1.) Jack Kirby’s estate is not getting the share of funds derived from the various properties Kirby helped create for Marvel, and
2.) this is wrong,

are, basically, self-important assholes. Of course, because this is Scott Kurtz, it’s not terribly well written or intelligent. But hey, let’s have at it.

You may not know it, but in many comic book industry circles, there’s a lot of hand-wringing going on about how all that money is being generated by Jack Kirby’s creations and none of it is going to his estate. And there’s a lot of slacktivism happening in the facetweets and twitsbooks trying to get people to boycott the movie or give to the Hero Initiative to counterbalance the karma-carbon footprint you left when you saw the movie three times and enjoyed it. You monster. Don’t you know that you’re just filling the coffers of an evil corporation while the estate of Jack Kirby goes unpaid. He created ALL THOSE GUYS!

It wouldn’t be a Scott Kurtz post if it didn’t start out with a gratituous amount of pre-emptive whining, would it? Also, note that he’s complaining about the Hero Initiative idea. This will be important a bit later on.

Even Thor (which was incidentally created by the Norse).

Also derived from ancient Norse myth: Jane Foster, the Warriors Three, the Destroyer armor, Sif as a warrior maiden (as opposed to the demure earth goddess she was in the Norse Eddas), only Thor (or someone worthy) being able to lift Mjolnir, the Odinsleep, the Bifrost being a wormhole… really, one could go on at length about all the things Stan and Jack lifted directly from Norse mythology!

Now some people are saying “hey, this isn’t about the money. It’s about proper credit. It’s about Jack Kirby’s legacy. About how he created the Marvel Universe and nobody cares. This is about creator rights.”

Except wait. Here’s a picture of the Avengers from Jack Kirby’s Avenger’s #1. And here’s a picture of The Ultimates from Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch. Which looks more like the movie you saw?

This isn’t terribly relevant – never mind that Movie Cap was much closer to being “classic” Captain America than Ultimate (a more “classic” costume, not a jingoistic asshole but instead a peaceful idealist forced into battle by ethics), ditto the Hulk (green and not grey, not a rape-obsessed killing machine when Hulked out), ditto Thor (Thor’s whole movie was a glowing paean to the Kirby vision of Asgard, right down to emphasizing that the Asgardians were super-science aliens rather than actual gods), with Black Widow and Iron Man splitting the difference and Hawkeye being the closest Ultimates analogue – because, wait for it, Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch did not create the characters in question. As I am sure they would be the first to admit.

Jack Kirby worked for Marvel until 1970, and then he returned for another three years in 1975. But since then. in the 30 some-odd years since he left Marvel, hundreds of creators have added to the mythos and stories of the characters that Marvel owns and Jack helped create. Hundreds. And many of them added integral aspects to these characters which are just as important to their legacy as Jack and Stan ever did Take a look at Walter Simonson’s run on Thor and tell me that he doesn’t deserve as much credit as Jack or Stan when it comes to the lasting mythos of that character as a modern day super-hero. Or how could you have the Tony Stark we saw on screen in Iron Man without David Michelinie and Bob Layton’s “Demon in a bottle” run on Iron Man in the late 70’s?

Certainly all the other creators who have added their own little touches to the characters since they were created are to be appreciated as well. But there is a difference between putting an awesome flame-job on your car, and building the car. It is easier to build on established work than to create something effectively from scratch – it just is. Any creator should know this in their bones. Scott Kurtz should know it better than most, as he created a whole lot of original characters (even though he relies on cheap pop culture references for many of his punchlines).

I don’t like that Jack Kirby got screwed over by Marvel back in the day. I don’t like it at all. It’s a sad story. It’s as tragic as the story of the men who created Superman. These guys got screwed over. But that was over 40 years go,guys. The men involved are dead and buried. The policies that screwed them over were changed decades ago. Things have changed for the better, even when it comes to doing work-for-hire with the big two.

This is a classic “look, I’m not unreasonable, but…” paragraph right here. Kurtz concedes that Kirby got screwed over by Marvel and that this was tragic and wrong (after arguing for several paragraphs that it wasn’t because Kirby was no big deal really but, whatever, it’s not like expecting Kurtz to be internally consistent within a single blogpost is a good bet), but then goes for the “this is not a big deal, because it’s all in the past and things are better now.”

