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Scattered Thoughts on the Siege and the Sentry

May 19th, 2010 Posted by Gavok

There’s little more disappointing in comic books than a bad ending. A story that’s bad from start to finish? It happens all the time. A story or series with a rough beginning? As long as they can get past it and get their footing, it gets a pass. A rough ending, on the other hand, easily poisons your final thoughts on a product. For instance, let’s say Return of the Jedi ended with a scene of Luke saving the galaxy by viciously murdering Darth Vader and the Emperor. Not only would that have sucked, but Return of the Jedi would have sucked and the Empire Strikes Back would have sucked in retrospect.

That’s how I feel about Siege, the miniseries by Brian Michael Bendis and Oliver Coipel. The miniseries ended about a week ago and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it initially. Why did the ending bug me so much?

First, let’s look at the miniseries itself and how it ranks as an event. At only four issues (regardless of the unfortunate delay), it’s really refreshing. With Secret Invasion and Blackest Night, I’ve become completely sick of overly long event comics. This goes doubly for the two examples, as it means every single comic tie-in is going to be the same basic story told over again. Siege is quick and to the point. The issues are action packed and move the story forward at breakneck speed. The tie-ins are quite good for the most part, with the worst being at least inoffensive. It’s the first event where the Ben Urich tie-in mini is actually pretty good.

The art’s rather nice too.

Then you have to look at what it’s all about. Usually with these event comics, they do so well because they’re really dynamic story ideas. You can rant about how people only buy them because they’re important to continuity, but I mostly disagree on the basis of having described these stories to non-comic readers and seeing their reactions. If you tell someone about what World War Hulk or Civil War or Blackest Night is about, a lot of the times they’ll come across as interested.

How do you describe Siege to somebody? “There’s this crazy jerk who is one of the country’s bigwigs and he conspires with a trickster god to attack a floating city of gods in Oklahoma just because they’re there. The crazy jerk has a uber-powerful ace in the hole and a bunch of superheroes interject themselves into the battle.” It doesn’t have any real kick to it.

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This Week in Panels: Week 34

May 17th, 2010 Posted by Gavok

Welcome to a very special Siege/Brian Michael Bendis/Luke Cage/Keith Giffen-themed This Week in Panels. For those of you new to the concept, every week, we take every new comic we’ve read since Wednesday and sum it up with one panel as a way to give you the gist without being entirely spoiler-heavy. hermanos has broken the rule against using full or two-page images as panels, but he writes the non-existent checks, so I’ll let it slide.
(joke’s on Gav, that page from BPRD: King of Fears is the top half of a page and the bottom half are a series of reaction shots. not technically a two-page splash! that’ll be two week’s non-pay for libel. -djdb)

Amazing Spider-Man #631
Zeb Wells, Emma Rios and Chris Bachalo

Astonishing X-Men: Xenogenesis #1
Warren Ellis and Kaare Andrews

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You Ain’t A Crook, Son.

March 10th, 2010 Posted by david brothers

I quote:

Okay. You ordered a bunch of Marvel Omnibus titles from Amazon as part of The $14.99 Glitch and they’ve been cancelled. You probably knew they would do. But you may have received a previous e-mail saying that you would get at least one at the magic price. Or maybe Amazon never got round to emailing you at all, they just deleted the order from your account. And you’re feeling a bit miffed.

I’m geting reports that people who have complained, even using the Amazon Call Me Back feature on the website, have been getting recompense from the multinational online retailer.
[…]
Me, I’m not complaining. I don’t think Amazon owe me anything. I understand however, that you may feel differently.

If you feel differently, you’re the laziest kind of crook there is. Tucker Stone breaks the situation down better than I can right now:

But when they get called on it, what do they say?

“I’m going to file a class action lawsuit” – some random infant, repeated exponentially

That’s the kind of response that would make George Washington weep. A class action lawsuit? Really? That’s the legacy you want written across your face, attached forever to your name?

Crime is a holy profession, and to join its brotherhood is to put oneself alongside this country’s greatest heroes. After oil and weapons production, it’s the most successful industry on the planet, with a storied history that stretches further than any religion. Getting caught out in it–even if all you did was take advantage of a gigantic corporation’s obvious pricing error–is something that should be handled with nothing short of the pride of a Dwayne Michael Carter. Playing the hurt consumer in this situation is the equivalent of standing in the door of the bank after the ATM accidently farts out an extra 20 and refusing to hand it over. It’s spitting on the flag, it’s saying that you’re only willing to play the game if everybody agrees to do it by your rules, and your rules are these: you can’t have done anything wrong, because it’s somebody else’s fault.

Amazon doesn’t owe you a single solitary thing. They’d be well within their rights to cancel every order and not lose a few thousand bucks. There’s even a note in their TOS that sometimes, on occasion, books are mispriced, and sucks to be you if they charge you the full price. Until the book ships, they do not charge your card, meaning that there is no sale. That means they owe you nothing until the book leaves their warehouse.

