Something something oh no it’s a tornado what will we do oh no etc.

Seriously, do we even have to bother pointing out that the tornado is no match for the likes of Rex the motherfucking Wonder Dog? It seems almost counterproductive to say it these days.

Strictly B+ Pixar, with some moments that feel perhaps more repetitive than thematic – but nonetheless extremely funny and touching, and B+ Pixar, while not A-level Pixar, is still better than 95 percent of everything out there.

Seeing those pages MGK posted from his reworking of “Civil War” reminded me of the story that was supposedly going to shake up the Marvel Universe forever. (So let’s see…Cap’s alive again, Spider-Man’s secret identity was restored, Iron Man’s brain was literally reset to pre-Civil War status, and the Registration Act was repealed. And most of the people involved were Skrulls anyway. But Black Goliath is still dead!)

But what really irked me at the time was Marvel’s claim that this was a more “realistic” look at how super-heroes would operate in the real world. In the real world, they said, super-heroes would be regulated and controlled. In the real world, there would be an authority governing them. In the real world, things would look like they did in “Civil War”.

Suuuuuure they would. That press conference where Tony Stark announced the Registration Act, and revealed his secret identity to wild applause from the crowd of reporters? Would have gone something like this.

“I’ve revealed my secret identity before, but always in ways I could go back on. This time, there’s no going back. I’m Tony Stark, and I’m Iron Man.”

“Mister Stark…didn’t you just say a few weeks ago that you were retiring from being Iron Man after the stress of your dual identity caused you to get drunk and publicly threaten to kill the Latverian Ambassador?”

“Um, yes, but that was evil magic, not alcoholism that–”

“Have you always been Iron Man? What about the time you claimed you ‘fired’ Iron Man for attacking government agents and murdering a Russian super-hero? Was that a lie too?”

“I think I should wait to speak to my lawyer about–”

“You don’t actually have any super-powers, Mister Stark, yet you’re claiming that the new Super-Hero Registration Act requires you to register because of your possession of the Iron Man armor. What happens if you decide to license or sell the armor? Does the new owner instantly become a law-breaker?”

“Well, these are questions that will be answered by the courts when–”

“As we understand it, you attempted to arrest Captain America for failing to register under the Act before it was even enacted into law. Isn’t that a blatant abuse of your new-found power?”

“This press conference is over.”

Soon, Iron Man would be forced to resign, the law would be tied up in the courts for years before being declared unconstitutional, and the Negative Zone prison would wind up being an expensive and unworkable boondoggle due to the use of shoddy and substandard contractors. Then Blaastar shows up at the United Nations, asking them to condemn America’s invasion of his sovereign territory…

There should totally be a four-issue Marvel miniseries featuring Captain America and Pete Wisdom and Sunfire and a collection of Marvel’s never-used “international” superheroes like Shamrock and Defensor and they’ll all be trapped in Arcade’s deathtraps and it should be called Murderworld Cup.

Recently got a couple more requests to repost the Sally Floyd/Captain America remix I did years ago, and the truth is that I don’t have both pages any more; I’ve only got the second page, courtesy of Edward Saul.

For those who never saw the first page: basically Sally Floyd says that Captain America is irrelevant because he doesn’t have a Myspace and doesn’t watch American Idol. (No, really, she makes those exact references. Three years later, Myspace is a backwater zombie site and American Idol doesn’t have Simon any more, which just makes her point even stupider.)

Before I begin, I’d just like to take a moment to apologize for the lateness of this post; no matter how much I say things like, “Oh, I’ll take my laptop to (insert vacation destination here) so I can blog from wherever I am,” it just doesn’t happen. Vacations always seem to happen in a strange parallel dimension where the laws of time and space don’t apply normally. But now that I’m back, normal service has resumed!

And it resumes with me talking about obscure comics characters. Every comic-book universe seems to accumulate these after a while; maybe they’re attempts to create a new hit that never caught on, maybe they were deliberately comic or strange characters, or maybe they’re supporting characters that linger in the memory long after the book they were in got canceled. (Rick Jones, for all that he’s become the linchpin of the Marvel Universe, started out as the Hulk’s sidekick before his book got canned after only six issues.) But they pop up with an absurd irregularity as different creators revive them (usually out of nostalgia…) It’s almost as if they live their own strange, private lives that only occasionally intersect with the comics we get to read. (Which is, of course, the whole joke behind Squirrel Girl.)