Of course, Alan Moore is still being screwed over by DC today, and Chris Roberson was booted off his titles post-haste when he said he wouldn’t re-up with DC because their actions were, you know, wrong and stuff, but I guess we have all learned since that happened a couple months ago and now it’s all in the past and DC isn’t going to release Before Watchmen after all. And of course Marvel isn’t going to attack sketchbook artists at conventions who draw Marvel characters, even though they’ve asserted that they have the right to do that if they ever chose to exercise it, because that’s all in the past and things are better now; I mean, just because Disney has a long track record of harassing absolutely anybody who uses their characters without permission (right down to unauthorized nursery school murals) doesn’t mean that they’re going to force Marvel to follow suit. Also, Alan Moore is (let’s be honest) kind of a dickbag, so it’s not really a big deal that DC is screwing him over.¹

In fact, the comics industry has screwed so many people over that there is an entire charity dedicated to helping destitute comics creators. It is called the Hero Initiative. You may have heard of it because Kurtz mocked the idea of donating to it in tandem with going to see The Avengers – not boycotting the movie, simply donating to charity in recognition of creator’s rights.² Because donating to a charity is, apparently, now a selfish thing to do somehow. I’m not sure how the moral math in Scott Kurtz’ head works here.

Bluntly: Kurtz’ argument here is so dense that it’s hard to imagine anybody seriously interested in actual argument making it. Corporate control over their IP is growing more grasping and tenacious, not less, and it is corporate IP that dominates comics even today, thirty years after the independent comics movement first began to pick up steam in the 1980s. That IP is so dominant that it reflects upon a good chunk of the “independent” comics scene – how much of said scene consists of reactions to or riffs upon those characters owned by DC and Marvel? Most indie superhero books (and there are so very many of them) read like DC/Marvel fanfic with the labels buffed off. (This isn’t to say that many of those books aren’t excellent. There are some true gems in there. But consider that Alan Moore’s run on Supreme, one of the most highly praised “indie” superhero comic book runs ever, is widely acknowledged as “Alan Moore’s never-going-to-happen extended run on Superman.”)

How many comic strips less would Kurtz have drawn, if he was forced to delete every single strip containing a reference to Marvel Comics? It would be a fair chunk of them.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t learn from this. I’m saying we’ve ALREADY learned from it. I have no doubt that we learned from it. The black and white creator-owned books of the 80s. The exodus of Marvel creators to form Image in the 90s. The indy comics movement now. Webcomics. Kickstarter. We’ve learned this lesson, folks. You’re getting angry over nothing. You’re suiting up for a battle we’ve already won.

Now, don’t get me wrong: it’s good that indie comics creators can use the internet to promote their work. Heck, I do it. But whenever people make this argument as a solution to the problem of corporate control of IP that has become part of the common ground of our culture, it’s inevitably someone who has already made it. The phrase we are looking for here is “confirmation bias,” and it becomes more and more obvious as fewer and fewer webcomics “make it” to the webcomicking big leagues. I’ve discussed Kickstarter here previously and that’s not an answer either – again, Kickstarter is fine for delivering product to an established fanbase, but by its very nature it isn’t great for trying out new stuff (and looking at Kickstarter funding lately, it seems the market has started figuring this out as funders get more selective).³

But even were indie comics to be flourishing – and let’s just say they are rather than diving into numbers to see if they in fact are flourishing or just scraping by, because that whole issue is a major derail – the issue here is that a significant part of our common cultural language (and as noted above, common cultural language Kurtz frequently uses himself) is private property, and how we choose to engage with that fact. Some of us think that the private-property nature of the beast is fine – these are the comics fans who bitched endlessly when the Siegel estate exercised its rights over the Superman copyrights. Some think that the public domain needs to be more aggressively pursued. Some want a middle ground. And some, like Kurtz, have chosen to bury their heads in the ground and assert that there is no problem.

It’s a child’s argument to say that Marvel is the bad guy and the Kirby estate is the good guy. It’s just infinitely more complicated than that.

It really isn’t. Marvel aggressively did their best to browbeat Kirby, during his lifetime, out of rights that were his by any reasonable moral standard.

Now, granted, there is an argument against Kirby-screwage. It demands that you take the position that we must all be eternally vigilant against others who might try to screw us over or exploit our weakness for their own advantage rather than believe that we should rightly expect some sense of community and fellowship even from corporate entities. It is Randian and it is cold and it is heartless, but it is intellectually consistent and had Kurtz made it, I could at least maintain some respect for him even if I thought making it made him, by default, kind of an asshole. But Kurtz hasn’t made that argument (I expect in part because he recognizes that it is cold and heartless and doesn’t want to be thought of that way) and has instead defaulted to the “come on, guys, can’t we all just get along?” whine of the enabler. Which also means he’s still kind of an asshole.

And to say that Jack Kirby is responsible for that Avengers movie is a ridiculous notion and insulting to the combined hard work of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of creators who have put their efforts into keeping our modern mythos of super-heroes alive and well.

I don’t think anybody is saying Kirby is solely responsible for the Avengers movie. Because that would be stupid. But Kirby created the characters, so maybe, just maybe it is worthwhile to argue that he (or his estate) should be justly compensated for creating the characters which have starred in a movie that has made one billion dollars in its first month of release, as opposed to the share of profits from the film the Kirby estate has currently received, which is… let me check my figures here… ah, yes, nothing.⁴

And these are men and women who are well aware of Jack Kirby. They’re doing this in the spirit of Jack Kirby, not to spite him.

