character choices seem perfectly trustworthy, and fair game to use in an argument.  Ah, the capriciousness of the reader.

Lately DC has been adding an eight-page back-up story featuring a new character to existing comic books.

The Question has been appearing as a back-up to Detective Comics, and the Blue Beetle has been added to Booster Gold.  I love the double feature, both because it gives me a chance to get to know new characters and because it allows ongoing stories of characters who, for reasons that pass understanding, don’t sell well enough on their own.

And now that I’ve pushed some minor characters, let’s get back to the five-hundred pound gorilla; Batman.  This is a guy who’s passed around to any title that needs a boost, from The Outsiders to the Blue Beetle.  (Tough beat on that last one, Battsy.  We all felt it.)

But what would be a different way to present Batman, considering he’s already in at least five books at a time?  I don’t know.  But I know what I want, and that is a return of the Batman: Black and White series.

Batman: Black and White, pitched by Mark Chiarello, was a series of 8-page Batman stories written and drawn by different artists.  The stories ran singly at the end of the newly-created Batman: Gotham Knights, and as 4-story collections.  The art and the writing are superb, the stories wildly disparate, running the gamut from gothic horror, to poetic meditation, to cutsy bat-with-a-baby stories.  There is a story in which Batman frees a genetically-engineered mermaid.  There is one in which Batman threatens someone’s life for killing his son’s cat.  There is one in which Batman is futuristic freedom fighter, and one in which he and an early Catwoman/Batgirl mash-up fight nazis, and one where he bleeds in an alley.

The stories are collected into three volumes, all of which are well-worth getting.  They are a must-have to any fan, partly because of the talent involved, but mainly because they add up to more than the sum of their parts.  The many takes on Batman, his motivations and his effects, his different eras and his absurdities, end up building something far more epic and sweeping than any planned Batman story I’ve ever read.  If I wanted to argue that superhero comics can be moving and artistic, these are the books I would present as evidence.

And if something like that were to come back, I would clamor for people to read it, no matter what book it was stuck to.

Some people believe I always go out of my way to search for weird comics. Not always. The truth is that most of the time, weird comics go out of their way to find me.

For instance, one day I’m flipping through some back issues, when I find a batch of issues for a Honeymooners comic from the mid-80’s. I didn’t even know there was a Honeymooners series. I’m still not certain why there was one in the 80’s, considering the show was long dead and gone for decades. Now that I think about it, it does give me hope for one day reading Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s Perfect Strangers.

Okay. So now we have an old sitcom re-imagined into a comic years after the fact. That’s a good start. I looked through the covers and found one that completely stood out. It’s the kind of comic that makes you question the industry and reality itself for allowing such a thing to exist. Ralph Kramden in a comic book? I guess I could buy that.

Ralph Kramden in a comic book, wrestling alongside Captain Lou Albano?! Welcome to flavor country.

Much like the epic battle of Superman and Muhammad Ali, there are plenty of cameos in that crowd. I notice Frankenstein’s monster, Gumby, White Spy, Groucho Marx (obviously not amused by rest-hold spots), Alfred E. Newman and Gorbechaf.

Also note the top right corner. Not only is this issue #7, but it’s #7 of 24. That’s… odd. I guess Triad must have had a two-year contract and decided to flaunt it. Though from what I’ve found, the series didn’t make it past the twelfth issue. No other wrestler cameos, from what I’ve gathered.

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Might as well finish off the garbage post trifecta we have playing today.

In other news, I’ve finished off the Crisis on Infinite Earths Graphic Audio set, based off of Marv Wolfman’s disappointing novelization. Stay tuned for that review.

Yeah.  It’s a cheap, divisive, artificial question, but I’m still asking it.

DC or Marvel?