So who are my favorites? I’ve always had a soft spot for the Constrictor. He’s developed a wonderfully fatalistic personality over the years; he’s a C-lister and he knows it, but he gamely soldiers on in his career as thug and assassin, hoping not to bump into a super-hero and taking his lumps when he does. The Taskmaster sometimes falls into the same class; you have to admire someone who cheerfully takes government money to train the new Captain America just as readily as he hires himself out to fight Captain America.

I like the obscure villains who shouldn’t be obscure. Flag-Smasher is a great character and should be an excellent foil for Cap, even though he’s rarely used well; he’s an anarchist who wants to tear down the entire concept of nationality, and he’s got a huge freaking mace. (And henchmen with a lovely chiaroscuro design scheme. And berets.) Ruby Thursday is genuinely fucking creepy in a way that Steve Gerber exploited to great effect and almost nobody has ever used since; she’s completely normal from the neck down, but her head is just a featureless red sphere. THAT CAN GROW TENTACLES THAT STRANGLE YOU. Oh, and she’s chillingly remorseless and casually murderous. And Doctor Demonicus is a wonderful seething cauldron of resentment and rage; he’s a scientist who exposed himself to radiation…and got skin cancer. And he’s still trying to conquer the world.

And I like the heroes who you don’t see very often. I’m always a sucker for Hawk and Dove (thank you, Gail Simone!) and I love Jolt. What’s not to like about a young, idealistic super-heroine who finds out that she’s become the new team mascot for the Masters of Evil? I adore the Guardians of the Galaxy–the originals, that is (nothing against the new team, but I miss the classic squad.) I’m even a fan of big, bland blond Wendell Vaughn, AKA the Quasar that keeps dying. He’s just so refreshingly normal.

Characters like Rocket Raccoon, Ego the Living Planet and Cloak and Dagger make the universe a more enjoyable place. They’re like the tiny brushstrokes in a landscape painting; barely noticeable individually, but adding up to a portrait of an entire world. I cherish every strange, silly, entertaining one of them.

Feel free, in the comments, to add a few of your own favorites!

I don’t see how anybody can’t not love El Papagayo.

I mean, honestly: can you imagine a better foil for mean old never-smiles Jonah Hex? El Papagayo is such a happy and friendly backstabbing amoral bastard. He has a happy parrot! How many baddies have a happy parrot? I bet Jonah Hex really hates that parrot. “Fuckin’ parrot,” he mutters under his breath (because Jonah Hex mutters under his breath, that is a very Jonah Hex sort of a thing to do).

And if there’s anybody who’s going to be the “damn Mexican” who gets away every time, who’s the guy Hex can never quite manage to fill with lead, I defy anybody to have it be someone other than El Papagayo. Because he has a happy parrot. Not everybody can pull off a happy parrot. Captain Stingaree, for example, never could. But then again, Captain Stingaree was insane and thought he was a pirate.

So I happened to be watching some Batman: The Animated Series the other day, and I felt compelled to talk about how much I enjoy the series’ version of the Joker played by Mark Hamill.

This might seem, at first glance, a little silly to write about. “Really?” you might respond. “You mean to tell me that one of the most celebrated interpretations ever of not only the Joker, but any comic book villain, is really really good? You don’t say! Perhaps you’ll favor us next with a post about how Citizen Kane is a pretty sweet flick, and that the Beatles wrote some cool songs.”

Yes yes, okay, but the reason I thought it might be moderately interesting to talk about the show’s version of the Joker is that he is so fondly remembered by fans despite being quite different from the way he’s portrayed in current comic books.

The modern day Joker (and by “modern day,” I mean you can actually trace this interpretation back decades, but it’s especially in the air today after the success of The Dark Knight and his portrayal in Grant Morrison’s Batman comics) is described often as “a force of nature.” That’s pretty much the standard characterization these days, right? Death on two legs, a man-sized natural disaster with a body count  in the, what, thousand? A malicious, twisted trickster god raining blood and death and madness.

This is fine. It makes him a really powerful conceptual opposite for Batman, and it can hardly be argued that “man vs. force of nature” doesn’t make for terrific drama.

However, a thunderstorm doesn’t really make for an interesting character.  I am, the record will show, a huge supporter of Grant Morrison’s superhero comics – one of those guys who’ll point to a character’s one-off appearance in an issue of JLA as that character’s definitive portrayal, etc., and you all roll your eyes. And yet, his nigh-invincible Joker personally leaves me cold, however well-done his portrayal is, because he really is just a thunderstorm. He just sort of happens, and you never know why because he is so far above you. Even his quest against Batman seems somewhat dispassionate – like he’s holding all the cards, he knows he’s going to win, and he’s just waiting for Batman to catch up. Works very well in The Dark Knight as one story, but in the ongoing narrative of superhero comics, at some point, there’s not a whole lot to do with him other than have him show up, kill people, mess with our heroes’ heads, and repeat.

