Someone on Twitter was saying “it’s never too late, the lead singer of this band got a law degree and a Master’s in journalism and worked as a journalist and now she’s a singer,” but in fact she is 25 and UK law degrees can be had at the bachelor’s level (e.g. are not advanced degrees) so really all she did was get a Master’s degree and then work a bit before her band took off, so it’s not really a “never too late” situation. But whatever, I love the song, because it is sort of Eighties without being too egregiously Eighties.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

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

I just found this comment added to an incredibly old thread (link removed):

“Debora said on August 10th, 2013 at 1:14 pm
If i could possibly clone myself ten times the will perform all other Search-engine Optimization business I require by hand.
I can’t therefore I exploit Ultimate Demon in place
my homepage: freelance blogging delhi (Debora)”

I want to frame this. I want to develop it into a screenplay, about a mad computer programmer who becomes obsessed with developing the perfect software for optimizing her search-engine. “No, it’s not fast enough. “It’s not good enough!” she rants to her assistant. “1.6 million results in .30 seconds? What if they need one result, and only one? We need a search-engine that can know–truly know–what the searcher wants! We need the Telepathic Master Engine! And I will code it!”

And in Act Two, she realizes that she simply can’t code it by herself. She needs someone as intelligent as her to collaborate with, someone who can truly understand all her revolutionary ideas about search-engine creation. So she instead begins work on human cloning technology, planning to create an army of Deboras to work in parallel and create her infinitely powerful search-engine optimizer in a fraction of the time!

Then finally, in Act Three, she’s been abandoned by her assistant. Her love interest has told her that he loves her, but he can’t watch her tear herself apart with this obsession. She’s finally realized that she can no more clone herself ten times than she can perform all the search-engine optimization business that she requires by hand. So instead, she turns to the last resort of the mad. She kidnaps thirteen infants and prepares to summon and exploit the Ultimate Demon. With the power of the occult backing her computers, she will create the perfect search engine. She will optimize and organize the Internet! All human knowledge will bow to her command!

I haven’t figured out how it ends yet, but I think that it has something to do with the assistant challenging her Ultimate Demon to find a single specific piece of lesbian porn and failing. But we might have to change that to get a PG-13.

So the movement to do… something about Russia’s insane new anti-gay laws via the Sochi Olympics is starting to pick up steam, but the unfortunate truth is that most of the ideas that are being generated are most likely to be ineffective. Stephen Fry’s open letter, for example, is eloquent and moving – but it is also directed at the wrong people. The British government doesn’t get to make decisions about Olympic management, nor does any other government for that matter. The International Olympic Committee quite obviously does not care a whit about public opinion – remember, we’re talking about the IOC which cheerfully went ahead with the last games in Russia despite everybody getting angry over the invasion of Afghanistan.

But the IOC, being a private organization run by oligarchs primarily concerned about subsidizing their own lifestyles, is concerned about money. And we know how they make money, because it is a matter of public record. Over 90% of Olympic revenue comes from two sources: sales of broadcasting rights and sponsorships. And those money sources are mostly other private companies. And private companies are vulnerable to boycotts – especially when we’re talking about the high-end, prominent sponsors who are officially partners with the Olympics and who pay tens of millions of dollars for the privilege. There’s even an easily-accessible list of the premium-level sponsors, who provide the majority of sponsorship funding:

Coca-Cola
Atos
Dow
GE
McDonald’s
Omega
Panasonic
Procter and Gamble
Samsung
Visa

Now, some of those companies are so widely diversified that it’s difficult for consumers to avoid purchasing them entirely (particularly Dow and GE). But Coke, McDonald’s, Visa, Panasonic and Samsung are actually pretty easy to avoid: all of them have high-profile alternative competitors (Pepsi, Burger King, Mastercard, Sony and… Sony again, I guess… to name a few). If you want some supermarket brand orange juice buy Tropicana instead of Minute Maid. If you want a burger go get a Whopper rather than a Big Mac. (Or, you know, something good.) Charge things to your Discover card if you can find a place that takes Discover. Et cetera.

And don’t just not buy McDonald’s and Coke – don’t buy McDonald’s and Coke and tell them. What is McDonald’s going to do when it has ten thousand tweets – or a hundred thousand, or a million – directed at it along these lines:

And I am quite serious. I mean, I like McDonald’s every once in a while, but it’s not gonna kill me to not eat it. Not eating McD’s is the easiest thing in the world! And they know this. Ditto drinking Coke. Ditto charging to your Visa (well, assuming you can get an alternative card – I know a lot of people depend on credit). Atos is a bit more difficult to hit because they’re an IT company, but they’re an IT company that contracts out services to many governments, and that is something you can pressure your government about. (But really: stick with pressuring the companies directly, because direct is better than indirect.) And Tweets are literally the smallest thing you can do to communicate your displeasure with these companies. Sit down and write a letter, a real letter. (Companies react very strongly to large bags of angry mail. Remember that most of them have a “respond to all complaints” policy.)

