I was at DragonCon last weekend when I found out that City of Heroes is being closed down. (I was also at DragonCon last weekend when I was supposed to be making last week’s post, which is why, along with some boring work-related stuff, you haven’t heard from me in a while. But I digress.) It’s hard to really describe how I feel about this news; I don’t really have a whole lot to analogize it to. I was too young to be in organized fandom when ‘Doctor Who’ was canceled, and I had already lost a lot of my emotional investment in ‘Buffy’ by the time it went away. Even situations like the sunsetting of the WotC Star Wars TCG, or the various times that I’ve seen Shadowfist look like it was going to go the way of all flesh don’t apply, because I still had the cards I’d already bought. I can’t get new Netrunner expansions anymore, but WotC didn’t come to my house and burn my collection. This feels more like finding out that a new highway is coming through my neighborhood. My house isn’t being wrecked, but a lot of the places where I spent time with my friends over the last seven or eight years aren’t going to be there anymore.

Even if the game does go down, though (and I know of and approve of the various efforts to save the game in one form or another) I think that the people who worked on it can take a lot of pride in what they did over the last eight years. City of Heroes might not have been one of the biggest MMOs out there, but its influence was out of proportion to its subscriber base. It was the first MMO to really push the idea that you shouldn’t punish people for playing your game; lenient death penalties, casual-friendly loot systems, and a grouping design that pretty much everyone in the industry scrambled to emulate made it clear that MMOs could, if done right, appeal to a large audience. It might be an exaggeration to say that MMOs might be a much smaller genre without City of Heroes, but I don’t think it’s wrong.

I’m trying not to be angry at NCSoft over this. I’m certainly not a satisfied customer, and I don’t think they see it from the same perspective as I do, but I think it’s about as useful to get mad at a company for making a business decision as it is for getting mad at a shark for biting you. NCSoft is a business, their goal is to make the most money they can. They think something else will be more profitable than CoH is for them currently, and they have the numbers to back that up. I can get upset over that, but I can’t really argue with it. In some ways, I think the saddest thing about all this is the way that it’s revealed an ugly vein of racism in the fan community, as some people are muttering darkly about how the Korean-based NCSoft is somehow doing this because they don’t like their American playerbase. I know these people are upset, and I can sympathize with that anger, but that doesn’t make what they’re saying right or appropriate. They’re doing what any company does, trying to find the most profitable investment of their funds. City of Heroes is profitable, but it’s not a cash cow and it’s never going to be. Do I wish NCSoft cared more about its fans and the wonderful development team that have put years of effort into this game? Of course. But companies don’t work that way.

I know that if the various efforts to save the game fail, I’m going to spend a lot of time missing Paragon City and the Rogue Isles. But I think what I’m dwelling on most right now, though, is the lost potential. I was still creating characters up through about three weeks ago, taking advantage of the new powersets and looking forward to the next issue (I already had an idea for a Chow Yun-Fat inspired Dual Pistols/Martial Combat blaster.) So many things that were teased and hinted at now may never be revealed. (Although I have to confess, I’m amused by the speculation that the “Coming Storm” and the mysterious enemy referenced over the last several issues was, in fact, the end of the game world at the hands of the developers.) Playing City of Heroes was always fun, but more than that, it seemed like a world of limitless possibilities that stretched out into the future. That’s gone, now, even though the memories are always going to be great ones.

What will I do with the time I spent playing City of Heroes? I don’t know. I probably won’t pick up another MMO. The setting was always a big part of the draw for me, and Champions Online never caught my interest in the same way. (As for DC Universe Online…I think I played it for five minutes, but that was only because it took me four minutes and thirty seconds to figure out how to quit.) I’ve already backed up my characters (thank you, mad genius who invented the character export tool!) and I’ll probably move on to other interests, and wait for the day when someone’s fond memories of this are strong enough that they make the game live again. Because to me, this game is worth waiting for.

So this admittedly funny post is circulating around the internets, and while people are arguing whether or not Jimmy Carter is underrated (dude was Navy) or betting on whether Teddy Roosevelt or Andrew Jackson is the biggest ringer, the one thing they all mostly agree on is that Obama would get killed early on because he’s too nice.

People are underrating Obama because Obama wants to get along, and here is why:

There’s a great Star Trek novel – bear with me, people – by Julia Ecklar called The Kobayashi Maru, which is theoretically about how Kirk, Scotty, Chekov and Sulu all took that famous “built to fail” test, and it’s some of the best Trek writing I’ve ever read, up there with the Zar books by A.C. Crispin or Final Frontier by Diane Carey or How Much For Just The Planet? by the late, great John M. Ford. I know this sounds like total nerdbait, but I am genuinely serious when I say that the top tier of 80s Trek books are simply some of the greatest genre fiction ever written – there’s real genius there, writers who wanted to write Big Sci-Fi Adventure and realized that Trek books were their best option for doing so. If you haven’t read these books, you’re missing out.

So anyway, The Kobayashi Maru is basically four short stories written into a binding narrative. They’re all very good: Kirk recounts how he cheated on the test (and it’s even funnier than it was in the 2009 film, and that was pretty damn funny), Sulu’s story is a melancholy and beautiful meditation on loss and the harsh realities of becoming an adult, and Scotty more or less blows up the universe in his test, which is kind of classic.

