So here’s a question I’ve been pondering for a while now: If you were to find someone in the early stages of geekery…a “proto-geek”, if you will, with an interest in cult fiction but no knowledge of it to speak of, what would you feel like they’d need to know to develop a useful cultural vocabulary for hanging around with other geeks? That is to say, if you had to write a capsule summary of every “essential” piece of geek fiction, something that would at least let them follow a conversation until they can see it themselves, what would you sum up? Obviously they’d need to know Star Wars and Star Trek…but what are the key points they’d need to be aware of? (For Star Wars, I’d say the six movies and at the least the Zahn trilogy. For Star Trek, I’d say you could suffice with an explanation of Starfleet and the various main characters of each series, and a summation of the types of adventures they get into. Since Trek has looser continuity, I don’t think you need a timeline.)

Beyond that…what else would you at least try to instill a knowledge of into this proto-fan? Doctor Who? Babylon 5? BSG? Buffy/Angel/Firefly? X-Files? Farscape? Hercules and Xena? Those seem to have pretty well-established fandoms, and giving someone a capsule summary seems fair. Then there are the Alien, Predator, and Terminator movies, Blade Runner, Highlander, the Evil Dead series, the Marvel movies, the Indiana Jones series…older films, like the Universal horror films would be good to know, and there’s always Godzilla and its sequels…and of course you’ve got the basic timelines of the Marvel and DC universes. And what would you call the essential books? Dune, perhaps? Heinlein, Clarke and Asimov? Maybe even the Dragonlance series, as a way into Dungeons and Dragons and other tabletop and computer games?

The more I think of it, the more exhausting it seems. But I do think you could reduce it down to just one book, at most, a sort of Compleat Geek Primer. What do you think should be on the list? Do you think it’s doable? Do you think it’s desirable? Share your thoughts in the comments?

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

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

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

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

I still haven’t seen ‘Revolution’.

Honestly, I don’t even know if it’s been picked up for a second season, or whether it’s going to be another one of those post-‘Lost’ series that the networks poured money into hoping to catch lightning in a bottle a second time only to see it die a quick and painful death. (Along with ‘The Event’, ‘FlashForward’, ‘No Ordinary Family’, ‘Heroes’…and yes, ‘Heroes’ died a slow painful death instead…the point is that a lot of people have tried to recreate what made ‘Lost’ popular, only to find out that it doesn’t work like that.) And the greater point is, I haven’t watched it because it looked lousy.

I kind of do this a lot. I didn’t see ‘Cloud Atlas’, I didn’t read ‘Avengers vs. X-Men’, and I have no intention of checking out ‘The Lone Ranger’. Why? Because they all look awful. This is one of those statements that feels like it shouldn’t be contentious, but it very frequently is. Because everyone has different tastes, and each of the stories described above has people who will defend it passionately and vociferously. (Except maybe ‘The Lone Ranger’. That thing will sell tickets to Johnny Depp’s immediate family only. And even they’re going to sneak out and see something else.) And these defenders always have a single defense whenever anyone says, “I didn’t see that because it looked awful.” That defense is, “Well, how do you know it’s awful if you didn’t even see it?”

On some levels, this is the perfect attack. It paints your opponent as ignorant…and worse, as prejudiced. They saw two minutes of footage from a movie, and instantly decided they knew what was going to happen in the entire 90 minutes. (Or 186 minutes, if you’re one of the people who skipped watching ‘The Hobbit’.) They don’t know the ending, they haven’t experienced the twists, they can’t possibly judge a film/TV show/book/comic based on an ad for it!

But there’s a simple counter-argument: Life is too short to waste on shit that you know is going to be shit walking in. This was a gigantic revelation to me as a college student, when I sat down to watch ‘Godzilla’ (1997 version, free ticket) and I realized that even for free, I had overpaid for this by spending my time on it. It looked like it was going to be a bad movie, it got terrible reviews, the word of mouth was lousy, and you know what? It was exactly what everyone said it was. I was not going to discover a secret gem of cinema that the masses had disdained when I saw ‘Godzilla’. I was going to be wasting my time.

