I had a “Movies You Should See But Have Not Seen (Because They Are Good)” in the queue for next week, and now I have to write something else, because Pajiba went ahead and did an excellent column about the merits of Sneakers.

BASTARDS!

Every Thursday, mightygodking.com returns to the pages of Who’s Who, the classic 1980s DC comic book encyclopedia of their characters. Every week, a character shall be judged on the only scale scientific enough that matters: the Rex The Wonder Dog scale of fantasticosity.

The DC Universe is not, let us be honest, one that is famed particularly for international criminal/terrorist groups. Marvel Comics has HYDRA, AIM, the Hand, the Maggia, Roxxon, and of course all the splinter groups that come along with those big, important evil ones - so that whenever a Marvel comics writer needs a villainous terrorist with a psycho-death gorillabot, he can just invent Radically Advanced Ideas in Destruction or Maliciously Advanced Ideas in Larceny or Transformative Realizations Of Advanced Ideas in Nanorobotics and the reader will instantly know “oh, it’s just AIM again, except not.” And this is fine, although they never really explain why the guys in AIM dress up like evil beekeepers.

Meanwhile, DC has tried time and again to invent their own equivalents of these same groups, and almost universally they fail. With the exception of the League of Assassins - which mostly gets by on Ra’s Al Ghul’s cred; I mean, I like Merlyn and all, but come on - they almost always end up sucking pipe. We have Kobra (”just like Cobra in “G.I. Joe,” except completely different and even less impressive”). We’ve got Intergang (”hey, are you a common criminal deluded enough to believe that sheer numbers can beat Superman? Then sign up today”). There’s The 1,000 (”like Intergang, but with a less interesting name”).

And those are the good ones. There are more terrible failed shadowy organizations in the DC universe then there are Green Lanterns, frankly. A short and not comprehensive list: the 2000 Committee, ASP, the Assassination Bureau, the Battalion of Doom, Black Ops, Cell Six, The Council, H.I.V.E., The DMT, Eurocrime, Locus, Les Mille Yeux, MAZE, the Oblivion Front, Scorpio, Shadowspire, SPIDER, The Veil, VULTURE, and no less than three separate unrelated outfits known as the Network.

Honestly, it’s kind of amazing that all these organizations manage to co-exist. Do they have their own human-resources divisions?

“So, Mr. Kelly. I see here you worked for three years at SPIDER as an arson specialist. How do you think you could help VULTURE’s accounts payable division?”
“Well, I could set the people we owe money on fire.”
“Interesting, interesting… You are aware that the health plan requires a buy-in if you want optical coverage, right?”

And then there is SKULL. If there is one saving grace to DC’s horde of indistinguishable villainous cartels, it is that they are homogenous; the same vaguely pan-Hispanarabic terrorists and criminals in every one (ah, the good old DC universe, where dusky-but-not-black skin almost always equals “evil”). But not SKULL. Simple swarthy looks are not enough for the likes of SKULL.

SKULL makes you dress up.

Now, unlike a lot of these criminal organizations, SKULL did not arise out of a shared interest in power and money. Rather, it arose because the Atomic Skull needed a lot of flunkies. Perhaps you’re thinking “but wait, the Atomic Skull is mostly a nobody.” And this is true. SKULL is an organization founded to serve the whims of a second-rate Superman villain. Okay, by itself it’s not that bad. For example, Kobra is pretty lame, but he’s got his own army. Which is also pretty lame, come to think. But he had his own comic! Which… you know, Kobra probably isn’t a good reason to justify the Atomic Skull having a terrorist army.

But it’s even sadder than that, because one day the Atomic Skull just said “oh, fuck this,” and left SKULL. But that didn’t stop the members of SKULL from continuing to do evil… stuff. It also didn’t stop them from keeping their original name. SKULL is like a Milli Vanilli cover band that chose to carry on after everybody found out that Rob and Fab weren’t actually doing any of the singing.

But they still have the uniforms with the skulls on them, so what are they supposed to do, huh? I mean, they’re already cutting costs. Every third meal is ramen, and when it’s not ramen they’re buying off-brand food, and they had to sell the Skullships for money so now everybody has to make do with bus passes, and Brenda cancelled the maid service so now they keep the evil headquarters clean via a chore rota. Getting new uniforms and coming up with a new name would be expensive, and everybody likes the skull motif anyway, so…

Yes, I know somebody’s going to say “but you can use them for a comedic riff on evil comic-book terrorist armies,” but the thing is that you don’t need SKULL to do that. You can just use a witless member of a GOOD evil comic-book terrorist army and it’ll be more effective (and funnier).

