I don’t know if you noticed, but I posted the winners 35 minutes ago.
Psyche.
Sorry all. We moved offices at work and I’ve spent today, yesterday, and the day before buried in networking issues and cables of all sorts. Look for it tomorrow at lunch.
We’re almost done with yet another week of this awful Morrison mind-scramble crap. God, what a hack. Between this and his Seven Soldiers run, I don’t even get why the man gets any work. Did you even read his New X-Men run a few years back? The guy who followed him was SOOOO much better.
But enough about that. Yesterday’s update saw some incomprehensible garbage involving Rubik’s Cubes and Metron as a tard. I don’t know, Final Crisis sucks. Let’s move forward!
As always, thanks to david “hermanos” brothers for helping me with this. He wanted me to remind you that a new Seaguy miniseries comes out today. Make sure to stay far away from that tripe. The last one was bad enough. Fucking Morrison.
We’re almost done with this week. Tomorrow, we get Darkseid at a rave and a guy with a bunch of bubble monitor things wrapped around his head. You can see a preview here.
, words by grant morrison, art by marc silvestriMy Scott & Jean is accepting change. Opinions change, people change, stories change, characters change, and comics change. Gambit and Rogue had a “will they or won’t they?” relationship when I first started reading comics. Cannonball was on the verge of becoming a great leader. Iceman was learning just how powerful he really is. Scott and Jean were going through relationship troubles. And so on.
When things last that long, they stagnate.
New X-Men was the last great X-Men story. It told a tale that of drama, death, and revenge that, in the end, was solved by love. Jean Grey is basically the main character of Morrison’s New X-Men. Despite having grown apart from her husband after he went through some serious trauma, she loves him. She’s grown-up enough to let the relationship go without any drama or mess. She laughs, and tells her husband to live. It was easily the most mature thing to ever happen to that relationship, which has been fraught with Claremont-style fairy tale love and forced drama.
It’s over, let it be. It’s time for something new.
I’ve got no interest in Green Lantern: Rebirth, Flash: Rebirth, the return of Babs Gordon as Batgirl, Johnny Storm and Iceman being dialed back to being idiots because writers are too lazy or too infatuated with the first time they read them (whatever happened to that friendship, anyway?), Cyclops going back to being cold and aloof, the X-Men going from thriving minority to endangered species, or any of that crap. Leave 1985 in the past, because we have been there and done that.
Stories shouldn’t last forever.
I think most of the people reading this have heard of Dollhouse. It’s a series about a super-secret underground organization that rents out ‘Dolls’ out to the rich and powerful. Dolls are men and women who have had their memories wiped, and have been mentally implanted with memories that allow them to complete a specific task asked for by the client.
A good enough premise, but a few things keep hitting me while watching.
Sometimes I wonder about the backstories of the characters, and how they relate to their skills. Batman has his parents murdered in front of his eyes. He becomes the best martial artist, the best detective, the best strategist, the best escape-artist, etc. True, he did have a long time to train, but what are the odds of him actually being the best, no matter how hard he worked?
Frank Castle had his entire family murdered in front of him. No lifetime of training for him. He went straight to ultimate badass after that.
Superman tops them both with his entire planet blowing up. He becomes, arguably, the most powerful being on earth.
It’s not that I can’t understand the reasons for this. In the story, a traumatic event explains the character’s drive and focus, which in turn explains their skill. Also, practically speaking, few people want to read a superhero comic about a superhero who feels fine and isn’t very good at what they do.
At the same time, I wonder about ways to break from the mold. An evil part of me wants to make up a superhero character who has that traumatic past, but whose past hasn’t conferred upon them the skill that other heroes have. It’s tragic to be the hollow-eyed, traumatized heavyweight who saves other people’s lives because you couldn’t save your own. How much sadder would it be to be the hollow-eyed, traumatized screw-up who can’t run fast enough to save people’s lives, can’t fight well enough to save people’s lives, and is just too damn dumb to figure out the situation, anyway?
Another fun-filled week comes to a close. Last time, Hank Pym blew himself up to save the SHIELD folks. None of this would have happened if they remembered Ultimate Captain Marvel exists. There’s a joke in there about Pym committing suicide because he saw that his Janet-less self leads to Dan Slott’s Mighty Avengers, but I… oh, wait. I just made the joke. Carry on.
Let’s finish this off with the Ultimates.