And since then, I have (for the most part) trusted my judgment when it came to ads. If it looks bad in two minutes, the odds that they picked the worst two minutes to show you are not high. If the concept sounds stupid, it probably is stupid. (Peter David once said that everyone judged ‘The Other’ as dumb based solely on hearing the concept of “spider-cancer”. Speaking as someone who read it, the people who judged it as dumb before reading it are probably happier. They certainly have more money in their pocket.) You do not have to sample everything that comes down the pike just to see if it’s really as bad as it looks, and you don’t have to apologize for skipping something that looks bad. Yes, you might be missing out on something wonderful. You know what? There’s plenty of other wonderful things out there. You can spend your whole life watching movies and not get through them all. Why waste time on the bad stuff? (Unless the bad stuff has a guy and two puppets making fun of it. Then the reasons are self-evident.) Demanding someone go out and watch a bad movie just so that they can argue it’s bad based on more evidence is like demanding they touch the stove just to prove that bright red glow emanating from the metal isn’t a paint job.

So I won’t be watching ‘Revolution’. I won’t make a big deal of it–there’s a whole companion post to this that could be written about people who jump into forums just to tell everyone how lousy the show they like is, and how stupid they are for enjoying it–but I also won’t back away from my opinion on it. Because if I’m right and it’s bad at two minutes, it’s going to be punishing at twelve hours. And I have too many good shows to catch up on to spend twelve hours punishing myself.

You know, it may be hard to believe, but I don’t always want to talk about feminism in the geek community. I don’t seek out fights with angry misogynists. I’d be perfectly happy to talk about Episode VII, and why I’m looking forward to it even though I have a sneaking suspicion it’s going to suck.

But then shit like this happens.

For those of you not clicking through on that link, it’s a post on John Scalzi’s blog about Tony Harris, former artist on (among other things) ‘Starman’, and his misogynist, semi-literate, possibly (hell, hopefully) drunken Facebook rant about girls “preying” on male geeks by showing up at conventions in costume while being attractive, and not always knowing that much about the character they’re portraying. Because somehow, this is predatory behavior. (Presumably, he bases this off of the African veldt, where lionesses are known to dress up as Wonder Woman to attract the attention of antelopes even though spotty distribution and poor literacy rates in the region mean that they’ve never even read a single issue.)

Naturally, Scalzi eviscerates this stupidity with ease, because even though he is wrong wrong wrong on which Star Wars movie is the best (hint: it’s the original) he is almost never wrong on matters of real consequence and is excellent at expressing himself. And because he is confident in the rightness of his opinions and is willing to defend them, he has a comments section. Said comments section, for those of you not willing to read several hundred comments, is filled with women saying, “Hell yes. I am sick and fucking tired of having to prove my geek cred to every fucking man at the convention, one by one, simply because I’m a woman who is moderately attractive. I’ve been active in fandom my whole life and legitimately enjoy geeky things, and the sexist disbelief I experience is obnoxious almost past the point of endurance.”

This is promptly followed by someone clueless saying, “Oh, we weren’t talking about you! I totally believe that you’re a real geek girl. We were talking about all those other girls out there, the real poseurs who are just impersonating geeks in order to gain that all-important cachet of social acceptance from the now-dominant geek sub-culture. Those are the real enemies out there, as I’m sure you’ll agree. They’re the ones who are just trying to ‘belong’, and don’t really ‘get it’. They’re mainstream people who think they’re geeky even though they’ve never seen an episode of the original Battlestar Galactica!” Usually, this is where they bring up ‘The Big Bang Theory’ and use the phrase “nerdface” unironically.

Here’s the thing, everyone who insists that while each individual incident of rampant misogyny and asshatted stupidity is obviously terrible and should be condemned, there’s still a principle that’s worth defending here and you’re going to defend it…it is not your principle that everyone is arguing. It is your facts. Because there are no women out there who do this. Women do not treat science fiction conventions as some sort of four-day singles bar, where they can pick up a guy for only the price of having to dress up in a random skimpy outfit that they found on the Internet and pretend to be interested in boring shit about elves. It does not happen. When you think it is happening, you are either a) imposing your own frame of geekery onto the woman in question, or b) confused and imagining that your lack of social skills, your sexism, and your unfortunate history with women in high school is somehow the fault of the person you are talking to.

