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"

We here at mightygodking dot com have, in recent days, seen a lot of nerds complaining about The Dark Knight Rises, which is the latest movie starring Batman and therefore something which will be controversial among nerds. In an attempt to placate those more outraged nerds out there, we offer up the following list of answers to your pressing issues with the new movie about Batman.

Why did they fake the physicist’s death in the plane at the beginning of the movie? What was the point of that?

The physicist was the only person in the world who knew how to turn (theoretical) fusion reactors into bombs, and the feds knew that Bane and his mercenaries were looking for said physicist. Accordingly, they fake his death so the reason they were looking for him specifically became a non-issue for the feds, who have enough on their plates as it is.

It’s stupid that Robin figured out that Batman was Batman by looking at him. He’s never even seen Batman as Batman before!

Well, look at it this way. Blake (not “Robin” – come on, a one-line off-joke to get the cheap recognition laugh does not a Robin make) suffered the same sort of tragedy as Bruce did, and when he saw Bruce, he saw that Bruce was doing the same thing. Then when Batman shows up, Blake thinks “well, you’d need a lot of money to do Batman stuff, like having YOUR OWN SUPER-TANK and stuff, and who do I know who has both a lot of money and the same burning desire to Stop Crime that I do?” And there you go.

As others have noted often enough: it is not terribly hard to figure out Batman’s identity if you are not willfully blind. I mean, fuck, Egghead managed to do it (almost) during the 60s TV series. And he was Egghead.

In any case, if during Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s speech about how he was traumatized for life by the deaths of his parents and how it changes you, your first reaction was “well how did he figure out Batman’s secret identity,” I would kindly suggest maybe you were concentrating on the wrong bit of the movie.

Why did they send ALL THE POLICE underground?

This is a fair comment and the movie’s biggest plot hole. Sure, they didn’t send ALL the police, but they sent the overwhelming majority, which is stupid.

So, yes, this is a plot hole. It does not make the movie bad. (The plot of Casablanca revolved around travel papers signed by De Gaulle – which would have been useless in Nazi-controlled Casablanca.)

How did that guy cure Batman’s back by punching him in the spin?

Eastern medicine or something.

Why does the prison in the middle of nowhere have cable TV?

Because Bane wants Batman to suffer, and Fox News will make you suffer like you would not believe, especially when you don’t get to watch Jon Stewart make fun of them. Bane is a bastard like that. I’m sure Sean Hannity’s nightly monologues about how the Gotham crisis “proves that we need to lower taxes” made Batman suffer like fuck.

How did Batman get from the prison back to Gotham? Why didn’t they show that?

This is a “why didn’t they show Batman doing his taxes, he must have to do taxes” argument. It is a long movie already, and (say) sneaking onto a boat is criminally easy for Batman. Because he is Batman. And there is no reason to show it, so they skipped it. This isn’t a plot hole. This is basic film editing.

How did Batman get onto the island which is supposed to be all locked down?

You realize that Batman’s entire deal is sneaking around and not being seen, right?

Why did those police officers just run at the hoods with machine guns instead of using modern tactics?

Because the point of their charge is not to demonstrate how to take a position using flanking maneuvers, but to demonstrate that Men Can Stand Against Evil, even if it means their own deaths. Really, aren’t nerds sick of the “tactics” argument by now? Must we treat every movie like it’s a fucking real-time strategy game? Is it not enough to see men charging at one another in an awesome manner?

Again: this is a movie about a man who flies around in a giant bat-thing which in real life would never get off the ground, and this is where you cannot suspend disbelief?

What about the fallout from the bomb?

They expressly said it was a neutron bomb at one point, and a neutron bomb wouldn’t create fallout (and the radiation would get mostly absorbed by the water anyway). It wouldn’t create a mushroom cloud either, to be fair, but mushroom clouds are awesome-looking, so the cheat is forgivable.

I don’t like grim and serious Batman. I like fun, energetic Batman.

Then go watch the Adam West series or Batman: The Brave and the Bold or read some old Batman comics from the 60s and 70s. Really, you have no end of options for fun, energetic (and campy) Batman. We are talking literally hundreds of hours of it you can watch, so I’m not sure why you’re complaining about this particular movie when, going in, you probably should have been able to figure out that maaaaaaaybeeeeee the third film in a Batman trilogy which has been extremely serious and grim in tone thus far would differ from the first two.

