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(it only took us five issues, but we pass the Bechdel Test now!)

Why is it that every Len Wiseman film is made on the assumption that an interesting backstory can make up for a total lack of non-trite dialogue, skilled pacing, original plot, intelligible editing, and coherent cinematography?

Fair warning: I’m going to be discussing events in this week’s issue of Avengers vs. X-Men, so watch out for spoilers.  Also, I haven’t read Avengers vs. X-Men, or the vast majority of the storylines I’m about to discuss, so feel free to decide I’m full of crap.

I was surprised to learn that the marriage between Storm and Black Panther was dissolved in Avengers vs. X-Men #9.  Although given that T’Challa is an Avenger and Ororo is an X-Men, I guess I should have seen that coming.  What doesn’t surprise me is that this development hasn’t ended the debate about whether the Panther/Storm marriage was  a good idea to begin with.

If you need more context, I think this article provides plenty, although I think the writer jumps to a few conclusions.1  In a nutshell, Marvel wanted to marry Panther and Storm as a big event, and fandom was deeply split on the issue.  I didn’t follow the debate too closely but the main points of contention seemed to be as follows:

PROS: Storm and the Black Panther are two of the most iconic black superheroes, so this is a big deal and a great idea.  They have a history as shown in Marvel Team-Up #100, so they’re a perfect match.

CONS: Marvel Team-Up #100 was, like, the only time these characters had anything to do with one another.  Pulling Storm out of the X-Men comics to be a supporting character in Black Panther is a disservice to the character.  This is an ill-considered marketing ploy that’s all about manufacturing an event instead of telling a story.

It seemed to me at the time that Marvel could have avoided the controversy with a little more planning.  Regardless of whether you liked the wedding event, you can’t deny that it was pretty sudden.  A year or two of romance leading up to the wedding would have quelled at least some of the criticism that the coupling was arbitrary.  I certainly don’t think those in favor of the marriage would have complained about a longer courtship.

But as it happened, the marriage didn’t work out creatively, as Tom Brevoort admitted to Newsarama.  And this is what bothers me, because the reasons he gives in his postmortem are all factors that anyone could/did identify when the wedding was first announced.  Instead of anticipating those challenges and developing solutions for them ahead of time, Marvel just fumbled around without a plan for six years before finally giving up.  “Gosh, it turns out Storm fans prefer for her to be in the X-Men’s storylines!  We had no idea!”

This is all a symptom of a bigger problem in both Marvel and DC–they get so caught up in figuring out how to sell a comic right now that they fail to plan how to sell that same comic later.  It’s all well and good to spike Black Panther sales with a wedding stunt, but unless there’s a long-term plan attached to the stunt then you’ll just have to keep trotting out stunts, and eventually you run out.2  It’s all well and good to have a “Black Panther marries Storm” collected edition in your back catalog, but unless there’s a strong story behind it nobody is going to go back and buy an event that’s been rendered moot.  To be fair, I have read very little of the Panther/Storm stories, so it’s hard for me to judge if they had an underlying plan or a strong story.  That said, Brevoort’s admission of failure does not inspire confidence.

What makes this personally frustrating for me is that I am fascinated by the circumstances of T’Challa’s separation from Ororo.  From what I understand, the X-Men launched a devastating attack on Wakanda, and thus Panther cannot remain married to a woman associated with war criminals.  Without knowing more of the context, I’m intrigued by this development because it’s textbook T’Challa–no matter what he may want as a man,  his obligations as a king and high priest take priority, and he doesn’t mince words about it.  This raises all kinds of questions I’d like to see examined, whether it’s the final word on their marriage or not.

So right now I would totally pay for comics dealing with the aftermath of the annulment.  But I don’t have any faith that Marvel will really tell that story, because experience suggests they have no plan for what happens next between Panther and Storm.  It’s more likely the two characters will have nothing to do with one another until their paths cross in some future companywide event.  At that point, in some brief nod to their history, they’ll either exchange icy glares or unexpectedly reconcile and leap into each other’s arms.  It’ll be enough to get people talking for a week…but only for a week.

