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June 20, 2006
Spider-Man No More?
I refrained from commenting on last week's Civil War #2 and the big news event about Spider-Man unmasking. If you read Amazing Spider-Man 532, you would have seen it coming two weeks in advance: an entire issue laying out Peter Parker's justification to unmask. No matter how great it is that Aunt May and Mary Jane encourage him to reveal his identity, it's still pretty dumb. Peter can't rationally say, well, they are living in Avengers Tower now, they'll be safe. They've already been attacked living there (by Morlun during The Other) and I can't imagine they'll have Sentinels for bodyguards out on the street. And didn't Peter take notes on what happened to his buddy Matt Murdock? Whatever, this event fulfilled Joe Quesada's goal to get people talking about Marvel Comics. Civil War is a megahit on the stands, selling in excess of 300,000 copies. Joe Q's Fridays at Newsarama have stoked the fire with talk about how boring Peter's marriage is to Mary Jane, which leads us to believe she could die. I seriously doubt it, but it's good for Quesada to make us think so.
Something's bothered me about this decision--something even worse than making Tony Stark into a Machiavellian creep. I couldn't put it into words myself, but Jeff Lester wrote it down beautifully over on the Savage Critic:
If you ask me, what makes Spider-Man work in the first place is how Stan and team approached the whole Pete/Spidey duality. Unlike the relatively binary set-up of secret identities for superheroes (usually hero is lauded, secret identity is dumped on--the Superman/Clark Kent blueprint) which makes them such satisfyingly simple ego-fantasies, Stan made that duality more complex: the happier Peter Parker would be in his personal life, the more fucked up things would get for Spidey, and vice-versa.
Seriously. Check out the first hundred or so issues of Amazing Spider-Man. What makes the title work isn't that Peter is a miserable bastard, or that Spidey is a shat-upon superhero, it's that the two rarely happened at the same time. As Pete gets a girlfriend and a life, Spider-Man becomes a hounded superhero (and when Pete was more miserable in high school, Spider-Man actually had a stronger public following). Part of that--the miserable super-hero--is what we think of as "Spider-Man," but it's really that distance that's so archetypal, because it taps into the universal frustation about how the distance between one's fantasy life and one's real life always stays constant.
Over on Newsarama, I read many interesting fan responses:
That's gonna be hard to fix when they undo it in five years.
Mary Jane dies. Marriage ended by death. Mary Jane comes back from the dead. Ta-da, the single status quo is restored by her death while we also get MJ back---without ever using divorce as a plot device.
They can't get a divorce. Mary Jane can't die. So what do you do to put the genie back in the bottle? You kill Peter Parker!
Scarlet witch will turn everything back to normal next summer in HoM2...
Who knows which of these things will be true? For comic-book fans, we're so jaded that we can anticipate lots of different outcomes. Non comic book fans may be drawn in temporarily, just like they were with the Death of Superman. Marvel still has Ultimate Spider-Man where Peter will stay a geeky out of luck kid forever. And we still have those first 100 issues of Spider-Man, which are looking more and more like sheer genius. Nuff said.
Posted by Adam Warlock at 12:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)June 19, 2006
The Flash Volume 3 Debuts This Week
This is the week I've been both looking forward to and dreading at the same time. Flash Volume 3, Number 1, will be in comic stores this Wednesday, June 21st. Can a couple of TV hacks really reinvigorate this character? Will the Flash turn out to be Bart Allen or Jay Garrick or Wally West? I'm betting that things will start off leading us to believe the former and wind up with the latter at the conclusion, just like Wonder Woman is doing with the Donna Troy business. I have no doubts about Ken Lashley on the artwork. Blog @ Newsarama tipped me off to this article about Lashley on the Canadian MetroNews site. There's also a review of Flash #1 which doesn't really say anything, except to indicate that the first arc is another example of decompressed storytelling. Can't wait till Wednesday. Nuff said.
June 13, 2006
Whedon Crazy For Runaways
Remember when I said that fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer would appreciate Runaways? The Master himself, Joss Whedon, has this to say about it in a recent Wizard interview with Brian Bendis:
And also, I’m so crazy about Runaways. That would be daunting, but I have to admit. I once said to Brian [K. Vaughan], “You know, if Runaways isn’t doing that well, I could throw them into the X-Men and give them a little exposure.” And he was like, “I really appreciate it, but that’s so cheesy.” And then he wrote that X-Men/Runaways crossover! [Laughs] I can’t even find a copy. I’m like, “Wait a minute! I gotta read it!”
Check out the full interview, lots of great tidbits there about Serenity, Wonder Woman, and the new Buffy comic that will take the place of Season 8.
