Sorry about the lateness of this post; I just got done with a weekend at CONvergence, a Twin Cities sci-fi con that fits nicely into that category of “not so tiny that it’s just a dealers’ room and a movie room, but not so huge that you have to stand in line for two hours for everything.” I got to see a clever little indie movie called ‘My Sucky Teen Romance’ that people should keep their eyes out for, got to chat canon with Lars Pearson of Mad Norwegian Press, and generally had fun. But now, it’s back to work!

“Work”, in this case, elegantly describes the task of thinking about the ‘Matrix’ sequels. Because while I do recall bumping into a few defenders that hectic summer, I think that with the benefit of almost a decade of hindsight, nobody really wants to say that ‘The Matrix Reloaded’ and ‘The Matrix Revolutions’ were any good at all. But I’m not here to discuss the bad things about them. I think we were all aware pretty quickly of the mistakes they made…the fight scenes that were there simply because they thought they had to top the first movie’s fight scenes, the dull speechifying, the inexplicable downgrade in power that Neo got offscreen, the “what the fuck happened” final conclusion…today, though, I’m more interested in discussing the good ideas that were buried in under all the dreck, the stuff that could have been the bones of a good sequel before they began slapping the bloated, corpulent flesh onto it. So let’s talk about the good in the ‘Matrix’ sequels, shall we?

1) The Oracle is a liar. That would actually have been really brilliant, if they’d only followed through on it properly. The whole first movie, we’re set up to believe that the Oracle is a wise, mysterious, shamanic figure who is guiding Neo to his ultimate destiny. The second movie, we find out that all that’s true…but his destiny is to cull the “free humans” down to a manageable number, and she’s actually a computer program whose job is to convince him to betray mankind. Hell of a second act twist, sets up a brilliant third act…shame that they found the least interesting way possible of executing it. (I had one friend who explained to me that he didn’t even realize that’s what the twist was, because “after about the Architect’s third sentence, it all just started to sound like the grown-ups from Peanuts talking.”)

2) The Merovingian. Not anything about his actual execution, mind you: He’s dull, smug, pretentious, snotty, and his endless blather kills every scene he’s in. Oh, and his plot function is terrible too. But the idea of the villain of the second movie being a powerful renegade computer program who prefers the Matrix to his “natural habitat”, who is the opposite of Smith in the first film because he adores the pleasures of experiencing life through sensory input, and who is running a secret “underground railroad” for programs who want to live in the Matrix…that’s quite clever. And it makes sense that such a person would be against the One, because he’s enjoying things the way they are and doesn’t want the boat rocked by the One, v6.0. It needed a lot more drafts, but it’s a solid idea.

3) Smith returning as a computer virus. The idea that Neo somehow accidentally made him is stupid, and the less said about it the better, but again, there’s the germ of a good idea under this. At the end of the first movie, Neo is all-powerful. If you want to get at him, you need to get at him outside of the Matrix. For the artificial intellegnces, recreating Smith as a living computer virus, one who can infect human brains and wear human beings like suits, would be the way to go. (Although it’d have to be for the third movie, once Neo has realized his destiny and rejected it.) But one of the key elements that they almost utterly neglected is that Smith hated even being in a simulation of flesh…being in an actual flesh body should have been a source of major character conflict for him. Perhaps he becomes a nihilist, hoping to bring down the Matrix and bring about the extinction of both humans and computers rather than continue as he is.

Which would lead, in the end, to a roughly similar finale. The AIs realize that Smith, their creation, is a bigger threat than Neo, and form a truce with Zion to stop him. Neo dies saving everyone, the AIs make the Matrix voluntary (one of the things they should have played up is that the average human being is driven insane by Neo’s attempts to “snap them out of it”.) And eventually, they all live sort of kind of happily ever after until everyone realizes that the whole “using human beings as a power source now that solar power is inaccessible to us” thing actually violates the laws of thermodynamics in a big way and they’d all have perished in a frozen grave ages ago.

Okay, so the original had its problems too.

Actually, she’s almost five and a half, now. And she loves superheroes. In the mornings, on the way to school, she is frequently Batgirl who changes into Spider-Man Girl who is, in turn, secretly Green Lantern, and that’s when she’s not being Violet and assigning members of the family their identities as Mister Incredible, Dash, Elastigirl, and “the nice Syndrome”. (There was a point, I think, where she watched ‘The Incredibles’ every day for a solid month.) And so when she told me she wanted to watch ‘Spider-Man 2’, I wasn’t really a bit surprised.

But here’s the funny thing about what everyone considers the best of the Spider-Man trilogy…she couldn’t finish it. She didn’t even get halfway through before she said, “Daddy John, I don’t think I want to finish this,” and we swapped DVDs to ‘A Bug’s Life’ instead. And when she did? I wasn’t a bit surprised then, either. Because while it does do a lot right, it’s only when you watch it with a little kid that you notice…

1. It takes a long time to get going. After the great opening sequence where Spidey tries to deliver a pizza, which held her attention pretty well, there’s a long stretch of wandering around and hearing about what a failure Peter Parker is. We don’t even see Otto Octavius until twenty minutes in, and he doesn’t become a villain until a little over the forty-minute mark. To an adult who sympathizes with Peter’s struggle at juggling all the different elements of his life, there’s a lot of compelling stuff going on. My daughter? She was asking, “Where did Spider-Man go?” a lot. Which reminds me…

2. There’s not much Spider-Man in it. Admittedly, part of this is because she didn’t stick with it through to the end, where there are a couple of big Spidey set-pieces…but again, this is a kid. Time dilates when you’re five and watching an Amazing Spider-Man movie and all you keep getting is people standing around and talking. This movie is front-loaded with people having conversations about money, grades and emotional commitment, three things guaranteed not to be nearly as interesting as the prospect of Spider-Man fighting Doctor Octopus. Generally, the second movie of a superhero series is a lot more exciting because they’ve gotten all the origin stuff out of the way and can get straight to the action, but ‘Spider-Man 2’ spends just as long on set-up as the first movie did. And worse…

