The next Comics from the 5th Dimention column should be up soon. The big drawback about writing for PopCultureShock rather than here is that you can’t have your stuff up instantly. Them’s the breaks.

I plan to one day write my own comic series. I’m currently trying to move my gears forward on that. That said, I still find myself thinking about what kind of DC or Marvel-owned series I would love to write if I had the chance. Stuff like an Eradicator on-going where he stations himself in Coast City as a way to make up for and investigate the human feeling of guilt he suffers from his failure to protect the city from Cyborg Superman and Mongul. Or a Juggernaut series where he’s on the run from SHIELD, all while showing the parallels of the Superhuman Registration Act and being the avatar slave of Cyttorak.

There’s one comic concept that came to me the other day. What If occasionally had sequels, most of them not very good. Having read so many issues and having some of them so nestled into my memory, the continuity nut in me always compares some issues to events that happened after the release date. Sometimes it’s just to laugh at the continuity screw-up, like how Alicia Masters in What If the X-Men Lost Inferno was really a Skrull and the writer didn’t know it yet. That revelation gums up her part in the story.

Sometimes I realize how much more interesting stories become when you toss in delayed retcons and new pieces of canon. For instance, there’s the issue What If the X-Men Had Died on Their First Mission, where the New X-Men team (Wolverine, Storm, etc.) go to Krakoa to save the original X-Men and they all die. Xavier beats himself up over it, Moira comforts him and eventually another X-Men team is created. It was a good story, but compare it to what we know now. Deadly Genesis showed the other X-Men team that died fighting Krakoa. When they failed, Moira was angry, so Xavier erased her memory of the events. Put the two stories together and it’s pretty fucked up. Xavier deserves to feel bad. His Krakoa mission would have cost him three X-Men teams, totaling at 17 mutants. Then you have Moira trying to keep him from being suicidal, not knowing what a bastard he really is because the son of a bitch removed it from her memory.

What would have happened when Vulcan came back to Earth, not only forgotten, but now without his brothers? Now that would be a sequel issue worth reading.

I think back to other What Ifs that lead to a new status quo and how vastly different things would have been if they continued the story and met up with the events that were destined to happen. I think a handful of them could make for a good limited series.

Read the rest of this entry »

Oh yes.

Oh no! Marvel has completely white-washed Storm! And maybe brown-washed, too, I can’t tell with homegirl on the top right.

I’m kidding. Congrats to that guy for winning a TV show I don’t watch.

MTV Multiplayer > Black Professionals in Games

These articles are really interesting. I’m kind of surprised to see it on MTV.com.

No excerpts, click through and read on.

TALKING IRON FIST WITH SWIERCZYNSKI, FRACTION, BRUBAKER AND FOREMAN – NEWSARAMA

Highlights: Misty with a fro, and a “Ten years later” flash forward of a little boy asking Misty how his father died.

I’m sad that Bru/Frac/Aja are leaving, though.

I’ve been rereading Silver Surfer this weekend. I started with the Englehart/Rogers stuff, which was really very pretty, but kind of boring so I skipped up to Jim Starlin & Ron Marz scripting over Ron Lim.

And wow. What an underappreciated bunch of comics these are! I’m not sure if they are actually good or not, but I’m enjoying the crap out of them. I’d read half a dozen of these as a kid, so I figured I’d see if they held up. I’ve taken some notes which I hope you’ll enjoy and possibly be able to answer!

• Silver Surfer is a gigantic whining wimp. Honestly man, he spends entire issues at a time either a) fighting his own psyche or b) moping around space or c) moping around a planet in space.
• Black Panther punking Surfer in Fantastic Four was way more of a big deal than it should have been. Surfer spends half the series getting punked by dudes with no powers, dudes with guns, dudes with sharp teeth, and a girl with big fat angel wings who is upset that he doesn’t love her back. Even people whose powers are “sharp teeth” and “big muscles” rough him up.

