Playing Favorites excerpts, pt 50 - The Verdict

Every Most Tuesdays I post excerpts from best selling at not selling super blog, Playing Favorites. 

Spider-Man

Jenny Sparks

The Batman

Blue Beetle (Ted Kord)

Lindy Reynolds (Dark Avengers)

Captain America

Gauntlet

Superman (All-Star Superman)

Elijah Snow

Cable (Cable & Deadpool)

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Playing Favorites excerpts, pt 46

Every Most Tuesdays I post excerpts from best selling at not selling super blog, Playing Favorites.

So, yeah, it looks like in my category of bad-guys who aren’t bad-guys, I like the ones who believe strongly in their purpose, don’t kick puppies, and provide the reasoning behind the actions of otherwise unsympathetic actors in the universe. These characters aren’t heroic in the conventional sense, though they do have strong beliefs that bring them into conflict with their own side. In fact, villains who just do whatever they want when they want usually aren’t that interesting.

This conflicts with my pettiness point somewhat. Sure Lex, wants to kill Superman and he doesn’t ever say, “I can’t kill Superman this way; it would destroy this orphanage.” In the trailers for the DC Universe Online, he wrecks the world (or at least Metropolis) just to kill the Justice League just to kill Superman. I suppose there’s a difference between pettiness of means and pettiness of ends. While Chaplain Action, He-Man of The Cloth and Victoria Hand have fairly high-minded goals and means, Lex and Doom have very petty ends and very highbrow means. Minor criminals have tiny goals and pathetic means. I suppose they’re called petty criminals for a reason.

Cap Week: @#&^ Yeah, Captain America

Ye gods, yes fun. I mentioned the characters with only a few lines of dialog; those lines of dialog are packed with (admittedly simple) character and add a lot to the enjoyment of the movie. I’ve heard tell that there might be some flashbacks in a sequel. While I’m not a big fan of Cap as a solo act, the possibility of more multinational, multiethnic platoon of badasses does this fanboy thing where I completely forget that they’re essentially going to be potato chip content stretched to fill in the gaps of the terrible idea this is Captain America solo adventures.

Cap Week: The Main Event

The first thing I want to say about CA:tFA is that while I know it’s about a super-soldier bombarded with vita-rays who uses his indestructible shield to fight a super-Nazi with superpowers over a cube of infinite energy that fell out of Odin’s trophy room and who ends up harmlessly frozen in ice in the North Atlantic for seventy years, but…

Cap Week: Things to Come

It's CapWeek, the week I celebrate having witnessed the third live action movie about a guy who wears more stars than a kindergarten production of "The Solar System,"and punches more Nazis than is the standard by which punching Nazis is measured.

Yesterday—you know what happened yesterday. Read it again if you forgot.

When I left off yesterday, I had just settled in to watch the Captain America: The First Avenger…previews.

The Immortals is nice and shiny, but it somehow come across as over-produced. Between the sexy, hairless twentysomething cast, shouts for “freedom” in a setting where I can't imagine it being a really popular concept, and obvious wartime setting, it just seemed like a polished, formulaic film pushed in front of a populace hungry to eat up its sexuality, bloodshed, and toothless, affirmative ideology without reflection. That line didn’t start out to be insulting; while The Immortals looks like it will be very good at what it is, what it is is slightly more blatant about feeding a sickened, navel-gazing populace more cultural dessert through an NG tube instead of a good, goddamned nutritional meal you can taste, chew, and swallow.

Cap Week: Prelude

If there's one good thing I can say about Louisiana, it's that we sell booze in movie theaters. I don't know if other states do it, but by god, they should. At the very least, it's great for someone who sees movies and drinks at nine in the morning, and by that I mean someone who's actively attempting to live at a destructive frequency with civilization, and by that, I mean me.

Sadly, we suck at everything else, including how we serve liquor. The corner of the theater that serves liquor was presciently half-lit. This place was to be the most depressing alcoholery I’ve ever been to (well second; there was that time I went to a gay bar for middle-aged dudes).