The broadcasting works along the same lines except here the IOC’s revenue stream is even more concentrated. Really, if Americans want to kill the Sochi Olympics dead, they can just start Tweeting at (and mailing and phoning and so forth) NBC – the American broadcasting contract is worth a ridiculous amount of money. “Hey, I’m not going to watch the Sochi Olympics while Russia seems determined to ghettoize homosexuals” is a start. The Olympics are a perennial cash cow for NBC because they get billions in advertising revenue, which means activists can start targeting NBC’s revenue stream. All of this technically won’t hurt the IOC directly – after all, NBC has already paid for the Games – but it can mean lower bids in future for Olympic broadcasts, and that’s all that really needs to happen.

To sum up: If you’re just going to rant on the internet, nothing’s going to stop the Sochi Olympics from happening, because words are empty to people who care about nothing beyond the bottom line, and that is the International Olympic Committee in a nutshell. You get their attention by hurting their bottom line. The good news is this: they are remarkably vulnerable.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

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

Back in 2007, when I was writing about the death of the original Green Goblin, I described how shocking it was to see him die in the classic “Death of Gwen Stacy” storyline. I pointed out that he was impaled on-panel, just to make it clear that he was really dead and there wasn’t going to be a last-minute cheat to allow the character to survive. “Except that there was,” I then said, “some twenty years later, but we’ll save that for another long, angry day.”

That day has arrived, but I’m not really angry anymore. Marvel’s doing its thing and I’m doing mine. But I did want to explain why it was a mistake to bring back Norman Osborn, and along the way give my answer to why Norman isn’t Spider-Man’s arch-nemesis (although I should note clearly here that this is entirely separate from any answer MGK might give, and that he reserves the right to give his own answer at some future point. He’s nice enough to give me a guest spot here, but I don’t speak for him.) But let’s start with the resurrection of Norman Osborn. (After the cut, because this is kind of a long one.)

continue reading "A Long, Sad Talk About Norman Osborn"

I retweeted Andrew Wheeler’s rant about how sexism plays a role in people saying Wonder Woman is hard to write well (there’s more at his Twitter, it gets scathing real fast) because he was mostly right: there is often some misogyny involved when people say they hate Wonder Woman or think she is boring. It’s comics fandom, you have to assume there’s some soupçon of misogyny in the base more often than not.

But.

Wonder Woman is hard to write well, because there is no definitive Wonder Woman. I’ve written about this before, but think about it for a second. There’s a definitive Batman, now: he’s been arrived at over decades. There’s a definitive Superman, a definitive Spider-Man, and we’re only just starting to hit definitive Wolverine over the past few years and even then there have been mis-steps.1 Definitive Daredevil took, what, 180 issues until Frank Miller showed up? So it can take time. In Wonder Woman’s case it has taken over sixty years and counting.

Like: Who’s a “must” member of Wonder Woman’s supporting cast? Supporting casts are important: they define your character’s milieu (assuming they aren’t a lone wolf like Wolverine is). Superman has Lois and Perry and Jimmy; Batman has Alfred and Dick and Commissioner Gordon; Spidey has MJ and Robbie and Betty and Flash and Jolly Jonah. Who’s Wonder Woman’s supporting cast all-stars? Etta Candy? Only shows up occasionally and has no definitive role. Steve Trevor? Hasn’t been prominent for years, even decades. I-Ching? Please. And so on.

Alternatively, who are Wonder Woman’s most notorious villains? Look at this list of Wonder Woman “adversaries” from Wikipedia:

Angle Man, Ares, Baroness Paula Von Gunther, Badra, Bizarra, Blue Snowman, Captain Wonder, Cheetah, Children of Ares, Circe, Cyborgirl, Dark Angel, Decay, Devastation, Doctor Cyber, Doctor Poison, Doctor Psycho, Duke of Deception, Egg Fu, Eviless, Genocide, Giganta, Hades, Hypnota, Jinx, Mask, Mavis, Osira, Queen Clea, Queen of Fables, Shim’Tar, Silver Swan, Superwoman, Tezcatlipoca, Trinity, Veronica Cale, Villainy Inc., White Magician, Zara

So, to sum up: Cheetah, Circe, Ares and Hades? Maybe Dr. Psycho, but then again Dr. Psycho is a character better known for his stint in Villains United than for his classic Wonder Woman stories. Really, this is not the most inspiring list. Of all of those characters, I think Ares ends up being Diana’s archenemy by default mostly because he’s always been the most powerful, but there is no definitive Ares/Wonder Woman story like there are Batman/Joker or Superman/Luthor or Spidey/Doc Ock2 or even Wolverine/Sabretooth, for crissake.