Wow, that’s not a very impressive line-up for the Ultimates. Two of them just died, one of them is dying and the other one wants to die.
Hope you enjoyed this week’s run. ManiacClown and I had a blast. I’m going to be gone for the next few days thanks to the CHIKARA King of Trios tournament in Philly, but I’ll be back with more of that Venom garbage people seem to enjoy. In the meantime, enjoy the usual set of words from hermanos and Esther.
Yesterday’s installment featured Thor and Captain America talking about financing or whatever, followed by Iron Man and Ms. Less-Than-Marvel taking on Multiple Man. Then an arrow shot out. Who could it possibly be?!
In Ultimate X-Men #100, they killed off Ultimate Madrox, so in one fell swoop we get rid of the Matrix and Rocky Horror jokes. Due to the latter, ManiacClown is currently inconsolable.
Join us tomorrow as we close out yet another week.
Reading about Oracle always tangles me up in logistical questions. Does second-life work like that? Can a guy really open up a wall in a game? When a woman screams in real life, does it make any sense at all that her avatar starts screaming, too? Because I think she would be too busy screaming to tell her character to scream. Then again, maybe it’s pre-programmed that they scream under certain circumstances.
And how does one explode a human head, anyway? I first thought it would happen with an explosive device, but that couldn’t happen unless said device were pre-planted in said head. The second idea was heating up the liquid inside the skull with microwaves, but it seems like that would get the excess liquid to bubble out the eyes and nasal cavities. Unless it happened fast enough to heat the liquid instantly, which brings us back to an explosive device.
While I may not be much of a second-lifer or skull-exploder, I do know my Babsology, and more importantly, my superheroes. The series is called The Cure. The first issue chronicles the villain’s desperate, yet evil, attempts to save his desperately ill daughter. It also makes much of the hero’s misery over her grievous injury. Babs is going to have to choose whether to heal the girl or heal herself. Being a hero, she’s going to heal the girl. There is a way that set-ups like these go. In fact, this is the way that this set-up has already gone in Birds of Prey.
And so, of course, I’m hoping it goes the other way. Part of this is because of my shameless bias for Batgirl Babs. Part of it – let’s say that I’ve had it up to here with stories that come complete with forgone conclusions. My heart drops a bit each time I see summaries that go along the lines of: “Will Batman kill the Joker this time?” “Is this the end for Lois and Clark?” “Is Batman dead?” The answer is always ‘no.’ Always. Without exception. We know it the moment we pick up the solicit.
This time, I’m hoping for a surprise.
And we return. As you may recall, the last installment had the X-Men being dysfunctional as always. Then we saw Thor and Captain America fight side-by-side against the Army of Darkness in order to save the life of Valkyrie.
In terms of cutting room floor jokes, ManiacClown wanted to have Danvers complain that she can accept being killed by Magneto or Doom, but not a C-lister like Multiple Man. Then after a series of shots, “BLAM! D-lister. BLAM! E-lister. BLAM!”
Tomorrow we have… Okay, let me break it down for you. The first issue had a variant cover of Dazzler. The second one had a variant cover of Xavier. We saw what happened with those two. This issue’s variant has Yellowjacket. You know you want to read tomorrow’s update.
I just saw the preview for Justice League 31 on the IGN website, and something in it really bothered me. This something has been bothering me for a while in comics.
Dinah decks Ollie, her husband, because he embarrassed her. It isn’t playful roughhousing, or a light smack on the shoulder, or even a slap. She punches him, and he gets up and says that he deserved it. Then Hal Jordan, Ollie’s friend, says that he deserved a lot more than that. Then they go on with the discussion.
I.
That.
No.
No, no, no, no, no.
Let’s run that the other way. Ollie comes up to Dinah and punches her in the face hard enough that she’s knocked to the ground. When she gets up, he tells her that he punched her because she’s his wife and she embarrassed him. Do you think there is a chance in hell that she’d agree? Or that her friends would also agree and the discussion would go on? No. Ollie would go the way of Hank Pym. He’d get thrown out, beaten up, and his character would be marked as a disgrace for the foreseeable future.
This isn’t Batman and Catwoman fighting because they’re on different sides of the law. It isn’t the friendly wrestling matches, or even the full-on fights that we see between vigilantes when things get heated. This is one spouse, in this case the more highly trained martial artist, beating another spouse for not toeing the line. This has happened before with Ollie and Dinah. This is not okay. This needs to stop.