3. It’s repetitive as all hell. The movie opens with Aasif Mandvi telling Peter that he’s coming off as sloppy and irresponsible, and Peter knows but can’t say that it’s because he’s trying to be Spider-Man on top of everything else. This is followed, immediately, by Jameson telling Peter that he’s coming off as sloppy and irresponsible, and Peter knows but can’t say that it’s because he’s trying to be Spider-Man on top of everything else. We then get Curt Connors, Mary Jane, Otto Octavius and Peter’s landlord all chiming in on the same theme. (I’ve never watched the deleted scenes for this film. Presumably, it features Betty Brant, Robbie, Aunt May, Harry Osborn, and that guy in the elevator all explaining to Peter what a loser he is.) Oh, yeah, and…

4. It makes Spider-Man out to be a total loser. This is something that it’s hard to blame Sam Raimi for completely. He’s working in a different medium. A movie doesn’t have time to do just a little bit of Peter’s personal life here and there and develop a theme; if they want to show that it’s hard to balance Peter Parker’s life with Spider-Man’s, they only have two hours to fit it in along with a whole plot about a supervillain, too. Even so, I think the movie misunderstands the point of the Spider-Man series. It’s not that being Spider-Man and Peter Parker is hard, it’s that being Spider-Man and Peter Parker is hard but Peter manages anyway. The original “Spider-Man No More!” storyline wasn’t about Peter giving up being Spider-Man; it was about Peter resolving to give up Spider-Man and failing completely because the first time he saw someone in danger, he couldn’t stop himself from helping out. (Something the movie completely botches, sorry.) Peter has trouble making rent, he misses the occasional date, his grades could be better, but he doesn’t totally fail at life. Movie Spidey spends a lot of time wearing his “but! but I! but!” face and getting chewed out.

So while it does have a 93% fresh rating on the Rotten Tomato meter, ‘Spider-Man 2’ completely failed the “Can it enthrall my daughter?” test. (As opposed to the first ‘Spider-Man’ movie, which she called “the best movie ever.” This apparently supplants her previous “best movie ever”, ‘Toy Story 3’.) Now of course, some of you will point out that Sam Raimi wasn’t making that movie for kids, that he was making a serious and mature Spider-Man film for grown-ups and I have no business showing it to a little kid and expecting her to be entertained…but before you do, take just one minute to think about the implications of trying to argue that kids should have no right to watch a Spider-Man movie and be entertained by it. Okay? Okay.

A good while back, in my first real post for MGK, I talked about the problems with reboots and how they rarely work from a storytelling standpoint. (There’s also an argument that they rarely work from a sales standpoint; for every high-profile success like the Silver Age relaunch or the Ultimate Universe, there’s ten failures like the post-Zero Hour Fate and Manhunter.) But that leaves us a question that seems more relevant than ever this week, what with DC announcing that they’re relaunching the entire DC Universe except for the bits that Geoff Johns likes because they’re so awesome. If reboots are rarely critical successes, and they’re rarely commercial successes, why do people keep doing them?

The answer lies in the world of being a comic book writer…or more relevantly, a comic book editor. The world of a comic book editor is a never-ending pressure cooker nightmare, like being trapped on a treadmill that never stops while angry chihuahuas constantly bark at you and nip your heels. (Yes, I did just compare comics fans to angry chihuahuas. I feel, after reading the comment boards on comics websites in the wake of DC’s announcement, that the analogy fits.) Every month, the book must get out the door. It doesn’t matter if the artist has chlamydia, if the writer has been washing down LSD and amphetamines with whiskey and beer for three weeks and still can’t come up with a good idea for a story, if everyone hates each other and the editor has to route all communications through him because he’s the only one on speaking terms with any of the creative team and that only because he signs their checks…the book still has to come out.

And worse, these days people aren’t just expecting a comic story. We’ve been trained to spot fill-ins and reset buttons and retcons and similar tricks to bring out an issue without actually moving the story, and such things are quickly derided. The metastory is what counts these days, and it’s not just about bringing the book out, it’s about changing the main character’s life forever while still leaving it in a condition that can sustain a monthly book. Which means that it’s not like being on a treadmill after all, not anymore. Now it’s like being stuck in a car that’s got no brakes with the angry chihuahuas in the backseat and every turn is an opportunity to slam headlong into a brick wall going seventy-five miles an hour. (Which is what more or less happened with Aquaman.)

What with all that, even the best creative teams eventually pile up a gradual accumulation of mistakes. Things that seemed like a good idea at the time now seem like the thing that cost you about twenty percent of your reading audience, and not all of the changes are as easy to reverse as a costume change. You can do stories that undo other stories to a limited extent, but eventually audiences get sick of contrived deals with the devil and hokey memory erasures and you wind up stuck in a corner, telling stories about a teenage version of your old character who’s from a parallel universe created when a time-traveling supervillain set a trap for his enemies using pocket-dimensional copies of a superhero who’s no longer in continuity thanks to…

You can start to see why the idea of sweeping it all under the rug and starting over from the point when your characters still made sense sounds like a good idea, right? Reboots cut away, at least in theory, all of the detritus that piled up over the years, all the Spider-Mobiles and deaths of Doctor Octopus and Grim Hunters and teen Iron Men and missing hands and Jewel Kryptonites, and leave the character iconic and sensible again. To a desperate and semi-sober editor, it’s got to start looking like a pretty attractive idea. Even if it doesn’t work, it’s not like the amazing adventures of the one-handed, dead, wifeless, childless, kingdomless Aquaman is going to sell anyway.

So once again, we see another reboot. Once again, it’ll probably fail. But when you’re reading that new Justice League #1, complaining about how we’re seeing the origins of these characters for the fifteenth time instead of getting a new story…remember that poor, drunken editor, okay?

While I was struggling to come up with a topic for this week’s post (they don’t all spring fully-formed as though from the brow of Zeus, y’know…actually, it’d be pretty creepy to have a kid that way. You’d be sitting there, getting these headaches that get worse and worse, wondering if you have some sort of tumor…and bam! Suddenly your head explodes and a fully-grown woman crawls out, soaked in gore. Hell, that sounds more like a Cronenberg movie than a Greek myth.)

