Question and Rant: Here and Back Again

I sound smart when I speak to people, a skill I honed in lieu of any other skills. I did this primarily because I like the sound of my own voice, which is a pity because I'll never have an audience inside of my own head to appreciate the light, yet solid qualities my skull lends it. Despite sounding a bit like a stereotypical mentally challenged person, my sounding-smart skills encourage people who barely know me to ask me about my thoughts on current events. People who really know me skip this in favor of letting me daydream about Magic, comic books, or emo guys, mostly because they know I'll be thinking about those things anyway and don't want to put me to the trouble of pretending that I'm listening to them.

Now because I've had the money to stay away from strangers for the past few years, this hasn't really been something that's happened much. However, if I did still have to meet new people and interact with them, I'm sure these are the questions I'd imagine them asking me while they said boring things.

What do you think about this secret service prostitute thing?

Secret service agents fucking prostitutes in South America is no more connected to Obama than Abu Ghraib is to Rumsfeld.

GoMnomnom: It doesn't get blogged anymore...

Last week, Kris mentioned how he quit his job to go back to college and how torn up inside he was about it and all twelve of you had a good cry about it. Since he &@#$ed up talking about his last hitch and torturing you with slides of the same, it falls on me to get this done.

I'm only doing the torturous part, naturally.

Response to all those things: For Reals

My view on DC isn't that they shouldn't make sexy comics or that by doing so they're just terrible people. I think such a thing would be problematic in a shared universe, but blah blah I hate share universes anyway. Most entertainment does some sexual pandering, but I can accept that for things I like because I know it sells, these people have to make money, and I generally think that the upsides balance that out to "good."

But when DC hears this controversy and responds very specifically in a way that doesn't address the narrative, but instead calls-out how that narrative is executed (albeit with some merit), it doesn't give the impression of a company that's aware of the actual controversy. If "kids could read this!" was the complaint, they would've nailed it.

If they'd said "Scott Lobdell is one of our best writers and we trust the direction he'll be taking 'Red Hood and The Outtakes' over the next few months," that would've been in the ballpark. I'd be happy with that.

Incidentally, they told everyone who might be interested in getting their 12 year old a "T" comic that "T" means tits and talk about sex, which brings up an entirely new issue that immediately makes them look bad.

DC's made an impressive number of bold and boneheaded decisions this year. In my opinion, they were getting more "bold" hits than "boneheaded" ones until this moment. I don't even mind "Red Hood and The Ouroboros" so much; it's not meant for me and the people it is meant for probably don't care about how responsibly women are portrayed in the media. It's that if DC failed to address this, it would have merely backed up a lot of the sexist image they've accumulated lately--an image that's frustrating since they're in the midst of an effort to show more, and more different, people how awesome one of my hobbies is. It's even more maddening because that effort has come at the risk of losing at least some of their fan base that kept them afloat.

Instead, they replied with this tone-deaf WTF and I'm left wonder why any intelligent person would start looking into comics--the communities, the companies, and the actual product--and see something they'd want to spend time and money on.

It reflects badly one of my hobbies, and, in some small way, on me as well. Don't get me wrong; I'm still lined up to buy some "JLI" and "Stormwatch." However, if my money's going into the same pocket that makes and markets "Red Hood and The Outfielders," then "Schism" and the rest of my "Sandman" collection are going to carry a bit more weight than Booster Gold & friends or Travis Tritt & Friends.

Penny Reviews: The Reboot

Justice League International #1

Booster Gold, Guy Gardener, Batman (of course Batman) and an unhealthy level of nostalgia for the previous JLI prompted me to try the new one. The team's foundation is vague, but hopefully it'll be revisited and some of the Chinese and Russian stereotypes will simmer down. It's not explained what The Hall of Justice's history is that makes it so contentious, but that's the forth central conflict the issue presents while still cracking jokes, introducing the cast, and doing everything else a first issue should do, including addressing potential fan outrage. It's just good comics and fits the reboot. B-

The New DC

You know, two to three weeks ago, I talked about how I was going to talk about the DC Reboot instead of Innistrad, but then I rambled about politics for a week like I was on a bender and then did a whole Prisoner thing that was totally awesome, but didn't much mention Grant Morrison or The Justice League very much?

It's all part of my fully intentional air of enigmatic, unknown mystery where I—

...so...shiny...

