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

When I wrote last week’s post, about how it it’s okay to form opinions on things you haven’t seen yet, and even to not change those opinions in the face of opposition from people who have seen those things, many people pointed out the perilous downside to this. Which is that, just as we have all (or most of us have) been faced by an angry fan snarling out, “How can you judge it if you haven’t even seen it?”…we have also all been on the receiving end of dripping disdain wielded by someone who read about a casting rumor on io9 that shows that the movie is totally going to suck because the gay cowboy from ‘Brokeback Mountain’ is playing the Joker and there’s no point in even watching it now.

Those people are absolutely right. (The people who point out the perilous downside, not the people who refused to watch ‘The Dark Knight’ because Heath Ledger was in it.) There’s no question that fans can be obnoxious, and that any creative decision that’s daring and unconventional will attract a crowd of people not just ready but eager to jump on it with hobnailed boots before they have a chance to really judge it. The impulse to see a truly spectacular failure in progress is an old one, and there are many who will say that it resulted in a lot of brilliant stories never getting a fair shake. (Even now, ‘Heaven’s Gate’ has its defenders, and I’ve met someone who will insist that ‘Sucker Punch’ is a Brechtian masterpiece.)

We all have a responsibility not to be that fan. It is okay not to like things. It is even okay to not like things irrationally, based on little to no evidence. If you are wrong, the only thing you’re hurting is you, after all. And yes, it is okay to tell people that you’re not interested in something when it comes up in conversation (like, say, a discussion of “Things You Irrationally Dislike Based On Almost No Evidence”.) But what isn’t okay is to be aggressive. Going into a comics forum to tell everyone that you’re not even going to pick up ‘Avengers Vs. X-Men’ because it’s s obvious it’s going to suck…not cool. Sitting in on a DC panel just so you can tell everyone that ‘Flashpoint’ was the last DC comic you’re ever reading…why bother? Clearly nobody there will agree with you, because they’re all there to hear about the new comics coming out of DC, so why do you want to start an argument? It’s okay to let people disagree with you. That doesn’t mean you can’t ever say you didn’t like something, or even to have a friendly argument about the relative merits of a film/book/TV show/comic/play. It’s good to discuss things, and and even to have wildly differing opinions. The point at which you start getting upset at people for liking things you have no interest in, though, is the point at which you need to just take a step back, relax, and remember that just as nobody can make you watch ‘Green Lantern’, you don’t have to make a pre-emptive strike on their enjoyment in order to stop them from forcing it down your throat.

If for no other reason than someday, you might change your mind. And when you do, the last thing you want is for all your friends to remind you of the time you said you wouldn’t watch ‘Buffy’ because you weren’t a thirteen-year-old girl.

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

Click on thumb to see full

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

Contemplation on the responsibility of power, check. Massive earth-shattering action, check. Superman’s faith in the common man, check. About the only thing I’m not sold on is Lois Lane as a non-brunette, but other than that, yeah, I’ll be lining up like fuck for this one.

Apologies for the lateness, but Technical Difficulties. You know how it is, right? Right.

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

ROM’s been in the news lately; Hasbro filed once again for the trademark on the property, prompting speculation that we may be in for a revival of the character. Personally, I don’t care so much about seeing future adventures as I do about getting reprints; if Marvel does get the rights back, the smart thing to do would be to pump out ‘Essential ROM’ Volumes 1 through However Many It Takes to Reprint His Every Appearance as fast as they can get the ink on the paper. Because ROM…ROM was freaking epic.

And I mean that literally. In a lot of ways, ROM foreshadowed episodic series whose individual stories built up into a single, large epic. Which is not to say that Bill Mantlo actually influenced people like J. Michael Straczynski or J.J. Abrams or Joss Whedon…but he was doing the same thing a long time before they did it. The 75-issue series starts with ROM’s arrival on Earth in pursuit of the Dire Wraiths, a species of evil shapeshifters that ROM and his fellow Spaceknights repelled from Galador and now hunt through the galaxy; and it doesn’t end until the epic conclusion of the Dire Wraith war (which crossed over into Marvel comics from ‘X-Men’ to ‘Fantastic Four’ to ‘Power Man and Iron Fist’) and ROM’s triumphant return to his home planet. There’s a lot of twists and turns in between, of course, but the whole series feels like it’s got a coherent beginning, middle and end. That’s very unusual in an era where you either had a twelve-issue miniseries, or you went for broke and tried to extend your run as long as you could. (To some extent, it’s a happy accident…I’m sure if ROM had sold better, he’d still be fighting the Dire Wraiths to this day.)

The character of ROM has a strong emotional arc through the series; he starts out consumed with guilt over allowing the Dire Wraiths to escape their Waterloo on Wraithworld, and slowly grows to regain his humanity (literally and figuratively) through his feelings for Brandy Clark. Brandy, meanwhile, has her own great arc; she goes from merely admiring ROM for his courage and nobility to becoming a hero in her own right, suffering loss and seeking vengeance. Bill Mantlo did a great job of making his characters accessible and sympathetic, especially when the series takes a turn for the horrific around issue #47. (I think this was actually the first issue of the series I read. The opening sequence, in which a member of the new, ruthless sorceress class of Wraith murders someone by drilling a hole in his forehead with her tongue and sucking out his brains like a Slurpee, is high on my list of Good Old Fashioned Nightmare Fuel.)