Um…anyway, while I was struggling to come up with a topic for this week’s post, I was toying with the idea of coming up with a “Defenders” movie to match the upcoming “Avengers” movie, on the grounds that it would be kind of, y’know, cool to see it happen. Except, of course, that we still haven’t gotten a Doctor Strange or Namor movie, and that the Silver Surfer’s rights are being held by different people from the Hulk’s rights, and he’s only ever been a supporting character in the FF movies anyway, and the whole rationale for the Surfer joining the rest of them doesn’t make sense in the movie continuity…

And then I proceeded to “…and anyway, it’s not like that was a very good incarnation of the team to begin with, even though it’s the version everybody tries rebooting when they reboot the Defenders, and frankly it’s not like the series ever had the same popularity as the Avengers in the first place, and it’s actually kind of a fundamentally flawed team dynamic…” and it occurred to me that maybe a post dissecting the Defenders’ flaws would be a little bit more interesting than a “Hey, you know who would be a cool Namor? Benedict Cumberbatch!” post. (Although he would.)

So let’s talk about the Defenders as a concept. Because I don’t think anyone has ever really sat down and done it, with the possible exception of Steve Gerber (who always struck me as a more intuitive writer anyway.) The original idea of the Defenders, and the original team line-up, was that it was going to be the opposite of the Avengers. This was going to be a team of the guys who weren’t straight-arrows, who weren’t team players, who weren’t the guys who would love to hang out together and bicker about who was going to be on monitor duty that week. These guys would be dangerous, anti-social loners with their own agendas.

The problem with that is that it doesn’t work. Dangerous, anti-social loners with their own agendas do not, by definition, work together as a team. At least, not for the kind of long-term purposes that you need for an ongoing series. Sure enough, the first few issues are full of phrases like, “This is the last time I work with you three,” and “Only because the fate of the world is at stake,” and “As much as I hate the rest of you, I’ll help…this time.” Within a few issues, Namor and the Silver Surfer had departed for good.

Which led to the next, more interesting incarnation of the team. Instead of focusing on the “the Avengers are team players and we’re not” aspect, writers (particularly Steve Gerber) focused on the “the Avengers are socially acceptable and we’re not” angle. The Hulk and Doctor Strange stuck around, with Doctor Strange acting as a sort of counter-culture Tony Stark and the Hulk as a none-too-bright Thor substitute. Nighthawk completed the trio by being a whiny, insecure anti-Captain America, and other characters joined and left as needed. This concept lasted for the best part of the series 150-issue run, even as the characters who made it up came and went. (Although it should be noted that the version that didn’t have Doctor Strange or the Hulk lasted about twenty-five issues. As awesome as the Beast was, he just couldn’t make up for the lack of an A-list star in sales terms. The “New Defenders” line-up was roughly akin to the “Justice League Detroit” era, if you don’t mind me cross-company-izing my analogies for a moment.)

Subsequent relaunches, though, have focused on reuniting the “classic” Defenders line-up (as previously mentioned.) This doesn’t work now any better than it did in the beginning; the Hulk is still bad-tempered and quick to anger, the Sub-Mariner is still a bi-polar jerk with his own agenda, and the Silver Surfer still sees Earth as a cross between a prison and an insane asylum (and one that he’s escaped anyway.) The series just doesn’t work with the classic Defenders line-up, and that’s all there  is to it. What’s needed is a Defenders team that reunites the best aspects of the classic team, keeps the core concept of “counter-culture heroes” but has enough popular A-listers to make the book a success. Doctor Strange is a good start, but you need more heroes that are popular in the real world but disliked within the Marvel Universe. Heroes that are team players, but that don’t get much respect from their fellow supers. Heroes like Spider-Man, Wolverine, maybe Power Man and Iron Fist, maybe a borderline socially-acceptable hero like Hawkeye…

Sound familiar? Yep, it’s the Avengers line-up we had up until just a couple years ago. Despite the “Avengers” name, it’s actually the kind of Defenders line-up that most of the classic-Defender-era writers would have killed for. It’s the kind of line-up that would make a good series and maybe bring some respect to the team, make them into the kind of heroes that really would get their own movie.

Except that, y’know, the people who own the rights to Doctor Strange still aren’t the same people as the ones who have the rights to Wolverine and Spider-Man…

We can all agree now that it was crap, right?

I don’t mean in the purely aesthetic sense; it was pretty obvious even at the time that this was a 64-page special padded out to seven issues of thin, underplotted gruel with Millar’s penchant for pithy one-liners and macho posturing substituting for actual story and characterization, and with a hamfisted 9/11 analogy that seemed simultaneously trite and tasteless even at the time and now looks just unforgivably crass. I mean that since all that was a given, we had to rely on it being not so much a “good” story as an “important” one, a change to the status quo of the Marvel Universe that would resonate for decades in the same way as ‘Crisis on Infinite Earths’ altered the shape of the DC Universe. (Which was, after all, what Millar promised. Sure, there was some hype there; after all, that was pretty much what Stan Lee promised for every issue of every title back in the Sixties.)

Then again, Stan Lee delivered on that promise to some degree. The characters he and Kirby and Ditko and others created stood the test of time as original, ground-breaking, and genuinely unpredictable. Whereas five years later…let’s look at the “massive, enduring changes to the Marvel Universe” and see how they stood up, shall we?

continue reading "Civil War, Five Years On"

There has come to be something of a debate over the last few days over the morality of the Doctor’s actions in the opening two-parter of Season Six. It’s something I really want to talk about, to the point that I’m posting a day early to weigh in on it (since I just posted a piece about The Incredibles in my own blog and I don’t want to push it down the page right away.) And since Season Six is so recent, I’m going to quarantine the whole thing behind the cut so that people who haven’t seen “The Impossible Astronaut” and “Day of the Moon” can remain unspoiled. Then I’m going to point out some things to those who feel that this is out-of-character cruelty from the Doctor.

continue reading "On Moral Culpability In ‘Doctor Who’"

Admittedly, this is one of the easiest shows to get into, in some ways; the series’ premise is explained neatly and succinctly in under two minutes by the opening credits. The show is little more than a vehicle to make fun of old movies much the way classic horror hosts like Vampira and Ghoulardi did, and the actual premise (mad scientists experiment on the effect of bad movies on the human brain, as measured by a guy and his robot companions forced to watch said bad movies) is just an excuse to make it happen. Every episode is more or less its own self-contained story, and if you can get behind the concept of mocking cheesy sci-fi films, there’s not much more you need to know.

