So, I’m reading this.

From what I’ve read in bits and pieces from blogs and everywhere else, the 5YL is the Legion’s “Grim and Gritty” phase – the UFP is more Dystopic, Cosmic Boy’s lost his powers, the Legion is basically shattered, Richard Kent Shakespeare, Shrinking Violet has a bionic leg or something, etc etc. And then there’s whole thing where they find a bunch of bright and happy clones (who may or may not be the real deal) and Earth is destroyed? How does that not conflict deeply with the whole thing of “LOSH should be bright and happy and heroic”?

The first thing you have to understand about the v4 era Legion is that it was almost certainly one of the most ambitious superhero comics undertakings of all time. The blogpost Michael references rightly describes it as a “post-Watchmen comic book” in the proper sense, which is to say it took away far more in the storytelling toolkit from Watchmen than simply the grim tone. Indeed, calling v4 “grim and gritty” oversimplifies it greatly; after all, this is a run which had some of the greatest comedy issues of all time.

What Keith Giffen took from Watchmen was the concept of whole-world-building and the idea that the greater world beyond one’s protagonists matters, but his use of it was expressly in opposition to the core thesis Alan Moore advanced, which is that, all things considered, superheroes in and of themselves are basically powerless to stop society’s self-destructive urges (Dr. Manhattan is only a stopgap, Nite Owl and Rorshach are meaningless, and Ozymandias only succeeds because he abandons superheroism for conspiratorial means). v4 Legion, in comparison, is set against the backdrop of a full-fledged galactic war between numerous enormous space empires – the United Planets, the Khunds, the Dominion, the Dark Circle, et cetera – but time and again, the Legion mostly succeeds in its goals. Where it does not are usually disasters of immense scope rather than the result of others’ agency.

As comics have grown more cognizant of the belief that superheroes could only “realistically” operate as agents of state authority (see the Marvel Universe, where currently most of the major superhero teams either are explicitly state agents like the Avengers or operate on a wink-nod basis with the state), Giffen’s Legion went entirely the other way: he had the Legion reform under conditions as hostile as possible, with only their own resources keeping them afloat (and although Chameleon was at this point ridiculously wealthy, the series made clear that individual wealth really only goes so far more often than not) and with most of the established power actors either disinclined to cooperate with the Legion or actively hostile towards their re-inception. It’s an overwhelmingly pro-superheroic, deeply idealistic run of comics. To call it “grim and gritty” because a lot of characters die misses the point – after all, the series takes place mostly within a war, and whenever the focus shifts away from those wars, the most striking thing about the story is how much care it takes to show that the Legion is an extended family more than anything else.

And, as a writing accomplishment – getting back to the technical side of things – even though it does not entirely succeed (Giffen tries to juggle an enormous number of balls, and frankly he drops a few here and there) it is staggering in its scope. What Giffen did (along with the Bierbaums, who I think at this point are widely acknowledged as being the weaker writers in the v4 team, particularly when their eventual run without Giffen was so much… less than his) was to apply Watchmen‘s use of wider-world story to the Legion universe – IE to apply it to over thirty years of comics. Giffen had done this before with Paul Levitz, of course (see the Great Darkness Saga and the Legion of Super-Villains story, both of which were massive callbacks to practically the entirety of Legion history) but v4 is so dense at times it practically begs for annotations – not that they are necessary, for the most part, to follow the vast and ambitious swirling plot. And Giffen did all of this while creating a new status quo to explain how the Legion came to be in a universe where Superboy was never a member to boot (a task at which he was mostly successful, creating Laurel Gand in the process – a Supergirl replacement who became quite popular in her own right).

It doesn’t entirely succeed. Some elements were controversial at the time because neckbeards hate change (the Ayla/Vi gay relationship, the Shvaughn/Sean Erin de-transgendering story, Sun Boy’s character arc). Some elements were controversial because they just sucked (Kid Quantum, a bad idea all around). But on the whole it is far more successful than not, and where it fails it is forgivable because of the furious attempt by Giffen and his co-creators to do something new in superhero comics. And that is worth commemorating.