This week’s contribution from me at TheCourt.ca is a bit on Loving v. Virginia and its influence on high-level Canadian jurisprudence.

In a more serious vein considering superhero movies (as opposed to previously), some random thoughts about where the origin story is appropriate for a superhero movie, and where it just isn’t.

GREEN LANTERN: This is probably the last of the really good “movie is the origin story” superhero movies, because Green Lantern’s origin, when told right, is really fucking awesome. To wit:

1.) Hal Jordan in exciting test pilot plane sequence
2.) Abin Sur “interrupts”, gives ring
3.) Fun stuff with Hal using ring, maybe fighting criminals who have, say, golden battle armor for some reason (so to explain ring’s weaknesses).
4.) Sinestro-as-a-Green-Lantern shows up, starts training Hal on Earth then in outer space. Tentative student/apprentice friendship emerges!

This is the obvious first act. Then you go into the balls-out SECOND act:

5.) Trip to Korugar. OH SHIT it turns out Sinestro is INSANE, because Sinestro thinks the need to keep “order” means you need a fascist interstellar government. Plus, Hal has no way of knowing that Sinestro doesn’t represent the Green Lantern ethos, so now it’s him against ALL the Green Lanterns, he figures.
6.) So Sinestro has an interstellar battle fleet and he’s going to restore order to the universe sector-by-sector, planet-by-planet. STARTING WITH EARTH because he wasn’t impressed with it and because Hal, who is Hal, resists him.
7.) Sinestro reveals that it was HE who killed Abin Sur, because Abin Sur found out what he was doing and was trying to stop him.
8.) Sinestro uses his awesome will to strip Hal of his ring and dumps him OUT OF A FUCKING AIRLOCK into SPACE.

And finally you get the awesomer than awesome THIRD act:

9.) In the seconds before Hal dies of space death type thing, he gets picked up by a stealth shuttle piloted by Katma Tui and Tigorr. (YES FUCK YOU IT IS MY GREEN LANTERN MOVIE AND I SAY TIGORR IS IN IT.)
10.) Whoops, Sinestro finds them on Korugar and Hal Jordan uses WILLPOWER to get his ring back and they have a ring-fight which is AWESOME and Hal knocks Sinestro for a loop long enough…
11.) …for Hal to go into space and really GO TO FUCKING TOWN on the interstellar space fleet with his power ring. I am talking ten-mile-long buzzsaws, swarms of a billion boxing gloves, enormous star-devouring Bea Arthurs, you name it.
12.) But Sinestro shows up for ROUND TWO and they ring-fight EVEN MORE and at this point everybody watching the movie should have an enormous erection because it will be JUST THAT GODDAMNED COOL.
13.) And then the Guardians show up and you play the “wait, what if the Guardians are on SINESTRO’s side?” to the hilt until Tomar Re and Kilowog show up and say “fuck YOU Sinestro” and Sinestro gets exiled to the Anti-Matter Universe and Katma Tui gets the power ring and replaces him and then the movie makes eleventy billion dollars.

I’m of course being exceptionally facile here, but the point stands that the Green Lantern origin story just works in a way that a lot of superhero origin stories don’t because it - much like Iron Man - is fundamentally a movie about the superhero origin story as self-discovery, about the realization of greatness (Tony Stark and Hal Jordan share one thing in common, traditionally - they’re both, as people, way above average on the “ability” scale) and the responsibility borne with it. Origin stories work as movies when the origin makes you want to root for the hero.

FLASH: Now, this is fundamentally the opposite of a Green Lantern movie right here, because Flash’s origin story is shitburgers from a movie storytelling standpoint.

1.) Meet Barry (or Wally)! He’s a decent guy! He’s a cop!
2.) He gets zapped with chemicals and lightning!
3.) So he becomes a superhero!
4.) And fights, I dunno, Gorilla Grodd or Captain Cold or whoever.

Compelling, frankly, this is not. You can layer on stuff about “it’s tough to be a decent upstanding guy in the world” but Christ, that’s a shitty movie right there because every day your audience has their own shit to go through and you don’t want to paint Barry (or Wally) as a whiner when he can run at the speed of something really fucking fast.