But then again there are no definitive Wonder Woman stories, are there? There are plenty of good runs on the title. I mean, if you do a list of everybody who wrote more than two years’ worth of Wonder Woman comics, you get:

William Marston
Robert Kanigher
Gerry Conway
Martin Pasko
Dan Mishkin
George Perez
William Messner-Loebs
John Byrne
Greg Rucka
Gail Simone
Brian Azzarello

That’s a goddamn Murderer’s Row of comics writing talent right there – and I’m not going to do the “well William Marston only gets in because he invented the character, because really he was just a weird pervert” because those old Marston comics show a real understanding of the form.3 And then you go into all those great writers who didn’t have long runs on the title: Mike Sekowsky, Len Wein, Alan Heinberg, Phil Jimenez, Walt Simonson. Wonder Woman is a title that DC has always made sure had serious talent working on it. So where is the Wonder Woman equivalent of “Year One”> or “For The Man Who Has Everything” or “The Boy Who Collected Spider-Man”?

I should note I don’t think this is simply a failure of marketing, either, or of DC failing to properly promote groundbreaking stories. All of those great writers wrote decent Wonder Woman stories, and DC over the years has made valiant efforts to publicize them and the character generally. Despite a lot of attention and a lot of talent, we’ve never really found what makes Wonder Woman work, and for the most part the result is every time a new writer gets their hands on it they revamp whatever they like, be it turning Diana into a martial-artist spy without powers, the Avatar of Truth, an ambassador from a very very foreign country or the secret daughter of Zeus. This isn’t just a new spin on the character each time, either: Superman as capricious trickster in the Silver Age, Superman as TV reporter in the Bronze Age, Superman as humble, lovable family man in the Whatever-This-Is Age and Superman as Bloggerman in the New 52 are all still identifiably Superman: Clark Kent, who is also Kal-El from Krypton, last survivor of a dead race, and so on.

But if you took no-powers martial artist spy 1970s Wonder Woman, 1990s George Perez Wonder Woman and current-day daughter-of-Zeus Wonder Woman, and gave them different names, they’re barely the same character. Different powers, different origin stories, they’re really different people when you get down to it. There is no definitive Wonder Woman story because there is no definitive Wonder Woman, and that means every time a writer gets an idea about how to make Wonder Woman relevant they tear down whatever they want to get rid of, which is often something another writer spent time building up. Writing a Wonder Woman series is not unlike building a sandcastle, when you get right down to it, and about as stable.

This matters, because people seek out given comics because they’re looking for a particular reading experience more often than not (Batman: gritty noir; Spider-Man: adolescent angst; Wolverine: revenge drama; etc.). If you pick up a random Wonder Woman comic you have no idea what it’s going to be about, because everybody’s idea of Wonder Woman is different; there is no such standard as a “good Wonder Woman story” (as opposed to simply “a good story,” which is in part why Man of Steel was so divisive in comics fandom).

And realistically this is not going to change until a Wonder Woman movie comes out, because when we get a Wonder Woman movie, that will hard-define the character in a way that no comics event realistically ever will (much like Robert Downey Jr. has defined Tony Stark for the next few decades at least). Brian Azzarello’s current run on the character (what I have seen of it, because I don’t read DC comics any more) is good stuff and inventive, but not enough people are reading it for it to make a dent in comics fandom’s collective understanding. It’s going to take a movie, and the self-fulfilling prophecy of “well, nobody will go to see a Wonder Woman movie, so we’re not going to make one” is presently getting in the way.

1. Remember that Jeph Loeb run where Logan was one of a race of werewolf-things? What happened with that? It sucked, I remember that much. [↩]
2. Otto is Spider-Man’s definitive arch-enemy. Period. Green Goblin – no, not even close. [↩]
3. Granted, which Marston then used as his personal and weird masturbation aid, but that is neither here nor there. [↩]

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Mark Gruenwald was one of those wonderful, mad, quixotic people who actually wanted the Marvel Universe to make sense. Obviously, he was aware that there were limits to this dream; in the real world, people cannot turn into solid steel simply by willing themselves to do so, or stick to walls with their bare hands because they have “spider powers”. But he wanted the fiction of the Marvel Universe to operate according to an internally consistent set of rules that applied to all its stories. It’s an impossible dream, unfortunately; the laws of drama trump the laws of physics in a fictional universe, and Gruenwald’s explanations of time travel and the structure of the Multiverse held together only as long as he was around to hold other writers to them. But the explanations he came up with were more than just a set of rules. They were a set of stories.