There’ve been appearances of ROM and the Spaceknights since the end of the series, which is good…but it’s that initial epic that I love, and that I want to see collected. Hopefully Hasbro and Marvel can make it happen, because with the rights to the Wraiths solidly held by Marvel, the rights to ROM don’t do anybody any good unless they can make an agreement.

EDIT: of course I typo the image URL the day I’m in court for five hours. Fixed.

So this teaser poster for Man of Steel is making the rounds:

And of course there is nerd rage because nerds are all “why is Superman letting them put him in cuffs” and “this is so stupid, Superman can bust out of the handcuffs whenever he wants” and “this better not be some stupid thing where they have Kryptonite bullets.”

This happens because so many nerds fundamentally do not get Superman, because Superman, when written properly, is not your traditional power fantasy. Instead, Superman is an ongoing morality play, where every question he must pose himself is “is this the right thing for me to do?” Of course Superman lets himself be put in handcuffs, even if he can snap the handcuffs at any time, because Superman understands that the rule of law must be respected in order to protect everybody less powerful than him (e.g. everybody ever). He is not allowing himself to be cuffed because he is weak or he is afraid. He is allowing himself to be cuffed because he is strong.

This is why Superman is such a great hero. It also gives me more confidence in Zack Snyder’s film than I have previously had, even if Superman is wearing the awful no-red-briefs costume variant.

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

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

Peyton, over in John Seavey’s post about the Fake Geek Girl bullshit which I am glad he wrote because honestly at this point I just do not have the energy to engage with that bullshit for what feels like the tenth time, writes:

As a complete aside I also wanted to thank MGK, John Seavey, and Jim Smith for this site. As someone said upthread, it’s one of the few places, along with Scalzi’s Whatever, Evanier’s blog, and Jim Hines blog and a few others that, as a female nerd, feels safe and supportive.

I’m just gonna say that I feel very proud to have received this comment, since I decided quite some time ago (like, years) that this was going to be one of my primary goals for the site. As I get older1 I find myself getting more liberal rather than less, which is a pleasant thing to realize, and John and Jim and everybody else I’ve invited to the site were invited, at least in part, because I knew they had no truck with all of the bullshit that nerd-dom encourages in celebration of the straight white guy norm. And I say that as a white guy who mostly invited straight white guys, which happened mostly because whenever I’ve encouraged guest bloggers to apply, they are usually straight white guys.2

This really isn’t just about the blog, either, but what I do generally. I mean, I’ve said before that Al’Rashad is adapted from a screenplay I wrote about a dozen years ago, but the simple truth is that the comic is much better than the screenplay ever was. The big action beats are for the most part the same thus far, but:

– Originally Rayana was much less proactive as a character. Even then I wanted her to be kick-ass, but as written in the screenplay, she was not nearly at the nigh-Brainiac-Five level of intelligence and competence which she is at now, and she works, I think, so much better now than she did previously. Having Kahal be her personal engine of destruction adds a new twist to their relationship which I like quite a bit as well; I like that Kahal takes his lead from Rayana whenever it isn’t a “right now we fight desperately” moment.
– Apali was originally male, and moreover was not nearly so important to the story as she is now. Making her female actually broadened her quite a bit and let me do more with her. The fact that she has essentially been Rayana’s surrogate mother isn’t something I’ve explicitly written in a page yet, but I think it’s pretty obvious, and that simply wouldn’t work as well if she were male as she was originally.
– Also, Joro really should have been a girl, as I’ve written previously, but the ship sailed on that one. Sometimes you realize things too late.
– Finally, there’s one more major character aspect that hasn’t been revealed yet (and might not even be revealed in the first story arc) but to which I gave serious thought, then discussed it with Davinder, then discussed it further with a few people whose opinion I respect in order to make sure that it would work with what had been written already. I think when it gets revealed people will accuse me of pandering (as always happens in these instances), but again: it’s something that makes the overall story simply work better. This is because different races and genders and sexual orientations and all the rest: they’re not checkboxes you have to fill in to pass a test. To blatantly steal from Pratchett: they are all different metals, and alloys are stronger.

I’m drifting a bit here from my original point because I started talking about my comic (which you should all read and adore, of course), but to get back to it: it’s a damn shame that the internet needs places that are “safe and supportive” for female nerds and gay nerds and non-white nerds and all of the other nerds who are not typical nerds, because everybody should have the right to act like a goddamned overgrown child about some irrelevant piece of pop-culture if they so choose because that is what we are all doing, really. The question should not even have to be posed. More people who I can argue “but Superman would TOTALLY beat up Thor” with is always going to be a benefit. More people who will argue whether the Enterprise could blow up a Star Destroyer are always welcome.3 I really don’t care if they have tits or different amounts of melanin – I care that they have fresh perspectives and new ideas, because more ideas is always better.