Of course! Spiting Jack Kirby is apparently Scott Kurtz’ job.

Am I really expected to be angry at Joe Quesada for something that happened before he was even born? Just because he’s a big-wig at Marvel now?

Of course Joe Quesada bears no responsibility for Marvel screwing over Kirby back in the day. However, Quesada certainly bears responsibility for how Marvel chooses to conduct itself now. Addressing the issue of fans being upset that the Kirby estate is not being justly compensated for Marvel’s success is, when you get down to it, part of Joe’s job. It is not in any way a repugnant or inflammatory act to address the major executive of a company and say “your company is not behaving as I would like it to behave,” no matter how much Kurtz wants that to be the case.

Part of the change in comics culture over the last couple of decades has been the transformation of Marvel and DC from being relatively small-potatoes publishing concerns into massive corporate IP farms, and the con atmosphere where All Comic Creators Are Buddies often obscures the fact that Joe Quesada is the chief creative officer for a company worth billions of dollars rather than just another pencil-jockey. But Joe Quesada isn’t just another pencil-jockey. He’s a major player in a large entertainment conglomerate. It’s perfectly reasonable to request that he address concerns about the company’s behavior.

Am I really expected to be upset with Stan Lee for deciding to stop writing comics and get paid to be a tireless ambassador for Marvel? The man earns every penny he gets paid at that job. Ask anyone who knows him or spends any amount of time around him. Are YOU going to be traveling the globe at 89 with infinite patience and enthusiasm for every person that approaches you? Hell no you won’t. Nor will I. But Stan does. And that’s why he gets paid. And that’s why he get the cameos every movie. I’m sorry that I can’t muster the energy to be angry at Stan Lee for having some business sense and not dying.

In the words of Darrell Hammond playing Sean Connery in “Celebrity Jeopardy” sketches on Saturday Night Live: “Boy, I believe you may be functionally retarded.”

Seriously, what the fuck is this? I’ve read all of the major critical pieces arguing that Jack Kirby’s estate deserves greater compensation than what he and it received, and not in a single one of them has anybody ever attacked Stan Lee for starring in movies or argued that Lee had anything to do with Kirby getting screwed over. I’ve read more than a few articles and essays which argued that Stan Lee over-emphasized his role in creating all the great Marvel characters (which is probably true to some extent because Lee’s always been a self-promoter, although I’ve never bought the argument that some have made that Kirby/Ditko did all the work and Lee was just a glorified scripter), but I don’t think any of them ever said “and that’s why Jack Kirby got screwed.”

But even if Lee somehow was to blame for it, how would his actions as an “ambassador for Marvel” (which is a formless fictional entity designed to hold intellectual property to provide value to shareholders) mean anything? Jesus, Kurtz can’t even win the arguments he’s making up in his head.

I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not going to argue the merits of the Kirby estate’s case against Marvel. I’m not a theologist, so I’m not going to debate whether it’s a moral imperative for Marvel to just GIVE the estate a couple million dollars cause they can afford it.

“Look, this entire debate functions on two basic levels, but I don’t want to engage on either of those levels because… I don’t want to, okay?”

(Only theologists can discuss morality, you see.)

But I am a grown ass man, and I can tell you this: the real world does not operate like the morality plays we see acted out on the silver screen in movies like “The Avengers.” Life can not be summed up by “that’s not fair.” It’s not as simple as “Give Jack’s estate some money, Marvel. You can afford it.” That’s not pragmatic thinking. That’s cynicism. And I’m so tired of the cynicism.

I have read this half a dozen times and, putting aside the fact that Kurtz has argued a moral position right after saying he wasn’t going to argue a moral position, it still doesn’t make any sense. Seriously, what is he blathering about here? How is one position or the other “pragmatic thinking” or “cynicism”? Which of the two applies to people encouraging other people to donate to charity or put pressure on corporate officials? How are these even applicable terms? Scott Kurtz writes shit for a living! How can he write a sentence this meaningless?

Guys, learn from the Avengers movie. The real villains here are the cynics. They are our Loki. The people looking to pit fandom and an entire industry against itself to make themselves feel powerful. The worms who never had the courage to create anything themselves looking to forge an identity on the internet by getting in a good dig. By being the guy who got the awesome last word in. These are the real bad guys of our world. Not Marvel executives. Not movie studios. Not the hundreds and thousands of creatives who make movies. Don’t fall for it.

This paragraph strongly makes me suspect that Kurtz got in an internet slapfight with some nerd somewhere who said he was a shitty comicker and who, at some other point, also said Kirby got screwed, because this last paragraph is positively Kevin-Smithian in its levels of pre-emptive defensiveness. It’s the fans who are at fault here, because the fans are pointing out the entirely reasonable argument that Kirby got screwed and that’s making it harder for all of us (and especially Scott Kurtz) to enjoy watching The Avengers.