In fact, this is one series you definitely don’t want to watch from the very beginning; first off, the “very beginning” is only available in the form of fan bootlegs, since the series started as a local show in the Twin Cities. (I remember turning it on and thinking, “Ooh! Sci-fi movie! Huh? Why are there guys in the lower right-hand corner of the screen? Ohhhh…this is the BEST IDEA EVER!” I was so disappointed when it went to cable and I couldn’t watch it anymore. (My parents didn’t believe in cable.)) Secondly, the first season is very much all about them getting comfortable with their series; nobody had ever done anything exactly like MST3K, and it took them a while to figure out how to pace their jokes. (Which is “frequently”, by the way…they estimated that in later seasons, they wrote about 700 jokes per episode.) And thirdly, not all the episodes are legally available; the producers got broadcast rights but not video rights to most of the movies they showed, and so the process of releasing the series on DVD is as much an adventure in “What can we get the rights to?” as “What are the classic episodes?” (Fortunately, the series’ creators actually included the phrase “Keep Circulating the Tapes” in the credits for the first seven seasons, and their pro-bootlegging stance has led to a wide network of informal episode trading. So long as you buy the episodes that are commercially available, they seem to be willing to turn a blind eye to bootlegging the ones that aren’t.)

So I’d skip ahead to at least Season Two, perhaps even Season Three or Four to introduce you to Joel (the original host and “man in space” for the first five seasons.) He’s got a laid-back delivery style and a penchant for silly gimmick props (the Invention Exchange, which opens every episode for the first six seasons or so, was an exercise in prop comedy.) The most recent release from Shout Factory, “MST3K Volume XX”, features several later Joel episodes (“Master Ninja” I & II, “The Magic Voyage of Sinbad”), while the next release will feature five classics (the complete “Gamera” collection.) These episodes also feature the classic mad scientist duo of Doctor Clayton Forrester and his dim-witted sidekick, TV’s Frank. Doctor F is perpetually frustrated and grandiose in his schemes by Frank’s incompetence (and his own, which he chooses not to acknowledge.)

In Season Five, Joel left (due to creative conflicts over what would eventually become “Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie”) in the episode “Mitchell”, which may still be available through Rhino. He was replaced with Mike Nelson, head writer for the series, who played a temp at the mad science labs who got shanghaied into doing his own bad movie riffing. Shout Factory’s first DVD set, the “20th Anniversary Edition”, features three excellent Mike episodes…including the departure of Doctor Forrester at the end of Season Seven. (Cast changes are a feature of the series.)

The last three seasons, which aired on the Sci-Fi Channel, featured Pearl Forrester, Clayton’s mother, who vowed to carry on his work after smothering him with a pillow. She acquired her own henchmen (Professor Bobo, an ape from the titular Planet Of, and Observer, a brain in a dish with a human to carry it around) and proceeded to do her own tormenting. This era featured some experimentation with actual storylines, which some liked and some didn’t. If you like the idea, try to watch “Revenge of the Creature” through “The Deadly Mantis”, “The Thing That Couldn’t Die” through “The She-Creature”, “I Was a Teenage Werewolf” through “Agent for H.A.R.M.”, and “Prince of Space” through “The Projected Man”. Watching those out of order will leave you occasionally wondering why Mike is in Ancient Rome, or what Pearl is doing on a planet where apes evolved from men!!! (Luckily, you can always ignore all that and just focus on the movie.)

Eventually, the series ended…but it’s definitely not gone. Joel is currently doing “Cinematic Titanic”, a live stage show where he and several MST alumni riff on bad movies (they also have some DVDs available), while “Rifftrax” features Mike Nelson and other MST alumni riffing on major studio releases through the magic of downloadable MP3s that you can manually synch up with films like “Iron Man”, “Twilight” and “The Happening”. (They also have some DVDs available.) All are recommended.

I’ve tried to cover the basics, but really, it’s a wide and sprawling show that I’ve barely scratched the surface of. (Just think, all this space and I haven’t even mentioned “Manos: The Hands of Fate”.) Feel free to share your favorites, and remember to “repeat to yourself, ‘it’s just a show, I should really just relax!'”

A couple of people asked for:

The age old debate of Ameritrash v Euro.

Which, even for a nerd site like this one, is definitely getting into esoteric territory, so explanation is in order. Among serious boardgamers –

– No, wait! If you’re not a boardgamer, stick around! I promise something at least slightly profound by the end! –

– ahem. Anyway. “Ameritrash” and “Euro” are the names for the two major “serious” styles of boardgame design.

Here is Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game. It is considered “Ameritrash.”

“Ameritrash” is code. It means, roughly, the idea of a game as a thematic experience first and foremost. Battlestar Galactica is a board game that positively drips with theme: it mirrors the show by having the players be important humans on the Galactica, like Adama and Tigh and Roslin and Baltar, and they’re playing a cooperative game to get to Earth before the Colonial Fleet starves to death or runs out of water or fuel or commits collective suicide or get blown to shit by the Cylons, just like in the show, and secretly some of the players, randomly selected, are actually Cylons bent on making sure the humans lose.1 Thus, the actual mechanics of the game are twofold: there are the rules which explain how you fight Cylons and jump from star system to star system, but there’s also the real game, which is figuring out who at the table is a Cylon and who isn’t, and who’s lying and who isn’t. If a Cylon can manage to stick an innocent human player in the brig, they often win.

To further aid in immersing players in the theme, Battlestar Galactica has bits. Lots of bits. It has umpteen different decks of cards to randomize all the events that could possibly happen. It has little plastic Vipers and Cylon raiders to fight in space. It has dials to measure how much water and food and fuel the fleet has left. It has rules for the extra advantages the President and the Admiral get, and the chain of command among the players for each position to descend. The rulebook for this game is thirty pages long. There are, so far, two additional expansions, which introduce the Pegasus and New Caprica and the Ionian Nebula as additional playable elements of the game and heaps more rules and characters and options.

All of this makes for the quintessential Ameritrash game. Lots of attractive bits. Lots of rules to cover every possible fiddly little idea the players can come up with. Lots more bits. A theme that’s usually either fantastic or epic if not in fact both. And lots of bits. “Ameritrash” isn’t a derogatory term: it’s one spoken with affection.2

And then, at the other end of the spectrum, there is Caylus. Which is a “Euro.”3

Caylus is ostensibly a game about building a castle and its surrounding town for a king, but really, that is crap and everybody knows it. Caylus is a supremely complex mathematical problem in game form. The game’s victory condition is simple: who has the most points at the game’s end. You can get those points in a variety of ways: by building the castle, by building buildings other players use, by getting the “royal favour” again and again and again and using it every time for points, and so forth. But while you’re getting points, you’re also trying to set up the board to ensure that you have what you need to get more points as the game progresses. And so is everybody else.