1. He lost me when he suggested the marriage was an obstacle to a Black Panther movie, which is absurd since Storm probably wouldn’t be in said movie either way. [↩]
2. Black Panther joins the Fantastic Four!  Black Panther’s a woman!  Black Panther goes to war with Doctor Doom!  Black Panther replaces Daredevil!  Black Panther gets cancelled! [↩]

And now it’s time for another one of those posts where I eschew cynicism and snark to just talk about the things I love about comics. Because if you’re here reading this, you probably love them too. Today, I’m going to talk about a single-issue story that always brings a goofy grin to my face every time I think about it: Tales of Suspense #83, “Enter…the Tumbler!”

Technically speaking, it’s not a totally self-contained story, so let me set the stage. In #82, Captain America has returned to the Avengers Mansion after a long day of trouncing the hordes of HYDRA, only to find himself hallucinating and flashing back to World War II. At first, he assumes that he’s finally succumbed to some sort of PTSD after years of combat, but in reality, Jarvis has drugged his tea! (Insert dramatic sting.) He finally collapses, and Jarvis reveals himself to be not Jarvis, but a robot designed by HYDRA to destroy Cap and SHIELD. The Adaptoid (this was before he was Super) impersonated the Avengers’ butler to get close to the perfect physical specimen, Steve Rogers, and now duplicates him precisely in order to become the ultimate living weapon against SHIELD. He ties up the unconscious Cap in a closet and prepares to attack SHIELD HQ, using his enemy’s face…

And then, as the title of this story suggests, the Tumbler enters. He’s a small-time crook who read about Captain America’s exploits and realized that any man can do amazing things if only he trains hard and perserveres. With this inspirational message in his heart, he goes off to become the best darned criminal he can be! And after years of intensive training in acrobatics, weight-lifting, and unarmed combat, he’s ready to show that he’s no small-time crook anymore. He’s going to defeat Captain America, and then take over New York’s mobs!

The Adaptoid assumes, at first, that he’ll be able to handle this enemy easily. After all, he’s duplicated Captain America, the perfect physical specimen. But he quickly finds out that while Cap is stronger and faster than any other human, the difference between him and an Olympic-level athlete is minor, at best. The Tumbler quickly overwhelms him, using his aggressive acrobatics to confuse and disorient the android, and proceeds to beat six kinds of hell out of him. Capdaptoid tries to take him out with a shield throw, but the Tumbler adroitly dodges out of the way and starts beating him with his own shield. The Adaptoid actually tries to adapt to the Tumbler, assuming that he must be superior to Cap because after all, he’s beating the living shit out of someone in Cap’s body, but he’s being hammered too hard to make the switch. Finally, the Tumbler throws his defeated foe clear through the wooden doors leading deeper into the mansion, and prepares to strut off with his trophy–Captain America’s shield–while saying, “I’m a dozen times the fighter Captain America ever was!”

And then Cap walks right back out of those same doors, because he’s been recovering from the drugs and untying himself while the Tumbler and the Adaptoid fought. The Tumbler doesn’t even have time to get cocky before Cap pastes one on him for the crime of being mouthy, and then asks, “Who are you? And what are you doing here?” Because Cap doesn’t have time to ask questions of people before starting the beating. He’s on a schedule, people.

The Tumbler tries to fight back, throwing Cap’s own shield at him. Cap catches it “like it was nothing more than a toss from shortstop to first”, and proceeds to wing it right past the Tumbler’s head at slapshot speed. He could have hit him with it, of course, but why knock a man out when you can show off by ricocheting a piece of metal past his head three or four times in less than a second? The Tumbler tries some of his acrobatics…so Cap hits him with a table. Then the beat-down starts in earnest. The best part is that this is 60s Cap, before he became all “Eat your Wheaties, kids!” He’s openly smack-talking the guy while he fights. (The Tumbler at one point says, “I was set to be the kingpin of the whole underworld after I’d beaten you!” To which Cap responds, “But it would have put you in the higher brackets! Think of the taxes you’d have to pay!” I think this is an argument still being used on Fox News.)

After a few pages, Cap literally knocks the man into comics obscurity (literally–this is the Tumbler’s first and only appearance) and rounds up the unconscious Adaptoid for later study. If you want to find out what happens next, you can find the story in ‘Essential Captain America, Volume One’…or, if you just want to see one of the most hilariously inept supervillains ever and his one, shining moment of thinking he’d just trounced the greatest hero of World War II.

Michael Busuttil: You’re in charge of doing for DC what Kevin Feige did for Marvel. Go.