Chris Roberson, on Twitter, responded to this by saying “Standing up for fairness makes you a cynic and “bad guy,” but accepting inequity with a shrug makes you an “adult”? Do I have that right?” And that is basically accurate and much more concise than what I have written here, not least because Kurtz’ post is mostly empty wind and on its own merits isn’t really worth addressing. But a lot of people will read his stupid bullshit and think “well, he’s got some good points,” because if someone writes enough paragraphs about anything, there will be people who decide that he has written something of substance based on the number of words produced.

But Kurtz doesn’t have any substance. He’s just got attitude. And that’s not enough.

UPDATE: In comments, Pete notes that Scott Kurtz, in 2010, said this:

“If you’re a member of an industry that let Dave Cockrum die in a VA hospital after helping give us most of the X-Men characters that comprised three blockbuster films and you get pissy about what Mark Waid said, then you deserve to remain on this sinking ship.”

That Scott Kurtz! He’s so cynical.

1. I have honestly lost count of the number of times I have heard variations on this in the last few months. If DC was doing to Neil Gaiman a tenth of what they’re doing to Alan Moore, the nerdrage would measure on the upper end of the Richter scale.
2. Full disclosure: I donated the cost of my Avengers ticket to the Hero Initiative.
3. And besides, it’s not even good confirmation bias because when a Scott Kurtz or whoever “makes it,” they’re at best finding their own survivable little niche. There is not gonna be a PVP movie anytime soon.
4. The combined worldwide box-office revenue for the “Avengers universe” films is over $3.3 billion dollars. That doesn’t count the Fantastic Four films, which would take you to the $4 billion mark. Or any of the DVD/merchandise sales.

DC, on the other hand, has a high-profile Batman trilogy that isn’t even wrapped up yet, one which establishes an internally consistent mythos for the character that doesn’t involve any other superheroes. It’d be difficult to imagine Nolan and Bale’s Batman standing on the same screen with Green Lantern and Superman, even if it seemed likely that Bale would return to the role (which it doesn’t.) They have a Superman franchise whose most recent movie has been more or less entirely disavowed by the studio despite positive reviews and box-office success. And they have a Green Lantern movie that woefully underperformed both financially and critically. The Superman reboot that could serve as the beginning of a hypothetical Justice League launch is coming this year, but it’s anyone’s guess whether Warner Brothers had gotten its act together sufficiently by the time Man of Steel went into production to be able to think of their comics properties in these terms. (I have insisted, and will continue to insist, that the reason Marvel’s films have done so well while DC’s have done so poorly is because Marvel is in a position to be able to dictate terms to the studio, while DC is ultimately just “the hired help” at Warner Brothers.)

So the first thought ultimately leads to the second: There’s gonna be a lot of rebooting going on. Two of your three core members (Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman) need a new movie to establish themselves as part of the DC Movie Universe, and one of your second-tier members has a stinker that needs to be swept under the rug (a la Ang Lee’s Hulk.) How do you handle this?

You start by ignoring it. You’ve got an Aquaman movie, a Wonder Woman movie, a Green Arrow movie and a Flash movie to make. By the time you get through those four films, there’s a pretty good chance that you can go back and do a soft reboot of Green Lantern that isn’t so obviously an admission that the previous film tanked. Then, with five films under your belt, you can go in and do your Justice League film.

“Wait, what, five?” I hear you say? “What about Batman? What about Superman? What about the Martian Manhunter?” But honestly, I don’t think you need a movie to establish Batman and Superman before putting them in a JLA film. Batman and Superman are, at this point, such iconic characters with such iconic origins that babies practically come out of the womb knowing that Bruce Wayne’s parents were killed and he was inspired by a bat to fight evil. The last thing we need, pardon my mild frustration, is yet another goddamn retelling of the origin of Batman and Superman. (You can see how excited I am for the Man of Steel movie, aren’t you?) Just mention them from time to time in the other films, establish that they exist, and then throw them in the final flick.

As to the Martian Manhunter, he’d be filling the Nick Fury role on the DC end. He’d appear in all of the different movies, talking to the different heroes about how he’s getting them together to face a larger threat, one that he knows about as a telepathic space alien. (Maybe even one that killed off the Martian race…) This would link the various heroes together, whet interest for later films, and give audiences time to get used to the Martian Manhunter, who is definitely something of a legacy from a very different age of science fiction and comics.

So who would the villain be? Actually, surprisingly enough, I’d pick Libra. Go back to his original roots, where he was a supervillain attempting to steal the powers of the entire Justice League, and give a tip of the hat to his recent role in ‘Final Crisis’ by a) having him do so in order to better prepare Earth for the coming of Darkseid, and b) having him recruit a passel of henchmen to help him out. Then, in the Justice League movie, you pull a big surprise at the end…in the third act, after he steals the powers of Superman and the Flash and Green Lantern and seems pretty much unstoppable, you find out that the Martian Manhunter’s been recruiting a lot more than just the heroes who have movies. The final battle would have cameos by dozens of superheroes, from Zatanna to Black Canary to the Elongated Man to Steel to everyone who you haven’t gotten the rights to, all dogpiling on Libra and his Secret Society. In the end, Libra overloads himself absorbing everyone’s powers and blows up (a la his original appearance…) but the greater threat is still out there.

