From last week’s open house:

Mike From Nowhere: 2 Man 2 Steel is going to feature Lex Luthor and they’ve talked about businessman-genius Luthor. (It’s not official, but come ON.) How best to translate Luthor to the big screen?

I endorse the Luthor-as-super-Renaissance-man concept that works the best. Luthor is a super-genius scientist AND a super-businessman AND in top physical condition, because he is driven to excel at all things. It makes him the ideal opponent for Superman – the man who can do everything versus the man who can do anything. Also it means he can wear his power suit, by which I mean “a really nice suit,” which has always been Luthor’s most intimidating look. (The battlesuit overcompensates.)

John: Your Dr. Strange series has been amazing. Any chance you’ll do (or even a few one-shots) of “I Should Write Superman”? Or what you would do if you had a year’s run of Action/Superman/some other similar book?

In the first place, the reason I liked doing the Legion ones and the reason I like doing the Dr. Strange ones is because both of those properties let one play on the fringes of their respective universes, which is great. This is not to say that there are not tons of Superman minutiae which are fun, but everybody has their list of Superman minutiae they would bring back in a comic in a new and improved form (like when Kurt Busiek brilliantly re-imagined the Prankster, for example). There is a long, long lineup for Superman – and the Avengers, and Batman, and the X-Men, and Spidey, and so forth – and that leads itself to a certain sort of conservatism and a little less freedom to experiment with tone.

Or, to put it another way: my prototype for an extended run on a corporate property is more along the lines of Jason Aaron’s Ghost Rider run. Think that level, rather than Superman.

(Also, I would be terrified of writing Superman. I have no idea how people summon the hubris to write it.)

Aussiesmurf: What’s your favourite in-continuity story for each of the following characters that DOESN’T significantly affect the status quo :

1. Batman
2. Superman
3. Spider-Man

1. “Blades” by James Robinson and Tim Sale in Legends of the Dark Knight
2. “The Miraculous Return of Jonathan Kent” by Cary Bates and Curt Swan in Action Comics
3. “The Thousand” by Garth Ennis and John McCrea in Spider-Man’s Tangled Web

JayDzed: Which is the most overplayed, really-limited-joke character in mainstream comics, Deadpool or Lobo?

Lobo, because Deadpool can be used for more jokes. Lobo is only really good for Alan Grant/Keith Giffen style over-the-top violent satire. Deadpool has wider range.

A few people both in last week’s open call and subsequently via email asked me for my opinion about Superior Spider-Man, and I think it’s probably one of the best comics Marvel’s put out in years,1 if only because it’s really incredibly daring on a number of levels and directly in opposition to much of the new paradigm Marvel has put forward for its superheroes over the past few years. Which, really, is what a good Spider-Man comic should do, but Superior Spider-Man is putting a knowing and even satiric slant on the whole thing.

Firstly, let us acknowledge that Marvel killed off Peter Parker. Not just sorta-killed him off, either: they’ve killed Peter as comprehensively as you can really kill a flagship character, and did it the right way by having his greatest enemy, Doctor Octopus, invade his body, destroy his mind, and steal his life.2 And they didn’t just kill him: they killed him, left a window in order to enable his return where he was sort-of-surviving within Otto-Spider-Man’s mind, and then killed him off in that. Which was both shocking and thrilling, because subverting the standard comics resurrection paradigm – even if we all know it is only temporarily – is kind of great.

But what’s really great about Superior Spider-Man is that it is, on a subtle level, active criticism of many Marvel comics’ current top-down model of heroism, where the heroic protagonist does What Is Necessary For The Greater Good. (See: Iron Man, Nick Fury, Cyclops’s renegade X-Men, the Illuminati, and so on and so forth.) And it’s trying to do so from as sympathetic a portrayal of Otto Octavius as is possible: we’re constantly reminded that Otto, before becoming a supervillain, had a really screwed up and horrible life, and he actually wants to do the right thing and be a hero. The problem is that because Otto has no faith in people’s inherent goodness (which is a very Spider-Man thing to have), it informs his entire approach towards being a hero, which is to completely control every situation: by installing spy robots all over New York so he can know in advance where to be heroing, by blackmailing Mayor Jonah so that he can install a base of operations, occasionally killing a baddie because if he didn’t then the baddie would have just killed more people – and now he’s assembling what is for all intents and purposes an army of henchmen, and he’s doing it because he thinks this is how good guys should be good guys because it’s more efficient (and he’s not wrong about that).