The theme is besides the point: what matters is the gameplay, and Caylus is a brainburner of first order as you sort out your moves in order to generate best advantage. The idea that you’re collecting food or dye or stone or gold in order to build the various buildings is entirely besides the point: they’re just wooden cubes in various colors and combinations that you require. This is the quintessential Euro.

Of course, both Ameritrash and Euro can commit sins of excess or laziness. With Euros, gamers have coined the phrase “JASE” (“Just Another Soulless Euro”) to describe Eurogames that rehash the same old variety of mechanics all over again – worker placement, auctions, area control, role selection – for no purpose other than to get victory points in a slight variation on the formulae other, superior games already used the first time through.4 Ameritrash games can concentrate so deeply on their theme that they can forget to have an actual game be present, turning the whole affair into a boring slog because without some decent mechanics at its heart, a game’s play just becomes a joyless exercise in mental calisthenics.5

Despite this, however, plenty of gamers have taken up the banner of nerd supremacy (or, if you like, competitive geekery), proclaiming the innate superiority of Ameritrash or Euro. Which is silly, really, because a game is a game is a game and I believe what we come to play games for is not the actual exercise of the game – although that’s important – but the rituals inherent in playing that game. There’s a reason gamification theory has become so prevalent in modern marketing: we love ritual, we’re trained to love it, and every game has its own set of rituals.

As a longtime patron and occasional part-time employee at Snakes and Lattes, Toronto’s boardgame cafe, I can safely say that despite the staff’s best attempts to get people to adventure a bit and play more advanced games like Power Grid6, the most popular games are stuff like Jenga and Hedbanz. Hedbanz is really just a game manufacturer’s clever method of getting people to spend money to play Twenty Questions, but the ritual of putting on the silly plastic headband is one that people find endlessly entertaining. It doesn’t matter that there are better block-stacking games than Jenga (for example, the always-awesome Bausack) – people love the ritual of stacking up the pieces almost as much as they enjoy playing the game itself.

Ameritrash and Euro enthusiasts each begin with a starting premise I think is false, which is that they downplay ritual in favour of a specific experience. For Ameritrashers the allure of ritual is obvious: the thematic games they play are steeped in it, and lend themselves to injokes, traditions and unique ways of approaching each game. Eurogamers might want to pretend that their games are less ritualized, but that’s crap. The most abstract strategy games like chess and go have their own sets of rituals, and just because they’re less overt doesn’t mean they’re not there. Go to a chess tournament sometime and watch people playing “serious” chess and you’ll see it. Using one hand to simultaneously move your piece and capture your opponent’s piece. Hitting the timer on your clock with the piece you just captured. The ceremonial tipping over of the mated king. The Eurogaming experience is no different, if more varied in how it’s approached because of the variety involved.

In the end boardgaming, whether it’s Ameritrash, Euro or Hedbanz, is about socialization. It may offer different rewards (mental immersion into a setting, challenge of brain calisthenics, or the opportunity to wear a plastic headband), but the method of offering them is ultimately the same. All we can do is extrapolate our social selves and put them into the game. Otherwise you might as well just be doing sudoku on your couch.

1. Yes, yes, I know that by the end of the show we all knew who was a Cylon and who wasn’t. Shut up. It’s a game. [↩]
2. Well, usually. [↩]
3. Okay, I could have gone with Agricola for this example, but firstly I think Caylus is a purer example of the form, and secondly I hate Agricola with the passion of a burning sun. It is a boring non-interactive game about FUCKING FARMING. [↩]
4. Or, as some people have suggested, “getting wooden cubes so you can make other wooden cubes to buy more wooden cubes.” [↩]
5. Steve Jackson Games makes plenty of these. [↩]
6. Which everybody should play. [↩]

Last month, io9 did a “March Madness” competition in which they did head-to-head polls of the popularity of 64 different movies, then pitted the winners against each other repeatedly until “The Empire Strikes Back” went up against “Serenity” for the title of…and even before I’m describing it, the analogy breaks down. “Best Sci-Fi Movie”? I don’t think anyone involved really thinks that these two films represent the pinnacle of the genre. (Actually, I don’t think there is such a thing as the “science fiction genre”, but that’s a rant for another time.) “Most Popular”? Among a subset of a subset of a subset of science-fiction fans, perhaps. So why do some people feel the need to vote in these popularity contests? Why do we feel the need to rank these movies? What is, in short, going on here?

I think that at heart, it comes from something we, as geeks, try very hard to pretend isn’t true: We need validation. We like to think that we’ve gotten used to finding enjoyment in the obscure and the esoteric, that we don’t care whether anyone else likes it as long as we do…and to some extent, that’s not entirely untrue. I have long ago accepted that my unquestioning adoration of “Jason X” and “Mortal Kombat” and “Kung Pow: Enter the Fist” is never going to be reciprocated by even other sci-fi fans, and I’m okay with that. (You don’t know what you’re missing.)

But nonetheless, there is that need. The need to show that we are right in loving our favorite films, that it’s not just us but everyone who understands the appeal of Joss Whedon’s film masterwork. Even more than that, there’s the need to prove that we’re in the majority. (There’s a certain perverse brilliance to the way geeks handle popularity. Instead of desperately trying to join the “in” crowd, we desperately try to prove that the “in” crowd is the crowd we’re already “in”. With statistical data to back it up, too!)

It’s not the worst thing in the world, of course. (Taking it all seriously, on the other hand, is. The comment boards on io9 were filled with utter, incoherent nerdrage at the fact that Whedonites cheated, or that “Blade Runner” is clearly the best film ever made and it’s a shame that modern sci-fi fans don’t appreciate its greatness, or that none of the sixty-four films are anything like as good as “Kung Pow: Enter the Fist”. Um, not that I’m admitting anything.) But it nonetheless amazes me how hard it is to escape that need for validation, how hard it is to just enjoy the things we enjoy and leave it at that.

Then I look at the ESPN Power Rankings and remind myself that competitive geekery isn’t limited to science-fiction.