But all that, of course, assumes that Warner Brothers is interested in replicating Marvel’s success, something which has never been particularly clear from their actions. Certainly, it’s hard to believe that the people who made ‘Batman and Robin’ are interested either in making money or in bringing joy to the lives of others.

Why do I love Hawkeye? Because he’s absurd. It is fundamentally a crazy idea that a glorified carny would one day wake up and decide to show off his archery skills by becoming a full-time superhero. It’s something that shows off just how wildly implausible a superhero universe is; men in powered armor and Norse gods are actually easier to suspend one’s disbelief for, because there’s no way of knowing how the real world would react to a figure of myth showing up in the modern world. But we all know how it works in the real world if you decide to practice archery until you can hit the bullseye every time, and then proceed to decide to glue bombs to your arrows and fight criminals (while wearing what looks, let’s face it, like a purple dress), and the answer is, “YOU FUCKING DON’T.” The very existence of Hawkeye is a sign that you have left real-world logic behind, which absolutely infuriates some people but evokes in others a sense of giddy delight.

I’m with the giddy delight crowd. Hawkeye is wonderful because he is impossible and plausible all at the same time. It’s plausible that someone could be an extraordinarily gifted bowman, but good enough to hang with gods and sorcerers and aliens and twenty foot tall super-scientists? That’s wonderfully impossible. Hawkeye becomes mythic not despite his Everyman status, but because of it. He’s absurdly talented, literally. Even the look of his costume contributes to this effect. It’s the exact opposite of a realistic costume that a real human being would wear when fighting crime, which is exactly what a character like this should wear.

And it comes out in the text. Hawkeye is perpetually dismissed by villain after villain. “An ordinary man with a bow can’t be a threat” is a common refrain over the decades, despite the fact that for the majority of human history, ordinary men with bows were difference-makers on the battlefield. And time and time again, Hawkeye makes bad guys pay for overlooking his talents, because he’s not ordinary at all, even though he has no powers or abilities. He succeeds time and time again, simply because he refuses to acknowledge how out of his league he is. I could name a few favorites…his battle with Imus Champion, where Champion decides to show how amazingly skilled he is by shooting a bomb that Hawkeye is standing next to from a range that would challenge even a champion archer, only to have Hawkeye shoot his bowstring in half from the same range…his fight with Crossfire, which ends with Crossfire dismissing the “weakest Avenger” by preparing to shoot him with his own bow, only to discover that the pull on Hawkeye’s bow is more than he can draw…or his ‘fight’ with Scarecrow. “What kind of arrow is that? Acid? Explosive? What?” “No, I’m all out of trick arrows. This is my old stand-by, the ‘very sharply pointed, if I shoot you with it, it makes a big hole’ arrow.” “Why don’t I just get that cell door for you.”

But more than all that, I love that Hawkeye is a fundamentally straightforward, honest, and decent human being. He’s someone who found direction in life by joining the Avengers, by becoming one of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, and who wound up epitomizing their code of ethics better than perhaps anyone else. Hawkeye doesn’t believe in having an Avenger like Wolverine around to do the dirty work that the other Avengers can’t or won’t do, because he believes that you can’t call yourself an Avenger if you forget about your ethics when they stop being expedient. He’s someone who believes that there really is a better way of doing things, that you believe in justice even when it’s hard because it’s meaningless if you only believe in them when it’s easy, and that you really can show people a better path in life, and they’ll take it. (That’s why it worked so damn brilliantly when he became the leader of the Thunderbolts, BTW.) (It’s also why, in the interests of staying relentlessly positive, I am not discussing Brian Michael Bendis’ handling of the character.)

I love Hawkeye because he’s bold, brash, and uncomplicatedly heroic, and because that actually works for him despite all of the cynicism in our hearts that says it shouldn’t. And if none of that stirs your heart, I will leave you with Tom DeFalco’s words: “This bow is a work of art that should never be used like a common baseball bat! **WHACK** But I guess it’ll do in a pinch.”

Not pictured: Rex operating the rifle with his paws to kill three people with a single shot via a richocheted bullet.

I feel very much different now. For one thing, a six-year old is a wonderful cure for feeling jaded, and let’s face it: Even if I didn’t know that I was feeling jaded, that’s what I was feeling. To her, it’s a big day. We get to go to the comics store (which is not an everyday thing; another thing that changes when you have a kid is that you find better things to spend the money on than comics) and she gets to pick out her very own comics to take home for free! There’s a party atmosphere at the store, which contributes to the feeling that it’s a special day; this year, she asked if she could bring her Thor hammer along (the Thor hammer being the only present that she directly requested for her sixth birthday) and everyone at the store got a huge kick of her carrying it around…and she got a huge kick out of everyone getting a huge kick out of seeing her carry it around.