Playing Favorites excerpts, pt 19

Every Tuesday I post excerpts from best selling at not selling super blog, Playing Favorites.

The Midnighter(Warren Ellis/Mark Millar)
Jenny Sparks(Warren Eillis/Mark Millar)
The Batman
Booster Gold (Geoff Johns)
Damian Wayne (Grant Morrison)
Steve Rogers(Ultimates Vol 1 & 2)
Cloud 9 (Dan Slott)
Superman(All-Star Superman)
Rorschach
Deadpool (Cable & Deadpool)

I guess that's it. It's strange that it’s these guys. There are a lot of other characters out there that are great and have some really good books, but fundamentally, these are the characters I like reading about. They're a motley crew--well, less motley than my original list. One homosexual, two females, two non-Americans (if Damian counts, even though I'm sure he would be an American citizen if Bruce Wayne is on his birth certificate), an alien, a time-traveler, six different tax brackets and two effective amnesiacs, but it is a whole loaf of white bread. Guess I can blame the comics industry for that. Sounds convenient.

That said, with the exception of All-Star Superman and Rorschach, most of these characters have a compatible feel to them that would let them interact in some way. I mean, you'd have the killing versus no killing sides, which would be Batman versus...well everyone but Booster Gold, I guess.

Though I would read the hell out of a Batman/Booster Gold team-up versus a Jenny Sparks lead Authority consisting of Midnighter, Deadpool, Cloud 9, Ultimate Cap, and Damian Wayne.

Playing Favorites excerpts, pt 17

Every Tuesday, I post excerpts from my best-selling at not-selling super blog, Playing Favorites
 

Alright, I think it's easier for me to break down the characters I like into four distinct groups:

Characters in a Great Story: So, maybe I like these guys more for the story they're in. All-Star Superman, Cloud 9, Adrian Veidt, Rorschach, Cable(Cable & Deadpool)

Like them Because They are Jerks: It is a shitty reason, though I worked really hard to come up with that 'righteous violence' thing, which I stand by, but it is just a fancy way of saying “I like a character because they are a jerk and I'm just going to go ahead and act like it's actually a call-out to the fundamental nature of the medium.” Midnighter, Ultimate Captain America, Damian Wayne.

Playing Favorites excerpts, pt 08

Every Tuesday, I post excerpts from my best-selling at not-selling super blog, Playing Favorites.


Once upon a time the Hulk destroyed a small town and then some punk kid superjerks called The New Warriors fought a guy called Nitro and a school blew up. Two seconds later, the government passed a bill to make superpeople register with the government, but in a way that wasn’t the same as the Mutant Registration Bill which has been kicking its way around congress since some time around the early seventies. In order to make these super-folks accountable for their actions, they were trained in ethics, physical fitness, public relations, and (of course) combat for their inevitable roles as super-soldiers and super-heroes. The prime training facility was in Camp Hammond (named after the original, android Human Torch who fought alongside Captain America in World War II) as part of a program called The Initiative. ‘The Initiative’ as a comic book was about young, new superkids learning their powers and drama-ing it up in a pseudo-bootcamp run by world champion loser Hank Pym, Marvel’s answer to the insane, paranoid racist telepath Maxwell Lord in Henry Peter Gyrich, and a Nazi in a wheelchair (the only guy to have an honest description because he was a literal Nazi in a literal wheelchair).

Believe it or not, this series was the bomb. B-list characters, C-list characters, and Hank Pym (and this is probably the nicest way I’ve ever referred to him) populated the cast, which let it have good stories with consequences and actions that have effects. The main cast (consisting of the second batch of cadets to arrive at the school), weren’t at ease in the world of super-heroics and most of them were bitter or at the very least reluctant about being forced to join up. There were plenty of mistakes made by both the trainers and the students and most of them (this still being comics) had irrationally harsh consequences. Before the end, you do even feel a little bad for the Nazi in a wheelchair (okay, it happens once).