Being a geek does not automatically mean “being into everything you are into and having an encyclopedic memory for trivia.” Many cosplayers are costume geeks. They have as much interest and obsession with the details and minutiae of costume-making as you do for Star Trek, or (slightly more accurately) as rocketry geeks do for rockets. They may very well be choosing that costume based on its aesthetic appeal and challenge, not because of an attachment to the character. Does that mean they’re not real geeks? No, it means they’re geeks about something you don’t care about and instead of taking the time and effort to get involved in their fandom, you’re berating them for not getting involved in yours. This is not defending a principle. This is being a jackass.

Which is the other important thing. A lot of the time you’re just being a jackass. The woman who’s dressed as Death, but doesn’t respond when you say to her, “Chim-Chim-Cheree!” It’s not that she’s a fake geek girl who didn’t even read the character’s first appearance; it’s that she’s at the convention to have fun, not to participate in a fucking trivia contest…especially not one where the prize is you looking down her shirt for the next six hours. When she nods politely at your comments about ‘American Gods’ and walks away, it’s because she has someplace to be, not because she’s secretly one of the cheerleaders who turned you down for a date in high school and she doesn’t really love Neil and she’s laughing at you when you’re not looking.

If your response to this incident, or any of the other incidents like it, is to say, “Yes, but the principle of keeping out the poseurs because they’re really just bullying real geeks with their condescension, that needs to be defended,” then remember this: It is not the principle that the other side is arguing. It is the data. If you claim that squirrels are secretly stealing your underwear, the question involved is not whether or not theft is wrong. That question is moot, because there are no underwear-stealing squirrels in your home. And even if you find a YouTube video out there of someone sitting at a park bench with their gym bag partially unzipped, and a squirrel runs up to the bag and pulls out an item of clothing and runs off with it to use it to line their nest, that does not make you right. The plural of anecdote is not data. The existence of this video does not make pointing at random squirrels and shouting, “Stop stealing my boxer shorts, you bitch!” any less insane. Please, just let this ‘fake girl geek’ bullshit go. Because you’re not doing yourself any favors when you defend it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last week I had a curious dream about me reading a crossover between Quantum Leap and Doctor Who.  This would not be particularly stunning except that I’m like the one contributor to this blog who cannot stand Doctor Who.1  Indeed, what made the dream amazingly vivid is that I was constantly thinking “Why am I reading this?  I don’t even like Doctor Who.”  Also, I have checked and I’m pretty sure the first Doctor Who was in the dream, which is disturbing because I wouldn’t have known what that guy looked like before he appeared to me in a vision.  This is like one of those creepy stories about somebody visiting an ancient castle for the first time and remembering a past life spent there, except that my past life was apparently a colossal dork.

After I woke up and thought about this some more, I realized that a) Quantum Leap/Doctor Who certainly makes sense and b) it would be cruel of me to withhold this concept from the universe just because it doesn’t turn my crank.  (I am choosing to pretend no one has ever thought of this before, despite the fact that Doctor Who has been crossed over with literally everything I have ever heard of.)  Maybe somebody else can get some mileage out of it.  So for those of you looking for a plot for the next great fanfiction, this one is on me!  (Adding the buttsex is up to you, though.)

continue reading "I’m meeting you halfway, you stupid hippies!"

1. Hopefully Seavey is being plagued by dreams about James Nguyen meeting Tommy Wiseau, to balance things out. [↩]

All right, so.  Problems:

1. I cannot tell if this is ironically suggesting fake nerd girls are a menace to nerd culture or if it is meta-sublimina-ironically mocking nerd culture for believing same.  It should not be so hard for me to figure this out and that makes me very sad.