So to call them up and ask for a refund for time wasted ordering obviously mistakenly marked down books makes you something like a jerk. They don’t owe you anything. If anything, you owe them whatever the actual price of the book you ordered was. It’s a blessing that they honored any of the orders, considering it was such an obvious cheat that we were all taking advantage of. I got a few Ultimate Spidey HCs and I’m pretty happy about that. I didn’t get a Tomb of Dracula, but so what? I don’t expect Wal-mart to let me buy eighteen computers that got marked down to 50 bucks because somebody dropped a decimal point, and they’re under no obligation to let me do that.

Basically, don’t be the old lady at Kroger with a fistful of coupons, trying to game the system and score a dozen eggs for free and getting pissed off and demanding recompense when the manager is like “Sorry, we’re all out.” You played the game with a few aces hidden up your sleeve. If you lost, so what? You lost what, ten minutes of your time? A couple megabytes off your bandwidth for the month?

Get real.

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This Week in Panels: Week 15

January 3rd, 2010 Posted by Gavok

Welp… here it is.

Blackest Night #6
Geoff Johns and Ivan Reis

Origins of Siege
Brian Michael Bendis, Lucio Parrillo, Fred Van Lente and many others

And that’s it! That was anti-climactic. Luckily, we of 4L have a little more content to make up for this, but that will have to wait for tomorrow.

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We Care a Lot Part 20: Creatures on Infinite Earths

December 30th, 2009 Posted by Gavok

It’s time for the second part of the journey to check out the other alternate universe takes on Venom. We should probably start off with—wait, a sec.

What about Exiles? That’s a series that’s all about different Marvel universes. From what I’ve seen, Venom got shafted throughout. There was an inclusion of Peter Parker with the Carnage symbiote (I think), but Venom wouldn’t appear until the very last issue.

You see, Marvel always has to give Chris Claremont something to do… or else. He’s like the incompetent nephew that Quesada always has to give work to or else his sister will give him hell. They tend to give him stories that take place outside of Marvel 616, such as Exiles. The series became New Exiles and Claremont ran it into the ground, all while fulfilling his rampant [insert female X-Men member] fantasies. They relaunched it with Jeff Parker at the helm, where Morph would lead a team made up of Blink, Scarlet Witch, Beast, Black Panther, Forge and Polaris. It was fun, but nobody cared because of the stigma attached to the previous run. It was canceled by #6.

Venom appeared for a single panel. Why did I go through all that explanation to cover a single stinking panel? Because in it, the team sees another Exiles supergroup and I just know that Jeff Parker made the wrong choice.

Look at that team! I swear, if Parker went with that lineup instead of mutants and wacky Black Panther, it would be outselling Blackest Night.

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Noh-varr’s Got A Brand New Bag

December 4th, 2009 Posted by david brothers

Gavin wanted to know what I thought of the Dark Avengers Annual, since it features Bendis writing Noh-varr, which I’ve had some harsh words (one, two) about before. I’m not pissed about the new change or whatever. It’s just clear that Bendis didn’t get Marvel Boy. At this point, it’s like, who cares? It’s a different character in a book I don’t even care to read for free. I do want to point out one thing from the series, though.

From Dark Avengers Annual, words by Brian Michael Bendis, art by Chris Bachalo:

Noh-varr's New Costume

Kobe, what do you think about this new costume?

kobewtf

That’s the dictionary definition of a soft batch. Put that back in the oven, let it cook a little more, then try again.

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Trying to say nice things today…

November 11th, 2009 Posted by david brothers

so I’ll just let y’all judge these quotes from IGN’s The Final Days of Dark Reign interview with Brian Michael Bendis and Brian Reed yourselves:

On Ms. Marvel’s identity crisis

Bendis: “Carol Danvers is awesome. She’s another character where there’s a lot going on in her own series. But she’s in every single issue I’ve written over the last six months, so there’s a lot going on with her. But what’s interesting is if Moonstone is sleeping with all of the Dark Avengers, they might not realize later which Ms. Marvel they had been sleeping with, and there might be trouble down the line.”

On Moonstone’s secret weapon

Bendis: “Now Moonstone I’ll probably get some letters on. She’s going to be using sex as a weapon, not because that’s what I feel women do, but because that’s what I feel this mentally ill woman would do in close quarters. She started with Marvel Boy and will begin making her way through the team.”

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“Their capacity for evil so evident and prevalent”

November 5th, 2009 Posted by david brothers

I wanted to revisit and expand on the “HEROES DON’T KILL” post from yesterday, since it prompted some conversation.

My biggest problem with HEROES DON’T KILL as a hard-line rule is that it stems from the days when comics were meant for children and suffered under the tyranny of the Comics Code. Heroes must be pure and heroic at all times, and killing was right out. For children, that’s fine. Simple morality tales are an easy way to introduce the social contract. What’s racism? Racism is bad. What’s war? War is bad. And so on.

The problem is that comics grew up with their audience, and writers started stretching the limits of believability in an attempt to appear grown up. Every time a villain broke out of jail, he’d have to do something worse to top the previous story. Joker evolves from the Clown Prince of Crime to the Thin White Duke of Death, and every breakout spreads death and decay by the dozen. Norman Osborn goes from a guy who killed a girl once and wanted to run the underworld into a scheming plotter capable of faking several deaths, ruining even more lives, and torturing whoever he likes.