Okay, follow along with me here. It’s well-known that George Lucas was a big Kurosawa fan during his formative years as a film-maker, and that he cites ‘The Hidden Fortress’ by Kurosawa as a key inspiration for ‘Star Wars’. Some have even described Lucas’ movie as a science-fiction remake of ‘The Hidden Fortress’, much the same way as ‘A Fistful of Dollars’ is a Western remake of ‘Yojimbo’. Which leads me to wonder, what might have happened if Lucas had been inspired by a different Kurosawa film? What if it wasn’t ‘The Hidden Fortress’ that shaped the direction of his classic film?

The Seven Samurai: Tatooine moisture farmer Luke Skywalker stumbles upon information that his insignificant homeworld is about to become the crux in the Empire’s plan to destroy the Rebellion. Princess Leia of Alderaan, a key figure in the Rebellion, is coming to this distant world to exchange vital information with Rebel spies; little does she know that the Empire has already learned of her mission, and has set a trap for her with a hidden garrison of Imperial troops…a garrison led by the Emperor’s personal enforcer, Darth Vader. Skywalker longs to help the princess, but he’s only one man, and an untrained fighter at that; he needs help if he’s going to save her. So he recruits a rag-tag band to help him: An exiled Jedi Knight named Ben Kenobi, a smuggler with a heart of gold named Han Solo, a bestial Wookie named Chewbacca, a grizzled bounty hunter named Boba Fett, and a Rebel pilot named Wedge Antilles. The six of them rescue the princess from the initial ambush; and together, the seven of them retreat into the Tatooine desert, where they use Ben’s knowledge of the terrain to slowly winnow away the Empire’s advantage of numbers. In the end, although Ben and Boba die in battle, Leia succeeds in her mission and (possibly) begins the end of the Empire.

Yojimbo: In the distant galactic backwater of Mos Eisley, Ben Kenobi (a former Jedi Knight who fled to the Galactic Rim after the fall of his order) becomes embroiled in the middle of a war between rival gang lords Jabba the Hutt and Xizor. He hires himself out first to one, then the other, playing both sides against the middle while he secretly works to clean up “the most wretched hive of scum and villainy.” The end features him dueling against Jabba’s top enforcer, Boba Fett. (The scary thing is, this requires only minimal changes to fit into continuity…)

Rashomon: In the aftermath of the death of Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi at the hands of Sith Lord Darth Vader, we see differing interpretations of the event from Vader, Kenobi, Leia, and finally the droid duo of C-3P0 and R2-D2. In the end, though we see many versions of the final battle between the two, the truth remains elusive and unknowable.

The Lower Depths: Owen Lars and his wife, Beru, run a small flophouse on Tatooine for scoundrels down on their luck. Among them is Han Solo, a smuggler and thief, and Ben Kenobi, a mysterious wise old man with a troubled past. Han is having an affair with Beru, but his growing friendship with Beru’s nephew Luke makes him consider breaking it off. At the same time, his admiration for Ben makes him think about finding a better life. When he discovers that Owen and Beru beat Luke, he breaks into their house to defend his young friend, only to wind up inadvertently killing Owen. Beru claims that he did it to continue their affair, which ends his friendship with Luke, and Ben flees when Imperial stormtroopers come to arrest the smuggler. In the end, Beru is arrested as well, leaving Luke without guidance and support.

Ran: Emperor Palpatine’s ambitious plan for his succession backfires on him when he delegates power to three of his most senior advisors, Grand Moff Tarkin, Grand Admiral Thrawn, and his apprentice and “son” created through Jedi magic, Darth Vader. Vader questions the wisdom of splitting the Empire between so many ambitious men, and is disowned and banished along with his droids. But Vader is proven right when Tarkin and Thrawn go to war over the Empire, and both of them try to put the Emperor out of the way as a potential obstacle; with his Royal Guard slaughtered, the insane Palpatine is left to wander the countryside. There he is discovered by R2D2 and C3Po, two of Vader’s droids that have remained loyal to the Emperor. They take refuge in a peasant’s hut on the swamp world of Dagobah, only to find it occupied by Yoda, Palpatine’s old Jedi foe who he had ordered to be blinded.

Vader discovers what happened to Palpatine and gathers an army to find him; this is viewed as an attempt at conquest by Tarkin and Thrawn, who send their own armies to stop him. In the final battle, the three armies weaken each other to the point where the Rebel Alliance is able to overthrow them; it’s revealed, in the end, that this was the ultimate goal of Tarkin’s wife, Mon Mothma. Tarkin kills Mothma, but is himself killed when Rebel ships blow up his Star Destroyer. Vader finds Palpatine, but is killed by Boba Fett, an assassin sent after him by Tarkin before his death. Overcome with grief, Palpatine dies, marking the end of the Empire. The film ends with a shot of Yoda, blind and alone on Dagobah, the only survivor of the film’s events.

(And by the way, before anyone thinks to comment on it, yes, I know ‘Ran’ came out after the trilogy was finished. If I can postulate an alternate universe where Lucas based ‘Star Wars’ on other movies, I can postulate one where he did it a decade later.)

There’s a comic book project I’ve been wanting to write for a while now, and since a) there aren’t any spoilers involved, and b) I’ll probably never get to write it anyway, I thought I’d share it with everyone. It’s based on a fairly obscure, but interesting piece of comics trivia: In Uncanny X-Men #165, during the Brood saga, Kitty Pryde is described as 14 for the first time. Her birthday, we’re told, passed while she was in space. (So Lockheed? Officially the Coolest Birthday Present Ever.)

Then, in Excalibur #15, we see her celebrating her 15th birthday in the company of Saturnyne. (Who she thinks is Courtney Ross at the time. God, it’s hard explaining Chris Claremont comics.) These two comics were both written by the same author, so there’s no question of continuity mistakes or differences in authorial intent. The span of X-books from January 1983 to late July 1990 are fully intended to take place over roughly one 365-day span of time.

And since this occurred during one of the most crossover-rich periods in comics history, we have plenty of mutual data points to tie the other Marvel books into a cohesive timeline. “January 1983” doesn’t necessarily translate across every title to the exact same moment in Marvel Time, but we know that Secret Wars happened within that span. So Johnny and Alicia started their relationship during that year, Tony Stark lost his company and had his bout with alcoholism, the Hulk turned intelligent, and Spider-Man got his black costume.

