One neat little feature of Survivor Series is how just about any random wrestler is capable of main eventing the show, especially apparent in one of the two PPVs I’ll be showcasing in this entry. For every Randy Savage, there is a Koko B. Ware. Here’s a list of some of the guys who have main evented this major PPV.

– Bobby “The Brain” Heenan
– Hillbilly Jim
– Jacques from the Quebecers
– Marty Jannetty
– “The Model” Rick Martel
– Maven
– Shane McMahon
– Jim “The Anvil” Neidhart
– Paul Roma
– The Red Rooster
– Butch Reed
– Irwin R. Schyster
– Gene Snitsky
– Koko B. Ware

Now, you might point out that the Royal Rumble match is a main event too and therefore you have guys like Virgil and Mantaur main eventing major PPVs. To that I say…

Goddamn it. Moving on.

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Somebody asked me why I quit reading Amazing Spider-Man last week. I thought about doing a post detailing what I liked and didn’t like, but who cares? Why spend time on something that isn’t working for me? Instead, there is this, which, if you look at it sideways, maybe kinda relates.

My love of rap is directly related to my love of stories, but I’ll come back around to that.

I’ve been reading since I was a kid. I partially learned how to read by looking for my name in the credits of movies, which I would invariably watch all the way to the end. Comic books provided another useful resource, as the dialogue tended to be very simplistic and childish while the word choices were bombastic.

In other words, it wasn’t hard to understand the sentences, but you’d still have to look things up, particularly when you’re too young to figure out context. I remember Claremont/Lee-era X-Men being a treasure trove of new words. I know for a fact I learned “vernacular,” “deadpan,” and “kinetic” from those books. Poring over a stack of well-read comics, some freshly traded from friends, and having to ask someone how to say “Adirondacks” (where X-Force lived) is one of those things that sticks out in my memory.

Years later, I got a library card and was old enough to go there on my own. You could check out, what, five or eight books? Something like that. Enough to pack a backpack with. I’d burn through them and come back the next weekend for a reload. This would’ve been around 1995 or 1996.

In that same stretch of time, I started actually listening to rap. I knew the popular songs, and I knew that Method Man was kinda cool, and I really liked Tupac, OutKast, and Goodie MOb, but I didn’t really hear what they were saying. I couldn’t tell you anything about it, other than that it sounded cool. It was just something that came on the radio. And my mom controlled the radio, so that meant it was gonna be all R&B, all the time.

(Half a memory: Jay-Z’s “Ain’t No Nigga” dropped in 96, and it ran around my school like a brushfire. Tons of pretty little brown girls singing, “Ain’t no nigga like the one I got!” while the boys grunted, “No one can uh you bet-ter!” We couldn’t curse in school, you see.)

Jay-Z’s “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)” hit in 1998 like an atom bomb. It decimated the airwaves, and my memory may be faulty, but I think the only song that I remember even touching it was OutKast’s “Rosa Parks.” “Hard Knock Life” was huge, and as a result, I heard the song at least a dozen times a week. That bassline is still absurd.

Eventually I started paying attention to the lyrics, and suddenly rap started looking a lot more attractive. There were stories here, people playing roles and creating their own myths. On top of that, there was wordplay, the sort of wordplay you simply didn’t see in R&B or movies. The meaning of words changed based on inflection, position in the bar, or even just because. Flow mattered, and one thing Jay has in spades is flow.

I had an after school job at this point, and one of the guys I worked with was this white dude who was super into underground hip-hop. He introduced me to a site called UGHH, which was full of indie acts and Real Media files at the time. That’s where I discovered Bad Meets Evil, bka Eminem & Royce da 5’9″, and a gang of other groups. At this point, the floodgates were opened wide and I was lost forever. Company Flow, Big L (who I discovered overseas when Rawkus released The Big Picture), Big Pun, Ras Kass, Kane, G Rap, Chino XL–whoever it was, as long as they could spit, I was there.

The kind of rap I’m still the most attracted to is built around the lyrics. Clever turns of phrase, complex wordplay, tongue twisters, double entendres, or even just kicking phrases with three or four meanings are what gets my motor going. Language is immensely powerful, and rap is all about bending language to your will. What you are talking about isn’t half as important as how you say it and the words you choose to express it. A simple chase scene (“The cops came, so I ran”) can become something that puts you right into the scene, and a sad love song (which would be rendered with earnest literalism in R&B, most likely) can turn into a sad first-person story.