Click on thumb to see full

As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

But whether or not you show up, there is something you can do for me. I’m on a panel about great bad comic book villains, the kind who are so absurd and ineffectual that you just have to love them. (Like the Hypno-Hustler, the Big Wheel, Doctor Demonicus…) And so I’d like you to chime in, in the comments section, on who you feel absolutely needs to make it into this hour-long panel. Who would it be inexcusable to leave out? Who is such a hilariously lame menace that he/she gives Stilt-Man and Toomazooma the Living Totem a run for their money? Your chance to influence an hour of comics-based silliness begins…now!

I’m not talking about things that are scientifically impossible or implausible, which to my mind are no more legitimate criticisms of Doctor Who are than saying the the monsters look phony and the sets are made of cardboard. What I mean is that the central premise of the show makes no sense from a logical perspective.

It’s particularly obvious in recent years because the show has returned to doing a lot of show set in Earth’s past, but always with some fantastic element (I’m informed, via The AV Club, that “Black Orchid” was the last historical Who story with no SF element other than the Doctor in it, and it was the first one since “The Aztecs” about twenty years earlier.) Often these fantastic elements would have earth-shaking or even earth-destroying consequences (an Ice Warrior triggering a nuclear war in the 1980s, for example) if the Doctor didn’t stop them. But the Doctor has been to our time, which has not shaken or blown up by any of these events, “before” (in his timeline) going to many of these times and places. So how did these events happen “before” the Doctor got involved? Why wasn’t modern-day London a smoking, radioactive ruin until the Doctor went back and stopped that Russian sub’s missiles from launching?

Now maybe this has been answered somewhere — I’ll admit to not having an encyclopedic knowledge of all Whoiana, especially of the Colin Baker-Sylvester McCoy years — but to my mind there are a couple of possible answers. The first is that these things didn’t happen because the Doctor “always” went there — essentially, when he visited our present (or future) he was experiencing the effects of things he would do in our past, his future. This makes the most logical sense but is also the most dramatically unsatisfying, because it basically means that everything he does is already set down by fate.

The only other option, considering that multiple timelines have been declared a no-no in Who canon (and are similarly undramatic, since they undercut the significance of anything you do when you travel in time) is that the times and places the Doctor goes are in some way temporally indeterminate: essentially, if they’re left alone they’ll happen the way they did in our history, but they can be changed by outside intervention. The problem with that interpretation is that it suggests that everything would be fine if the Doctor just stayed home, and that he’s risking all life on Earth to satisfy his wanderlust. Unless, that is, we suppose that each indeterminate point can only be changed once, in which case the Doctor is being brought to them so that he can seal them up before some other time traveler does.

Why are these points in time and space indeterminate? Why are so many on Earth? Why are they crawling with extraterrestrial and interdimensional visitors? Why do they so often seem to create points where history could be changed significantly? And why is it the Doctor’s job to seal — or perhaps we should say stitch them up? I don’t know. But they are pretty interesting questions…

Now here is that GIF of Ford trying to throw a football again!

Basically I can divide this movie into Stuff I Liked and Stuff I Didn’t Like.

STUFF I DIDN’T LIKE

Okay, so Benedict Cumberbatch is, indeed, Khan. (Not “Khan Noonien Singh,” since calling him that would emphasize rather pointedly that the role has been whitewashed since Ricardo Montalban played him. Just “Khan.”) That, combined with the repeated thematic callbacks to Wrath of Khan, is a little worrying because the last thing I want from the rebooted Trek is for it to get a bad case of Reboot Syndrome, where you have to re-introduce every fucking thing that the original mythos created because why tell new stories when you can just tell variations on older, successful ones. The plot doesn’t mirror Wrath that greatly, but it’s enough for me to mention it.

I like Benedict Cumberbatch and I liked his performance – which was just alien enough to emphasize that Khan, in real life, would be kind of weird and offputting – but most of his time in the movie is spent punching things dramatically and it would have been nice for him to have some more conversational moments. I would guess there is at least one decent conversation scene on the cutting room floor.