Things have been a little light here this week because Torontoist asked me to review the latest report into the events at the G20 Summit here in Toronto back in 2010, and it took me a while to plow through it. But if you want my take on this one, it is here.

FLAPJACKS: So your problem is that nobody likes you and everybody hates you? Is that more or less the problem? It sounds like the problem.
MITT ROMNEY: Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say –
FLAPJACKS: Right, so nobody likes you and everybody hates you. That’s not a problem. We can work with this. So… hm. There’s this tax return thing. You don’t want to release them.
MITT ROMNEY: You see, I don’t –
FLAPJACKS: Shut up. Doesn’t matter. We’re not going to release the tax returns. What we’re going to do is campaign against the right person.
MITT ROMNEY: Isn’t the President the right person?
FLAPJACKS: No, people like him. Except for the people who don’t, and they are already holding their noses and voting for you because of the aforementioned “everybody hates you” problem. What we need to do is flip the dynamic inverseways. That is a trademarked phrase, by the way. I trademarked that.
MITT ROMNEY: That seems like something you shouldn’t be able to trademark.
FLAPJACKS: You’re just saying that because you’re a billionaire finance guy. See? This is why everybody hates you. But it is fixable. What we are going to do is campaign against somebody else.
MITT ROMNEY: But nobody else is running for President. Nobody serious, anyway.
FLAPJACKS: So what? Look, the next time someone says “Mr. Romney, when are you going to release your tax returns,” you say “well, when is Tom Cruise going to release the terms of his divorce settlement to Katie Holmes? What is Tom Cruise hiding?” This will work because people may be entertained by Tom Cruise, but they don’t exactly like Tom Cruise. You will put Tom Cruise on the defensive this way.
MITT ROMNEY: But Tom Cruise isn’t –
FLAPJACKS: GAH. How hard is this to understand? You will not get people to like you better than Obama. It’s not going to happen. But if you flip the dynamic inverseways tee-em, then you might be able to get people to like you better than Tom Cruise. The choice between you and Tom Cruise is a campaign that maybe you can win. Meanwhile, the President is sitting over on the other side saying “but wait, Tom Cruise is a meaningless distraction” and nobody pays attention because they’re all, like, distracted and stuff.
MITT ROMNEY: But what if I can’t beat Tom Cruise?
FLAPJACKS: Then we go after someone else. Mel Gibson, maybe.
MITT ROMNEY: Actually, Mel donated –
FLAPJACKS: SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP. God, you can ruin anything, can’t you? When are you going to start listening to me? We need to work on this. Okay, so if not Mel Gibson, maybe a Kardashian. I don’t want to start out with a Kardashian because that’s sort of like if Mike Tyson fought Ernest Borgnine, but a win is a win.
MITT ROMNEY: So I’m like Mike Tyson, then?
FLAPJACKS: Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Mr. Candidate. Okay, so we’ve got you beating Tom Cruise. That wins you everybody who hates and/or envies Hollywood, plus everybody who is freaked out about Scientology. So, win. But we need more. We need the votes of the people who love Hollywood. And to do that, we must get Hollywood to love you. Or at least tolerate you, sorta.
MITT ROMNEY: And how do we do that?
FLAPJACKS: We have you apologize for your Diet Coke addiction.
MITT ROMNEY: But I’m not addicted to Diet Coke. I’m a Mormon. We don’t drink caffeinated drinks.
FLAPJACKS: Start. Diet Coke is, like, delicious acid. So it’ll be easy. But even better than that, it will humanize you. People think you are a soulless robot.
MITT ROMNEY: I know.
FLAPJACKS: They look for the wires in your back.
MITT ROMNEY: Uh huh.
FLAPJACKS: They ask you how many diodes are in your tongue.
MITT ROMNEY: I get it.
FLAPJACKS: They ask you “what is love” in an attempt to make you explode.
MITT ROMNEY: Can we drop this?
FLAPJACKS: Okay. Soulless robots don’t get addicted to things. So we get you addicted to Diet Coke. First off, it will make you seem sympathetic. People will overlook the fact that you are a rich tycoon who ruthlessly exploited the American financial system in order for your own benefit, because you’re just like them.
MITT ROMNEY: I don’t see it.
FLAPJACKS: Christ, George W. Bush figured this out. Why do you think he became an alcoholic? Whose idea was that?
MITT ROMNEY: Wait, that was you?
FLAPJACKS: Well, no, I was six. But retroactively I am claiming it, and you know I can do that.
MITT ROMNEY: …right.
FLAPJACKS: Anyway, the point is this: Hollywood fucking loves Diet Coke. My god, do they love Diet Coke. They would have it coming out of taps if they could manage it. I understand many of the rich ones do have it coming out of taps. So when you admit, tearfully, that you are not a perfect Mormon and you have a Diet Coke addiction, Hollywood will like you better. Not as much as Obama, who is a smoker trying to quit, because that is golden right there. But they will at least understand your cold, robotic soul.
MITT ROMNEY: And that helps me win?
FLAPJACKS: Maybe. Depends on how the Tom Cruise thing goes. We need to get America to open their hearts to you.
MITT ROMNEY: So I can win their votes.
FLAPJACKS: Well, I was going to say “so you can rip them out like that guy in Temple of Doom,” but then again he didn’t need anybody to open their hearts because he used magic. Do you have any magic?
MITT ROMNEY: No.
FLAPJACKS: Pity.