Does this mean a Flash movie is unworkable? Of course not, but it means you have to take a different approach. I gave Speed Racer a well-deserved heaping of shit because it was really just a bad movie, but one thing it did right is that it didn’t bother explaining why Speed Racer lived in this crazy-ass world with these crazy-ass cars driving on crazy-ass racetracks, and also why they had a monkey. The point is that if you start your movie with the premise “this is how things are,” audiences will, more often than not, be fine with that so long as you suspend their disbelief and never question your own narrative.

Applying this to a Flash movie allows us to use the strongest element of the Flash concepts, namely the heroic legacy model. In short, a Flash movie has Barry and Wally and Jay in it - Barry as the star, Wally as the sidekick, Jay as the elder statesman. You want Professor Zoom as the main villain, although you can of course throw in any number of Rogues for color. And most importantly, you establish that Barry has been the Flash for years and everybody knows him and is used to him and Jay as the elder Flash and Wally as Kid Flash.

And the movie is about Barry’s last adventure as the Flash, ultimately joining the Speed Force and becoming the lightning bolt that gives Wally his powers. (You probably want to retcon Jay’s origin just to make it closer to Barry and Wally’s for the purposes of the flick.) Wally and Jay can help defeat the Big Bad, and somewhere in there Zoom dies, but the important thing is Barry sacrifices himself to save the world. Then, at the end of the movie, Wally puts on the Flash outfit for the first time, says “The Flash lives again!” and that’s your triumphant ending right there - a hero has died, but the legacy continues.

People will eat that shit up with a fork. It’s the superhero story as Greatest Generation-style narrative of shared sacrifice and shared victory.

(And you’ll note, incidentally, that this sets up the sequel for an almost-straight retelling of Mark Waid’s “The Return of Barry Allen” story, which continues the theme of heroic legacy while being an awesome story that translates incredibly well to a filmed narrative.)

ALSO: If and when they ever make a movie for The Flash, they must set a sequence to Madonna and Justin Timberlake’s “4 Minutes,” because that would be awesome.

So I just saw Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and it’s good and funny and everybody in it is good and funny, but what the hell is up with Mila Kunis - Mila fucking Kunis of all people - being the single best thing about it?

THE WORLD DOES NOT MAKE SENSE ANY MORE!

Fafblog interviews Hillary Clinton.

CLINTON: Ha haaa! Well you know, anyone off the street with a scary black pastor can talk about change, but it takes a fighter to fight for change. And I’m a fighter. I’m tough. And if you lived my life you’d be pretty darn tough too. I mean, I had to go to Wellesley. That was my safety school. But I was strong anyway and I endured. And as president I’ll fight the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry and the health care industry, just as soon as they stop giving me millions of dollars!

Blue Beetle knows that nothing slams evil like well-coordinated J-hops.

Blue Beetle knows that scimitars are wiggidy-wiggidy-wiggidy-wack.

Blue Beetle knows that the 6-step is foundational to any anti-villain martial arts program, but has progressed to the legendary fourteenth step.

Blue Beetle knows that masked goons have never been part of the four elements of hip-hop and never will be.

Blue Beetle’s suicides don’t shiv, bro.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

GREEN LANTERN
PROBLEM: Really stupid costume nobody would actually want to wear in real life.
SOLUTION: “The Jack T. Chance”: Green Lantern symbol (which is cool) as badge on regular clothing.

CAPTAIN AMERICA
PROBLEM: Getting international audiences to watch movie without sneering.
SOLUTION: Plot features Captain America finding out about dastardly plot within American government to blah-blah-blah-fascist-something and foiling it, thus maintaining American patriotic credibility and issues rest of world has with American government in nifty nutshell.

THE FLASH
PROBLEM: Barry is boring; Wally is hard to explain without Barry; Jay is old; Bart raped Veronica Mars on her teevee show.
SOLUTION: Meet Steve Zurkel, AKA The Flash!

WONDER WOMAN
PROBLEM: Character does not really have a defined reason to exist beyond being “pre-eminent female superhero.”
SOLUTION: Accuse anybody who complains about this of being rampant sexist.

LUKE CAGE
PROBLEM: Fanboys complaining that movie Luke Cage takes fashion cues from Bendis-era New Avengers rather than 70s-period tiara/afro/yellow puffy shirt.
SOLUTION: Death camps.

GREEN ARROW
PROBLEM: Arrows are stupid.
SOLUTION: Give him a samurai sword and make him the best ever with it and ignore it when people ask why he uses a bow at all and why don’t you just call it Green Sword, huh?