External Link: Brian Bendis Interviews Joss Whedon
Posted by Kid Flash at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)June 6, 2006
Halo 3: The Making of the E3 Trailer
Only poor deprived Halo fans could get all hot and bothered over the Halo 3 coming soon trailer that appeared during E3 2006. Count me in as one of them--I downloaded it the minute it was available. While the graphics looked impressive, and the scene on Earth promises a lot of action, it is really hard to wait until 2007 to play this game. Today Bungie released this cool making-of-the-trailer documentary which shows a few things that didn't make it into the movie. It's always good to see Marty O'Donnell creating this great symphonic score, which really contributes a lot to the game. Nuff said.
June 5, 2006
Bad Guys Will Go Out In Style
There was lot of furor over the fact that HBO was terminating Deadwood after the current season (number three) ends this summer\fall. Critics in almost every major newspaper were lamenting the decision, which was prompted by a bloated budget and expensive production costs. But now you can rest assured that we will see the final fate of Al Swearengen: David Milch made a deal with HBO to bring Deadwood back for two 2-hour movies next year. At the same moment, we also get this news that Vic Mackay will be stick around for another season on FX. Besides the ten episodes starting in January 2007, we'll get an additional 13 episodes (season seven), probably appearing in January 2008. If you saw the last season, you have to wonder how far Shawn Ryan and his excellent writing staff will go in torturing Mackay's Strike Team. Great news, sometimes the bad guys win. Nuff said.
June 4, 2006
Watch the Emperor Discover the Death Star Was Destroyed
This little clip (from Adult Swim) of Emperor Palpatine finding out from Darth Vader that the Death Star was destroyed is pretty fucking hilarious!
Wonder Woman Lassoed Out of E3
Dang, this is somethin you don't see everyday, pardners! A good lookin gal (good enough to be in Playboy) dressed up as Wonder Woman on her own dime! Her name is Kasey Poteet and according to her MySpace page, she's a really big comic book fan. She loves Wonder Gal and Superman and looks like she'd like to replace Jennifer Garner as Elektra! One photo on her MySpace page shows her holding a sign, "Honk If You Like Daredevil". She gets kicked out of E3 for wearing Lynda Carter's bikini briefs, but keeps her cool long enough to make sure her buddies retain their E3 badges. Now that's a gal who stands up for honor and justice! The first part of the video shows Kasey explaining what happened in the full stars and stripes...she'll make you forget about Rachel Bilson. Nuff said.
June 2, 2006
Zombie Resurrected
It's old Horror week at Marvel. At Wizard World Philly 2006, they announced that the Zombie is returning as well as the Son of Satan. Unfortunately, they are completely rebooting the Zombie from scratch. It makes sense--heck, there are only about a couple dozen of us left who remember the black and white Tales of the 
Zombie? A reboot makes sense from Marvel's point of view, but I think the writer, Mark Raicht, is missing something:
"This is an ensemble piece, but our main character is Simon Garth who is an Assistant Bank Manager. He is nothing special at the beginning of the story. Just a guy caught up in a bank robbery trying to survive. He makes a few semi-heroic choices that lead him into a Zombie nightmare of pretty epic proportions. Layla is a teller at the bank. Simon, and just about every other guy at the bank, has a crush on her. She's probably a bit too much woman for all of them though. She's also tough as nails and pretty opinionated. Not things that would endear you to a bank robber.
"Gyp is a bank robber. He hates Simon. He wants this money and he wants to get away. When the Zombies show up they're just another obstacle to him."
Huh, keeping the Simon Garth character but making him a plain old assistant manager? The original Zombie stories had a good deal going with making Garth a powerful boss of his own coffee company, then taking it all away by getting Zombi-fied and making matters worse by having him take orders from whoever wielded the amulet of Damballah. What the heck, I'm cranky--Raicht is probably going for humor in this tale. Nuff said.
Posted by Kid Flash at 3:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)Daimon Hellstrom returns in October 2006
Marvel announced today that Daimon Hellstrom will return in a MAX imprinted series called Hellstorm: Son of Satan. According to the interviews I've read, with the editor (Axel Alonso) and with the writer (Alexander Irvine), it keeps a few of the past elements subtly intact so that both new and old readers can enjoy it. 
Irvine remarked on one event:
"...As I explored the character, one moment from the existing history struck me: when Satan tells Daimon to seek the holy in the world and then erases his memory of having been told that. What a crisis that must be, to have this longing to do exactly the opposite of what you think your father would want, and to not know why you feel it so strongly."
Satana or Hellcat won't make any appearances, but from the plot synopsis we are inferring that Daimon is no longer the ruler of Hell. If that's the case, it's a welcome development. Apparently the storyline deals with demons infiltrating post-Katrina New Orleans. The plot synopsis to Irvine's novel The Narrows sounds great (an alternate WW2 era Detroit where the main character works on the Ford Golem production line) and gives me hope that this will be a good revival. Nuff said until October.
Posted by Kid Flash at 2:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