Going into D&D alignment terms, it’s very much a Lawful Evil approach to being Lawful Good; Otto’s flaw isn’t that he doesn’t want to do the right thing. He does. The problem is that Otto doesn’t understand what the right thing actually is. Which makes it an excellent tragic comics story, because while Otto is the antihero of this story, he’s an extremely compelling one. It’s just great superhero comics all around, and given the gravitas of what’s happening I’m amazed how well it works as an all-ages story.

And yeah, I think this eventually gets resolved by having the Ultimate Universe get destroyed by 616-Galactus (as was foreshadowed in “Age of Ultron”) and Miles Morales managing to escape to 616 and then defeating Otto-Spidey to become the new Amazing Spider-Man, because that would be kind of great3 and just as bold a story choice as the entire Otto-Spidey Saga was in the first place.

1. And really, Marvel has put out a whole ton of good comics over the past few years, so that says something. [↩]
2. Yes, Peter will be back eventually. Probably it will involve Mephisto in some way, because why not. Let us all take a moment to acknowledge that after semi-rebooting Spider-Man to end his marriage in order to tell all the stories they couldn’t tell with a married Spider-Man, the single best idea they had was “hey, let’s kill him.” [↩]
3. Not least because the usual suspects would flip out over Spider-Man now being a blackity blackity black kid. [↩]

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Click on thumb to see full

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

There’s nothing comics fans love like “badasses”. Wolverine, the Hulk, the Punisher, Batman…all of these characters’ popularity depend on their ability and willingness to kick ass in a fight. Anytime someone wants to take an obscure character and make them into a fan favorite, their first step is to give them a “take no prisoners” attitude and a lot more combat prowess. And even within the fictional universe, the fighting abilities of these characters are respected and feared by villains and heroes alike. Every villain knows that when Wolverine shows up, Shit Gets Real. Likewise, their opponents are badasses-by-proxy; if Sabretooth can take on Wolverine in a fight, he must be one tough customer despite the fact that Spider-Man once defeated him by tricking him into clawing his own face off.

But there are plenty of characters out there who don’t have any kind of reputation as “tough” customers, despite the fact that they could easily murder their way through the entire Marvel Universe faster than you could say “personality change by authorial fiat”. Here are five characters whose abilities make them scary enough that villains should pray they never get a personality transfusion from the Punisher.

1) Kitty Pryde. Kitty is mostly portrayed as a cute teenage kid, a skilled computer hacker, and a ninja with neat infiltration skills and a mostly defensive array of powers. But in any kind of actual physical fight…she can’t be hit, she can’t be hurt, and she can kill you instantly. All she has to do is take an object, any object, phase it, stick it inside your chest cavity or skull, and let go. Thud. Alternatively, she can phase a person, let them sink into the ground up to their chest, and let go. Not only do you die, but your final moments are unspeakable agony as your entire nervous system is now completely integrated with foreign matter.

2) Invisible Woman. Sue Richards can create an invisible, solid object in any shape she wants. She can make it hard enough to stop a speeding car (you know that if she was a supervillain, she’d totally do this just for kicks) and thin enough to cut through human flesh. She can expand it, and she can contract it. And she does not need line of sight to use it. The number of ways you could use this power to murder another human being are limited only by the imagination. Doctor Doom getting on your nerves? Create a cylindrical force field that forms a seal over his eye, then extend it out to create a partial vacuum. The Hulk bothering you? Wait until he exhales, then create a force-field in his esophagus. And the Wizard’s anti-gravity powers don’t sound so impressive when he’s flying through an invisible maze of razorwire.