I really can’t stress that enough, actually; for a six-year old girl, being told that her geekery is a positive thing and that it’s not just okay, but actually awesome to be into Thor and Green Lantern (she already knows the Oath by heart) is something that she’ll be able to carry with her through the times that I know will happen, despite my best efforts, where she’s told that it is not okay for a girl to be into these things. The man who jokingly tried to lift her hammer and pretended he couldn’t, the guy behind the counter who gave her a “Free Comics Day” sticker for being the “most awesome kid in kindergarten”…those gestures were important to me. And to her. (If you happen to be reading, thank you!)

She got a “Yo Gabba Gabba” comic and a “Tinkerbell/Smurfs” comic, and I added the “Donald Duck”, “Peanuts/Adventure Time”, and “Superman Family/Young Justice” sampler to the mix for her. I read all five (because what kind of parent would I be if I didn’t read stuff my kid was reading) and was relatively happy with all of them. The “Superman/Young Justice” issue was fairly inconsequential, really more a taster than an actual comic, but was cute; the “Donald Duck” and “Peanuts” were timeless classics but anyone who didn’t already know this probably isnt reading this blog (the “Adventure Time” backup wasn’t to my taste, though); the “Yo Gabba Gabba” comic was cute and captured the feel of the show, which really means different things to different people depending on what they think of “Yo Gabba Gabba”; and the “Tinkerbell/Smurfs” thing…well, let’s face it, my daughter’s going to like it a lot better than I do. Because she likes Tinkerbell just as much as she likes Thor, and that’s pretty awesome too.

For myself, I got the “New 52″ sampler…which, I’ll be honest, did nothing to convince me that the new DC Universe is anything other than a terrible vortex of suck that somehow escaped the 1990s and hungers for the future of the comics industry; I got the “Age of Ultron” prelude, which was significantly less terrible than the DC comic but tried a little too hard to convince me that Ultron’s return was a terrible, unbearable, unprecedented threat to the Marvel Universe instead of, you know, Thursday; I got the perfectly good Spider-Man origin recap, which I will toss on the pile with all the other perfectly good Spider-Man origin recaps; I got the various Dark Horse media tie-ins, which were decent (although the final exchange between Mal and Jayne is one of the best in all of “Firefly” in any of its incarnations); and I got the Bongo comics special, which as in previous years delivered a perfectly workmanlike piece of entertainment product. (And a straightforwardly beautiful and touching little bio-piece from Sergio Aragones that feels like it got snuck in by accident, but was absolutely perfect.)

Perhaps, judging by my reaction to the comics I grabbed for myself, I’m still a little jaded. But my little girl isn’t.

But here’s the thing. When I came out of Captain America and Iron Man and even Thor, I came out and said to myself, “well, that was a great movie.” Because all of those were great movies.³ I did not say that after coming out of The Avengers, because, well, it’s not a great movie. It’s not even a really good one. It’s an okay movie. At this point someone usually says “but it’s a great thrill ride!” and… well, no. At the end you might think it’s a great thrill ride, but again – that’s after the superb third act. The first two thirds of the movie are not a great thrill ride – there are thrilling moments interspersed with a lot of waiting for the awesome moments. There is, let us be honest, barely a plot to this movie: it is a bunch of Awesome Character Moments (well, mostly) and big fights, but the Awesome Character Moments aren’t really earned like they are in the previous and better Marvel films because no character gets enough time to really build a coherent storyline, and some of the plot twists in this movie are really amazingly stupid.⁴ Also, the movie unfortunately points out multiple times how stupid it is for anybody in a superhero universe to use a bow and arrow, which is a shame because Jeremy Renner is great, but nobody put a gun to his head and said “hey, be Hawkeye.”

So it’s not a great film. It is about as good, though, as I think an Avengers movie can be in the modern era of film: it is entertaining, competent on most levels, and if you’ve seen all the other Marvel films you can appreciate it as Adventure of The Guys From Those Other Movies well enough, and I have and did. It could be so much worse than it is, and it’s not really “worse” in any way. It’s just not great, and it’s not because it’s a team movie because The Incredibles was a team movie and it was splendid – it’s because it’s product, and product has to hit the expected beats, and in a movie like The Avengers there’s so much less room to hit them well. Which it does, right down to the end-credits reveal of Guess Who to make the fanboys come in their pants.

