* Here’s a by-definition SPOILERY promo for Battlestar Galactica Season 4.5, as I suppose they’ll be calling the show’s final stretch of weekly episodes. (There’s still the prequel pilot/potential series Caprica and at least one TV movie to account for, of course.) One thing that looks promising is increased screen time for Richard Hatch’s Tom Zarek, one of my favorite characters.
* Tom Spurgeon explains what he doesn’t like about Final Crisis. I agree with his points about how the series is conveying hopelessness, and disagree with but appreciate his observation regarding Morrison’s interpretation of the Anti-Life Equation. (Actually, in the sense that Tom’s interpretation of Kirby’s original idea allows for an even more hopeless universe than Morrison’s, it’s probably something I’ll cotton to myself eventually. You know how much I love hopelessness!) But Tom’s main beef, in a nutshell, is that he doesn’t care about the DC Universe or the vast majority of its characters anymore. As this has long been his position regarding the big corporate superhero farms, it’s not exactly a surprise. It reminds me a little of my friend who today told me she thought Let the Right One In was overlong and overrated and generally terrible, but maybe someone who doesn’t hate vampire movies the way she hates vampire movies would like it. No kidding!
* However, one aspect of Tom’s critique for which my response goes beyond “agree to disagree” is whether bad comics set in a particular character’s or mythos’s continuity hurt comics like this. I’m honestly not a whole lot more invested in the idea of “The DC/Marvel Universe” than Tom is, but I do still hold some affinity for a lot of the ideas contained in both, and I’ve never understood why I have to pay any attention at all to bad comics about them. I haven’t said to myself “But wait, that contradicts Countdown #3!” or “man, this would be good if I hadn’t known what happened in that lousy Countdown #3!” a single time while reading Final Crisis, because long ago I realized that no matter what Dan DiDio or Joe Quesada say, it’s entirely up to me what I choose to treat as canon when reading big superhero books. In that light, some crappy comic that steps on a good comic’s thematic or narrative toes no more ruins my enjoyment of the good comic than the fact that there are stinky comedies set in New York City ruins my enjoyment of Ghostbusters or Annie Hall.
* Speaking of disagreeing, I enjoyed Neil Marshall’s Doomsday a bunch, but the movie just won a reader-participation contest at Topless Robot for Stupidest Fantasy World–not, I have to admit, without reason. The phrase “Sir Knight of Eatingpeopleshire” is deployed.
* Four things Becky Cloonan draws well are hair, tentacles, pretty girls, and skeletal toothy mouths. Put them all together and you’ve got a recipe for delight.
* The Dark Knight is doing the For Your Consideration bit in the trades, and I thought this ad was really lovely because of how normal it looks. This image is like if a friend of yours had snapped a picture some dude on the street, only the dude is the Joker. The Dark Knight is not a perfect film by any stretch of the imagination, and to me the idea that it’s a Godfather-level masterpiece is utterly cockamamie, but there’s not a whole lot involving the Joker it got wrong. In this case, the idea that he’s just some clown off the street (heh, no pun intended) is quite creepy.
Doomsday was very dumb. Then again, Rhona Mitra’s ass.
I actually enjoyed Doomsday as well, but I do have to say its idea of Scotland splitting neatly into renaissance faire enthusiasts and Mad Max-esque cannibals in 20 years after being walled away was perhaps a bit silly.
I mean, it would take at least 30 years for Scotland to turn cannibal. Right?
One of the great “lightbulb coming on” moments of my life was in college, when a…backing up a sec. In college I had work-study with the AV department, since I knew how to run a sound board. They taught me how to do old-school two-projector film showing, too, so I showed movies for all kinds of classes. Learned a lot that way, and had much fun.
One of the very best moments came when I was waiting to show a film about the work of de Koonig and the professor was explaining her aim in the paper students would be writing about abstract styles. It wasn’t their place, she said, to write as a critic would, or even as a professor would. She wanted them to write like themselves, simply better informed than they used to be. They didn’t have the context to address business or managerial or other concerns well, and that wasn’t the point anyway; the point was the art and their responses to it.