But so long as those places are necessary, I am determined that my place will be one of those places. This is not an ironclad promise that I will always be perfectly enlightened, because we are all works in progress and nobody ever gets it right one hundred percent of the time. But I think it is important that I try.

Okay, soapbox mode over, and tomorrow if I have time I’ll write the essay about Wreck-It Ralph that lots of people have been demanding for some reason.

1. IMPORTANT CAVEAT: I AM NOT OLD OLD, JUST, LIKE, OLDER AND STUFF [↩]
2. Unless Jim Smith is actually a pseudonym for “Laverne Washington,” which it could be. You never know with Jim. [↩]
3. Right answer: The Battlestar Galactica nukes both of them. [↩]

And if you like, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

Since I don’t read Hellblazer I don’t have any strong feelings about the Vertigo series ending at issue #300 and being replaced by a Constantine series about the DC Universe version of the character.  But I do find it interesting that the news led to a surge of articles about comics being relaunched and renumbered, since I figured the issue was largely dead.

First, let me say that I prefer for a comic series to have a long, sequentially-numbered run of issues.  This has less to do with nostalgia for things past than with practicality.  It is easy to figure out where, for example, Savage Dragon #147 fits into one’s collection and the history of the character–it goes between #146 and #148, and it’s about 35 issues before the most recent one.  It is hard (or at least harder) to do the same thing with Iron Man #7–for one thing, I’d need to figure out which #7 we’re talking about, as there have been at least five that I know of, and there’s no pattern to when they occur.  Moreover, I fail to see any lasting benefit to renumbering a series as a means of boosting sales and attracting new readers.  If it was such an effective gimmick, no comic would need to do it more than once, let alone three times in a decade.  So, if it were up to me, various long-running series would be numbered sequentially without interruption, and it’d be a lot easier to keep track of them, and that would be that.

That said, this is an argument I lost many years ago.  DC renumbered most of its long-running series before I even got into comics, and Marvel started doing the same shortly after I showed up.  In the mid-2000s the trend went the other way, and we got Fantastic Four #500 and Superman #650, and I had hope that the Big Two learned their lesson and would stop it with the silly counting tricks.  But by now Marvel has settled into a pattern of relaunching, re-titling, and restoring a series willy-nilly, while DC has reset virtually all of their books.  Obviously, chances are good we will nevertheless see, f’rinstance, Action Comics #1000.  But we’re probably not going to see Action #905-999 or #1030-1099 in any meaningful sense, so there really isn’t any point anymore.

Uninterrupted sequential numbering of corporate superhero comics is a lost cause, and going forward I would be very surprised to see a Marvel or DC title go for more than 50 consecutive issues without a silly stunt.  At this point I’ve made peace with it, so it surprises me that anybody was clinging to the idea that Hellblazer would go untouched, as if Dan DiDio might somehow fail to notice he’s publishing a series he hasn’t micromanaged yet.  Personally, I am resigned to buying Captain America #1 over and over, as long as the story’s good.

What’s more important to me now is that Marvel and DC figure out when to do these inevitable relaunches.  The current Marvel Now! program rubs me the right way, because each of the series being relaunched seems to have some fairly good justification.  That is, I don’t think there’s a great reason to restart Avengers at #1.  But if you’re bound and determined to do it, I think “The writer is somebody other than Brian Bendis for the first time in eight years” is at least a halfway decent reason.  On the other hand, DC relaunched Green Lantern last year for no other reason than a) it was September and b) Sinestro replaced Hal Jordan as the title character for about two and a half issues.

In this renumberiffic landscape, there needs to be some vague rules about when you ought to or ought not to start over with a new series.   Marvel probably should have launched the current Dark Avengers with a #1 instead of #175, but it certainly doesn’t need to renumber the book now as it is still mostly continuing the same storyline.  On the other hand, Journey Into Mystery #646 will start a new Sif storyline that probably won’t be all that deeply connected to the previous Loki feature, so  there’s not much reason to maintain any continuity with the numbers.  Given the decision to reset the Legion books at #1, it made sense for DC to end Adventure Comics altogether and replace it with Legion Lost, since the only purpose of the Adventure brand was tradition.  In contrast, I have no idea why DC didn’t use the opportunity to replace Action and Detective with new books that actually have Superman and Batman’s names in the titles.  A Batgirl storyline reintroducing Barbara Gordon is a sensible place for a new #1; a new series about the Red She-Hulk is a rather silly place for a #59.  And so on.

It may seem absurd to be worrying about how to get these relaunches right so soon after the Big Two have relaunched virtually everything they publish.  But it’s sillier to think the New 52 or Marvel Now! will stand the test of time, given that both initiatives are based in the idea that no previous initiatives need to stand the test of time.  By 2015 or so we’ll be seeing this topic come up again, and it would be nice if Marvel and DC learn something by then.