Linkstorm: What It Is

I generally like No High Scores, even if I can disagree with them, and after playing Mass Effect, I find Brandon Cackowski's remarks on morality systems in video games to be highly disagreeable. He boils every variation on the theme down to a paradigm of good and evil and then proceeds to pick apart how invariably neither option is "good" or "evil."

DC do over

As some of you may have heard, DC comics is relaunching everything in September. They will have fifty two comics out, each will be a #1, each will be written to be accessible to new readers, each fill feature heroes updated to be contemporary, and each will be released simultaneously online. For those of you who regularly read comics (even some of you who don't), this is nothing new except for the impressively larger scale and the internet thing.

Collars for everyone. Even Wonder Woman, who's missing the top half of her shirt.

It won't work. That’s not nay-saying; I’m proud and excited by what DC’s doing. It’s a ballsy move and I hope it pays off and I’ll do what I can to help that happen. No, it won’t work because even whenever you relaunch Superman and start writing stories about Superman that don’t reference earlier Superman stories, those stories are still there. The problem is decades of preexisting canon attached to one character. DC was on the right track bringing Kal-L back during Infinite Crisis; for a while, there were two Supermen with different histories drawn up from the same base, storytelling clay, but shaped by the different experiences they had. Whenever they reinvent Superman, Batman, Wonder Wonder Woman, etc., in September, they’ll still be The Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, etc. and that continuity will be attached to them, even if it's done outside of the narrative by fans and onlookers.

For example, this is Batman. This is a part of what happened to Batman.

Fans have long made strong proclamations about how Batman from one source isn’t “their” Batman and depending on who you ask, some one-off stories aren’t considered part of the character’s history, but ultimately, there isn’t an official cutoff point between the Silver Age zany Batman, the grim, nineties Batman, and the current, ubersmench Batman, besides for a few hasty, inconsistent pre and post Crisis declarations. They’re all masquerading as The One, True Batman.

Here's my solution for DC: Ragnarok. The renewing cycle wherein the gods die and are born again in a new age. Except instead of “new age,” it’s “a different multiverse set a few years later.” Let’s take Final *snerk* Crisis; what if, instead of returning everything to the status quo with a few changes, Darkseid wins. He rules Earth…say…6; Earth-6 and surrounding Universe. The heroes aren’t all destroyed, the battle isn’t over, but no one wants to read about a post-apocalyptic universe week after week, well, some people do, but not most. So you wrap up the stories of the guys on Earth-6, give them their tearful farewells and their heroic sacrifices, then next month, Earth-7.

Victory, but at the high price of karaoke.

Earth-7 is the present, but the heroes are just starting out and have none of the history dragging them down. Yes, it’s a reboot and you do it every few years, but it’s a clean breakaway that tells fans new and old when to get on and your characters and stories have bite-sized back stories that only go back to the beginning of the latest universe. As a bonus, you can actually give characters a satisfying arc from beginning to end before you wrap up Earth-7. Instead of being an endless litany of updated canon, Batman can be a story, well told, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Whenever a fan says "That's not my Batman," they can add, "The Batman of Earth-7 is my Batman." Whenever someone dies, they stay dead until the next turning of the wheel and the death of characters can actually be a relevant event that doesn’t make fans roll their eyes.

The end of Earth-7 doesn’t have to be a disaster. Maybe the heroes overcome their crisis. Maybe they win, defeat the God of Evil and make the universe a better place. They can retire or go back to stopping the occasional bank robbery. The good guys can actually succeed in this scenario. Then, after all of the stories have been told, Earth-8.

You might say that means that by default, the old characters are gone. That The Batman of Earth-6 was hit with Darkseid’s Omega Beams and he’s dead. But that doesn’t matter, the point is that Earth-5 and Earth-6 are still there, in the background and ready to be used again, but their time as the backdrop of The DC Universe is over. Even in the Omega Beams scenario, it can justify The Batman of Earth-6 showing up in a different Earth for more adventures, or in a different time of his own universe, either as a one-shot, a mini-series, or just a simple crossover. Is that any more ridiculous or confusing than having Batman simultaneously in three titles a month?

With this proposal, you're labeling the chaos inherent in the system and making it look like part of the master plan.

Do it fellas.
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Pictures via Comics Alliance.