Avoid Superman and Batman; DC’s problem is that nobody else comes close to Superman and Batman and they need to push their smaller properties. (Green Lantern was a failure in execution, not a failure in concept.) Start with the Flash, who does not yet have a bad movie and does not need a reboot. Then do Aquaman (and hopefully at this point we do not have to explain why Aquaman is actually totally badass). Then Wonder Woman in the Thor slot. Then you reboot Green Lantern properly, and probably have it be John Stewart instead of Hal. In each of these movies, the connecting thread is J’onn J’onzz, who appears in each movie as a different person because he is a shapeshifter, which also lets you have J’onn be played by whoever in the Justice League movie you’re aiming towards.

Probably you can squeeze Flash #2 in there somewhere so Wally is properly ready to be the Flash, and only then do you do your Justice League movie. Probably with Starro as the villain, because Starro is a League-caliber threat and because it’s a nice nod to the comics and also I think a giant fucking space starfish would work wonderfully onscreen. But you can also probably fit Lex Luthor in there somewhere, because come on, it’s Lex Luthor and he is the best villain ever.

The key difference here from the Avengers template is that, unlike in Avengers, your biggest comic properties in DC are very much core to the team. You can do the Avengers without Spider-Man or Wolverine (and many argue that you should). But doing Justice League without Superman or Batman will not quite work.

So this is how we fix that. Somewhere off to one side a bit, there’s a Superman movie. Don’t explicitly acknowledge it as “new DC movieverse canon.” Have Superman fight baddies in space, he’s good at space. And then in Justice League just when the baddies are going to win about halfway through, that is when Superman makes his big entrance. As for Batman, there is no Batman movie, because in the new DC movieverse, Batman Is A Myth until the Justice League movie when he shows up and people are all “wait, you’re real?” This was a cool idea when DC first used it, so let’s steal it. And it lets your big movie coming out of Justice League be the next iteration of Batman, which will give it a respectful distance from the Nolan trilogy.

That’s how I’d do it. The only issue is that this Justice League only has one woman on it, which has always been a problem with the team. Maybe you can replace Aquaman with Zatanna, who is the only DC female character who I think can justify a movie other than Wonder Woman right now. (Hawkgirl won’t quite work, sorry.)

It’s about that time again: ask me anything/requests for post topics.

VIA THE INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC COMMITTEE
Lausanne, Switzerland

FIVE RINGS: Your suggestion to revise J.R.R. Tolkien’s stanza describing the Rings of Power from his Lord of the Rings series by adding the line “Five to the International Olympic Committee, who think they’re so goddamn special, la dee dah” was, to say the least, terribly impolitic. Also, it does not scan well.

POPEYE: We understand that you are a fan of Popeye, but Popeye was created by E.C. Segar, an American, and is currently owned by an American company. Really, Popeye has nothing to do with Britain at all and is not appropriate for the opening ceremony, even if it would be exciting to watch him fight Aslan (whom we believe is who you meant by “that God-Lion, you know the one”). Other suggestions you made that have nothing to do with the United Kingdom fall into this same category: Abraham Lincoln freeing the slaves, the re-enactment of a chase scene from the videogame Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (which is set in Rome, which is in Italy, not Great Britain), the army of dancing leprechauns (which are Irish, not British), and Spider-Man (who is portrayed by a British citizen currently but who is not, in and of himself, British).

Sincerely, etc. etc.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Earlier this week, I posted my thoughts for where to go with another Batman movie, now that Christopher Nolan seems to have wrapped up his “Dark Knight” trilogy. Little did I know that Newsarama and io9 were both planning to rip me off, albeit with more actual speculation about where to go next and fewer brainwashed killer orphans. But that’s okay. I can play that game too. And after the cut, I’ll talk about what I seriously think the next Batman movie should be like. (Hint: brainwashed killer orphans…from space!
continue reading "Let’s Try This Again: The Next Batman Movie"

Your guest judge this week is Christina Applegate, which – okay. She was much better than many other celebrity guest judges.

Tiffany and George: hip-hop. This was quite good and reasonably hard-hitting, and weirdly Nigel complains that the hip-hop routines aren’t “grungy” enough on the show, which – well, that’s quite true, but come on, Nigel, you didn’t say anything last week when Christopher Scott was doing routines that were only moderately hip-hop at best. Tiffany hit her moves harder, but George hit his more crisply. This was good.