It’s not just us fanboys that are prone to that kind of thing. 🙂 But it certainly applies a lot, with fans staking out arguments based on turf that really is seldom theirs. There just aren’ t that many of us who are actually line developers or editors in chief or whatever, and that’s not – shouldn’t be, at least – the point when it comes to our reactions. We have no burden of fidelity to the work – we’re not making it. Our job is to get our entertainment. What we owe each other is simply clarity about what we’re doing, so that I don’t start talking about (say) the Legion of Super-Heroes as if it were somehow “really” the way I’d like to see it. But I’m a big boy and can distinguish between what’s published, what parts of that I toss or keep, and what I invent or take from others’ inventions.
Ha! Just posted my take on Let The Right One In. Weird she rejected it because it’s a vampire flick, since most people seem to love it in spite of the blood sucking – as if that element is just window dressing for “the real story”. I think your friend read the movie better than most people have, even though she hated it.
It’s more sort of like the Sci-Fi Network having Starbuck and Boomer show up on Knight Rider for a few episodes and having them presage whatever is going to happen to their characters in BSG Season 4.5. Or having them show up on all the science fiction shows on TV and in some of them they do their BSG Season 4.5 character arcs and in some of them they don’t.
I mean, I don’t care about the bad comics, either. I barely care about the good ones! But the kind of affection a lot of people hold for these characters and their worlds — or the idea of these worlds — seems to me warped by what for many of them is some relationship to its absolute latest permutation. This is because its absolute latest permutation is 1) an eighth-generation do-over that 2) maintains its official imprimatur and 3) these days can’t help but try and do its own version of this kind of event comic itself. All the time. That’s a brutal combination. After a while, that starts to have an effect, I think, if not for some kind of abstract reason then because the third time a story gets told it usually loses some of its freshness.
How would the last quarter-hour of The Sopranos be viewed differently if eight months earlier we had seen Jerry Orbach and Sam Waterston investigate Tony Soprano’s murder on a two-hour Law & Order event? Not an equivalent — same character! Or if you had just heard about it? No way you compartmentalize that as easily as you’re asserting, no matter how fabulously David Chase makes the case for you to do that in his long Newsarama interview.
(Although to make this more of an equivalent, Jerry Orbach is playing Andy Taylor, Sam Waterston is playing Dan Fielding and James Gandolfini is playing Ralph Kramden. And he was shot at Arnold’s.)
Tom: That’s actually an analogy I haven’t seen before. I was working on something in response to your thoughts on Final Crisis, but find I lack the finesse to articulate a counter-argument effectively – particularly since I’ve been feeling very betrayed by the over-all quality of Final Crisis and it’s tie-ins lately. I just can’t seem to work up the energy to defend a product that has left me so cold for the past few months. I really appreciated the Lovecraftian approach to the story at it’s launch, but it seems now that Morrison has traded that for a superficial Romero riff that boils the whole thing down, once again, to a mere physical threat that must be socked into oblivion.
Having said that, I really have no problem “compartmentalizing” as you say the whole Orion is dead…no, wait, he’s alive nonsense. I tend to evaluate each series as a stand-alone story myself and ignore the continuity stuff. If I weren’t able to do that, I think I’d find it nigh impossible to enjoy this shit on any level whatsoever (witness for the defense: Green Lantern).
Granted, events like Final Crisis owe as much to the use of characters with an embedded history with specific iconic resonances for the audience as they do to the actually story itself (in some cases, like say Kingdom Come, the entire story relies on the clash of embedded symbolism/iconography of the characters). Still, I’m not sure how much that either adds or detracts from my enjoyment of one of these Ultimate Final Secret Armageddons.
But, again, your analogy does really hit on something I haven’t thought about before – for people who DO have a certain kind of particular investment in this stuff, it must be maddening to see characters flit about in one another’s titles and create these ripples of discontinuity. While I’ve never had a problem with that, I can see how some folks might and it does seem a) pretty flip of Morrison and DC to just shrug and tell those people to get over it, and b) like it would conversely create a real sense of “eh, who gives a damn,” in regards to just about any story coming out of that crew.