But as much as I like the narrative quality afforded by being at the periphery of massive crossover events (“World War Hulk” and “Secret Invasion,” not to mention being birthed by “Civil War”) with largely unimportant peripheral characters, The Initiative had one character with a good arc that showed development and depth, and a lot of characters who were fun to watch interact with one another and whose further improvement would (unbelievably) be best explored with exposure to the mainstream Marvel Universe. Don’t get me wrong, Hardball will probably become a wishy-washy Hyrda double-agent. Komodo can get some Spider-Man team-ups and angst points versus The New and Improved (TM) Lizard. I think everyone else did go mainstream and joined up with the New Warriors, so fuck those guys.

Except Crusader. He’s dead. Crusader might actually get one of these spots. Now, I haven’t read the comic that he’s introduced in, so all I know is his brief, albeit memorable, appearances in ‘The Initiative’ just before and during “Secret Invasion.” I do nitpick that he should have been a veteran of more than a few Skrull Invasions to flesh out his background and ‘grizzled veteran’ status, but for a Skrull warrior who was sent undercover to Earth to infiltrate the Avengers just before they were destroyed even though The Skrull Queen herself was doing that very same thing and no one bothered to follow up with him so he ended up learning everything he could about The Avengers and becoming a fanboy until he eventually met Freedom Ring and trained him and Freedom Ring died and he took the ring that was a fragment of a cosmic cube and joined The Initiative as part of his (very recent) lifelong dream to become an Avenger only to get his wish and find himself pitted against his own people in their last grasp at their destiny before becoming a people with no home lost amongst the cosmos because of something that happened in some cosmic miniseries that I didn’t read because, c’mon, I tried that “Emperor Vulcan” thing where a Summer’s spawn ends up running the Shi’ar and fucking everything in space up forever, which I feel that I can only blame on the overall terribleness of recent X-books…

So Crusader chooses Earth (spoiler alert) and fights for his new home, red licorice, and Nick Fury (because who wouldn’t fight for Nick Fury, except for the soldiers hungry for the kind of leadership only a Nick Fury made of red licorice can provide.) and the Earthmen win the day and the Skrulls…well, I guess they’re boned, but no one is much focusing on it and Crusader’s dead, so fuck that too.

Ultimately, Crusader has tried, failed, and then redeemed himself and found focus in his life. He’s given up a lot for something he believes in (I’d like to think it was more than Avengers cartoons, red vines, dudes with one eye, and the prospect of boning not a single, amorphous Skrull sex, but boning humans with their amazing two sets of genitals to choose from. Maybe there was something off screen that really compelled him to stick it out with Team Homo Sapiens.). However shaky his motivations, his (admittedly short) story packs a punch and does a good job of showing how he hardens from an unsure traitor to a confident loyalist.

Tentatively, Crusader’s up.

It should be mentioned here that the Dark Avengers, from Victoria Hand to Bullseye-as-Hawkeye was an awesome read that took ‘dysfunctional team’ to new levels. It was a pity that it was short-lived, but then the series would’ve started looking pretty toothless when all eight deadly assholes kept living after pissing off the other seven assholes on the team. No matter how great a series it was, the only remotely heroic character was Victoria Hand, who was making some moral compromises because she believed in Norman Osborne. Even in the end, she was smart enough to realize that she’d backed the wrong horse. That she’s a good person who’s trying to get something done instead of repeating the asinine, run-in-place games of Nick Fury and the Avengers makes her a damned compelling hero, but until she gets superpowers and puts on a mask, she and her Hot-Topic dye job and lipstick lesbianism fall far short of superheroism.

I guess that covers all of the teams. Unless I somehow mistakenly left you with the impression that any of the X-Men were serious contenders for this list because I just want to assure that that was never even remotely close to the case.

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Playing Favorites excerpts, pt 06

Every Tuesday, I post excerpts from my best-selling at not-selling super blog, Playing Favorites.