Flow is crucial. Evidence once said that “emcees without a voice should write a book.” Any idiot can tell stories. Some idiots even make major cash and fame doing it, and good on them for being able to parlay mediocrity into a living wage. The people who matter–and I’m not just talking about rap here–the ones that stick out in your memory, are the ones that do something different or new. Pick your poison–Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Grant Morrison, Kurosawa, William Gibson, James Ellroy, Scorcese, Michael Mann, Quentin Tarantino. All of these guys either do something new or synthesize something old into something that’s almost entirely new. All of these guys have a voice.

Consider Big Pun dropping this bit of brilliance into an otherwise normal verse: “Dead in the middle of Little Italy, little did we know that we riddled some middleman who didn’t do diddily.”

Or Biggie Smalls going rapid-fire: “Motherfucker better duck quick, cause/ me and my dogs love to buck shit/ Fuck the luck shit, strictly aim/ No aspirations to quit the game/ Spit yo’ game, talk yo’ shit/ Grab yo’ gat, call yo’ click/ Squeeze yo’ clip, hit the right one/ Pass that weed, I got to light one/ All them niggas, I got to fight one/ All them hoes, I got to like one/ Our situation is a tight one/ Whatcha gonna do, fight or run?/ Seems to me that you’ll take B/ Bone and Big, nigga, die slowly/ I’ma tell you like a nigga told me/ Cash Rule Everything Around Me/ Shit, lyrically, niggas can’t see me.”

Or Bun B murdering Jay-Z on “Big Pimpin'” to the point where Jay had to step his game up on the video version: Now, these motherfuckers know we carry mo’ heat than a little bit/ We don’t pull it out over little shit/ And if you catch a lick when I spit, then it won’t be a little hit/ Go read a book you illiterate son of a bitch and step up yo’ vocab/ Don’t be surprised if yo’ hoe step out with me/ and you see us comin down on yo’ slab/ Livin ghetto fab-ulous, so mad, you just can’t take it/ But nigga if you hate now/ then you wait while I get yo’ bitch butt-naked, just break it”

Or Eminem on “Kill You,” after he made his first mil: “It’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder/ Why I keep on duckin’ under the bed when I hear thunder/ ’cause I ain’t crazy, I say shit that’s crazy to crazy people/ To make ’em believe I’m crazy so they can relate to me/ And maybe believe in Shady, so they can be evil baby/ I like that!/ I’m only as crazy as people made me”

Or Fabolous mixing the Superman mythos with a stutter-step flow on Lil Mo’s “Superwoman”: “Be whipped? I might/ ’cause usually with my chips I’m tight/ But the only green I keep from you is kryptonite/ The way that blue and red suit fits your hips so right/ I be like duh-duh-duh-duh, duh-duh-duh-duh-duh DAMN”

Or any of the times when Ghostface has built an impressively visceral mood and setting using nothing but free association rhymes, new slang, and nonsense (“Hold up, we at the opera/ Queen Elizabeth rub on my leg/ Had ketchup on her dress from a Whopper/ Chunky ass necklace/ Must be her birthstone”), or when Luda has turned simple nursery rhyme-level lyrics into something that gets you heated just off charisma, or when Black Thought’s impressive technical skill knocks your socks off when you stop to think about his effortless rhymes. Young Jeezy isn’t lyrical, but he’s clever enough that I keep coming back for more. He’s like a supernova of charisma and black superhero music.

This sort of thing is why I listen to rap. It’s why I read books, it’s why I consume comics, and watch movies. It’s probably even why I made a conscious decision to become a writer. The stories and wordplay are what works for me, and if I can’t chew on something for a while, or if it’s just emulating something old, or if it’s just going through the motions, or if it’s just the same old, same old, it’s worthless.

One more Gobbledy Gooker video for you all and this one is very important to the annals of history. You see, the failed gimmick of the Gobbledy Gooker crosses paths with a man who will one day become the Shockmaster. It’s like George Washington meeting Abraham Lincoln.

Shock the turkey!
Shock the turkey!
Shock the turkey to life!

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Before we get to #15 on the list, let’s check back in with the Gobbledy Gooker.

Three cool guys right there. Three cool, cool guys.

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It’s ThWiP time. This week I’m joined by regular contributors Was Taters and Space Jawa. Jawa sent in something for Thanos Imperative, but I didn’t use it since it went against my “full page spreads are not a panel” rule. Also, David handed me a couple panels, but skipped on Amazing Spider-Man because it “became unreadable overnight.” Yikes.