3) Iceman. Honestly, I never understood why Scott Lobdell needed to make up new powers for Bobby when he wanted to show how he wasn’t using them to his full potential by having the White Queen take over his body. The guy has the power to instantly freeze things, and human beings are mostly water. Do you really have to pretend that he could always turn into ice but just never figured out how in order to show that he could be a tough customer? To say nothing of the fact that ices is heavy and hard. Even if you weren’t interested in killing someone subtly and undetectably by freezing their heart solid in their chest, you could make a big flashy statement by dropping a giant icicle on their heads.

4) The Human Torch. Actually, this is one of those characters whose most astonishing achievement is that he’s never killed anybody purely by accident. His principal power–hell, his only power–is to unleash a torrent of insanely hot fire at things. The degree of control he exerts on a daily basis to avoid inadvertently murdering not just people but entire housing tracts really shows you what an amazingly good person he is. If he ever decided not to be that good, I really don’t think many characters could survive an encounter with him. (Except for the Invisible Woman, who could murder him easily. See above.)

5) Storm. Most of the time when the X-Men get into a fight, Storm mainly just flies around and shoots little zap bolts at people. Occasionally she’ll hide the team with fog or toss around a little freezing rain to make bad guys uncomfortable. Whereas in fact, getting into a fight with Storm should be about as safe as juggling nitroglycerin. The upper limits of Storm’s weather control powers haven’t ever really been tested. Can she create 70 MPH straight-line winds? Can she generate a lightning bolt that contains 15 million volts of current and superheats the air around it to 100,000 degrees Fahrenheit? Can she cause a torrential downpour, causing an instant flash flood? Can she create an EF5 tornado, capable of devastating an entire city? Who knows? Pick a fight with her when she’s in a bad mood, and you may be the first to find out? (Thor also falls into his category, but usually people treat him like a badass. Mind you, they tend to be more respectful of his ability to hit things with a big hammer than his ability to steer a hurricane into Long Island.)

None of this is to suggest that I really want to see these characters turn into Wolverine-esque murderous “tough guys”. For one thing, the stories would be pretty short if they used their powers to their full potential. (“Oh, no, Magneto’s back! He’s going to…die, because Kitty Pryde just snuck up behind him and materialized a log through his head. Well, what’s on TV?”) I’m mainly trying to say that characters shouldn’t be idolized solely based on how easily they can win a fight. Because if you think Wolverine’s a super-impressive tough guy, try to remember that he wouldn’t last five minutes in a fight with a teenage girl.

It’s been a while since we did an “ask me anything/make requests” post, so here is one.

(Requests for “more original comics” will be noted in the “are you an artist if not then learn to draw” file.)

Sorcerers Supreme, as a rule, do not retire. “Defender of all reality” is not a job that is particularly conducive to packing it all in and moving to a condo in Florida, in the first place, because it has a remarkably high dying-on-the-job rate. People who become Sorcerers Supreme are disinclined to retire anyway; the sort of person who is right for the job never really stops being right for the job until they are disqualified from it by reason of end of life. (Even the ones who are total bastards. Especially the ones who are total bastards, really.)

Most Sorcerers Supreme, when you get right down to it, become Sorcerer Supreme because they were never truly meant to be anything else, and thus there isn’t any point for them to not be Sorcerer Supreme; the acceptance of the job is simultaneously the acceptance of one’s own mortality, along with a bit of general foreknowledge that it when it comes, it will probably be rather violent. In fact, there are no recorded instances of Sorcerers Supreme fully retiring to give the job to the next fellow in line. Even the Ancient One died in battle against Shuma-Gorath (he pretended to retire and give Stephen the job, but really he was taking care of many things his pupil wasn’t yet ready to handle, much as a parent lets their child swim on their own while keeping their hands close by in case they need to rescue them from drowning).

Which is why it comes as such a surprise, during a particularly relaxing series of mediations, when Stephen Strange finds himself in the future. That bit of it isn’t particularly surprising – the magical powers of the Vishanti which he has mastered do allow for time travel and one does occasionally wander, not unlike puttering through an engaging farmer’s market and coming across a country cheese stand you have never seen, except instead of cheese it is time. (Which also helps with cheese, incidentally, but that is another thing entirely.) So finding himself in the future is not that odd. Even finding himself is not that odd. (At least, not to Stephen Strange.)