Likewise, Secret Wars II happened in that year. Which places Xavier’s mugging and subsequent exile to space, the Hulk’s exile to the dimensional crossroads, Power Pack’s…um, almost their entire career, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves, Thor’s turning into a frog (in fact, the whole Simonson run was during that year), the founding of the West Coast Avengers, Tony Stark’s retaking his company from Stane and Stane’s subsequent suicide, the end of the Dire Wraith Wars, Cyclops’ marriage and leaving of the X-Men, the entire freaking existence of the Beyonder in the Marvel Universe, Kristoff’s becoming Doom and Doom’s war against Kristoff, the return of Jean Grey and the founding of X-Factor…deep breath…all in that year too.

Oh, and the Mutant Massacre hit in that year, and the Fall of the Mutants (which means that by extension, the Armor Wars saga, Captain America being defrocked and replaced by Super-Patriot, and then returning to the role as Super-Patriot became USAgent also all hit in that year…oh, and the deaths of the X-Men and their subsequent resurrection and relocation to Australia…) And Inferno hit in that year, so that meant that Johnny and Alicia’s marriage, the Thing becoming leader of the FF, Quicksilver’s descent into and return from mental illness, the entire career of the Hobgoblin, the first appearance of Venom, the death of Kraven the Hunter, Ms Marvel becoming the She-Thing, the Hulk’s career as a Vegas enforcer, the Thing’s career as a pro wrestler, the Masters of Evil’s assault on Avengers’ Mansion, the Avengers disbanding and subsequent reformation as a team consisting of Mr Fantastic, the Invisible Woman, Gilgamesh, Thor and Cap, the Avengers’ relocation to Hydrobase, Daredevil’s secret identity being discovered by the Kingpin, Storm losing and regaining her powers, the destruction of the X-Mansion, the temporary transformation of New York into a demonic netherworld…and although we can’t be sure, since Excalibur didn’t participate in that particular crossover, it also looks like Acts of Vengeance happened around then. So that adds the founding of the New Warriors, the destruction of Hydrobase…

Basically, it was a busy freaking year. 🙂 (You may feel free to contribute further momentous events in the comments section, but I think you get the idea.) The plan for the series I want to write borrows from DC’s “52”; only instead of telling a “missing” year of continuity in real time, this 52-issue weekly series would go back and retell that 365-day span of Marvel Time in real time. The reverse of decompression, it would try to convey to the readers the sheer chaos that exists in the Marvel Universe, and what it feels like to live in a world moving that fast. A year where snow fell in summer, where gods and more-than-gods walked the earth, a year where Iron Man quit and Captain America got fired, a year of destruction and creation and joy and sorrow…Marvel. One Year.

Anyone interested in reading that?

Mitchell Hundred: The above article was written a while ago about fantasy novels, but a similar trend could also be identified in many forms of contemporary art (increasing gritty realism, morally ambiguous narrative, graphic description of unpleasant events, etc.). What do you make of the accusation made in the above article (that these pieces demean the genre and art as a whole)?

It’s wank, pure and simple. (I know, wank at Big Hollywood? Goodness gracious me!) Just for the sake of argument, let’s rattle off the bestselling fantasy authors of the past decade: Stephanie Meyer, J.K. Rowling, Terry Pratchett, Philip Pullman, Christopher Paolini, Robert Jordan, George R.R. Martin… are we seeing a trend here? The overwhelming trend in fantasy isn’t what the writer describes; it’s a push towards moral clarity to appeal to a young-adult audience. (And, in the case of Jordan, braid-tugging.) Even Martin, who’s probably the closest to what the author complains about, has very strongly moral characters in his books: Jon Snow, most of the Starks, many of the Night’s Watch, Davos, Daenerys… you can even make a case for Jaime Lannister.

What the author is complaining about is that the sort of sword-and-sorcery fantasy he likes (which he tokens to become all fantasy writing period) is getting gritty and unpleasant now, to which I respond “where were you when Stephen R. Donaldson started writing books in the late Seventies?” Hell, has he read any old Conan stories? Conan is not a nice person!

Nicodemus: Have you ever read the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher?

No. It’s one of my “get around to it” things. That list just keeps getting longer.

FistFullofFists: On a scale of sad to depressed, how sad are you to see stargate universe canceled?

Not at all. I mean, I’m sorry people who liked Stargate: Whatever lost out on a show, don’t get me wrong. It’s not like The Bachelor where the existence of the show is actively offensive. But I watched the movie and then I watched a few episodes of the first season of SG-1 and then I said, “well, that’s enough for me.”

Skemono: I think everyone would benefit from an essay on why Hawkman is a dick and everybody hates him.

Some people think Hawkman sucks because all he does is fly. This is erroneous. There are plenty of superheroes who “just fly,” and many of them are quite nifty, because flying is honestly pretty cool all by itself, and because it’s a natural progression for flying heroes who just fly to be more skillful fliers (Angel of the X-Men, for example, or Dawnstar in the LSH – yes, I know she has tracking powers too, but big deal) which gives them an additional niche. Hawkman, however, does not do this. What Hawkman does instead is be a dickhead: he’s the Token Conservative to Green Arrow’s Token Liberal (and Green Arrow is just as annoying as fucking Hawkman is) and it’s become his character thing to be a pompous, annoying douche.

On top of that, there are the melee weapons. In a setting where people can blow you up with eye lasers, melee weapons are stupid. More importantly, though, is that because they are stupid, writers have come up with justifications as to why they are not stupid which make them even stupider. I believe this reached its apex in Cry for Justice, wherein it was explained that Hawkman was “unpredictable” and a “berserker” and therefore Prometheus was worried about him for some reason, as if for some reason Prometheus could not just, like, shoot him.

And then there’s his origin story. Hawkman’s origin story has been so mangled that it is beyond belief, mostly because people wanted to “reconcile” Egyptian Hawkman and Space Hawkman into one character, which is stupid because it’s not like there’s some special ability you need to let you put on a flying belt and wings.

So basically everything about Hawkman sucks.

drasnianfrank: What are the best Dr. Strange issues to read (or issues that have Dr. Strange in them)?