Ant-Man & The Wasp #1
Tim Seeley

Assassin’s Creed: The Fall #1
Cameron Stewart and Karl Kerschl

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How about that? Day Four and I haven’t broken stride yet. This is promising. So far I’ve neither JMS’d this series nor Billy Gunn’d it. Let’s celebrate with the Gobbledy Gooker.

All right!

Now onto the list.

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Survivor Series trivia isn’t nearly as entertaining as Wrestlemania trivia, but I thought I’d give it a shot to fill up some intro space.

– Only two shows failed to include any elimination tag matches. 98’s “survival” had to do with its tournament setup while 02’s “survival” was mostly about the introduction of the Elimination Chamber. 02 also featured an elimination tables match and a three-way elimination tag match, which I suppose are close enough.

– Mick Foley has never been in an elimination tag match at any of these shows. Steve Austin has only competed in one during the 01 Series.

– The first non-elimination match at a Survivor Series is Hogan vs. Undertaker at the 91 show.

– John Cena is 6-0 at Survivor Series. Randy Savage is 5-0, though he did get eliminated in a match where his team won. Savage also went two years in a row where he was at the show and cut a live promo, but didn’t actually wrestle. The Ultimate Warrior is 3-0.

– Triple H lost his first seven Survivor Series appearances, though one of them is a no contest.

– Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels have been in four Survivor Series matches together. They teamed up in 88, fought for Bret’s title in 92, fought against each other as team captains in 93 and had that more well-known title match in 97.

– The first team to ever win with a shutout is the team of “The Model” Rick Martel, the Warlord, Paul Roma and Hercules at the 1990 Series. The first man to ever be the sole survivor will be brought up later in this installment.

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In late October, Vertigo published Vertigo Resurrected, a collection of rare stories.  One of them was Shoot, a story about schoolyard shootings in America by Warren Ellis.  Before it was published, the Columbine shooting happened.  According to Ellis, DC wanted to change the story, he refused, they refused to publish, and that was that. 

The new people at DC had a different take, and obviously it’s been a while since Columbine, and so the story came out.  I don’t have any problem with Ellis refusing to change his story.  That’s his decision.  I have to say, though, that I think not publishing it, especially at the time, was the right call.  That’s a debate for another time. 

For now, I’m looking at the content of the story.  Reading Shoot left me feeling acutely annoyed.  On his blog, Warren Ellis says that he intended the story to be horror, not social commentary.  Reading the story, I’m not sure that’s true.  It’s a Hellblazer story, so it has John Constantine swaggering across the page, saything pithy and clear-sighted things.  In the last few pages, he gives a long speech about what prompted the shooting.  I can’t say the speech wrong.  What I can say, is the speech is completely off the mark.

Let’s see what we have in the paragraphs above.  The first two panels are Constantine ridiculing the woman for thinking there is any one thing that made the kid do it.  It wasn’t violent video games, or movies or music.  Those ideas are stupid and simplistic.

So what’s his take?

Second scan, second bubble:  “These are the end times.”

Second scan, fourth, fifth and sixth bubble:  “The sins of the father are visited on the son.”

Third scan, first bubble:  “Television is taking over.”

Third scan, second bubble: “Think of the children.”

Although the ‘raised by television’ argument is a new one, it harkens back to boarding schools, nannies, the modern novel, the internet, pacifiers, and any other invention that lets parents forget they’re parents every once in a while.  The rest are biblically old.  They were trotted out to explain everything from plagues to fires to pre-marital sex.  They’re not useful advice.  They’re not insight.  They’re not even observations.  They’re slogans.

And they’re slogans that can be used for anything.  I’m willing to bet the people Constantine ridicules used the same lines he does.  ‘Our society is crumbling’ is a set up used for any argument, from lowering taxes to distributing condoms in schools.  And  I know that the ‘raised by television’ bit and ‘parents asleep at the wheel’ bit were trotted out by people wanting to ban graphic video games and violent music.

To be honest, if asked to side with a person making Constantine’s speech or someone who wanted to start a campaign to tone down video game violence, I’d go with the latter.  Not because I think it would work, but because it’s something.  It’s some concrete step.  It’s some way to engage with kids.  And if it doesn’t work, it can be changed.