NORTHSTAR
PROBLEM: Is gay.
SOLUTION: Make him be a manly gay. Sample dialogue: “time for you to get on your hands and knees now, Alex. You have to realize Northstar… is the man.”

MARTIAN MANHUNTER
PROBLEM: Nobody outside of comic fanboys knows who he is.
SOLUTION: Change title of movie to The Martian Manhunter, A Notable Silver-Age Character And Founding Member Of The Justice League, Who Shares Many Elements of Superman’s Origin While Remaining A Distinct Character In His Own Right, And Who Is A Really Big Deal.

THOR
PROBLEM: When you say things like “yon Avengers” and “thou art no worthy opponent” out loud, they sound really stupid.
SOLUTION: Three words: thick, Swedish, accent.

KARATE KID
PROBLEM: Keith Giffen stalking and killing whoever accepts lead role.
SOLUTION: Match Giffen’s rage with Ralph Macchio’s desperation for a comeback.

MAGNETO
PROBLEM: Character now much older than Ian McKellen, who is, let’s face it, pretty damn old already.
SOLUTION: Magical de-aging ray turns Magneto into Jared Padalecki.

HAWKMAN
PROBLEM: His superpower is flying.
SOLUTION: Tagline for movie: “You Will Believe A Hawk Can Fly.”

GHOST RIDER
PROBLEM: They already made a Ghost Rider movie and it really sucked.
SOLUTION: Invent time travel, convince young Nicolas Cage to become insurance salesman.

I theatre-hopped to see it and still feel like I should ask for my money back.

I’m working on a long-form project which involves gorillas (I’m not really able to say more at this point), and during my research I was reminded of this.

Gorillas are gentle, shy creatures who would almost always rather run than fight, and they’re some of our closest relatives in the world; we know they’re intelligent, on the very borderline of human intelligence. There is no reason to kill them; mountain gorillas aren’t even good bushmeat. This is the work of some asshole or assholes with guns who couldn’t think of anything better to do with their time than slaughter some gorillas.

This makes me so angry I have trouble expressing it.

…although volunteer-driven CG movies have a long history of not succeeding, I can’t help but hope that Iron Sky manages to make a go of it.

Someone on Ezra Klein’s blog recently linked to this post by a Hillary Clinton supporter, detailing why Hillary supporters should not support Barack Obama.

And, well. Here we go.

Every Thursday, mightygodking.com returns to the pages of Who’s Who, the classic 1980s DC comic book encyclopedia of their characters. Every week, a character shall be judged on the only scale scientific enough that matters: the Rex The Wonder Dog scale of fantasticosity.

There honestly isn’t that much to say about Carapax, because there’s sort of a trend for villains introduced in the pages of Blue Beetle or Booster Gold during the 1980s when those two titles, you know, existed and stuff. That trend was very simple:

1.) Show up
2.) Get ass kicked
3.) Disappear forever

Very old-school, mid-70s Spider-Man sort of villainy. (Big Wheel! Hypno-Hustler! And so forth.) And not without merit, because come on, when you’re getting your ass kicked by Blue Beetle and you have actual honest-to-god superpowers clearly you need to rethink your approach. Of course, nowadays that generally means “be reinvented as a serial killer” (it happened to Catalyst in JSA), or sometimes “join a larger gang of villains and then get killed off because you are a warm body” (the Madmen, for example).

Carapax is of course no exception, because despite being a man whose body was destroyed and whose mind became trapped within the form of an indestructible battle robot, he got his ass thoroughly outsmarted by Ted Kord, who dropped him into the middle of the ocean. Of course, indestructible battle robots generally don’t drown, so presumably Carapax went off somewhere afterwards to rethink his whole “five-year-plan.” I have no idea if he showed up anywhere else since.

But if he didn’t - well, he is an intelligent indestructible battle robot, and he’s got the whole “superpower as ultimate disability” thing going that’s worked for many a character (”I don’t have a body any more!”), and come on, he looks kind of cool, doesn’t he? Like an evil, bright red cross between Boba Fett and Voltron. Besides, let’s face it: Can you ever really run out of indestructible battle robots?

Mostly for potential and cool appearance, I admit, but let’s be honest: when Carapax briefly showed up, he did not suck. He did exactly what you would expect an indestructible battle robot to do: blow shit up and not get destroyed. And that deserves recognition!

Professional photographers recreate children’s drawings.

