Just a reminder...

I'm still here, but the new job means blogging will be slower, and as stated, shrinking slowly.

Anyway, just something for you to enjoy.

(If you need context, go here.)

A Possible world to come?

MARVEL COMICS OFFICES - THE NEAR FUTURE

"Hey Joe."
"Hey Bri."
"Last day."
"Yeah. Yeah."
"Packing?"
"Yeah."
"You want a-?"
"sure if you got-"
"-yeah."
"Cool. "
"Cool."
"So, you're going back to Image?"
"Yeah, well - if - "
"Still got the legal thing?"
"Yeah, it's no biggie."
"Sorry Bri, couldn't help with that."
"No biggie. So, you got that thing set up yet?"
"The thing?"
"The Dark Horse thing."
"Oh, yeah. Mostly just the Buffy comics, maybe a couple other things to start."


"Cool. Cool. You heard from Mark?"
"Mark?"
"Yeah, Mark."
"Not since he said he was flying out to LA."
"Oh. Me neither."
"Yeah."
"Anything on the others?"
"The others?"
"Yeah the others - Matt, Ed, Jason-"
"Oh. Nope."

"No one's at DC?"
"Maybe a couple of the artists - heard they picked up Colleen."
"Colleen?"
"Colleen Coover."
"Huh. Cool."

"Guess it's part of their new policy."
"New policy?"
"Yeah - they only want people with YA experience-"
"YA?"
"Young Adult."
"Young Adult? You mean like Harry Potter ?"
"Yeah."
"Wow. That's a new direction."
"Yeah."
"You figure that's what-"
"Probably. Explains things."
"Yeah."
"We better finish up. Lot to do before closing time."
"Yeah."

"Bri?"
"Yeah?"
"You think there's anything we could have-"
"about what?"
"I don't know - seen it coming?"
"Seen what coming?"
"I don't know."
"Exactly. We coulda gotten rich if we'd seen it coming."
"I guess.'
"Weird though."
"Yeah. All new people going to be in here. Guess it's best not to stick around."

"I guess."
"Good Luck Bri."
"Good Luck Joe. I'll text you in a couple days."
"Cool."

Pick the Best Caption

Why the Avengers movie might tank

Yes yes, I know - The teaser trailer was awesome and Joss Whedon and How Dare I and blah de blah de blah.

Yesterday's post on Green Lantern should have been a clue here as to what the problem might be.

The problem: The Audience, whom are not comic people, have to A) remember, and B) Give a damn about what happened in the following movies at minimum:

2008's Iron Man
2011's Thor
2011's Captain America: the First Avenger

Other movies that they might want to care about include:
2008's Incredible Hulk
2010's Iron Man 2

Now, while this is not necessarily a big deal, there's no proof that it won't be a small one either. Consider, the only modern example of this kind of crossover movie is the Aliens vs. Predator 'franchise'.

Scared yet?

This is also why I have serious concerns over the presence of Joss Whedon; because outside of Kevin Smith, there's no one in Hollywood I've found who caters more to the extremes of the fanbases while ignoring the larger audience than Whedon. Hopefully, he'll prove me wrong, and hopefully audiences will be able to follow along a clearly defined story.

Hopefully.

If the people making the film have taken this into account.

Your Moment of Funny

Your Moment of Funny

Catching up on things. Soon you will get more posts.

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?

Quick Links post

Short and sweet for today, with more for tomorrow.

Jens Altmann, friend of the blog and author of The Coldest Blood and Cowboys and Barbarians (hit the "Fellow bloggers" tag and go find the Amazon links!) has a really cool idea for a Doctor Doom story here. Check it out.

In the "Someone had way too much time on their hands" dept: The Marvel Universe relationship chart. Just try and follow it as best you can.

Ponder This

If Jack Kirby were a young and hungry artist today, do you really think he would go into comics?

Let's think about this for a moment - the pay is...so/so, unless you're a "hot" artist or a legend, you're working freelance no matter where you work in the industry, and your career length is fairly arbitrary. And let's not talk about the whole "creator's rights" issues.

Forgive me for thinking so, but I think part of the reason that storytelling and composition skills among "Big Two" comic artists has so degraded over the last 10-15 years is because those people all left the industry for the greener pastures of video games and web animation, where they'd likely get a better chance of making a long time living.

Just a thought. Maybe someone can enlighten me if I'm wrong here.

Quick Hits

-I cannot for the life of me imagine anything more pointless or unneccessary than another dystopic X-men alternate timeline.