But Chekov’s story is brilliant because it skips the Maru test completely and instead proceeds to a second test Starfleet cadets are made to fail, which is basically a giant version of Mafia/Werewolf where everybody is armed with stun lasers: there’s a “spy” whose instruction is to kill everybody else and they have to survive. Chekov and his fellow cadets basically all blow the shit out of one another with their stun lasers and in the process torpedo many a friendship, and at the end, when everybody is “dead,” along comes the instructor. Everybody assumes Chekov is going to win because he “killed” the most other people, and then the instructor drops the bombshell:

They all failed. Like everybody always fails this test, because everybody does what Chekov and his classmates did, because everybody always decides to kill everybody else and survive to “win.” Except, of course, for one person, who realized that the point of the exercise wasn’t “kill everybody else,” because Starfleet doesn’t work that way. What that student did was refuse to play the game: he created a “safe zone” where people could come and show that they could be trusted (by surrendering their weapons) and once you can trust some people, you can extend that trust to more people because you’ve got people to watch your back. The whole “only one survivor” thing is a con, plain and simple. And of course, that student who figured that out was James T. Kirk.

And that is why Obama would win. It’s not about getting along for the sake of getting along. It’s about being smart enough to know what game you’re playing in the first place. And when you’re dealing with “every President fights to the death with knives,” you’ve got to realize most of them are smart enough to know that doing so would probably get them killed, and most of them wouldn’t want to fight anyway. (Jackson and Nixon, yes, but not most of them.)

Because you get stuff like this:

Yes, that is a bowtie-shaped Doctor Who cookie. Which I got and you did not.

Okay, granted, my editor ate it, but she did send me a picture of it and it was addressed to me, so it still counts.

Torontoist, as they do every year, had me go to Fan Expo and be amongst the nerds, and so I wrote stuff about that.

Not mentioned: the sweet dedicated sketchbooks I started this con, one of Brainiac Five and one of Doctor Strange. (I may in future start a third dedicated sketchbook titled “Deadpool Plus A Giant Fish.”)

Obviously, Ayn Rand has been in the news a lot lately. Not because she’s done anything particularly newsworthy herself, of course, but because the new Republican pick for VP has frequently and publicly expressed his admiration of her before being told that loudly talking about how awesome a self-professed atheist is just doesn’t fly in a party that panders almost exclusively to fundamentalist Christians these days. So he made a public repudiation of his love of Ayn Rand’s thirty-year old corpse, while still of course admiring all of the bits of his philosophy that let him be a selfish prick. (Um, this is as good a time as any to mention that yes, this is going to be a post with Views. You may wish to skip it if you love Republicans, Objectivism, or being a selfish prick.)

And whenever Ayn Rand’s name comes up, I always think of Philip K. Dick. Not because the two of them were buddies or anything. I don’t even think they knew each other. Mainly because I read a very interesting book called ‘Counterfeit Worlds: Philip K. Dick On Film’, which covers a lot of his life and writing in the process of explaining why his films are so attractive to screenwriters. The section that talked about ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’, the novel that eventually became the film ‘Blade Runner’, explained that its genesis came from Dick’s thoughts on World War II and the Holocaust. He genuinely believed that no real human being could do that kind of thing…that while the Nazis might have looked human and sounded human, some fundamental human quality was missing from them that allowed them to perpetuate the atrocities they did. He envisioned a test that would separate the real humans from the fake humans, a psychological evaluation that would separate out those who possessed empathy for others from those who didn’t. This eventually went on to become the Voight-Kampff test, which could sniff out androids mimicking humanity through their inability to care about others.

Which is an interesting idea for a novel, of course, but I never really felt like Dick took it far enough. In the first place, I think his original notion–that people who lack empathy and do terrible things to other people are somehow “not human”–is really more of a convenient dodge than anything else. As much as I might wish it otherwise, Ayn Rand is part of the same species as I am, and is my kith and kin, even though she would fail the Voight-Kampff test. (“You see a turtle by the side of the road, lying on its back.” “The turtle is a leech and a parasite. If it can’t turn itself over, I’m doing the world no favors by allowing it to continue surviving. It will only consume food that should go to better, fitter animals like me.”) She’s a woman who notoriously idolized a sociopathic serial killer, and whose philosophy can best be summed up as “Altruism doesn’t exist. Anyone practicing it is a sucker, and anyone benefiting from it is a leech.” (Which didn’t stop her from collecting Medicare, of course.) Paul Ryan has bought fully into the idea that selfishness is a virtue and kindness a vice, and he’s far from the only one. To pretend that these people are somehow inhuman is to avoid confronting the painful and ugly truth about humanity: Decency is a skill we learn, not a quality we inherit.

And the most complex part of all is that it’s not a skill we ever truly master…and Dick is the prime example. His story that started with the envisioning of a test for empathy is, at its heart, about how it’s morally acceptable to kill people who lack empathy because they’re not really people. They’re things, and you can do whatever you want to things without feeling bad. (Sure, they’re androids, not people. And the Klingons weren’t the Soviets.) Fundamentally, Dick is engaging in one of the most classic ways of avoiding one’s conscience and shutting down empathy, by “otherizing” the people you hate instead of understanding them, while claiming that his purge is a pro-empathy action. He deludes himself into thinking that a man can “retire” androids who look like people, talk like people, act like people all day every day for years…and it won’t cost him any of his soul.