Starting when I was nine or so, during the summer and on weekends I would try to stay up as late as possible. This is not unusual for kids, of course, but I was moderately creative about it: I would read in bed with a flashlight, and then, when I heard my mom go to bed, I would wait a while and then I would sneak downstairs, since the TV was in the basement. Then I would watch late-night TV with impunity. Of course, I soon found out the hard way that the air conditioning vents would act like string telephones to my parents’ room, but this did not dissuade me since I quickly figured out that stuffing cushions into the vents would effectively mute them.

I can’t say that the late-night TV at that time was particularly engrossing. My mom usually didn’t go to bed early enough for me to catch anything earlier than the second half of Late Night With David Letterman (e.g. “the not as good half”). But there were sitcoms: episodes of Check It Out! (which started getting late-night airing soon after it debuted, never a good sign), Alice, Gloria, and One Day At A Time. There were plenty of movies airing from one to three: the first time I ever saw Night Shift was by staying up late. Ditto The Great Train Robbery, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, A Shot In The Dark, The Omega Man, The Dream Team, The Seven Per Cent Solution. Probably I was too young to be seeing a lot of these, but so what.

However, at a certain point even TV would give up the ghost; this was the 80s, and 24-hour channels were a thing of the distant future. I, of course, being a irrational kid, wanted to stay up as late as possible, because dammit if I was going to stay up then I was going to stay up. But, inevitably, come 4 a.m., there would be only one thing on the air. Night Drive. Night Drive was Global Television’s late-night programming stroke of genius, because Global recognized that there were people at 4 a.m. who wanted to watch something on television that wasn’t static or a test pattern. Granted, most of these people were drunks. But they still wanted to watch something. Global figured out that, since nobody else aired anything at that time of night, they could therefore air anything and some people would watch it.

Hence, Night Drive. The entire show was three hours of pretaped footage of somebody driving around in Toronto, and it was set to soft jazz. That’s the whole thing. And here is the fun part: there were commercials! In later years I would find out that Global would either sell the ads on Night Drive for a pittance to companies too cash-strapped to buy commercial time anywhen else, or offer ad time on Night Drive as a bonus for companies buying ad time when people were actually watching TV (“if you buy space on ALF, you get Night Drive for free”). Its largest audience was supposedly prisoners who loved watching scenes of sweet, sweet freedom, but I have trouble imagining, in retrospect, that prisons would let prisoners in the TV room at 4 a.m., so I think that must have been an urban legend.

Watching Night Drive now makes me almost nostalgic for Toronto-that-was. You can see a lot of old Toronto here that no longer exists – the original Sam the Record Man, the arcade strip on Yonge (which is long gone, the last of the great arcades now over a decade dead and gone, and the buildings which housed them bulldozed for larger, more modern, multi-story commercial developments), Maple Leaf Gardens before it was retrofitted to become a Loblaws. (In New York, they had the good taste to call Madison Square Garden’s replacement Madison Square Garden, because they appreciate history. Maple Leaf Gardens’ replacement is the Air Canada Centre, which is soulless and sad and everything that is shitty about pro sports today.) Now, Toronto is gradually becoming a more brightly-lit city, which generally I welcome – it’s both safer and prettier – but there is that mood that a dark city brings that is not duplicable in the modern age. It feels like pulp.