Amber and Turk Brandon: jazz. Amber got plaudits from the judges for dancing her “best yet” (true) and “superbly” (not really, no) – she was fine, after a couple of disappointing performances to start off, but a couple of her transitions were just kind of rough. (Okay, I’m more than a little irritated with the judges giving her subpar tango performance last week props after Nick simply carried her to a good performance.) Brandon was very good, both as a forklift (he’s an excellent forklift) and as a partner, and I was impressed with him.

Janelle and Dareian: cha-cha. Dareian’s performance last week in hip-hop was natural and unforced and just very good, so I had hopes this week, but… no. He was complaining beforehand that he didn’t have a natural feel for the hip action, which was pretty obvious, but even his basic was rough. Of course, give him a big trick and he pulls it off smoothly and effortlessly in the routine, and then falls right back into his bad basic action, so it’s not a lack of ability per se but (I suspect) a lack of comfort with Latin dance generally. Janelle was very rough as well and didn’t compensate with smoothness in the big tricks.

Lindsay and Cole: contemporary. A very good routine danced very well. I’m getting a little tired of “Cole, you’re a martial artist, how are you doing this” comments from the judges when we all know he’s cross-trained in multiple dance styles; it’s like hearing judges gush over Russell in season 6 all over again.

Amelia and Will: jazz. The good: Amelia and Will dance well and have good chemistry. The bad: the choreography (boring, awkward, just unpleasant), the costumes (ugh), Mandy Moore Revisits Her High School CD Collection Vol. 23, all of it. This was just bad on so many levels and Amelia and Will – who did their best with it – got the blame.

Audrey and Matt: salsa. Just awful. Louis Van Amstel clearly made the choreo as straightforward as he could manage for these two (right down to replacing ballroom spins with contemporary pirouettes), but even dancing at practically half-speed and given as much leeway as possible they still completely blew it. This was dreadful: no chemistry, no technique, no nothing. The Janelle/Dareian cha cha (which was not good) was miles ahead of this; hell, last week’s not-very-good Cyrus/Eliana jive was miles ahead of this.

Witney and Chehon: contemporary. Look, I am as big a Stacey Tookey homer as there is, but this was derivative, an “every contemporary routine set to a sweeping ballad and where the performers wear pyjamas” that utterly failed to surprise me in any way. Witney and Chehon were both fine, but this was just a choreo fail for me, and worse than the Mandy Moore fail previously because I expect more from Stacey Tookey.

Eliana and Cyrus: hip-hop. This was pretty damn good, actually (and when was the last episode of SYTYCD when the hip-hop dances were easily the best of the night? Season four, maybe?). Cyrus was predictably great in a routine that catered to his skills, but Eliana danced to, if not quite his level, the level where a classically trained dancer can hang with a hip-hop dancer and look completely credible. Nigel claims that Eliana outdanced Cyrus, which – no, Nigel. Just no. But her performance quality was superb.

And your bottom three for each are: Dareian, Brandon and George for the guys (buuuuuuulllllshiiiiit), and Amber, Eliana and Lindsay for the girls (only one who deserves to be in the bottom three), with Brandon and Amber (thankfully) going home. THIS IS WHY YOU CAN’T BE TRUSTED WITH NICE THINGS, AMERICA.

My friend Jonathan Balofsky wanted to comment on something re: the internet and WWE, and it ties into a longer post I’ve been wanting to write, so take it away, Jon:

Recently, New York Post sportswriter Phil Mushnick once again took aim at the WWE and Vince McMahon over the large number of wrestlers to have died before the age of 45, in an attack on the organization on the eve of RAW 1000. Mushnick has argued in various articles that even though some performers died after leaving WWE, WWE was a large contributor to their deaths (calling the company a death mill), citing among others, Brian Pillman.

This took me ten minutes on Google to research with some assistance from the commenters at wrestlinginc. Maybe it’s time for journalists to do more serious research before they make disrespectful accusations.

Saying that a sportswriter is a hack is kind of a truism: most sportswriters are hacks, after all, and the list1 is in many ways stupid and frivolous, as demonstrated above. However, the list is a bit self-serving.