But what is odd is that Future Stephen is retired. And not Ancient One retired; for real retired. He gardens. He does his t’ai chi every day, to ward off the stiffness of old age. He does the odd bit of mystical consulting because once superheroes learn that they can ask you questions they never really stop doing it, even if nowadays it’s Spider-Girl and American Dream asking the questions. He has tea twice a week with the new Sorcerer Supreme (whose identity he refuses to divulge: “look, when I realized who it was to be, I was distinctly surprised, and I think that was important”), and tells his protege about the importance of extra socks often.

He speaks with his daughter on the phone every day, and he dotes on his grandchildren.

All of this of course makes Current Stephen extremely suspicious, because he’s not a damned idiot. Here Is Your Blissful Future is somewhere in the first half-dozen pages of every would-be conqueror’s guide to sidelining a Sorcerer Supreme, after all, and he knows as well as anybody that his job doesn’t really allow for this sort of future. At best, you get the satisfaction of having kept things from going to hell, and that has to be enough. But Current Stephen does test after test – he knows every possible way someone could fool his senses and he knows how to nullify or counter every single one of them. And every one comes up empty. For every test Current Stephen knows, and even a few he improvises, says the same thing: this is real, this is no trick, this is your beautiful house and your beautiful life, this is what you get.

And that is when Future Stephen – who, since he is Current Stephen plus time, is even harder to fool than Current Stephen – poses a question:

“If this is real – and let us assume for the moment that it is, since I think I am quite tangible – then we accept that this is unlikely. But it is also unlikely that you would see this for no reason. Which leads us to ask: who gains by having you come to this particular now? Are they your enemy, seeking to sideline you with the fear of potential? Are they mine, hoping to eliminate you in a future you cannot be prepared for? Or perhaps does someone wish to ensure that this particular iteration of your future never comes to be – or, indeed, definitely comes to be?”

Click on thumb to see full

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

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

(This week’s Al’Rashad page will be up later this evening; server was acting up this morning.)

Dear Mr. Card,

I wanted you to know that I recently read your statement regarding the proposed boycott of ‘Ender’s Game’, and I can understand where you’re coming from in your plea for tolerance. Believe me, I can understand what it’s like to worry that your livelihood will be affected by the intolerance of others. Many of my LGBT friends have had to face open discrimination in the workplace due to the kind of open hatred you personally fostered with your time and money…and in fact, continue to foster today, despite your belief that the whole issue is now “moot”. So I can deeply sympathize with your hope that “the victorious proponents of gay marriage will show tolerance toward those who disagreed with them when the issue was still in dispute.”

To that end, I pledge that I will in fact show just as much tolerance of you as I expect to see you and others show towards people of different sexual preferences and identities (by the way, I assume that since the issue is now “moot”, you’ll be disbanding NOM? After all, no sense throwing good money after bad, right?) In that spirit, I pledge the following:

I will not seek to deprive you of your legal and constitutional rights.

I will not seek to have you declared mentally ill and institutionalized.

I will not seek to have normal, healthy sexual activities that you perform in private with consenting adults declared illegal, in order to “send a message” to you about their morality.

I will not seek to have you declared an unfit parent based on your sexual preference/inclination, nor will I suggest you act in a sexually predatory fashion towards prepubescent children who match your sexual preference.

I will not refuse to serve you at my place of business.

I will not advocate the overthrow of the United States government in order to install a puppet regime that discriminates against your sexual preference/inclination.

Because I agree with your request for tolerance, I freely and happily pledge to all these things. I think you’d no doubt agree that I am meeting you more than halfway, given your previous verbal and financial advocation on LGBT issues. Nonetheless, as you pointed out, your backwards and hateful rhetoric is rapidly receding into history’s rear view mirror, and you are rapidly becoming seen as nothing more than a bigoted old crank who nobody listens to anymore. In that light, I agree that it’s easy to be tolerant in victory. So let’s stand on this agreement and let bygones be bygones.

…oh, you may note that “paying good money to see your shitty-ass movie” isn’t included in the definition of ‘tolerance’. That wasn’t what you were asking me to do, was it? Drop me a line back and let me know!