In any case, Night Drive was far more successful than it had any right to be. So what did Global do?

It did what any good television channel did: it created a spinoff.

My weely TV column is up at Torontoist.

It’s bad enough that Daniel Tosh started talking about how funny rape jokes are. I’ll admit, that’s about the level of “humor” you’d expect from a man whose TV series consists of him showing YouTube videos and saying, “Hey, these people are dumbasses,” but it’s still a level of humor that you normally expect from that one guy in the fraternity who doesn’t realize that awkward silence doesn’t actually mean they’re secretly agreeing with you and don’t want to admit it. It is far, far worse when someone in the audience finally got fed up with how much of a worthless shit of a human being he was and called him on it, he responded by suggesting it would be funny if that person was gang-raped by the rest of the audience. (I sincerely hope that all of you are responding with, “Wait, he did what now?”) These things are terrible, but I will admit that my opinion of Daniel Tosh was already low enough that finding out he was inciting people to sexual assualt did not actually do much to make me think less of him.

I will admit, it made me think quite a bit less of talented comedians like Louis C.K. and Patton Oswalt to find out that they were defending this as an exercise of free speech. Because while the initial monologue is free speech and must be defended as such, his response to the heckler would have to be considered as incitement to violence, which is not constitutionally protected. (You could, I suppose, argue that while his statement was clearly “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action”, it was not “likely to incite or produce such action”. But given that the woman felt threatened enough to immediately leave the building, I would say that Tosh has no more grounds to his defense than I would if I was in the audience and started shouting about how funny it would be if we all started throwing our glasses at the stage. A room full of mildly intoxicated people is enough of a twitchy thing that I’d say any comments inciting them to violence are a terrible mistake.)

But here is the lesson for today: FOR FUCK’S SAKE, people, if you do hear about this, and you absolutely must feel compelled to defend Tosh’s actions as anything other than, “Have you seen this guy? He’s so coked up he doesn’t know what he’s doing half the time! If he has pants on, it’s a good day for him! You can’t take anything that comes out of his mouth as being meaningful; it’s like getting mad at the chimp for throwing shit at you! He’s never going to learn to behave like a civilized human being, and at least putting him on stage at a comedy club keeps him off the streets…”

…then please, do not fucking argue, “Well, she was a heckler, and heckling is such a social faux pas that people who do it deserve to be humiliated by the comedian that they just insulted. After all, Don Rickles and George Carlin and Richard Pryor did that kind of thing all the time!” Because saying this is a very good sign that you are not a decent human being, and if you find that statement leaping to mind as your defense, it is time to sit down for some serious introspection. (Michael Richards quit stand-up and went to Angkor Wat. I’m not suggesting that you go to Cambodian temples to get your head straight, but there are probably some very nice Buddhists in your own home country who can help.)

Because Daniel Tosh did not humiliate that woman. She did not leave that club as fast as she could because she felt humiliated. She left because she felt threatened. Put as kind a face on it as you want, suggest that the threat was not meant seriously if you feel like it, but Daniel Tosh threatened her for talking back to him. There is no fucking act of speech that should ever get, “I want the people in this room to gang-rape you” as a response. And yeah, this is one of those things that I’m going to act all self-righteous about, because yes, I am better than someone who thinks it’s okay to threaten a woman with sexual assault when she says a comedian isn’t funny. It’s not that high of a bar. And yes, even though people say this about just about everything on the Internet up to and including preferring Nightwing to Batman…disagreeing with that really does make you a worse human being. Sorry if you’re just now finding that out, but better you hear it from me than someone else.

It took a lot longer than I thought, but I’ve tabulated all the suggested lists of Avengers from my last post, and tallied them up.  I should point out the following qualifications:

• Not everybody made it easy.  If you said something like “I would sub in Martinex” and didn’t say who you’re subbing him for or in what list, then guess what, you just nominated a one-man Avengers team consisting of Martinex.  If you didn’t make any sense, I ignored you.  If you rambled on about “My 16th slot would either be Hogun the Grim or Sharon Carter, but later I’d replace them with Overmind,” then I just marked down Hogun the Grim and disregarded the others, because it’s DECISION TIME and I ain’t got time for you to quibble.  If you posted two lists, I used the first one.   You guys must have been real fun taking the SATs.
• A lot of characters have used multiple aliases and a lot of aliases have been used by multiple characters.  I did my best to infer the intent of each voter.  I assumed “Captain Marvel” meant Carol Danvers and “Wasp” meant Janet Van Dyne unless otherwise stated.  I assumed anyone picking Monica Rambeau would know they need to be as specific as possible, but if they picked “Photon” they probably meant Monica and not Genis-Vell.  A lot of people nominated “Spider-Woman” without specifying Jessica Drew or Julia Carpenter; I’d bet half meant one and half meant the other, but for the sake of clarity I’m assuming Jessica except where I was told otherwise.  Nobody who picked “Quasar” said which one (I think they meant Wendell Vaughn), so we’ll all have to live with the mystery.
• As you might imagine from the above, I did not do a particularly thorough statistical analysis of the data, because the data I had to work with was fuzzy and this is not important enough for me to go back and ask fifty-something people (I didn’t count) to do it over and clarify if they meant Jacques Duquesne or Phillip Javert as the Swordsman.  I just wanted a general consensus on who should be in the Avengers, and I got it.  If someone cares enough to triple-check my work, go ahead on.

OK, enough jaw-jacking, here are the top 18 picks, and therefore logically the IDEAL AVENGERS ROSTER:

1. Captain America (45)
2. Iron Man (43)
3. Hawkeye (43)
4. Captain Marvel/Carol Danvers (42)
5. Thor (39)
6. The Wasp/Janet Van Dyne (33)
7. The Black Panther (33)
8. The Vision (33)
9. The Scarlet Witch (32)
10. Hank Pym (28)1
11. The Black Widow (26)
12. She-Hulk/Jennifer Walters (22)
13. Luke Cage (19)
14. Quicksilver (18)
15. Beast (18)
16. Monica Rambeau (17)
17. Hercules (17)
18. The Hulk (16)

Runners-up and analysis after the cut.

continue reading "Some Assembly Required"

1. I’m counting 3 votes for “Ant-Man” and one for “Giant-Man” that didn’t clearly specify any particular person under the mask. [↩]

I’m not actually reading DC Comics any more – the combination of moral ickiness re: Alan Moore and the new comics just mostly being shit is enough for them not to get my comics dollars any more, beyond a few collections. The final Hitman trade paperback is due out in August and I believe that will be the last DC comic I purchase for the foreseeable future, because I pretty much own all the stuff I will ever want from DC ever, because they were good enough to have produced pretty much all of it years and years ago. Maybe they will do some deluxe Legion reprints of the Giffbaum era at some point and I will buy those.1

But someone handed me the first three issues of Earth 2 last week, and – well, they’re shitty comics, of course. I mean, it’s great that they’re setting up Alan Scott as basically Earth-2’s Superman equivalent, except he’s gay. But all this means, in practice, is that they replace a woman in a refrigerator with a gay lover on an exploding train; that the comic is slightly more progressive doesn’t make it not-shitty. It’s just a non-shitty note in a shitty comic. But the Nu52 version of Solomon Grundy shows up at the end of the third issue, and it is basically a microcosm of everything I now hate about DC Comics.

The new Solomon Grundy appears to be some sort of avatar of death – he bears an irritating resemblance to the revamped design of Necron that showed up in Blackest Night, with leather bondage straps and skirt-trousers and things like that (and has it really been over two years since that awful, no-good crossover finally ended? It seems like it was just yesterday that its unflagging shittiness was new to us). He is an avatar of death because Earth-2’s Green Lantern is, sort of, an avatar of life.

This is stupid. This is bad everything-is-connected comics writing. It’s all the more startling coming from James Robinson, who wrote a damn good Solomon Grundy when he used Grundy in Starman, but what every comics writer seems to be saying these days is that DC comics are basically written by the editorial staff now, because god forbid they trust some hack like George Perez or John Rozum to write a damn superhero comic book. But regardless of who is actually writing this, it is bad, because Solomon Grundy is not an avatar of death. Nobody wants to read about Solomon Grundy being an avatar of death. What people want out of Solomon Grundy being in a comic is for him to be, when you get right down to it, a off-brand version of the Hulk who is usually a bad guy.