I continue to spawn and recreate myself elsewhere on the internets; now and for the foreseeable future, I’m a senior contributing editor at TheCourt.ca, Osgoode Hall Law School’s group blog covering the decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada, where I’ll be posting once a week (at least for the summer).

Granted, my writing there will have a lot less swears than my audience here has come to expect from me, and the topics may not be of interest to all and sundry, and needless to say there’s no Photoshopping, and that’s all fine - but it’s important stuff, and I’m glad to be writing it.

Sad to say, I just missed all the discussion of the drug sniffer dog cases the week prior, so my first piece for the site is a brief summary of R. v. Mathieu, which is about whether trial custody can count towards a jail sentence (see? Thrilling).

At the tail end of my last I Should Write The Legion, I promised that this one would feature the “biggest badass” in the Legion, and the guesses were predictable: Brainiac Five, of course, but also Superboy and Star Boy, plus a couple of emails betting it was Wildfire.

All of them are cool, mind you, but when you’re talking sheer badass that is off the charts, there’s only one nominee.

She’s a ridiculously powerful telepath. Her mental abilities have at times managed to hold off gods. She’s made entire groups of Legionnaires believe that missing comrades were alongside them for months at a time, lobotomized enemies, beaten other top-league telepaths like rented mules. In terms of sheer power, Imra Ardeen is near the top of any scale upon which the Legion can be judged.

(Aside: I remember someone once asked me to explain the appeal of the Legion. The conversation went like this. “Do you like Magneto?” “Yeah.” “Professor X?” “Yeah.” “Superman?” “Yeah.” “Wolverine?” “Yeah.” “Imagine all of them on the same team, together, plus Iceman and Firestar and Mr. Fantastic minus the stretching and a bunch of other equally powerful characters. That’s the Legion. They kick ass.”)

But what makes Saturn Girl the biggest badass in the Legion isn’t that she’s powerful. Lots of Legionnaires are powerful, after all. What makes her the biggest badass in the Legion is her inherent pragmatism - recently pointed out quite adeptly by Jim Shooter when she calmly mind-controlled Timber Wolf to stop him from killing somebody in a fit of rage, then mindwiped all the onlookers to make them forget that Timber Wolf snapped. Is this a violation of both T-Wolf and the assorted citizen’s mental dignity? Yes, that’s exactly what it was - and she did it anyway because it was necessary.

In his run initiating the current Legion, Mark Waid placed Cosmic Boy and Brainiac Five in opposition to one another. I always felt this missed the mark, because Cosmic Boy has the Captain America role in the Legion - he’s the guy the team rallies around, the purest and most natural leader, the one who is, by definition, going to be on the right side. Placing someone in opposition to Cosmic Boy is like, I dunno, putting Captain America on one side of a superhero-versus-superhero conflict and then asking readers not to think of the other side as the de facto “bad guys.” It made Brainiac Five seem almost villainous.

However, Brainy does need a counter in the Legion, because his intellectual and moral role within the team is so powerful, and Saturn Girl is exactly the person to take on the job. She’s tough and smart, and her steady pragmatism is the perfect foil for Brainy’s powerful idealism. The way I see it, there are things Brainiac Five just will not do as a matter of principle, even if they are necessary. (A great story in the initial-reboot Legion had him refuse to use the Metal Men’s responsometers to help the timelost Legion get home without their permission, once he realized they were sentient intelligences.)

Saturn Girl, on the other hand, is a lot more willing to bite the bullet. It’s just who she is. Which in turn means the two of them will be at odds with one another frequently. Not team-dividing warfare or anything; simply the collision of two equally valid yet ultimately opposed perspectives.

(Oh, and since I know people will ask: she’s with Lightning Lad because Garth is, in many ways, the Captain Carrot of the Legion - he’s not brilliant, but he’s moral and upright and just plain good, through and through. Do you really think a telepath could manage to be with anybody else?)

EDIT TO ADD: I didn’t want to elaborate too much on why Saturn Girl is pragmatic, but Brad pretty much explained it for me in comments below:

Saturn Girl isn’t pragmatic, because it’s an extention of her desire for control, or peace, or some kind of moral imperitive - she’s just been raised in a society that’s to some extent a psychic open-book. Much of our laws about freedom and rights (and justice) are because we can’t ever know what someone’s actual intent is behind their actions or what their capacity to act on those intents are. Titanians have no such limitations.

Exactly.

Via Karen, this is a pretty concise - and amusing - background and explanation of the recent transit strike in Toronto.