Also, I just kicked Lois off, but I’m keeping Jenny Sparks. Even though Jenny Sparks never wore a costume and never wore a mask. In fact, I think that Midnighter was the only member of The Authority who ever wore a mask (unless you count The Doctor’s goggles). Each other member had a ‘uniform,’ such as it was. Midnighter and Apollo had their old Stormwatch duds, The Doctor had that eye-searing vest and khakis thing going on, Swift had the green pants plus…whatever that shirt was, Jack did bare feet with dress casual, and Jenny Sparks had The Union Jack on whatever shirt she wore. Not traditional costumes, certainly. Semantics about active wear aside, while Lois isn’t intuitively a super-hero, defining super-heroes demands more than intuition. Lois isn’t a full-time hero. Not that The Authority or Booster Gold are. The Authority only seems to work a few days out of the year, y’know, whenever there’s an apocalyptic threat. Booster Gold is a reservist at best, showing up (some might say ‘shining up’) whenever the big three are out of the picture or the timeline needs patching. I think, ultimately, she isn’t defined by her costume (when she wears one, which was mostly The Silver Age and ‘All-Star Superman,’ which is basically The Silver Age, if The Silver Age managed to be reborn in the Modern Age and thusly grew up making a lick of fucking sense). When Lois isn’t Superwoman or anyone else; she’s on this list because she can kick ass and fight crime when she has to. She doesn’t go looking for trouble to stop it. She’s a reporter and neutral by default. Everyone else on this list, from Cloud 9 to Batman will readily engage the forces of chaos and crime when they run into them. Cloud 9 might not be as enthusiastic or self-motivated about it as others—we get very few glimpses into her mindset after she becomes Cloud 9—but she will engage criminals. It’s this desire to aggressively stop these kinds of threats that separates Lois (even Badass, Marriage-Era Lois) from Jenny Sparks.

The Midnighter and Ultimate Cap make the list because they are both awesome. These guys don’t have complicated character arcs: Midnighter hurts people who (mostly) deserve it when we meet him, and he was still hurting people who (kinda) deserved it when we last saw him (I’m assuming he’s dead because they’re shuttering Wildstorm and I’m quite certain that The Midnighter was we know and love him won’t be surfacing in the DC Universe at large any time soon). Ultimate Captain America will beat the shit out of anyone who crosses him, which, incidentally, involves crossing America. He’s a good soldier who will mostly follow orders about not breaking your jaw, unless you beat your wife. Then it’s on like Donkey Kong (no, seriously. Check out that fight. Girders. Barrels. One tiny guy versus one big guy. Ultimate Captain America versus Ultimate Giant Man is like Donkey Kong, if Mario could cut sweet backflips.). Or if you imply he should surrender. Or you try to take over his country. Hell, let’s just say that you better watch what you say around Captain America, because he’s got a list of pet peeves he feels very strongly about and you’ll probably break one if you know him long enough. If you do, curl up into a ball and protect your softest parts; your hard parts are already forfeit.

Quotient Quotables

The following post is rated:

The following conversations may or may not have happened:

Terry: “The guy in the Subway was pretty cute, but you didn't seem to be checking him out.”

Kris: “Huh? Oh yeah, he totally was, but I tend not to check out attractive guys in public. If they're straight, it makes them uncomfortable. If they're gay, it automatically gives me a leg up in a social interaction.”

Terry: “Diabolical. How's that working out for you?”

Kris: “Haven't had a date in two years.”