Seriously, this shit isn’t hard. Solomon Grundy is a copy of the Hulk that lets DC Comics write the Hulk into stories without having to negotiate anything with Marvel. That’s the entire fucking point of the character. He can be a vicious cunning Hulk (like in the Golden Age stories where he first showed up) or he can be a dumb savage Hulk (like he was in The Long Halloween), or he can be a gentle cute and cuddly Hulk (like in Starman). But that’s who he is. That’s who the fans expect him to be. There’s no reason to try and tie him into the rest of your superhero universe’s pre-determined theory; really, if you’re writing a superhero universe and everything ties back to one central origin element for everybody, you’re probably doing something wrong.2 If you try to write Grundy as being anything else, you just wasting paper and ink on your own lousy concept.

I mean, it’s not like anybody was going to think Mr. Avatar of Death was an awesome idea if you called him “Death-O” or something.3 That’s how you know it’s a shitty idea: whenever DC knows an idea is shitty, they grab one of their existing intellectual properties from the Not Bein’ Used Trunk4 and awkwardly slap it onto the shitty idea in the hopes that fanboys will say “oh, it’s the new version of [NAME], I loved the old version, let’s give this a try.” Granted, they do this whenever they think they have a good idea too, because, well, DC Comics. But it’s more egregious when it’s something like this – when not two years ago DC put out a nigh-unreadable Solomon Grundy miniseries that tried to incorporate Grundy into the larger DC comics mythos and which was a horrible creative misfire, and now they’re doing it again but even moreso.

The bottom line is this: Grundy works best when you keep him simple. He’s a sorta-undead sorta-plantman Hulk. You don’t have to explain it any more than that. You don’t buy a comic with Solomon Grundy in it because you want a deep plot about Grundy’s origin or motivations. You buy a comic with Solomon Grundy in it because you want to see him punch the good guy in the face and then get punched in the face by the good guy (or something along those lines). The fact that DC no longer seems to understand this is a large part of why I – a DC fan since I was six – no longer buy their comics.

STRICTLY FOR CLASSIC GRUNDY.

1. V4 LSH is something I keep meaning to discuss, mostly because of Giffen’s use of the ninepanel grid – now that I’ve experimented personally with ninepanel storytelling, I find the format fascinating and keep meaning to return to it for a dedicated long-form story. But I digress. [↩]
2. Or you are Garth Ennis writing The Boys, which is, by the way, probably his fourth long-form comics masterpiece. More on this in another post sometime. [↩]
3. Actually, given the 90s ethos currently pervading DC, I guess he would be something like “Grymm.” TO THE EXTREEEEEEME. [↩]
4. Which I believe is in Paul Levitz’ old publisher’s office. [↩]

Witney and Chehon: samba. That opening pirouette by Chehon made me think that they were aiming for a redux of Lacey and Danny’s samba from season 3, but unfortunately Chehon isn’t quite comparable to Danny’s level when Danny did ballroom: he dropped in and out of the samba basic repeatedly and the hip movement wasn’t there, and given that this entire routine was choreoed at beginner level half-speed (as compared to other SYTYCD ballroom routines, e.g., the good ones) that does not bode well. On top of that, Whitney and Chehon have very, very little chemistry together. Witney was excellent, of course, as expected, but not enough to carry this to what it needed to be. Disappointing opening.

Tiffany and George: contemporary. Quite a lovely piece of work from Sonya here as she avoids her usual tics and had some really brilliant moves worked into her piece (the paired kicks en pointe while hand in hand? Daaaaaaamn). The only criticism I can make here is a minor one: George’s sense of balance is a bit lacking (he tends to fall out of his pirouettes and overcompensate on his aerial spins). This is a very, very minor criticism, however. This is a good pairing so far.

Janaya and Brandon: hip-hop. Oh, a Tabitha and Napoleon piece about a man overcoming his addiction to alcohol in the name of true love? Been there, done that – and it was better choreo and better dancing the first time. Nigel actually mentions that NappyTabs choreoed the thing so that it was much less hard-hitting than traditional hip-hop, which is to say “like most hip-hop on this show.” Brandon was fine. Janaya was acceptable but nothing special. Meh.

Alexa and Danny: jazz. I’m gonna go ahead and say the artistic decision by Sean Cheeseman to choreo a piece using scaffolding was kind of a bad idea because about a quarter of the piece was, uh, climbing – and when they first came down off the scaffolding, they were off the beat for at least another five or six seconds until they recovered. I suspect if they had been on time for the entire routine I would have been “kinda liked it,” because their dancing was quite good when they were in sync. But they weren’t, so I didn’t.