At a certain point, in the quest to give heroes something to fight against, the creators of these comics have made the heroes look like failures. Batman: Arkham Asylum, the recent video game, is an excellent example. No matter what he does, or who he rescues, nothing he does matters. You can idly rescue a couple of asylum patients and workers in the game, but when you re-enter that area, whoops, look at that, they’re dead. Sometimes you get there in time to see an inmate beating their brains in, but it’s too late to save them. It makes Batman look inept, like all he can do is stand there in his long johns trying to hold back an unstoppable tide of pure evil.

It’s not any better in the comics. Villains break out of jail, murder a few people, go after the hero, and then go back to jail. Eighteen of our months later (if we’re lucky, and we usually aren’t) and they do it again. And again. And again. The body count rises, the hero thinks about all the lives that have been lost and feels bad about it, and then does the exact same thing again. Lather, rinse the blood off your hands, and repeat.

What’s even worse is the sliding scale of acceptable killing. Sentient beings from computer monsters to aliens? Murder at will. However, a guy who has, over the course of maybe six months at most, shot down an airplane full of civilians to see if a hero would catch it, ordered the death of several American citizens, hired mass murderers and villains under false pretenses, engaged in military actions in foreign lands, and placed scads of people who are loyal only to him in various sensitive places in the federal government? That guy is strictly off-limits.

msmarvel28-01msmarvel28-02wahwahwhiner

See? Ms. Marvel is three things here. Creepy, smug, and a hypocrite. Why is it okay to kill aliens and not humans? Is that where “Thou shalt not kill” stops? “You weren’t born in Peoria, you’re fair game?”

It’s the hypocrisy that bugs me more than anything. When Hawkeye says that the Avengers should kill a man who has killed Spider-Man’s girlfriend, kidnapped his child, ruined the life of a good friend, created a vicious cycle of hate that infected Peter’s best friend Harry and his son, faked Aunt May’s death, and tortured Spider-Man for days… Spider-Man’s reaction, realistically, shouldn’t be to whine about how heroes don’t kill ever ever ever no matter what.

I’m not saying that all heroes should be bang bang shootem up all the time. That’s stupid. There are several perfectly good reasons not to kill someone, and killing would ruin the charm of certain characters. I don’t think Superman should ever kill anyone. Spider-Man, as the ultimate street level everyman hero, probably shouldn’t kill anyone, either.

(though back when i cared about that sort of thing, i realized that the one instance where spidey would kill would be if and when norman snaps, kidnaps MJ, or maybe Baby May, and it’s his last choice. he’d do it, and he wouldn’t feel good about it, but he wouldn’t regret it, either.)

But, to pretend that heroes should never kill, while their enemies continually up the ante and stack atrocity on top of atrocity and shoot past irredeemable and on into genocidal… you start to notice the guy behind the curtain. That’s when you realize just how the sausage is made and start caring less and less. Black Adam has millions of deaths on his resume. Vandal Savage destroyed Montevideo. Deathstroke’s blown up Bludhaven, and, along with Cheshire, nuked the capital of Qurac. Mongul destroyed Coast City.

At some point, you have to weigh your peace of mind and so-called moral high ground against thousands upon thousands of lost lives. And sometimes… it’s worth the sacrifice.

And that’s why the hard-line HEROES DON’T KILL is childish to me. It’s applying a black and white morality to a situation that doesn’t fit it any more. Back when Spider-Man was created, Doc Ock was killing people mainly by accident. Green Goblin just wanted to run the mob. Now? Now villains completely undercut the hero by simply existing, and every time we get one of the “I’m better than you, I don’t kill” scenes, or the scenes where the hero fights hard to save a villain’s life so that he can sleep soundly at night… well, I roll my eyes.

All I want is to see some nuance and maturity when taking on the idea of heroes killing, rather than heroes with barely a leg to stand on preaching directly at me. It’s not clever, it’s not smart, and we’re not children. Garth Ennis got it with his portrayal of the Punisher. It’s not even hard or really very complicated. Sometimes, the hard choice, the bad choice, the unreasonable choice, is the best possible choice to make. Sometimes you have to do bad to do good.

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Manichean Murder Machine

November 4th, 2009 Posted by david brothers

Chad Nevett on New Avengers #58:

Yeah, here’s the thing: not killing bad guys doesn’t make you better than them, it makes you a fucking pussy. It makes you responsible for everything negative they do after that point. No grey areas, no moral questions, no debates about what’s heroic and what’s not. […] I hate superhero comics for pretending that letting villains live is somehow the morally superior thing to do, because it’s not.

If you listened to the Fourcast! this week, and you should have, you’d know that I agree with every word Chad says. I wanted to have a longer excerpt, but it’s a pretty short review. Go read it.

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We Care a Lot Part 18: The Sammy Hagar of Cannibalism

October 13th, 2009 Posted by Gavok

“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.

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