‘Blade Runner’, the film made out of Dick’s novel, at least understands how false that is. Deckard in the film is a burnt-out wreck of a man because his empathy withered and died years ago, not because he’s secretly an android himself. The Voight-Kampff test separates out human beings with empathy from the androids…the androids that live a life of slavery from beginning to all-too-sudden end, exiled into space to do the jobs that humans won’t do. And when they try to escape? We kill them…excuse me. We “retire” them. Because if we call it “retiring” them, we don’t have to think about what we’re doing. We don’t have to understand their fear and pain and anger. In short, we don’t have to empathize with them because we passed the empathy test.

‘Blade Runner’ avoids that paradox for too much of its running length, which is why I would like to see someone else take a crack at it. It’s a drama about slavery where nobody ever suggests that slavery is a bad thing, which is a bit too bloodless for a movie with such an angry contradiction right at its very core. The only time we see even a hint of it is when Roy Batty rescues Deckard at the end, an act that gives the lie to the entire notion that androids are incapable of empathy and forces Deckard to confront the truth: He’s a mass murderer, and he never even thought about it. And given that he gets maybe two lines of dialogue after that, I’d call the film at least a little bit flawed. A sequel that really got into the idea, one that confronted the notions that androids could learn how to be human beings…and that human beings can all too easily forget…could be even better than its predecessor.

Let’s face it, we all know that ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ is likely to be the end of the Christopher Nolan Batman continuity. He did two good movies and one truly excellent one (I’ll leave it to you to decide which one you think was the excellent one, but hint: It had the Joker in it) and is now moving on to what sounds like a truly fascinating Howard Hughes bio-pic. The reboot will probably hit theaters in about 2016, just in time to tie in with the Justice League movie…or it would, if that didn’t get delayed to 2025 while Warner Brothers tries to hammer out a few details in the script to make it not so much like the mega-hit “Squadron Supreme” movie Marvel did a few years earlier. (Oh, I’m sorry. Is my faith in DC’s movie division showing?)

But if we did get a fourth movie, where would it go from the end of the third? A spoiler tag, for those of you uninterested in speculating just yet…

continue reading "The Two Post ‘Dark Knight Rises’ Directions"

It took a lot longer than I thought, but I’ve tabulated all the suggested lists of Avengers from my last post, and tallied them up.  I should point out the following qualifications:

• Not everybody made it easy.  If you said something like “I would sub in Martinex” and didn’t say who you’re subbing him for or in what list, then guess what, you just nominated a one-man Avengers team consisting of Martinex.  If you didn’t make any sense, I ignored you.  If you rambled on about “My 16th slot would either be Hogun the Grim or Sharon Carter, but later I’d replace them with Overmind,” then I just marked down Hogun the Grim and disregarded the others, because it’s DECISION TIME and I ain’t got time for you to quibble.  If you posted two lists, I used the first one.   You guys must have been real fun taking the SATs.
• A lot of characters have used multiple aliases and a lot of aliases have been used by multiple characters.  I did my best to infer the intent of each voter.  I assumed “Captain Marvel” meant Carol Danvers and “Wasp” meant Janet Van Dyne unless otherwise stated.  I assumed anyone picking Monica Rambeau would know they need to be as specific as possible, but if they picked “Photon” they probably meant Monica and not Genis-Vell.  A lot of people nominated “Spider-Woman” without specifying Jessica Drew or Julia Carpenter; I’d bet half meant one and half meant the other, but for the sake of clarity I’m assuming Jessica except where I was told otherwise.  Nobody who picked “Quasar” said which one (I think they meant Wendell Vaughn), so we’ll all have to live with the mystery.
• As you might imagine from the above, I did not do a particularly thorough statistical analysis of the data, because the data I had to work with was fuzzy and this is not important enough for me to go back and ask fifty-something people (I didn’t count) to do it over and clarify if they meant Jacques Duquesne or Phillip Javert as the Swordsman.  I just wanted a general consensus on who should be in the Avengers, and I got it.  If someone cares enough to triple-check my work, go ahead on.

OK, enough jaw-jacking, here are the top 18 picks, and therefore logically the IDEAL AVENGERS ROSTER:

1. Captain America (45)
2. Iron Man (43)
3. Hawkeye (43)
4. Captain Marvel/Carol Danvers (42)
5. Thor (39)
6. The Wasp/Janet Van Dyne (33)
7. The Black Panther (33)
8. The Vision (33)
9. The Scarlet Witch (32)
10. Hank Pym (28)1
11. The Black Widow (26)
12. She-Hulk/Jennifer Walters (22)
13. Luke Cage (19)
14. Quicksilver (18)
15. Beast (18)
16. Monica Rambeau (17)
17. Hercules (17)
18. The Hulk (16)

Runners-up and analysis after the cut.

continue reading "Some Assembly Required"

1. I’m counting 3 votes for “Ant-Man” and one for “Giant-Man” that didn’t clearly specify any particular person under the mask. [↩]

When I say, “I really love Godzilla”, I feel like the first thing I need to do is be more specific. After all, even if we narrow it down specifically to comics, Godzilla is one of those iconic characters that will pretty much always have a chance at a comic book, because there’s just something in all of us that sees a giant dinosaur on the cover, smashing up a city, and says “WANT.” But in this case, I’m talking specifically about the 1977-1979 run that Marvel did, the one they later collected in ‘Essential Godzilla’. Because not only does this one feature the giant lizard we all know and love, it’s actually set in the Marvel Universe.