Anything from the original Lee/Ditko run is good, but my soft spot is Roy Thomas’s run on the line; just gorgeous cosmic stuff, as you would expect from Thomas. “The Montesi Formula” story is truly excellent writing with mediocre art (and available in trade). Warren Ellis’ brief run on the character towards the end of Dr. Strange: Sorcerer Supreme is well worth reading, as is Brian K. Vaughan and Marcos Martin’s The Oath.

Just go with the Essentials, really: the B&W art actually, I think, improves the comics, since the lack of “hey look we’re otherworldly” colouring makes the book far more readable.

scarecrowprophet: I realised the original text for the first 30 ISWTLegion posts isn’t up, just the pictures and later commentary. Could you post the original text?

The original text largely isn’t worth reproducing. Remember, ISWTL started out as a series of joke posts; only towards the end did I start doing what I did with them later, exploring plot hooks and the like.

Cookie McCool: But then, I had a huge crush on Aquaman back then, too, so what the fuck did I know?

Hey, Aquaman is pretty cool when he’s done right. Which isn’t often (WHERE IS HIS BEARD, DAMMIT? HE LOOKS TEN THOUSAND TIMES MORE AWESOME WITH A BEARD), but hey.

JL: What’s the status of that Novella? I really liked what I read and the hook was golden.

Novel, not novella; it’s on hold while I try to get a lot of other things done. I’m hoping to finish it by the end of the year, but then again I said that last year. (I have a lot of sympathy for George R.R. Martin.)

Thornae: How big are your comic and book collections?

Comics: I have about two large shelves of trades and some overflow. My longboxes are in storage and I’m gradually trading/selling them off (anybody interested in a Green Arrow Grell/Dixon run? The Denny O’Neil Question?) except for my Legion and Dr. Strange collections.

My books – another two large bookshelves’ worth. At least.

Stephen T. Stone: What would your alignment chart for King of the Hill look like?

The problem with King of the Hill, alignment-chart-wise, is that there isn’t anyone who really qualifies as evil. Even Dale is just kind of stupid as opposed to mean or selfish.

PS Bernard: Now that Gates is part of the new “Levitz Legion”, would you re-introduce Kent Shakespeare to the Legion?

Confession: I have absolutely no emotional connection to the current remix edition of the Legion. The book’s readable now (it had a horrible start), and I quite liked the recent Legion of Super-Villains special, but it’s still kind of feels ersatz; I “know” what happened to these characters in v4 and it all seems like alternate history or something to me.

That having been said, Kent Shakespeare was always intended as Yet Another Superman Proxy; if you don’t need someone to play up the Legion’s Superman connection then he’s kind of redundant.

given that Doctor Strange would be your first choice to write that’s not your own original stuff, who or what would be your second?

The Legion, obviously. After that: Runaways, Justice League International, Anarky, and Fantastic Four. (Anybody who wants to write comics and doesn’t want to write Fantastic Four has something wrong with them.)

Steve Timberman: Which handles serialization better – Television or Comics?

TV, because TV by virtue of cost has to have endings.

Desumaytah: Does the idea of a MGK-written “Shang-Chi: Master of Kung Fu” hold any interest for you?

Not really: anything I would want to do with it has already been done – and probably better – in Immortal Iron Fist.

rbx5: Two questions: if one wanted to get into the Legion, where would one start? And also, after seeing your Akira post (which summed up my thoughts on the movie perfectly, and almost in passing at that), I was wondering what other manga you like?

The recent Great Darkness Saga deluxe hardcover seems to be in remaindered bookstores now all over the place – good job there, DC – and it’s a great starting point because it goes about ten issues on either side of the actual Great Darkness Saga itself and has Legion of Super-Heroes v2 Annual #1, which is a great intro story all in itself. The other good alternative is starting with the reboot Legion post Zero Hour, which is genuinely great superhero comics for about six years before sharply spiraling into mediocrity for a year or so and then rebounding just as dramatically into Big Space Opera when Abnett and Lanning sign on.

Other manga I like: Ranma 1/2, Maison Ikkoku, Oishinbo (despite occasionally being really irritating), Monster and anything by Yoshihiro Tatsumi.

Arthur Robinson: I loved what you did on your “How to start reading comics.” post. Is it possible to make a similar post for television? (“How to start watching TV, perhaps?)

It seems kind of redundant, because unlike comics, TV is a field that is widely criticized and discussed in mainstream media. The point of the “how to start reading comics” post was that comics which are widely critically praised are not necessarily good starting points for someone who has never really read comics (e.g. Watchmen), but honestly, you don’t need any help from anybody to start watching The Wire or find a list of shows telling you how good Larry Sanders is.

If you’re looking for introductions to older television, the AV Club recently did a couple of primers for 70s sitcoms and 80s sitcoms which are a good start.

Disco: What’s your number one board game of 2010?

I finally played Railroad Tycoon/Railways of the World in 2010 and absolutely loved it and bought all the expansions. So let’s go with that. I also played Mr. President, a political campaign game from 1967, for the first time in 2010 and was amazed by how damn good it was as a game; it’s gone seriously under-recognized. (Possibly because 3M made two games called Mr. President and the 1965 version is a crappy roll-and-move.)

chibikonatsu what’s your opinion on Astro City?

The Dark Age killed a lot of the series’ momentum, which is a shame because before that it was one of the best ongoing superhero series period.

rbx5: Is DS9 your favorite Trek, and if so, why?

Yes, and it’s simple: the most engaging ongoing plot, the strongest cast of characters with the most diverse moral spectrum and most character development, and the best overall writing of any Trek. TNG and classic Trek probably have higher peaks than DS9, but DS9 has the most consistency.

Zach: What, in your opinion, are the greatest comic storylines? And conversely, what are the worst?

That’s a post for another time.

Andrew Jeanes: Any thoughts on Chris “Dr.” Hastings getting hired to write Deadpool?

Good for him? And it’s a good match for the character.

KDBryan: Are you reading Secret Six from DC? If so, what would you say to get people to start reading it?

Yes, and I would say that it’s like Suicide Squad except more engaging and generally better than Suicide Squad was. If you don’t know what Suicide Squad is, then how about “it’s what Thunderbolts could have been if Marvel editorial had been brave enough to really do a proper book about villains without turning them into caricatures or ersatz heroes.”

Packerchu: Which alignment is Rex?

Neutral Good. Duh.