Now, the animated series’ Joker is a far more human character. One of the episodes I watched recently was “Joker’s Millions,” in which a flat-broke Joker gets a massive inheritance from a gangland rival, clears his name, and blows a bunch of money, only to find out later that most of the money was fake; with the IRS after him for inheritance tax, he can’t admit that he was fooled or he’ll be humiliated. Can you imagine the Joker, as seen in most contemporary comics, being portrayed as so down on his luck? Living in a slummy motel, unable to afford food for his pet hyenas (oh yes, there are pet hyenas)? Desperately cobbling together a crime just to keep out of something so ordinary as tax trouble? Or the Joker as seen in “Mad Love,” worked up into a jealous frenzy at the mere suggestion that Harley Quinn came a lot closer to killing Batman than he ever did.

This is a Joker with highs and lows, who feels joy and disappointment, a Joker with honest-to-God passion. This is a Joker who wants things, and can’t always have them. This is a Joker who retains the grandness of his philosophical and conceptual war against Batman, but is also petty enough offended when he’s tossed out of the Gotham City Comedy Competition.

There is a guy I’d be interested to read more about on a regular basis!

Hello again, and welcome to another installment of “Looking Back at Comics”! This week, we’re going to take a look at the 1990s. Everyone who was around during the 90s now looks back at the era through a lens of somewhat sheepish embarrassment; although it was easy to get caught up in the hype and excitement of an era that was all about flash and excess. Even the covers of the 90s were big and flashy: Comic books back then artificially raised their value through so-called “variant covers” that the company hyped as being worth more than the regular ones. Fortunately, modern comics have completely ditched the variant cover craze and…um…well, except…I mean, those are legitimately rarer! And they aren’t shiny!

But it wasn’t just the covers that made the 90s so ludicrous. Those fancy variant covers frequently adorned comics that had over-hyped “shock” storylines. Who can forget the so-called “Death of Superman”, a story that actually got play in regular newspapers because foolish reporters actually believed that the character was going to permanently die! Of course, less than two years later, Superman was back, but fans at the time treated the mock “death” as real and vehemently debated the merits of replacing him with a grim and gritty cyborg version of the character. Thankfully, we’d never see a grim and gritty cyborg character replacing an iconic American…um…let’s move on. Let’s just move on.

To the villains! Yes! That’s certainly an era where the 90s got downright silly! They loved nothing more than to make good guys go bad and villains reform, simply for the shock value of seeing them change sides! You’d get absurdities like Iron Man turning against the Avengers and Venom becoming a good guy…crap. The point is, we’ve learned from the 90s. Definitely.

Because we wouldn’t have such an excess of grim, dark, anti-heroes. Back in the 90s, it was almost de rigeur to have “grim and gritty” heroes show up like Darkhawk, Night Thrasher, and Lobo. Back then, they even had a “Dark Speedball” character! Of course, at least they were self-aware enough to make it a joke, instead of actually trying to sell the character as an actual deep and meaningful character moment. I mean, come the fuck on! “Penance”? Who were they thinking this would appeal to? Speedball fans who said to themselves, “Hey, I love Speedball, but he’s not enough of an emo prick!” Or perhaps comics fans who said, “I dunno, I really like emo pricks, but none of them have the name recognition that would make me take a chance on them!” …sorry, breaking character there. The point is, Dark Avengers, Dark Wolverine, Dark X-Men, and Dark Reign are entirely different from Force Works and X-Force. And X-Force is entirely different from X-Force, too. Just like Fantastic Force is different from Fantastic Force. Because it’s not the 90s anymore.

What changed to break comics out of the 90s mindset? The arrival of Joe Quesada, that’s what! Quesada put an end to the numberless spin-off titles that were diluting the brand identity of Marvel’s classic titles (like X-Factor, X-Force, et cetera) and ended the practice of frequent, pointless crossovers that was eroding reader loyalty. Without that, it’s doubtful that Marvel would have survived to hit the motherlode of movie adaptations that have become the company’s financial lifeline. Yes, Joe Quesada’s innovations ushered in an era of true greatness at Marvel.

I wonder if he remembers what they were…