Why is this important? Because I love superheroes even more than I love giant monsters, and a comic that combines both of them is just sheer, undiluted joy from beginning to end. The premise involves Godzilla heading to America, so you get SHIELD hunting the beast in their helicarrier (I’ve described the series in the past as “like ‘The Fugitive’, with Godzilla as Richard Kimble and Dum-Dum Dugan in the Inspector Gerard role.” If you don’t see this as instantly awesome, I feel a little bit sad for you.) Doctor Demonicus, in his first appearance, takes on the role of primary villain…and frankly, Doctor Demonicus is the world’s best at being the world’s worst evil super-genius. How can you not love a mad scientist who exposed himself to exotic radiation, only to get a painful skin disease instead of super-powers?

The first half of the book (and this, more than most series of the time, really reads like one 24-chapter story, albeit slightly shaggy-dog in form) involves Godzilla stumbling across various other monsters, usually ones created by Doctor Demonicus, and fighting them while SHIELD tries to figure out which monster is the bigger threat. SHIELD, in turn, creates a giant robot to fight Godzilla called Red Ronin…like you do…only to have it stolen from them and used for other purposes. This is the merely entertaining chunk of the book…

But it’s the last half where things really get nuts, as creators Doug Moench and Herb Trimpe really go all-out in showing the war against Godzilla. The Fantastic Four and Hank Pym get enlisted, using Pym particles to shrink Godzilla down to a size where he can be managed easily. But a rat-sized Godzilla escapes into the sewers of New York…and Pym’s research reveals that he’s already developing a tolerance to the gas. With time running out, the FF go on a desperate lizard hunt…which leads to a fight between the Thing and a human-sized Godzilla…which leads to the team banishing Godzilla into prehistory using Doom’s time machine…which leads to the inevitable Godzilla/Devil Dinosaur team-up…which finally leads back to the present and an all-out gigantic battle between the Avengers and Godzilla that absolutely has to be seen to be believed. The last issues move at a ferocious pace, each time upping the stakes and presenting Godzilla’s rampage as something that really is a crisis-level threat to the Marvel Universe, and while some might call the ending a cop-out, really, I feel like it’s the only way the series could end. (No spoilers, of course, but does anyone really think it ends with Godzilla dying?)

On the whole, this is the kind of series that could only be made in a big, sprawling shared universe like Marvel and DC, and it’s genuinely thrilling to see such an iconic monster being let loose into that universe…and then treated with considerable respect, albeit in a goofy sort of way. You will finish this book smiling, and there’s nothing wrong with that in my book.

It’s way too early to figure out what Marvel’s going to be doing with it’s “Marvel Now!” relaunch, but one thing that seems clear is that Jonathan Hickman is going to be writing a bimonthly Avengers series that will feature a roster of 18 (or more!) heroes.  Eighteen sounds like a lot, but I suppose it’s understandable.  Historically there were something like 70 different members of the Avengers before Bendis took over in 2004, and then he promptly added about a hillion jillion more guys.  (Red Hulk?  Seriously?)  At this point the Avengers are like the Legion of Super-Heroes; it’s pretty difficult to pick just seven or eight people that’d please everybody.

Right now I can only guess which heroes Hickman will pick for his team–the only confirmed selection is Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu.  But seeing as I’m pretty picky with who ought and ought not to be an Avenger, I figured I could pass the time by making my own list of people.  And I thought we could make a game of it, oh boy!

I have a fairly limited sense of who should be an Avenger.  I’ve never been thrilled with Spider-Man, Daredevil, or Wolverine being on the team, simply because those characters function best as loners or outcasts or reluctant allies.  As soon as those guys are on the five o’clock news attending a press conference with Captain America and Iron Man, everything that makes them unique ceases to make any sense.  An Avenger can be a misfit, but only about as far as Hawkeye or Moondragon, so that they still make some sense being on a team of professional, public superheroes.   (I give a pass to the Hulk, seeing as he’s a founding member.  But I think that backs up my position–who needs Wolverine or Sentry or Ares to be the “badder bad boy” of the team when you have the Incredible  Hulk?)  In general I’ve never been a big fan of “improving” the Avengers by replacing them with something else–either by dumping the casts of other comics directly into the roster, or by insisting that they have to resemble the Justice League.

To me the best Avengers are the ones which feel like the best at what they do, who can gel well with the team, and that have or could easily serve with on the team for years.  They should be professionals willing to endure public exposure–reclusive vigilantes and overly angsty trainwrecks need not apply.  I also prefer characters who don’t make me feel like I picked up the wrong comic book by mistake–one of the Eternals hanging around is fine, but half of the Defenders is pushing it.