What Constantine is offering is a four word explanation for everything.  “Society is to blame.”  Well, okay.  Thanks for letting us in on that. 

Now what?

Now that I’ve gotten settled into this list, I thought I should explain the review and ranking process. Over the past several months, I’ve watched all 23 Survivor Series shows, many of which for the first time. I graded each match as well as “The Atmosphere”, which is the term I use for the non-wrestling aspects of the show. Promos, backstage happenings, intro videos, packages, even the arena layouts if they’re anything of note. The Atmosphere counts as one match. Back when I did the Wrestlemania Countdown, I weighed it as two matches, since those segments felt more important than they do here.

Then everything is averaged out. Main events and world title matches count for double. If less than half the matches are elimination style, the elimination tag matches also count for double. I figured that would be fair, since it adds to the importance of the show’s main gimmick. If you’re only going to do the match once or twice this year, you better make it count.

With that boring explanation out of the way, let’s continue with the countdown.

Today’s episode: Shawn Michaels and His Amazing Friends Will Bury You.

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“Tune your ear to the frequency of despair, and cross reference by the longitude and latitude of a heart in agony.

Listen.”

Sometimes the newscycle doesn’t go quite how you expected. Wednesday was one of those days. DC announced a big new push for digital comics, which was clearly meant to open the news day and gain a certain amount of buzz, around 9 a.m. PST. Another post went up a few hours later about J. Michael Straczynski and Shane Davis’s sequel to the smash hit Superman: Earth One. Buried deep in the post was the news that Straczynski is quitting his position as writer of Superman and Wonder Woman, two major flagship DC titles where he launched major stories to much mainstream fanfare. Instead, Chris Roberson will now be writing Superman with issue 707 and Phil Hester is stepping in to script Wonder Woman as of issue 605. JMS will be working on a sequel to Superman: Earth One.

C’mon, son. Who you fooling? How dumb are we supposed to be?

It’s not hard to tell that this a bait and switch. Why hide the actual news to the point where you’re announcing something entirely different and then slip it in at the end? Why bring the Superman: Earth One announcement into it, especially when it isn’t an announcement at all? The release from DC says “It’s too early to talk art, story or release date,” which essentially says nothing, especially since the Earth One graphic novels were already announced as a series of books last year.

Superman: Earth One is a smash hit, and God bless Straczynski and Shane Davis both for getting that book out there to the masses. I even buy the idea that the sequel was fast-tracked due to the success of the first volume. What I don’t buy is the rationale put forth in the press release that Straczynski is just getting a bit busy, so he’s gonna let a couple of up and comers get their shot at the limelight while he works on the next Superman book to sell a kajillion copies.

When you look at Straczynski’s history of late comics, the delays and art troubles on his current comics, his comments regarding how far behind schedule he ended up, the timeline of when the books were announced and when they shipped, and perhaps most tellingly, his wish to take a one to five year sabbatical from monthly comics, there’s a lot more going on than JMS “getting busy” and putting someone else on.

His runs on Superman and Wonder Woman were announced in March 2010 and scheduled for July, on top of a run on The Brave & The Bold that began in Fall 2009 and Superman: Earth One, which had been announced in December 2009. That’s quite a workload for any one writer. Something had to give, and the first thing was The Brave & The Bold. Issue 36 was scheduled to ship in August 2010, but never appeared on store shelves. Its absence was not particularly notable at the time, considering that Superman 701 and Wonder Woman 601 shipped in July to great fanfare, but in hindsight, it was the first hint that something had gone wrong with Straczynski’s time at DC Comics.

Then Superman 703 shipped a month late. And on top of that, when Superman 704 arrived it wasn’t by Straczynski at all, but an unsolicited fill-in story scripted by G. Willow Wilson and Leandro Oliveira, which was announced on September 17 and rushed to stores in October. The artist lineup also hinted at more scheduling issues, as Wonder Woman artist Don Kramer ended up with a bit of pencilling help from Eduardo Pansica and Allan Goldman for his second, third, and fourth issues, despite being a typically timely artist. Having a mixture of artists in a typical comic is fairly rare; it usually means something gone wrong with the scheduling, and suggests that the scripts were late and Kramer had no chance of getting up to speed.

