Friday, January 28, 2011

Pick the Best Caption


Sorry about this, will try to get some content up on the weekend. Cheers






Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Quick Hits


As you've noticed already, 2011 isn't going to be the daily post-a-rama that 2010 was for various reasons - mostly due to an uptick in activity in my real life. However, the other reason? Comic "industry" news is pretty damn boring when you get right down to it. Let me go through the big news of the last little while.

-One of the Fantastic Four Dies! Uhm,....yeah, you do realize you brought back BUCKY, right? And Captain America, and Jean Grey's about due to pop out of the grave any day now, so excuse me if I don't take this all that seriously. How about, and this is a crazy idea, instead of obsessing on killing and murder and death (Heroes dying! Kids dying! Villains Slaughtering whole races and countries and creeds!) they try giving characters interesting lives? I know that would be a challenge, and challenge isn't really something that Big Two comics goes for much, but it's just a thought.


-WIZARD will stop publishing! Well, that's not a surprise, ever since any 12 year old figured they could find better toilet based humor using a Google search, Wizard has been redundant.
-Marvel Editorial Shake-ups! You know what? I'll care when I see any indication that there's a change of philosophy or how it treats creators rights, or shows a different and evolving perspective of comics as medium in the 21st century. Otherwise, it's just deck chairs on the Titanic.
-A final note - on Marvel Comic movies, there are only two possibilities as far as I'm concerned; either they will be good entertainment, which is more than 99% of their current comics output, in which case I'll spend money on it, while wondering why there isn't similar quality in the comics, or they won't do as well, which will lead to more focus on the comics side of the business, which will force the quality of them to rise by adapting grown up policies. It's a no-lose scenario, as I see it. Thus, I'm not too concerned about things like Jon Favreau or the new Spider-Man Costume. If they want to lose money and audience - well, they've had a lot of experience with that the way their comics have been selling the last 15 years, so who am I to stop them from doing what they do best?




Sunday, January 23, 2011

Choices


Easily the best response to my last post was a friend of mine asking that if it came right down to it, who made worse decisions - The Guardians of the Universe or the U.S. Military.

This was a no-brainer - the Guardians are incompetent on a massive scale. The Green Lantern Corps was wiped out a grand total of what? 3 times in the last decade? Plus that whole Manhunter thing, the fact that they've made the wrong move in every single "Crisis" event, the Blackest Night, etc.

Really, at this point, the Guardians should maybe scale back their ambitions -start with seeing if they can successfully protect, say, an abandoned strip mall. That's about their speed.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Hal Jordan: Criminal?


Question for those of you with some knowledge of military law and justice - Exactly how many charges would get leveled against Hal Jordan because (thanks to Geoff Johns) he's back in the US Air Force?

Before we get too far into this, I just want to point out a couple of things. The reason I ask is that there have been stories told about the whole military/superhero conflict that is central to other military-inspired superheroes (i.e. Captain America, Captain Atom), but not so with Hal Jordan since his new status quo as an Air Force officer has been re-instated (and I'm still not even clear on how that works). I also want to draw particular attention to another major distinction between the common examples and Jordan: the fact that the Green Lantern Corps is an alien foreign power, of which Hal Jordan is an officer.

Now, this is the metaphor as I see it, and I may be wrong. Captain America and Captain Atom (depending on the status of continuity) are ex-military officers who act as independent vigilante operators with ties to organizations that co-operate with governmental bodies (most of the time). While there's definitely a certain level of bending/breaking the Posse Comitatus Act there (and I leave this to more studied experts in this field here), you could compare this to ex-military officers who join community actions groups, or even criminal cartels and gangs - not a good thing, but not quite the same as what Jordan does. In effect, when Jordan goes from U.S. Air Force captain to Green Lantern, he's putting on the uniform and assuming the office of a foreign power - there is a clear conflict of interest with regards to oaths of allegiance, priorities and standing. And, if I recall the current status quo correctly, his superior officer and several co-workers are co-operating in this endeavor - which definitely meets the definition of conspiracy.

So I leave this to you to discuss.

I'll have more in the days to come - sorry for taking so long with this.





Saturday, January 08, 2011

Time considerations


Got some new posters up. More in the works, sorry for the delay.



Saturday, January 01, 2011

New Year - New stuff


Hey - hope you're enjoying the new year. I'm not going to be around for about a week or so so I can work on new posters and posts.

In the meantime, tell me about your favorite non-Marvel/DC comics. Superhero and otherwise. Webcomics included.

GO!