With all that in mind, here are the 18 characters I’d use if I was writing Avengers in 2012:

1. Captain America
2. Thor
3. Iron Man
4. Hawkeye
5. The Black Widow
6. The Hulk
7. The Vision
8. The Scarlet Witch
9. The Black Panther
10. Storm
11. The Wasp
12. The Black Knight
13. Excalibur (Faiza Hussain)
14. Captain Marvel (Carol Danvers)
15. Tigra
16. Shang-Chi
17. Living Lightning
18. Amadeus Cho

Wow, that was harder than I thought–several of my favorites got left out.  But I think it’s a good mix of icons, underutilized mainstays, and a couple of newer faces.

Anyway, I know you think you can do better, so post your dream team of Avengers in the comments.  Pick anybody you want (as long as Marvel owns them) and as many as you want, up to 18.  In about a week or so I’ll do a follow-up post listing the 18 characters who got the most votes.  Obviously that list will be THE UNIDSPUTED RIGHT ANSWER, and we can send it in to Marvel and get paid for figuring it out for them.

There’s always something fun about the quirky, organic partnerships that grow up between two characters in comics. Sometimes they’re done for mercenary reasons, like the need to combine two low-selling books into one moderate-selling title (like, say, slapping together a martial artist from the lost realm of K’un L’un and a street-smart super-strong hero for hire.) Sometimes they’re the result of a writer that decides the two characters fit together, and who does such a good job of selling it that the two become inextricably linked (like, say, an impossibly erudite blue-furred mutant and a self-doubting titan of strength and invulnerability.) Whether you love Blue Beetle and Booster Gold, Green Arrow and Green Lantern, or Black Canary and Oracle, those unplanned pairings are part of the fun of comics. And since there are a few characters floating around in the wake of recent cancellations, I thought I’d suggest some places for DC and Marvel to put them before they get around to killing them off.

1) Blue Beetle and Static. Both of these characters have a lot in common. They’re both fairly well-known to non-comics fans through other media (the ‘Brave and the Bold’ cartoon, the ‘Static Shock’ cartoon), but have never quite found enough of an audience in comics to sustain them long term. They’re both young men trying to learn how to be heroes. They’re both ethnically diverse in a comics universe that still has problems with that. The two of them could very well make a team that makes people forget Ted and Booster.

2) X-23 and the Winter Soldier. Two former killers, each trying to redeem their troubled pasts. Both of them are at the same time worldly-wise and strangers to real life. Both of them are the kind of badasses that comics fans gravitate to. It’d be interesting to see the original Bucky trying to take on a mentor role, especially when he doesn’t feel like he necessarily knows himself enough to strike out on his own.

3) Mister Terrific and Grifter. One of them has a plan for everything, the other can barely figure out where his next paycheck is coming from. One of them is a super-genius, the other is a killing machine. One of them needs the other’s help…but which one?

4) Daken and Deadpool. Let’s face it, if there is one creation that has completely and totally flopped, it’s “Dark Wolverine”. The concept of an emo teenage Wolverine with daddy issues practically screams, “Hate me!” and none of the stories he’s appeared in have ever shaken that notion. So why not make him the butt of Deadpool’s jokes? A Looney Toons-style romp between two characters whose healing factors make them unkillable, one of whom is utterly insane and the other of whom makes the perfect straight man could be the first Daken comic actually worth reading.

5) Ghost Rider and Doctor Strange. Actually, how has this not happened already? I mean, you’ve got the Sorcerer Supreme and a guy struggling to keep a demon contained within his body. Doc Strange has a habit of gathering together misfits and outcasts and making teams out of them, and Johnny Blaze clearly needs a mystic mentor. This just feels like something that should have been done ages ago.

Any partnerships you’d like to see becoming the next World’s Finest? Share ’em in the comments!

One of the things I lament most about the slow transformation of ‘Star Wars’ from a great movie into a multi-billion dollar industry is the way that George Lucas has mythologized the process of creating the films. I’m not upset about it; I understand that most people don’t really want to hear about the slow, messy, frequently accidental way that an idea is transformed into a finished film. They want to imagine a singular vision bringing a staggering work of art forth over years, even decades of painstaking effort; saying things like, “No, I really don’t know what the Clone Wars are. But I’ve got time to figure that out before we start shooting the prequels,” does not go over well. Lucas felt a lot of pressure to tell everyone that he Had It All Figured Out From the Beginning, not just financially but in every sense imaginable.

But it is sad, because it encourages people to think of the Star Wars saga not as a story that takes different paths, but as a monolithic universe to be elaborated on. The idea of “other directions” that the series could have gone is one that gets less exploration, I think, than in any other sci-fi franchise, simply because there’s the assumption that this was the way it was all along. But that’s simply not true; and in honor of yesterday’s Father’s Day, I’m going to poke at some other ways the story could have gone at a key juncture, if different creative decisions had been made somewhere along the line. And speaking of lines, here’s a famous one: “No, Luke…”

1) “…Obi-Wan killed your father.” Fan myth has it that this is what David Prowse actually said to Mark Hamill on the set, little knowing that it would be overdubbed in post-production with James Earl Jones’ famous line. (Fan myth also has it that after seeing ‘Star Wars’ and finding out that none of his dialogue was kept, Prowse had a tendency to wander off-script in the later movies. I’d love to spend an hour listening to David Prowse’s stories about the role.) But imagine how different the third movie would be if it were true. Instead of fighting to redeem Vader, Luke would be fighting against his own self-doubt. Both his mentors lied to him. The man who showed him a wider universe turns out to have deprived him of his first connection to it. (Guinness would have been amazing here; if you think he did a great job of confessing his deception and self-justification in ‘Jedi’, just imagine how he would have been weaseling around to the idea that while he was the one who killed Anakin, it’s Vader who’s really responsible.) Of course, you’d need to come up with the backstory…perhaps Vader had turned Anakin the same way he was trying to turn Luke, and Obi-Wan killed his disciple to save his soul. There’s no question, though, that it would radically transform the third film (and remove the need for the Emperor to be a powerful Jedi, if the emotional climax is Luke rejecting Vader’s temptations and destroying him. Palpatine becomes a much less important figure in this envisioning of the trilogy.)