I guess it took Jerry Orbach to show me the light. Is there anything that man couldn’t do?
That’s cool. Just to underline, it’s not solely the ripples of discontinuity; it’s also a very specific kind of unconvincing repetition utilized by a construct that isn’t flattered that way. While I’ll always go see a good Hamlet, I’m very much done with community theatre versions of South Pacific.
If said performance of South Pacific featured an undead Jerry Orbach in Joker make-up as Nellie, I doubt even you would be able to resist.
Tom: I think between the two of us, with my Ghostbusters/Annie Hall comparison and your BSG/Sopranos ones, have demonstrated the futility of trying to come up with an analogy for what goes on with contemporary corporate superhero comics. Mine was obviously way too broad, while yours require us to imagine an alternate world where the kinds of things that make us connect so deeply with shows like BSG and The Sopranos work in a completely different way.
All I can really say is that if the equivalent events you describe in your BSG/Sopranos examples happened in superhero comics, it honestly wouldn’t bother me when reading the actual good superhero comics involved. I can say this because it currently doesn’t bother me. It really is that easy for me to compartmentalize.
Now, if you want to argue against the way these companies do business as publishers and marketers, or against a way of looking at these books that does entail affording consideration for a particular idea or character’s crappiest iterations, I’m right there with you. But there’s nothing about Countdown that by necessity makes Final Crisis any worse.
If you look at my superhero comics collection, the actual tpb’s I enjoyed enough to purchase, it’s almost all discreet runs by particular writers and artists, or stand-alone stories. The longest contiguous stretch that actually bridges more than one basic creative team is the Bendis/Maleev/Brubaker/Lark Daredevil material. Event fatigue never enters into it because I don’t buy stuff that would fatigue me. If my wallet can avoid them, so can my brain.
That’s a good way to phrase it, and you just kicked my ass on debate points, although I hope that I didn’t cause the edge in your voice I might be detecting (or simply might be paranoid concerning). I just wanted to be clear what it is I think I’m maybe talking about possibly.
I don’t have event fatigue, either, but I’m sympathetic to those who do. Mostly I think the whole DC Universe has event fatigue, and showed up with a sweaty brow and clammy hands at this particular party and it shows.
I did have event confusion! A friend shoved a big bag of comics into my hands the day after San Diego, and I read them at LAX while waiting for my seven-hour-late plane. So when I read FC #1 I wasn’t tired, I was just confused.
I think where we might have a fruitful conversation sometime, Sean, is how a knowledge of standard superhero tropes or continuity has an impact on stories that we like. Alan Moore’s take on Dark Knight and all that.
Naw man, no edge at all. Gosh, remember when our primary mode of online interaction was arguing about superhero comics? Memories, light the corners of my mind.
That’s a good question about how continuity affects our appreciation of good comics. Particularly with Dark Knight, which was really the first comic I ever read for all intents and purposes, and played off continuity elements I had to glean through induction. (I had no idea who “Ollie” was for a long time, for example, and this was my very first exposure to Two-Face at all since he wasn’t on the Adam West TV show.) I think that for me it’s most likely part and parcel of the same internal editing process where I ignore the horseshit–here I’m just switching the “appreciate continuity” switch to ON instead of OFF.
I think that with any superhero character about whom I know a bunch of stuff, I sort of form my own personal mythos for that character in my head based on what I enjoy or deem important. As I said when I reviewed the recent death of Pa Kent in Action Comics for example, the Kents have never been an important aspect of the mythos to me beyond “nice generic couple who rescues baby Superman and raises him to be a nice guy.” So Johns could kill him or not kill him or really do anything to him at all and it wouldn’t matter to me beyond “was it a good story?” But there are aspects of a given character’s continuity I do come to care about or see as vital sometimes, and maybe those are the ones that give a good story extra juice for me.
I really liked Doomsday and “Sir Knight of Eatingpeopleshire” is still making me laugh. I’m going on Ten Minutes here. Heheh.
-N
I really liked Doomsday and “Sir Knight of Eatingpeopleshire” is still making me laugh. I’m going on Ten Minutes here. Heheh.
-N