This supposition is bolstered by explanations Straczynski gave in a Robot 6 comments thread in September, shortly before the Wilson fill-in was announced. He mentioned being too sick to write for two months this year, covering San Diego Comic-con 2010 and Fan Expo in Canada. That means the two months were July and August. He admits to falling behind, causing the lateness of Superman 703, and expresses a plan to be “2 full issues ahead by NYCC” in October. It’s fair to assume that the fill-in creative team was solicited for Superman 704 due to his lateness and to give him time to get ahead again. If you put the puzzle pieces together, it appears that Straczynski’s runs were both behind schedule from the outset, and his sickness exacerbated the lateness.

This may seem unfair to Straczynski, and losing work due to sickness is a truly unavoidable and tragic situation, but that’s just part of the story. Longtime followers of Straczynski know that he has a history of being late or outright not finishing series that he’s started. His run on Squadron Supreme ended on a cliffhanger with its seventh issue. His run on Thor shipped 12 issues in its first 18 months and a total of 17 issues over the course of 28 months. Thor, of course, was solicited and advertised as an ongoing monthly comic. His much-hyped Thor Giant-Size Finale was twenty-three pages long, one page longer than your average monthly comic, which makes it definitely not “giant size.” Considering the events in the story, it wasn’t a finale, either.

Finally, Straczynski stopped writing the The Twelve on its eighth issue of a 12-issue run, leaving artist Chris Weston high and dry. Around once a year since he left the series, Straczynski insists that the series will be done soon, or “come hell or high water,” with the clear implication that Weston is at fault for the lateness of the series. Weston, on the other hand, has written a one-shot prequel to The Twelve and helped craft the visual style of the (pretty good!) Denzel Washington film The Book of Eli while waiting on scripts from Straczynski. Straczynski recently took to the press again to talk slick about his collaborator in public, prompting Weston to remark that “The Twelve WILL be finished, apparently.”

What we have here is a pattern of Straczynski beginning projects and wandering off once he gets bored. He’s completed several projects, to be fair, but aside from Amazing Spider-Man, many of his major works (Midnight Nation, Rising Stars, Fantastic Four, Squadron Supreme, Thor) have been punctuated by lateness or simply not being finished.

JMS and DC both prioritized Superman: Earth One over Superman and Wonder Woman’s ongoing series due to the fact that Straczynski fell behind on his ongoing series to the point where maintaining his position became untenable. The reality is that JMS was (again, judging from available evidence) heinously late with his scripts and had already passed the point where the very high profile relaunches of Superman and Wonder Woman were either going to be creatively compromised by the presence of rushed art and scripts or slip from the schedule entirely. These are two launches that got enormous news coverage outside of the comics journalism bubble and managed to galvanize both the comics-reading audience and people who don’t read comics into having opinions about the stories. They are big, people care about them, and they matter in a certain way that a lot of comics stories do not. Something had to be done.

Comics fans aren’t stupid. We know about late comics, we know that sometimes health gets in the way, and we know when someone’s trying to pull one over on us. The problem isn’t JMS being late, sick, or needing help getting his stories done. The problem is the way that this news was announced, which attempted to scrub clearly obvious facts from history in favor of a fairy tale that makes everyone involved look pristine. A little spin is fine, and to be expected. Spinning to this extent, however, is absurd and borderline insulting.

When Chris Claremont got sick and couldn’t complete his work on Exiles and New Excalibur, Marvel straight up said so and brought in writers to tell stories until he could come back. They didn’t try to bait and switch their audience. They kept it honest: this is going to kill the schedule, but rather than compromise our quality and schedule, we’re going to bring in these other guys. The original writer will be back as soon as he’s well again. That’s the sensible choice.

Doing it DC’s way taints the entire story. The response to JMS surrendering his series has been overwhelmingly negative, due in part to the abysmal quality of his Superman work. Fans, journalists, and pros have snarked about his reasons for leaving. Instead of the news being Chris Roberson and Phil Hester getting a shot at the big time, the news is “JMS Quits Series Again, Some Guys Are Gonna Wrap Up His Work, News at 11.”

That’s awful. Roberson and Hester are talented guys and more than deserve their time in the sun. They don’t deserve to have their announcement overshadowed by JMS being up to his old tricks again. Now they’re sandbagged with not only cleaning up his mess, but also dealing with whatever ill will this press is going to generate.

The purpose of PR is to sell comics and to present a certain face for the company. The face you see here is one that’s okay with being intentionally misleading in a really crap way to its fans. It’s not a lie, exactly, but it’s spinning so fast it’d make a politicians head spin. This is a textbook example of what not to do.