2) “…Obi-Wan is your father.” After all, the decision to kill off Obi-Wan was made fairly late in the shooting of the original film, when it became obvious that the character didn’t have a whole lot to do after the Death Star escape except for offer Luke a key bit of advice at the final juncture, something he could just as easily do as a blue Force ghost. It’d be very easy to imagine a movie where he escaped along with the others, perhaps using some of that Force telekinesis that everyone displays everywhere else in all the movies, books, comics, breakfast cereal boxes… And then, in the second movie, it’s Ben who trains Luke instead of (or possibly alongside) Yoda. Ben is the one who talks about the irredeemable Sith, Ben is the one who tries to prevent Luke from confronting Vader…and Ben, it turns out, was the one who wanted Luke seething with revenge for the loss of an imagined parent, filled with anger and ready to strike down his opponent. Was Ben willing to throw away his own son to get rid of the Sith? If not–if Luke could kill a man for revenge and come out the other side with his soul unscathed–what does that say about the Jedi beliefs about the Dark Side? It’d be a very different emotional tone for the remainder of the series, because there’s really no way Obi-Wan could come out of this one seeming sympathetic.

3) “…you have no father.” Yes, we all saw how that turned out in the prequels, but I’m not talking about the half-assed “created by the living Force” bullshit that Lucas pulled out in the prequels to no apparent purpose. Keep in mind, at the time ‘Empire’ was being filmed, they really did have no idea what the Clone Wars were to have been about. (There were drafts of the script that had Lando as a surviving clone, with Leia’s distrust borne of the long-standing divide between clones and humans after the Clone Wars.) It would have been a very interesting twist to find out that Luke was made, not born, as a weapon to be turned against the Sith Lords. ‘Return of the Jedi’ would feature a conflicted Luke having to decide if he had a place with his friends (who would all be pretty anti-clone, given the hints that Clone War survivors made up the bulk of the veteran troops) or if he should just give up and embrace his monstrosity, and join the Empire.

4) “…Tarkin was your father.” Sure, it’s way the hell out of left field. But you have to admit, that’s one hell of a third-act conflict. Finding out that your father was a monster, not a martyr…and that oh, by the way, you killed him and you didn’t even know it…that’s a lot of burden to bear. This would make for a much more introspective final movie, with Luke uncertain as to how to proceed after losing his moral compass. In this version, Ben’s decision not to tell Luke becomes an act of mercy as much as anything else; who’d want to know that their dad destroyed an entire planet purely as an object lesson?

5) “…your father is alive.” This would be a pretty major cliffhanger: Luke finds out that his father isn’t dead after all, but instead rots in an Imperial secret prison for the last of the Jedi. (Perhaps for those that the Emperor feels some potential for evil in?) Vader makes it clear; for Anakin to continue to enjoy his health and long life, Luke must join the Empire and turn on his friends. Brokenly, he agrees to do so. And in the next movie, with Luke’s growing Force power turned against the Rebellion, Leia and Han (and Lando and Chewie and R2 and C-3P0 and Wedge and…) have to engineer a breakout from the most secure prison in all of the Empire. And when they do break out Anakin Skywalker, Leia would find out the truth of her own parentage as well…

6) “…Chewbacca is your father.” Nah. Too silly.

I’m not a movie guy.  I’m the guy who would watch Avengers at home, alone, on my 36″ TV if I didn’t have to wait four months to do it.  So I mostly only read movie reviews to see if some movie that actively annoys me is being panned.  Usually movies that annoy me are the ones that air too many obnoxious commercials, but in this case it’s Men in Black 3, which is a completely unecessary sequel to a completely unecessary sequel.

So I’m reading the MIB 3 review on Time.com and I come across this passage:

The average moviegoer is well educated in the particulars of time travel. Even if your high school curriculum didn’t include any H.G. Wells, thanks to Back to the Future, Terminator and dozens of other films, just about everyone knows how it works. Why don’t the fleet of screenwriters who cooked up this script? They have J wake up the morning after the bloodbath at the Chinese restaurant to a world already missing K. This makes no sense. Boris hasgone back in time, but given that he hasn’t found or killed young K yet, old K ought to be alive, well and doing that “sort of surly Elvis” thing he does in contemporary Manhattan. Instead he’s dead and gone, and at headquarters, only the boss and former paramour, O (Emma Thompson, 53 and playing 65 or so, every actress’s dream) even remembers old K.1