1. Although I wish I had not spent the money to see it in 3D. The 3D is ass. See it in 2D, folks.
2. Although Samuel L. Jackson just phones in a paycheck Samuel L. Jackson performance, which is not terrible but let’s be honest, he’s basically the black Christopher Walken at this point.
3. Okay, Thor less so than the other two by a fair bit, but even so, Thor is at least a decent movie with some really great moments.
4. Loki’s mind-control can be beaten by punching them in the head, which is basically the shittiest mind-control ever.

Not the article. The pictures. It really does seem, based on not just this but all the publicity pictures I’ve seen, that everyone in the Nu52 has only one expression, and it’s “perpetual grimace”. Seriously, you could make an animated gif of nothing but DC characters making inadvertently hilarious facial expression, and it would probably take about five minutes to loop around. Nobody ever smiles in the new DC universe. Nobody laughs, or jokes. Everyone is Serious and Angry, all the time.

Or in the case of the Superman pictured there, has accidentally stepped on a pile of Legos in the dark. Or possibly whanged his shin on the corner of a desk. Either one.

EDIT: And Wonder Woman has clearly just gotten the end of ‘Serenity’ spoiled for her. “I just discovered the series, you bastards! I’m only up through ‘Out of Gas’! And you just drop ‘Oh, man, it killed me when Wash died’ in the middle of conversation like that?!”

Batman? It’s January in Gotham. Swirling winds around the bus stop. And the bus is officially now twenty-seven fucking minutes late.

Twenty-eight now.

I will admit, though, that Jay and Alan’s expressions make sense. Presumably, the missing word balloons are, “FALLING! FALLING INTO RATS!!!!” and “OH MY GOD MY HAND IS ON FIRE!!!!!”

I would say yes and I don’t know, respectively. I think Mulcair is perhaps better positioned to leech votes from the centre than any other of the NDP candidates were and he’ll protect the new Quebec base, but the fact that he is from Quebec will be at least a slight negative in the West because they get incredibly pissy about that. I think on balance he was the best choice, not because he of geography or politics, but because he’s a political gut-punch fighter, and that’s what going to be necessary until the next election. But the NDP bench was really deep this time around (due in large part to Jack Layton making sure that it would be), so Mulcair is just the best of a strong lot.

supergp: If you were going to write a big comic crossover event, what would your premise be?

Old DC: Probably something involving most of the major heroes being mind-controlled with Starro or whatever and a few stragglers left to save the day. Probably including Empress, Major Disaster, and Geist the Twilight Man as some of the rebel fringe. (Yes, I know both MD and Geist were supposedly killed in Infinite Crisis. My answer to that is simple: “nuh-uh.”)

New DC: Something that brings back the old DC.

Marvel: Victor Von Doom. Infinity Gauntlet. *drops mic*

JDR: Can you compare Canada to some country(ies) that aren’t the USA?

Well, we’re colder than Botswana, freer than Yemen, less blonde than Sweden, better at parking than Italy, have less Japanese people than Japan, have better McDonald’s than Australia, less jiggly at most times than Brazil, less shaky than Djibouti, less class-riddled than England, have more Tamils working as line cooks than Sri Lanka (seriously, in Toronto Tamils fill the same role that the various Central American immigrants do in American kitchens; one of my former roommates, a sous chef and thoroughly white dude, spoke decent Tamil), easier to pronounce than Kyrgyzstan, less desert-y than the Western Sahara, and our French bears only a slight resemblance to France’s French. How’s that?

Greg Morrow: What is the most important difference between the constitutional laws of Canada and the United States? Not the procedural stuff about how the legislature is constituted, but the substantive stuff about civil rights and limited government power.

Probably the existence of s.1 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the limitations clause. (Which, for the uninitiated, allows the government to pass laws which limit individual rights, so long as those laws are relatively specific and enumerated and that the limitation is justifiable in a free and democratic society.) It prevents a lot of “this absolute principle is clashing with that other absolute principle” confusion that arises whenever rights collide with other rights, which actually happens just about all the time. Of course, I know more than a few Constititional scholars who absolutely loathe the existence of s.1, so who knows.

Der Whelk: Is there an old series or property out there you think deserves and would be a perfect for a big budget re-make?

It’s not so much a remake as it is a continuation or sequel or even logical endpoint: Quantum Leap.

You would still have Scott Bakula as Sam Beckett, clearly having aged in real time from the end of the show, leaping from life to life, his memories continually fogged, and you would still have Al traveling alongside him, guiding him in his tasks, and that would be the first quarter of the movie or so – maybe one or two quick leaps – and then Sam jumps into a timeframe he shouldn’t be able to jump into normally, a time well after his death would have occurred. Something has gone wrong in the quantum stream. Somebody is interfering. Al is completely panicked and Sam is at a loss.

And that’s when he meets a second Leaper – one Al recognizes, not that he can tell Sam this – and although Sam doesn’t quite understand it, suddenly they’re working together to do something he can’t quite understand. The three of them are now leaping together, and every time she reminds him of what’s been happening so he doesn’t lose track. She’s working with slightly more advanced technology than Sam is, but even her advances aren’t enough for her to do what she needs to do, so she has enlisted Sam’s help. Two Leapers, working in tandem across multiple times, can pull it off. There’s no other way.