‘Quasar’ was the series he came up with to tell those stories, and I loved both ‘Quasar’ the series and Quasar the character. I loved the series because Gruenwald looked at the Marvel Universe, the grand patchwork creation of hundreds if not thousands of hands, and saw infinite vistas to explore. Tiny little loose ends that most other fans forgot about, like the Chief Examiner in the ‘Questprobe’ video game tie-in comics, he saw as a chance to tell a story that was waiting for someone to do it justice. Forgotten characters like the Stranger or Maelstrom were interesting and compelling when seen through his eyes, and he couldn’t wait to show you why. The endless strangeness and vast complexities of the Marvel Universe, with its gods and gods-above-gods and gods-above-gods-above-gods, he used as the backdrop to tell stories that showed that universe in all its glory.

And Wendell Vaughn, the main character of the series, was exactly who was needed for it. He wasn’t the most interesting of protagonists; he was staid, solid, dependable and calm in a crisis. He wasn’t damaged or angry or broken inside. But he was nice. He was likable. He tried to do the right thing all the time, even when it hurt him–heck, even when it killed him, which was significantly more often than you might expect from a character who carried his own series. (I think he’s died at least four times, but I might be missing a couple. For Wendell Vaughn, death is like a coffee break from being Protector of the Universe.) He was a guy who had his shit together and acted like a hero, and that’s gotten to be rare enough in comics these days that I think it’s worth celebrating in and of itself.

And the stories were great. The Watchers fell victim to a devastating meme that killed them in their hundreds. Oblivion killed the embodiment of all life, leaving Quasar to protect its successor. Quasar slipped sideways out of our universe entirely, winding up in the New Universe and meeting the possessor of the Star Brand. All sorts of weird, crazy, goofy concepts that went to the forgotten corners of the Marvel Universe and brought back all sorts of treasures to share. Mark Gruenwald put his heart into this series, and it really showed. I’m still hoping for an ‘Essential’ collection, now that they’re finally getting up into the Eighties, because I really do think of this one as essential reading for anyone who wants to feel like being a comic fan is worth something. For all that pedantry can (and does) devolve into pointless point-scoring and petty bitching over “getting it wrong”, there’s a flipside to it. There’s a way of caring about these things that’s positive, that uses the questions of how the Marvel Universe works as a springboard to inspiration. Mark Gruenwald wrote from his passions as a fan his whole career, and ‘Quasar’ showed exactly why that was something to love.

Somebody asked the chief a rather loaded question about Lobo and Deadpool being “overplayed, really-limited-joke” characters. And frankly, I don’t think that’s fair to Deadpool.

Let’s set aside the tragic aspects of the character here–that Wade Wilson has a lot of emotional baggage that he can’t escape because he can’t die, that sort of thing. That’s all well and good, but I’m just talking about how the character works in pure farce. In that context, Deadpool’s problem isn’t that he’s limited as a joke character. It’s that people are limited in how they make jokes with the character.

This was already on my mind since I recently saw a gifset on Tumblr of Deadpool’s WACKY ADVENTURES at SDCC. It struck me that in each gif, somebody was doing something amusing with cosplay or props or whatever, and the sole contribution of “Deadpool” was to enter the scene and play along just like any other fun-loving convention-goer might. So you’ve got people cosplaying as Tetris blocks, which is kind of interesting I guess, and then OH MAN DEADPOOL IS WITH THEM NOW IT’S HA-HA-LARIOUS~!~!! XD XD

I get this same vibe from Deadpool’s appearances in comics–at least, the comics that are played for laughs. Deadpool is fighting ninja mimes because it’s funny, and it’s funny because it’s happening to Deadpool, and Deadpool is funny because it’s happening to him. It’s circular logic that only makes sense if you accept that Deadpool is some sort of humor-enhancer, who by his mere presence makes funny things funnier.

If humor were food, Deadpool would be the “bacon strips & bacon strips & bacon strips…” meme. Because let’s face it, bacon doesn’t actually make everything taste better, and even when it does there are diminishing returns as you add more. The first time I tried to make a sandwich with more than one layer of bacon, I ended up with a crispy-chewy mess that wasn’t at all what I hoped for. But the idea of extra bacon is indulgent and tempting. So we assume Epic Meal Time knows what they’re doing when they wrap a pork roast in a four-layer quilt of bacon, even when we should have the common sense to know better. Similarly, fandom seems to have been conditioned to assume that once anyone attempts to work Deadpool into something, it must be funny because Deadpool.

It’s not that bacon or Deadpool is bad, but the trick is in how you use them rather than simply using them at all or a lot. Wade is probably pretty versatile as a joke, but if Marvel and Deadpool fans forget to tell the joke, he is extremely limited as a punchline.

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