It says something about our society’s perception of time that the reviewer apparently thinks Back to the Future makes perfect sense and this plot does not.  Let’s be honest, most time travel stories are completely illogical poppcycock,2 but in general we do not care as long as we’re satisfied that the story follows certain rules we’ve come to expect, which I have given snazzy names because why the hell not:

1. Brown’s Law: A time traveler is capable of preventing events he has already witnessed, but it is extremely dangerous (in some nebulous, end-of-the-universe, don’t-cross-the-streams kind of way) and should be avoided.3
2. Connor’s Berth: The effects of a time traveler’s changes to the timestream are synchronized with the timeframe from which he departed.  That is, if I go back in time and a week after I arrive I prevent your conception, you have a week from my time of departure to send somebody to stop me before you cease to exist.
3. McFly’s Confidence: Time travelers are “immune” from the effects of changing history (even when the changes directly affect their own lives) and retain full knowledge of whatever nonexistent timelines they’ve witnessed.
4. Guinan’s Exception: “Stationary” observers are only “immune” to changes in history through extraordinary circumstances, like being a special kind of alien or standing next  to the Guardian of Forever.
5. Simpson’s Razor: The only changes a time traveler must concern himself with are the ones he can perceive; he needs only to make additional changes that restore history “close enough” to his personal satisfaction.
6. Beckett’s Mandate: The morality of altering the timeline is subjective and ultimately determined by the sympathies of the audience, represented within the story by the will of  “God, time, fate, or whatever.”4

So yes, the setup of Men In Black 3 apparently breaks several of these rules, but the rules are arbitrary to begin with–they have no logical basis and aren’t rigorously applied even in the stories that purportedly follow them.  As long as the good guy needs to fix time, the bad guys are trying to stop him, and the viewer isn’t completely lost, everything else is just gravy.  This is why so many Star Trek time travel episodes suck–not because they don’t play by the rules, but because the writers confuse themselves, give up, and end with an explosion that puts everything back to normal.5  In the end the only rule is to tell a good story, although I am dubious that the 10,000th variant of “Let’s go back in time to the late 1960s!” can do that.

1. If you’re wondering why I read Time’s movie reviews, it’s for the elitist attitude.  “Oh, your average mouth-breather at least saw an  Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, but my school could afford actual books by H.G. Wells!” [↩]
2. The Bill & Ted duology being a notable exception that follows Novikov’s self-consistency principle. [↩]
3. Incidentally, Thunderbolts #174 recently broached the subject of what the danger actually is, which was quite satisfying. [↩]
4. You might say “But the audience wanted Sam to save his dad!” but we really didn’t because that would fundamentally alter Sam’s history, and thus Sam as a character.  Similarly, Sam can’t fix Al’s past until the series is over and we don’t need Al to be a lovable creep anymore. [↩]
5. Jim’s Law of Time Travel clearly states that if you think your time travel story is so confusing that you decide to have a character point out how confusing it is,  you probably  should not be writing a time travel story. [↩]

The first thought: It’s tricky. Obviously, Marvel has provided a blueprint on how to create a blockbuster film that acts both as a standalone film and as a sequel to numerous other standalone films featuring the origins of the cast of your current movie (so that you don’t have to spend the first ten hours of your two-hour movie just explaining who everyone is.) They’ve shown not just that it can be done, but that you can structure the contracts to retain (almost all of) your cast and have a strong studio involvement to keep things consistent from film to film while still attracting A-list directors with unique personal styles (like Branagh, Joe Johnston and Joss Whedon.) But Marvel had a big advantage that DC doesn’t: They hadn’t made a whole bunch of movies already before coming up with the idea.

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.

Free Comics Day has changed a lot for me since my daughter came into my life. It used to be something I almost casually ignored; after all, I was already shopping at my local comics store. I didn’t need a neat holiday to get me through the doors, and whenever the folks at Mind’s Eye Comics (in Eagan, on Thomas Center Drive, just for the benefit of those looking for a good comics store in the Twin Cities–I promise they didn’t pay me for the plug) tried to foist free comics onto me, I told them no. I advised them to save the freebies for someone just walking through the door for the first time who might need an enticement to come back.

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.

It’s become an overused and empty catchphrase with almost depressing speed; faced with sexist caricature after sexist caricature, feminist comics fans said that they wanted strong female characters as an alternative to women who serve no purpose other than to be the eye/arm-candy for male protagonists. And seemingly within days, every character was being described as a “strong female character”, from Ripley to Buffy to Catwoman to Lady Bullseye to X-23 to Tarot, Witch of the Black Rose. Because there are so many different kinds of strength and different ways to depict it, just about any character could be described as “strong” according to the writer’s personal lights, even while feminists continued to decry them as sexist caricatures. Which just led to a sort of hurt puzzlement among clueless male writers…after all, how could Lady Bullseye be considered “sexist”? She beats people up! Having read more than a few of these debates that always seem to trail off into anger on both sides, I thought I might present some of what I think are tangible, clearly-defined differences between actual strong female characters, and those just called “strong female characters”. Here are some of the characteristics of the “strong female”, as opposed to the actual strong female:

1) A “strong female character” is strictly limited in the scope of where she is allowed to be strong, usually to combat; she is strong, but she is not active. The best example I can think of for this particular trope is Cherry Darling, Robert Rodriguez’ supposedly strong character in ‘Planet Terror’. Certainly, she’s strong in one sense–she is able to kick lots of ass, mowing down dozens of zombies and Marines and zombified Marines in the film’s action climax. The ending of the film even shows her as the leader of the group of survivors. But when the film isn’t showing her shooting people and blowing people up and openly defying the laws of physics in various violent ways, it’s showing her…taking orders from El Wray, the male protagonist. He tells her to stop moping. He gives her both her wooden leg and her gun-leg. He practically drags her along through every scene of the movie. Even her final decision, to become the group’s charismatic leader and take them south to an easily defensible coastal region, comes from a scene where El Wray says, “Honey, time for you to become a charismatic leader by following my plan.” “Yessir.” She is never a decision maker, only an exceptional fighter. The two should not be conflated, and all too often are. (This is what John Scalzi referred to as “Spinny Killbot Syndrome”.)

2) A “strong female character” is strong in a way that does not threaten male gender roles. The implication that’s always given in these roles is that anytime women are anything other than helpless and simpering, they are automatically challenging sexist assertions and should be lauded for it. But the fact is, in practical terms, there is a strong societal belief that violence is perfectly acceptable for women under the right circumstances. Take Ripley, for instance. She is definitely seen as a feminist icon, and there’s certainly a lot of justification for that. But her most iconic scene is actually her least feminist; when she confronts the Queen Alien at the end of ‘Aliens’, it is with the intent of defending her surrogate daughter. It is automatically assumed, in fiction and in life, that a woman standing up for her family (her children, her husband) is going to use violence far more effectively and with less hesitation than a man would in the same situation, because her primal maternal instinct is aroused. The “Mama Grizzly” stereotype is every bit as sexist as the “Damsel in Distress”, even though one involves inflicting grievous bodily harm on people and the other involves helplessness in perilous situations. So are all the female characters who fight with determined efficiency while the battle is going on, only to faint when it ends because they’re so relieved, so are the femme fatales who vamp their way through combat. In ‘Aliens’, it’s Vasquez who is the truly challenging female character, determined to succeed better than men in their own field. (Unsurprisingly, people seem to prefer Ripley’s brand of “feminism”.)

3) A “strong female character” is either sexless or hypersexualized. The “virgin/whore” dichotomy is a classic complaint about the treatment of women in both fiction and life; female characters, it seems, are never to mention that they have body parts that produce orgasms or otherwise they’re supposed to be teases, sex kittens, vamps and sluts. Red Sonja is one example of the former; she’s a “strong female character” whose actual motto involves a vow of chastity to be enforced at swordpoint, while Catwoman gives us a view of the opposite extreme, a character who fights crime in a slinky catsuit and high heels. There’s very rarely a middle ground (and ironically, characters who inhabit it are all too frequently deemed “sexist”, because in the minds of many feminists, it’s better to fall on the “sexless” side of the divide than the “hypersexualized”. Slut shaming is all too common, even among people who know better. Of course, that isn’t to say that all sexual characters can be or should be defended by saying, “Oh, you’re just slut shaming!”. Sometimes hypersexualization is exactly what it appears to be, turning a female character into nothing more than an object of male lust. Are you listening, Scott Lobdell?)

4) A “strong female character” derives her strength from victimization. And speaking of Red Sonja, her origin story is par for the course for about two-thirds of female heroes…she was made helpless and victimized (“sexually” is often implied even if not outright stated), and she has made it her mission never to be helpless and victimized again. Lady Bullseye, Beatrix Kiddo…even X-23 has an element of pointless victimization grafted into her origin, as she apparently spent some time as a prostitute with an abusive pimp. When the female equivalent of Wolverine gets sexually abused, you know the trope is a little bit nuts. (By the way, it’s worth pointing out that the number of male heroes with the same element of victimization is exactly one: Batman. And he was a ten-year-old when it happened.)

And 5) a “strong female character” has an existence that revolves around the male protagonist. This is why I grew less and less enamored of River Song, even though I couldn’t articulate exactly why at the time. It’s because while she started as a mysterious archaeologist with a hidden past, she rapidly became “The Doctor’s assassin who became the Doctor’s lover who became the Doctor’s wife who became the Doctor’s murderer who became the Doctor’s Doctor’s Doctor’s…” While she’s active, competent in ways other than the merely physical, and has an active sex life but isn’t defined by it, she does come to be defined by her relationship to ther Doctor. Her story revolves around his, it does not cross it independently; this is all too common regarding “strong” women. (One of the biggest and most positive changes to Lois Lane was when she stopped trying to prove that Clark Kent was Superman so that she could marry him and started becoming an actual journalist.)

Now, appearing on this list does not immediately mean that a female character is sexist, or that their creators are sexist. Every character is on a journey that may involve them overcoming personal issues like those mentioned above (take River Tam, who moves from being passive to active over the course of a season of ‘Firefly’.) Some characters are meant to be flawed, but still admirable (River Song, for all that she has become obsessed with the Doctor, is nonetheless an active figure who refuses to blindly trust him or follow his orders.) If your character can check off a box on this list, it doesn’t mean you’ve made a huge mistake. (If they can check off all five, on the other hand…) But they are things worth discussing, and they are definitely things worth remembering when creating future female characters. Because an actual strong female character shouldn’t be that hard to create.