Sincerely,

John Seavey

I just added my name to John Scalzi’s pledge (original pledge here, place for others to co-sign here) to refuse to attend any convention that does not have a clearly defined, well-publicized, rigorously enforced harassment policy. Admittedly, John Scalzi would be refusing to attend as a Guest of Honor, while I would be refusing to attend as a paid guest, possible volunteer and occasional panel presenter, but the principle is the same.

Why is this important to me? Because I was just at CONvergence. For those of you who’ve never been, it’s a good-sized sci-fi/fantasy/gaming/general geekery convention in the Twin Cities (actually the largest entirely fan-run con…there are plenty of larger ones, but they’re all run as for-profit businesses.) And it has a great harassment policy. You don’t need to take my word for it; Paul Cornell came here and has said publicly that he thinks it’s the best of its kind in the entire world. (Not that it’s a competition. Although maybe it should be…) The con doesn’t just have a policy, it commits to it. They have posters in every public space with slogans like “Costumes Are Not Consent” (with models of both genders on the panel, just to make it clear that men have as much right to wear kilts without having jerks use a leaf-blower on them as women do to wear Power Girl costumes without inappropriate “boob window” comments.) They have officially designated “Safe Spaces” where people who are being harassed can go and find someone who will keep the harasser away until con staff can come and kick them out. They make people feel safe at their con.

And it is wonderful. It’s a wonderful feeling, knowing that everyone there feels free to be themselves and to enjoy themselves without having to worry about someone taking their self-expression as a license to attack, demean or belittle them. It creates a welcoming, friendly environment full of great people who share a common interest. It’s basically everything you’d hope for in a con. (And it’s got a great consuite. And it’s got amazing, amazing, AMAZING volunteers who make it all happen, including the harassment policy. I can’t praise the volunteers enough; cons this good don’t happen in a vacuum, and so let me take advantage of the huge soapbox for a moment to tell everyone how AWESOME they are.)

And having seen a really good con with a really great policy, I want to give everyone that opportunity. So I co-signed. My voice might not be noticed as much as John Scalzi’s, but I’ll add mine to his for whatever it’s worth.

So in the last month, I’ve been trying to read more superhero comics than I ever did before, trying to give myself a crash course in an art form I should have followed when I was young, but didn’t. (So please remember this in light of what follows, and make allowances for the narrow, American-corporate-comics scope of this particular binge.) I read more comics than the doctor’s recommended dosage, with the result that I now announce everything I’m going to do before I do it, and talk grimly about hard choices without moving my mouth. Apart from catching up on the expected mix of brilliant work and not-so-brilliant work, and becoming convinced that thought bubbles are eventually going to make some kind of comeback, I was able to get into the best part of comics reading: finding characters you like and following them. (That’s why Marvel and DC will never go completely out of style: they may be reworking a lot of characters created decades ago, but their artists and writers-for-hire created so many characters that you can always find some you like.)

And in that free-associative way that only a blog post can excuse, it got me to thinking that one of my favourite types of character is the one who has the initially lame powers, who doesn’t get to fight a lot, and maybe doesn’t seem quite at home in superhero comics – the magical woman. Or the reality-altering woman. Or the woman who isn’t super-strong or super-fast, but somehow makes things happen. Call her whatever you will, I likes her.

There are lots of female characters with supernatural powers, but there are at least three who come to mind when I think of this kind of character and why she’s not quite at home in the superhero/action world: Jean Grey in X-Men, Wanda the Scarlet Witch, and – at least after her powers were redefined to include force fields and other stuff – Sue Storm, the Invisible Girl of the Fantastic Four. All three were early Lee/Kirby/Marvel creations. All three were supposed to give some female interest to superhero comics; all three started out with powers that seemed unimpressive to action-comic fans. Jean is probably the definitive version of this character: she looks, acts and talks like a character from one of Lee or Kirby’s romance comics (actually, she resembles that other Marvel redhead, Patsy Walker, but without that weird quasi-religious vibe Al Hartley gave to Patsy), a perfect and spunky young woman, adored by all men – including, creepily, her much older mentor Professor Xavier. She’s not there to be an alternative to the usual
continue reading "I love, I love, I love my magical girl, each and every day of the year"

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.