Excerpt from that thing I'll send you

"The Midnighter and Ultimate Cap make the list because they are both awesome. These guys don’t have complicated character arcs. Midnighter hurts people who (mostly) deserve it when we meet him, and he was still hurting people who (kinda) deserved it when we last saw him (I’m assuming he’s dead because they’re shuttering Wildstorm and I’m quite certain that The Midnighter was we know and love him won’t be surfacing in the DC Universe at large any time soon). Also, he has a boyfriend named Apollo and they’re pretty close. Ultimate Captain America will beat the shit out of anyone who crosses him, which, incidentally, involves crossing America. He’s a good soldier who will mostly follow orders about not breaking your jaw, unless you beat your wife. Then it’s on like Donkey Kong (no, seriously. Check out that fight. Girders. Barrels. One tiny guy versus one big guy. Ultimate Captain America versus Ultimate Giant Man is like Donkey Kong, if Mario could cut sweet backflips.). Or if you imply he should surrender. Or you try to take over his country. Hell, let’s just say that you better watch what you say around Captain America, because he’s got a list of pet peeves he feels very strongly about and you’ll probably break one if you know him long enough. If you do, curl up into a ball and protect your softest parts; your hard parts are already forfeit.

I’m willing to bet that unchecked and largely unprovoked violence are not at the top of the list of things you thought I might consider superheroic. In and of themselves, they aren’t. Don’t get me wrong, and excuse me if I go off on a tangent here about superheroics and violence. They are very closely linked. At their most basic level, superheroics are morality stories that don’t wait around for kharma or natural consequence to fuck up people who do not act correctly. Note, these aren’t necessarily evildoers. The super-protagonist of a story can punch anyone he damn well pleases for violating social norms, idealistic rules of behavior, arbitrary laws, etc.. It isn’t about good versus evil, well, it is, but only in a very subjective moral sense. Superheroic comics are on many ways based on the vicarious joy of watching someone deliver harsh and righteous retribution to those to transgress. Now, I don’t need my comics to be violent, but I need more than inconsistent paneling and inconclusive punches and grunts to make my comic fights work. Both Midnighter and Ultimate Cap tell you clearly what’s happening in a fight and what the score is. When they beat a guy; you know that he’s either in resurrection territory for causing a further threat, or if we just learned he’s that much more of a threat now.

What’s strange is that the two of these guys have similar methodologies, but it’s the execution that sets them apart. Midnighter will rip a guy’s spine out when he uppercuts him. He’ll strangle a guy so you can watch his eyes bulge. He’ll hit a guy fast enough that you don’t see the panel where he makes impact. How Midnighter’s violence is implemented and what violence he implements are creative and different. When the monsters that Midnighter kills are killed, you’re satisfied and entertained. The best part of his character is that he’s a weapon who just fucks things up, but tends to be off his kilter when killing stuff won’t fix stuff. Better, it’s something that’s exploited rarely, averting Badass Decay. The Midnighter is surprising and fun with an attitude that frames that violence to make it fun (make no mistake, the fella shit-talks, but isn’t that witty).

Ultimate Captain America, however, is all about the righteousness. Ultimate Cap will think and use tactics like The Midnighter, but he’s not just a killer. He’s got a more varied response to threats, largely coming from the fact that he’s usually the aggressor, and uses the force necessary to accomplish his mission. He’s not a killer; he’s a soldier, and the distinction is separate. Outside of a mission or some other superheroic goings-on, he’s gentle, polite and even hangs out with people his own age (that is to say, old people). Ultimate Captain America combines the two things I like most about comics: violence and character. That Ultimate Cap’s violence is occasionally believably real, misapplied violence (like when he kicks Banner after their first fight with The Hulk). He’s just angry so he hits stuff. It subverts (however unintentionally) the trend of righteous violence by just having Cap hit something because he doesn’t like it that much. Is Mark Millar that smart? I like to think he is. Seventy-five percent of the time he in a fight, Cap is someone you want to will totally root for, but the other thirty percent he is just being a jerk. He subverts righteous violence of the superhero genre by being an asshole, but he’s also just a guy who’s lost in time and trying to find his footing as a person with their own life. That these things are balanced so well in who he is makes him a fun read.

I guess it could also be a cheat, in that his general compassion and no-questions-asked action mean that he could conceivably do anything the plot requires, but I’ve never really felt (again, speaking strictly about Volumes 1 & 2 of The Ultimates), that he was ever really forced out of character to do something for the plot."