-Except for maybe another Wolverine title.

-Or another Deadpool title.

-Although, come to think of it, the current status quo for the X-franchise is a not-bad metaphor for the mentality of the big two comics - a group of people who have chosen to isolate themselves from the larger world and no longer even try to interact with it on equal terms. They dream of glory days that they helped to end with short-sightedness and petty grudges.

- I miss fiendish deathtraps in comics. It's just something that isn't done anymore, and it's kind of a sad loss if you ask me.

-Calling comic writers "Architects" is silly for a whole host of reasons. For the most part, they don't actually design anything as opposed to maintain an existing structure - that's not design, that maintenance. But as I've stated before "Corporate copyright Maintenance men" doesn't have quite that ring to it, you know?

-Another "This is something we don't need to see again" - a replacement Fantastic Four member.

-I feel sorry for the writers who have to fill in for JMS on Superman and Wonder Woman. Imagine spending all those years striving to work on your craft, climbing the rungs of the corporate field, with your dream of getting to work on one of the biggest franchises in history. Then, when you finally get there, you're hired to be a glorified ghostwriter. That's got to sting.

-Does anybody remember when superheroes actually fought each other because they...actually didn't like each other that much? As opposed to fighting each other because of some disagreements about a vague political debate?

-OK, let me get this straight - in the Captain America series right now, Bucky (the current Cap) is being put on trial for a few murders he committed over the course of about six decades, but Wolverine, who probably has a body count that would put him in the Hague for a war crimes tribunial and spends nearly half his time as a member of a group of untrusted mutants is a full-fledged Avenger who goes out in public and no one even bats an eye? How does that work?

Saturday is for Gamers

Religion in a comic universe

There are two primary schools of thoughts regarding how the events that occur in a superhero comic universe would impact religion.

1) No fundamental change - sure there might spring up the occasional flash cult for a certain superhero (this happens to Superman occasionally), but for the most part, things would stay the same, with the superheroes with the names of mythological gods dismissed as impersonators or just guys who liked the name.
2) Major fundamental changes with entire religious structures dedicated to superbeings.

Both of these are a little simplistic, and don't really account for all factors.

First, the argument that the mythology-based superheroes are simply extra-dimensional beings is a double edged sword - while it could be used to keep a Church of Thor from springing up, it would also be used by the Richard Dawkins types to discredit contemporary religious figures. It doesn't take much imagination to see how "Christ was a Mutie!" could have a very fractious impact on modern Christianity, and the same holds true of every other modern religion. After all, once you've argued that one "god" is a super-alien, it opens the door to say they all are/were - which reduces every religion to a simple affiliation - like picking which sports team is your favorite or your political party identification.

The flip side of course, would be the false messiahs - as every fringe radical religious organization with minimal scruples and maximum ambition would be promoting their own "super-savior" figure - a mutant or meta or enhanced or enchanted human to use to promote that theirs is the one true way. This promotion would likely involve a bodycount.

Next, with the frequent Resurrections of famous superbeings, the question of the afterlife would seem answered - particularly with the existence of someone like the Spectre or the firsthand accounts of superhumans who've been beyond the veil (Green Arrow, Superman, the Fantastic Four, etc). Of course, every reporter and theologian on Earth would be constantly hounding them for exact details of their experiences to try and match them with their own belief systems. And in areas where they would conflict, one would imagine religious scholars and pundits of all stripes to do their best to discredit the accounts entirely. Of course, discrediting does nothing to solve the larger issue of what happened, as the alternatives lead to a lot of questions - particularly "why do only super-people, even ones without powers, come back from the dead?" And there are no good answers there.

And of course, you could start looking into all sorts of things the existing religious institutions would be trying to maintain legitimacy or, if possible, claim supremacy. It's not too much of a stretch from real life to imagine a group of Vatican scientists (no, that's not an oxymoron - go read it for yourself) using a dimensional portal to contact Heaven, and accidentally opening a portal to, let's say, the Dark Dimension or Apokalips.

So, needless to say, the oversimplification of religion in comics, while it is done for good reasons to avoid offending sensibilities, does close off some rather amusing story opportunities.

HERCULES WEEK DAY 6

Today's classic Herc posters are brought to you by Trouble with Comics and the sound "BONK".

HERCULES WEEK DAY 5

Was there a more absurdly hilarious story than "The Replacement Thor"?

I think not.

(and again, we remind you to click over to Trouble with Comics)

HERCULES WEEK DAY 3

Once you're done looking at the pretty pictures, go support Trouble with Comics!