I don’t buy the “partially responsible” argument with respect to steroid deaths like Curt Hennig or Davey Boy Smith, though, by saying “well, they wrestled other places too!”2. Here is the simple truth: Vince McMahon is a bodybuilder. He always has been, and he wants his wrestlers to be muscular guys, which is why for decades he turned a blind eye to drug use by practically everybody’s admission (and, depending on who you believe, did far more than turn a blind eye). Before the WWF’s rise to prominence, professional wrestlers were not nearly so muscular, ripped and toned – and then they were everywhere because Vince set the national standard and the matching set of expectations as to what wrestlers were supposed to look like. (Eddie Guerrero went from being a slim, muscular man in WCW to a ripped, much bigger man in the WWF.) There is just no way that Vince (and by extension the WWE) does not bear some ethical and moral responsibility for that. Even if they have gone a long way to try and make amends for it by putting together a more coherent testing regime – well, there’s a reason you make amends in the first place.

But the real reason Vince bears responsibility for all those deaths is simple: Vince McMahon has always, always been controlling of the wrestlers he employs, and never missed a chance to exploit them. This recent interview says it more simply than I ever could:

MCMAHON: Our talent is taught not to be prima donnas, to be on time and know their lines. And quite frankly, people in Hollywood, once they see what we do, they are amazed. Our talent doesn’t demand the biggest trailer or a certain amount of grape juice or whatever the hell it is. Our talent is extremely flexible and knows how to act, so it’s a logical extension for them.

Vince McMahon: always willing to explain why it’s a good thing when your employees – whose effort and, yes, pain you have spent a lifetime profiting from – know not to get uppity.

But seriously, the WWE’s attitude towards its employees has gotten better only insofar as Vince is willing to avoid having them die young. Which is not to say he is an inhuman monster who revels in his wrestlers’ suffering, because that would be stupid; I am quite sure that Vince genuinely wishes his employees to be as happy and healthy as possible. But the key word here is “possible,” and the WWE’s well-wishing doesn’t extend to actually employing the wrestlers directly (since that would increase the company’s liability) or directly providing them with health insurance (too expensive). It’s quite true that most wrestlers will say quite willingly that Vince always treated them well and the WWE was a great place to work, and I would imagine most of them are being honest about that – but then again, how would we know? Because every wrestler who doesn’t want to burn bridges with the largest employer in wrestling isn’t going to trash-talk them.3 The WWE hires wrestlers long-term, gives older and semi-retired wrestlers jobs as trainers, road agents, producers – and there are of course the “legends contracts” where retired wrestlers are effectively paid to be retired wrestlers. They all know what happened to the wrestlers who did burn bridges; every few years there’s another cautionary tale, and most of them don’t end up on their feet like Jesse Ventura did.

People who know me know that I generally tend to side with labour when it comes to labour/management disputes, and nowhere else is this more the case than in pro sports, where the labour is the entire reason the product exists even moreso than anywhere else. Pro wrestling isn’t quite as pure in this regard because of its scripted nature, but even so: it is quite obviously the case that the wrestlers drive the product. Regardless of how much credit you want to give Vince for the success of the WWE4 the fact remains that nobody is gonna pay money just to watch the McMahon family soap opera without there being wrestling to drive the product.

Vince’s attitude, though, isn’t unique to him (unfortunately). It’s another example of what Dave Lartigue recently discussed in his excellent post yesterday: management wins when the argument that labour has no inherent worth is conceded. Of course Vince is going to celebrate that his talent isn’t “prima donnas” who don’t want to be treated specially like other actors: anything that diminishes the value of labour and accepts, as a given, that workers aren’t going to assert their equality of value to management is going to be celebrated in management culture. And that’s a problem, because the Vince-as-god belief system has become inherent to wrestling (with people mostly forgetting the 1993-1995 period when the company was at least within the danger zone of going under), and so long as the management/labour relationship is that unbalanced, there’s always going to be problems no matter how beneficient a dictator the manager may be.

At least nowadays the problems mostly aren’t people dying, and that’s certainly a good thing. But it’s setting an awfully low bar to pass, isn’t it?

1. Which appears to be a compilation of wrestler deaths that Mushnick has complained about over the years, and which I won’t bother reproducing or linking – go find a dirtsheet site if you like. [↩]
2. Which is one Vince McMahon has made a few times in an attempt to mitigate PR damage. [↩]
3. At least, not anywhere it will get reported back. [↩]
4. And he deserves credit – despite the failure of the World Bodybuilding Federation. And ICOPRO. And the XFL. And his various attempts to build separate wrestling brands. I suspect we’ll add Tout to this list in a few years. [↩]