Also, Alice Eve, who plays Carol Marcus, was a bit wooden at times, and by “at times” I mean “for most of the movie.”

STUFF I LIKED

I liked that the major overriding theme of the movie was about the necessity and dangers of militarism within an advanced society. The first reboot Trek in 2009 was at times a little more militaristic than I would have liked, and this sets back firmly on an opposing course in that regard (Spock’s dislike of the mission parameters being “immoral,” Scotty being angry at taking experimental classified weapons on board and declaring that he wasn’t a soldier, et cetera). Trek by necessity has to have some militaristic elements to it, because the big spaceships have to have big lasers because big laser battles in space are kind of important for Trek, and if you’re gonna have publicly funded giant spaceships with lasers then Starfleet has to be at least a pseudo-military, but the movie gets Starfleet back right into that sweet space of “look, we might have a lot of army things, but we’re not an army,” and that matters to me. And I liked that Trek goes right back into talking about currently relevant issues by making a sci-fi story be about them.

I liked that each of the main characters gets a real important drama point in the movie – another gripe about the first movie was that Uhura didn’t get enough accomplishment-time and they more than fixed that this time around, and more importantly most of the crew’s accomplishments aren’t just repeats of what they did in the first movie. (Chekov maybe runs a little light, but Chekov was always the least important of the original crew, so it’s not too bad.) As before, the performances are uniformly rock-solid excellence.

I liked that they mentioned the Prime Directive and treated it like a serious thing. I liked the Nimoy cameo (although that is a well they need to stop drawing from right now). I liked that Team Enterprise figured out most of the bad guys’ plans before those plans were executed (although generally not quite fast enough to outright stop them).

Generally, I liked the movie a lot. I do have misgivings, but on the whole I thought this was a strong outing.

IMPORTANT: Note that the second question allows for multiple answers.

Click on thumb to see full

As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

The key to understanding the Kubrick movie ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ is to understand that Kubrick was a notorious perfectionist, one who never left anything to chance. The reshoots that Kubrick undertook, reshoots that scrapped an already-filmed and extremely expensive ending, were explicit in changing the original film as well as the Broadway play. These changes were not undertaken by chance. By examining them on a frame-by-frame basis, backwards as well as forwards, we can see how Kubrick was actually making a movie about …

(…to be continued once I go completely insane…)

Oh, man, this thing.

I would’ve been about 14 at this point and it really does show: the map is mostly a conglomeration of D&D cliches (separate kingdoms for elves and dwarves and orcs and even lizardmen and Snake People), ideas lifted wholly from the low-grade fantasy I was reading (“the Wide” is a direct ripoff of Algaria from David Eddings’ Belgariad books, as is the Moors – man, couldn’t I come up with a name for my fantasy moors than simply capitalizing “Moors”? – and the idea of Snake People was stolen from the Fighting Fantasy books), and names that are either painfully generic (“Riverport,” “Alfheim,” “Coast Town,” “Hell Island”) or just awful (“Dontor,” “Twilldove,” “Fligit,” and personal least favourite “Wiv” – yes, one of the dramatic upstart New Kingdoms is called fucking Wiv, what the hell).

But right smack dab in the middle there is Boka, and my idea for it was pretty much the same as what you’re seeing in Al’Rashad now. Granted, at the time it also had jungle dwarves (as per the Forgotten Realms), but the basic idea of a world-dominating medieval African-ish kingdom was one that I liked – even when I was young and thought any reasonable empire would name a city “Nendle Bar.” The Free Isles – although they haven’t appeared in the comic proper as of yet – are there too and the idea was, as I recall, much the same as it is now.

And “Doomtooth” is just a rocking name, so good on my 14-year-old self.

Also: Consider this an open challenge/dare to all the other nerd bloggers out there. I know all of you did a world map of your D&D campaign world at some point! And I bet most of you can still find them.