2. Are the bow and arrows just part of the supervillain motif, or is it meant to indicate that newly minted Hunger Games and/or Avengers fangirls are to be incorporated in this stereotype?  I’m just saying, these are things I should not have to dwell upon when the intended response is “HO HO HO OH GOD IT’S FUNNY ‘CUZ IT’S TRUE!”

3. I am pretty sure that spending all day on Facebook and bragging about it in a self-deprecating way does indeed make you a huge nerd.1  The barrier to entry in this field is not particularly high.  Just knowing what a LOLcat is may qualify.

3a. Not gonna lie, the Star Wars ringer T-shirt is really really nerdy.  Not “I guest-blog for a guy I met on Usenet who reviews board games” nerdy, but like I said barrier to entry yadda yadda.

3b. Geez, that Nintendo 64 controller is probably almost as old as she is!  Why not give her a MP-05 Megatron pistol and a Tom Baker scarf while you try to convince me she isn’t legit?

4. She seems nice.  I mean, I can think of worse problems to have than running into her at the comics shop and being asked to explain the difference between Justice League Dark and Dark Avengers.2  She only seems to be a villain if we redefine the term to mean “person who is generally not difficult to coexist with and may choose not to have sex with you.”

5. I am not certain what her sinister plan is.  That is to say, I went and looked at the other characters3 and I get why they would be a pain in the ass, but The Imposter seems to just want to hang out if that’s okay.  Even if we accept that she’s not really a nerd, what is the problem? 4  The only downside I see is that she actually is a giant nerd, and therefore might annoy me by blathering about extremely esoteric subjects, like all other nerds do.

1. Or dork or geek or poindexter.  I prefer not to wade into such semantics. [↩]
2. Answer: Dark at the end of the title means “except spookier” and at the beginning of the title means “evil version of.” [↩]
3. SPOILERS: none of them were funny. [↩]
4. “All my Douglas Adams references are useless!” is not a problem. [↩]

Annnnnnd right off the bat we’ll put this behind a big ol’ spoiler tag for those who are behind on Season 7 of ‘Doctor Who’…

continue reading "My Question About ‘The Angels Take Manhattan’"

For those of you not already aware, it’s a new season of ‘Doctor Who’…and before I do the jump-cut that separates out the spoilers for those who haven’t seen the season premiere yet, let me just say how utterly strange it is to be a fan of ‘Doctor Who’ in an era where that series is enjoying such tremendous popularity. This year at DragonCon, Doctor Who cosplayers outnumbered Star Wars, Harry Potter, Star Trek, and any three Joss Whedon series you’d care to name. Full Daleks, TARDIS dresses, and Elevens too numerous to count. It’s a good feeling, don’t get me wrong; this isn’t one of those, “If you weren’t reading ‘Timewyrm: Revelation’, man, you can’t really understand what it’s like to be a fan!” rants that you occasionally see when something cult becomes mainstream. But I’ve spent the vast majority of my life as a Doctor Who fan, probably since I was two or three years old, and for the vast majority of that vast majority I could expect to meet another fan (outside of the Internet fora specifically designed to assist Who fans in congregating) perhaps once, twice a year. It was an obscure British import with laughable production values (especially compared to ST:TNG, which slightly overlapped the classic series in its dying days) and black-and-white repeats. To see it now rise from the ashes as a world-conquering juggernaut, right around the time that Star Wars and Star Trek (the Big Two when I was a kid) are fading to some extent, it’s…surreal. I keep expecting people to change their minds.

But since they’re not doing that, let’s talk ‘Asylum’, shall we?

continue reading "My Sneaking Suspicion Regarding ‘Asylum of the Daleks’"

In this particular case, I think it’s probably “Things Everyone Loves About Comics: Karl Kesel”. Because really, who has bad things to say about Karl Kesel? He’s a phenomenally talented inker who’s been working in the indsutry for decades, alongside everyone from John Byrne to Rob Liefeld, and who has a gift for making everyone he works with look better. (If you’re thinking, “He sure didn’t make Rob Liefeld look good,” remember that I just said “better”. Industry legend has it that Rob turned in the pencils for the final issue of the ‘Hawk and Dove’ mini-series late, without and hands or feet drawn in for any of the characters, then took the metaphorical phone off the hook. Those hands and feet you see there? All the work of the inker, which means they may be the only correctly drawn feet in a Liefeld book ever.)