What has happened? Thanks to the interference of the second Leaper (who is much younger than Sam), Sam has traveled into her timeline. This leaper dies much, much later than Sam will – a century or more later – and this means she and Sam, together, can effect the events necessary for a future Leaper to leap backwards and give her the technology she so desperately needs to return Sam home. And so the present changes the future changes the past changes the present…

…because Sam Beckett’s daughter wants her father back.

supergp: What game would you use to introduce a young kid to boardgames, and at what age?

Start them early (and this isn’t just me espousing the hobby, incidentally – any childhood dev expert can tell you that the problem-solving and analytical skills kids can pick up by playing boardgames will go a long way in their lives). You can start playing boardgames with kids as early as two thanks to games like Go Away Monster! (among others). Animal Upon Animal is a dexterity game first and foremost but there’s strategy to be found there (enough that I have played it with adults and had fun, albeit using variant rules); Geistesblitz never, ever stops being fun either, whether you are four or sixty-four. As kids get older you can introduce them to slightly harder stuff: Liar’s Dice, Blockers! or Zooloretto or even Ticket To Ride. And then you can get them into the big-name stuff like Settlers or Carcassonne.

Evil Midnight Lurker: Have you ever killed a man in Reno just to watch him die?

Seems like a waste of a perfectly good murder to do such a thing.

A2H: Will there ever be any more Who’s Who columns? And if not, would going over the Official Guide to the Marvel Universe be a possibility?

Yes to both. I was actually working on a fairly lengthy Who’s Who entry (one of the more think-piecey ones, although I do especially want to do another Crime Tailor segment at some point and have a couple of villains in mind for that) last week and didn’t have time to finish it for that Thursday. Maybe this Thursday if everything goes smoothly. Or not. It depends.

As for the OHOTMU, probably, yes. Rex the Wonder Dog’s awesomeness is not constrained to one universe.

Mitchell Hundred: Does Armond White actually believe all the crazy shit he writes, or is he just trying to garner publicity? I’m really not sure about this.

I think Armond White is a born contrarian, and contrarians are extremely skilled at making themselves believe that the contrary opinions they hold for the sake of being contrary are also correct. Seriously, if Armond White is trying to get publicity, there are much easier ways to do it than by arguing that latter-day Michael Bay films are unrecognized works of genius.

Nicodemus: If you were a flavor of soup, what flavor would it be?

Presumably “mangled flesh” flavour.

Jonathan: Do you have any opinions/insights into the current Alberta election? Does it even have any meaning to you as an Ontarian?

Yes. I said on MetaFilter a couple weeks ago that I thought Danielle Smith – not Wildrose, Smith – represented the future of Canadian small-c conservatism because she was what it needed to be to survive (or at least pretending to be so): fiscally radical-conservative and socially liberal/libertarian. Youth polling in Canada – even in Alberta – makes it quite clear that social conservative positions are wildly unpopular with young voters and that is only trending downwards. Libertarian-conservatism is really the only way for conservatism to truly survive in Canada over the next fifty years, and Danielle Smith was trying to sell Wildrose as being that.

The problem, of course, is that Wildrose was actually chock-full of the usual old white Reform Party psychotics who have always been the backbone of Canada’s far right and once it became obvious that this was the case, the moderates and youth that might have considered voting Wildrose suddenly found they weren’t so interested in voting for Canada’s religious right and went for the Progressive Conservatives, who have moved to a decidely centrist position over the past few years. So generally, I’m quite happy with the results, as Alberta politics seem to have shifted from all-right-wing-all-the-time to a centrist/conservative fight, and that’s a leftward shift in the most conservative province in Canada.

KD: Nearly a year in, what are your thoughts on the DcNU?

I’m reading I, Vampire and that is pretty much it (and I don’t know how long I’ll hang on to reading it). The Nu52 basically killed DC for me – the emotional attachment that I always had to the DCU is still there, but it’s strictly to the old DCU and not this shitty new EXTREEEEEEME version. Really, most of the Nu52 comics are just appallingly bad, and the ones that aren’t are crossing over with the bad ones far too often. But at the end of the day, it’s not about quality but about the fact that my DC comics, the ones I grew up with, have been mostly discarded for something else. Even if they were good comics, I still wouldn’t want to read them, because without the emotional tie they lose all resonance for me. I mean, I’m not even reading Legion of Super-Heroes! This is the first time basically ever that I am not bothering to read Legion. It just feels weird for me to type that, but it’s true.

And look – DC has greatly increased their sales, so good for them, I suppose. But it’s not for me any more. I used to dream of writing for DC; I don’t any more, because it’s quite clear that even if I could get past their abominable treatment of creators (and I don’t think I could), it’s just not a place I’d want to work now.