• There are ray guns in outer space, but a shocking amount of people still prefer to use good ol’ fashioned axes, spears, and swords. Not even ones made out of lasers or some kind of made-up science word– just straight up hunks of metal with pointy bits on the end.
• Frankie Raye, Nova, is dead. I didn’t remember this coming into the series. I’d kind of noticed her absence in the current Marvel Universe with an unspoken “Wasupwitdat?”, but hadn’t thought much about her. I mean, all I know is that Frankie Raye is an awesome name and fire hair is cool. Anyway, she told Galactus “No,” he told her to get gone, she literally had some kind of nervous breakdown, psychotic break, or amnesiac whatever and became a space stripper.
• Yeah, space stripper, not even joking. She was working at a bar aimed towards aliens with a flame-girl fetish, too.
• Luckily, she didn’t live to wrestle with the indignity of the situation, since she was killed two issues later by Morg, Galactus’s new herald.
• But seriously ladies, space amnesia turns you into a stripper. Be careful out there.
  
• Rereading the Infinity Gauntlet issues was a long and drawn-out process, to the point where I feel like I’ve read Silver Surfer continuously for the past eighty years. It’s not that they were bad– okay, they were pretty bad.
• Ron Lim is kind of awesome. You could make the case that his facial features are a little too similar, but that’s every artist ever. However, he draws awesome space battles, great aliens, and I think I like his version of the Surfer more than Kirby, Buscema, or Rogers.
• There are a lot of weirdly shaped word bubbles in this series. Terrax, Morg, Tyrant, Adam Warlock, Airmaster, Firelord, Nova, Drax, and Thanos all get custom balloons.
• Tyrant is a terrible name for a villain.
• Galactus talks a lot, but rarely backs up his threats. However, when he does, it’s almost always worth it. “I will have words with you” is an awesome entrance line.
• Surf really doesn’t have a supporting cast to speak of. They’re all either dead or too aloof to be interesting. Impossible Man should show up more often, too.
• The book got a lot less weird when Starlin left, though it was still pretty weird.
• Tyrant effortlessly punks Gladiator, Beta Ray Bill, and three heralds of Galactus in one issue.
• Surfer is guilty because his mother slit her wrists in the bath? And years later, his father put a bullet in his brain? Aw, c’mon. That feels like unneeded depth.
• Galactus should never, ever take his hat off. He looks ridiculous.
  
• The Spinsterhood is an incredible idea and one that should be relaunched and revamped in a prestige-format 12 issue maxi-series asap. We can draft a few established characters, hook up a new costume, give them a new enemy. It’ll be golden. From the comic: “We took our sacred vows, forsaking the pleasures of the flesh for training in the ways of war. We marked ourselves with the symbol of our ceremonial daggers.”
  

Happy 500 posts to us.

This guy:

is the same as this guy.

I love Duck Down Records, man. It’s always fun. Black Moon is composed of a rapper name 5 Ft., who is in fact five feet tall, Buckshot Shorty da BDI Thug, who is also like five feet tall, and Evil Dee, who looks eight feet tall when he hangs around with his buddies.

First off, I have a new installment of Comics From the 5th Dimension up. This time it’s the KO and Return of Superman, where I discuss the classic one-shot Superman vs. Muhammad Ali.

Also at PCS is a roundtable discussion about Secret Invasion #1, involving both 4L writers and Funnybook Babylon writers. Or as I call the collective group, The Corporate Ministry.

On another note, today is 4/4. That should be the official 4th Letter Day. Make it happen, politicians!

I tossed a new plugin into the mix today. It should put a pretty fancy image zoom onto the images posted here on 4l. Does it work?

Interesting.

I’ve seen it said, both online and off, that intent doesn’t matter– results do.

It doesn’t matter that you intended to do one thing if it ends up being another. All that matters is the end result and how the reader takes it.

I don’t know that I agree. For one, it puts the reader on a higher pedestal than the author. I’m not entirely comfortable with that. On equal levels? Sure, I can get with that. What you take from it is just as important was what’s portrayed or what was intended. But, the reverse?

Why should the experience of the reader trump that of the author?

Honest question, not just talking out loud.