In addition to his art, he’s got a lot of great writing work under his belt. The 90s ‘Hawk and Dove’ series he did with his then-wife Barbara remains a cult favorite, with all sorts of the things I absolutely love about comics that we never get to see enough of. (They actually created new villains for the series! It had unironic humor! The heroes used their powers cleverly, and were sympathetic and likeable! There was a really strong supporting cast, and good love interests for each of the two leads, who despite being male and female didn’t spontaneously fall in love! …until after the series ended, but in the interests of staying relentlessly positive I will not touch ‘Armageddon 2001’ with a twenty-meter cattle prod.) (And neither should anyone else.)

He did a phenomenal, well-remembered run on ‘The Adventures of Superman’ that’s perhaps best known for introducing the new Superboy…who wasn’t always that emo, I swear! As with ‘Hawk and Dove’, his run was always characterized by well-written, funny dialogue and fast-paced adventure (which he carried over to his two excellent runs on ‘Superboy’. Probably my favorite moment in the history of the character was when Knockout tried to manipulate him into becoming a supervillain, finally trying to cement his corruption by telling him to kill another villain in an issue-ending cliffhanger…only to  told, at the start of the next issue, “Are you nuts?”) He wrote ‘The Final Night’, which was a nice, tight, one-month crossover of the kind we saw for about four years from DC and then never again, which gave Hal Jordan a noble, dignified send-off that undid a lot of the poor treatment he’d suffered at the hands of DC’s editorial crew and probably should have stayed as the final end for the character. He also did some nice work for the probably-misconceived but still well-written Tangent line from DC (he was the one who did the Joker stories).

Over at Marvel, he had a tragically underappreciated Daredevil run (anyone remember the awesome story where Mister Hyde was framed for murder and Matt Murdock had to defend him? That was Karl Kesel.) He also wrote the first few issues of ‘Fantastic Four 2099’, the really high quality ones before the line utterly imploded because Marvel fired the line editor and all the talented writers walked in protest. (There is, somewhere, an alternate universe where Marvel kept Joey Cavalieri on, and Peter David and Warren Ellis and Karl Kesel kept writing their respective titles for another few years at least. I want to go there and steal all the comics.) He wrote an awesome FF annual where Ben Grimm traveled to a parallel universe where Marvel time mapped to real time one-to-one, and Johnny was in his late forties and thinking about retiring and leaving the whole “super hero” business to his kids. (High concept, and funny as hell.) He also wrote some great fill-in issues of the regular FF series, including the one where Ben Grimm was revealed to be Jewish (in what was ultimately a very touching Jack Kirby tribute. Another thing that Kesel loves to do is to tribute Kirby in ways both small and large. I approve.) I’m still hoping that someday he’ll get a regular gig writing the FF, because he has their voices down perfectly.

Oh, and he also did a really cute and clever “inverted X-Files” series called ‘Section Zero’ that was a victim of the implosion of the Gorilla Comics company, but that was way ahead of its time and presaged series like ‘The Middleman’ and ‘Warehouse 13′. It’s a frustrating theme of Kesel’s writing that all too often, he’s not considered to be a “hot” creator, and his work gets short shrift as a result. Either someone more famous comes along to write the book (like Kevin Smith on DD), or sales aren’t high enough to sustain a series. Which is a damn shame, because I’ve never read a Karl Kesel comic that hasn’t brought a huge smile to my face.

Oh, and if all that doesn’t convince you that he’s awesome, he just sold his whole comics collection. Why? To pay the medical bills of a special-needs baby he adopted. Even if he’d never written or drawn a single comic, that’d make him special. When you add it to everything else, it makes him one of comics’ unsung heroes…but I like to think that everyone who knows anything about him knows that he’s one of the great ones.

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.

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"

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.

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!