Amber and Nick: Viennese waltz. So I guess they’re going for the “first week, every non-contemporary dancer gets their own genre” plan again? (Oh, poor Cyrus.) Anyway. The rise and fall in this (and I think good waltzes live and die by the rise and fall) was a little bit inconsistent – I would have liked to see a tiny bit more, particularly from Nick – but the spins were both incredibly ornate and perfectly executed, and the general grace of the piece was there. Nigel references Dance Moms in his critique, which – don’t do that, Nigel.

Amelia and Will: hip-hop. Never mind, then: they’re letting people dance out of genre – oh, wait, no, this is just a jazz dance with a few brief hip-hop sequences thrown in. Granted, it was a fun routine, and Amelia and Will danced well (although they did not dance hip-hop well – they danced through the isos and there was no pullback where it needed to be) and have excellent chemistry together, but good lord, this show will call literally anything hip-hop, won’t it? If they had just called it a jazz or Broadway routine I would be less irritated. I mean, even Nigel said it wasn’t hip-hop, and Nigel has praised some of the least hard-hitting hip-hop I’ve ever seen as being exemplary of the genre.

Janelle and Dareian: Afro-jazz. This felt lacking. Both dancers hit all their marks and in time, but for me it lacked energy, especially in the middle – I like Afro-jazz when it feels wild and barely contained, and this was just not that thing. Perhaps it was too intricate for the pair of them, perhaps they were taking it easy of Janelle after her rough start and her injuries – but I was very meh on this. Good chemistry between the two of them, though.

Eliana and Cyrus: Broadway. Actually, I’m glad to see Cyrus not dancing hip-hop, because he’s not a classic hip-hop dancer and when he didn’t murder it he would get shit on for not dancing well “in his genre.” Instead, he gets to dance a boring Tasty Oreo Broadway and the judges go apeshit over it because… I have no idea. Eliana was really quite good. Cyrus was at the bare minimum of acceptable and I suspect he got pimped more than he deserves so that the judges don’t have another Cedric in season 3 situation on their hands.

Audrey and Matthew: contemporary. Very meh choreography which the judges pimp because it’s Travis and they can’t say their golden child is boring, after all, and they praise Travis for doing things like “choreographing kicks to the cymbal crashes” which is sort of like praising him for setting a routine to music, when you get down to it. Audrey and Matthew are perfectly good. But yeesh.

Lindsay and Cole: paso doble. I wasn’t terribly wild about Jason Gilkison’s choreo in this (even he can have off nights – I felt the choreo didn’t build to a climax as effectively as a good paso routine on this show should), but other than the choreo not being quite what I would have hoped for, this was basically – well, Lindsay and Cole danced somewhat imperfect choreo perfectly. Flawless chemistry and I really am looking forward to see what this partnership can continue to produce.

Probable bottom threes: BOYS: Chehon, Danny, Nick. GIRLS: Alexa, Janaya, Amber.
Should go home: Chehon and Janaya.
Will go home: Chehon and Alexa.

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.

Someone a while back, I forget who (hold up your hand in the audience if you read this, I guess) asked me how I would book the WWE given the chance. Now, the traditional internet-smark thing to say here is “well I would bury John Cena and make the fans care about Tyson Kidd and then I would book Dean Ambrose to win every title on his first night and also every wrestler I like would be a cool heel again.” I would do none of this. Well, I would try to make fans care about Tyson Kidd, because he is really great. But not the rest of it.

I also know that, after last night’s truly dreadful RAW, the obvious thing to do is decry it as being horrible wrestling and say “I would do the opposite of that.” But, unfortunately (from my perspective, anyway), the fans in attendance clearly had a great time last night. John Cena’s fan support has not been this strong in years (when was the last time you heard a really strong “Cena Sucks” chant?). There are lots of people out there who want to see Santino Marella in silly slapstick sketches and want to see Michael Cole get beaten up. (I am not convinced that anybody wants to see Hornswoggle the midget, though. Sometimes that sort of thing is just the result of Vince McMahon thinking midgets are inherently funny.) Saying that these people are wrong to want to watch these things is, frankly, not good business. So you don’t just cut them off.

But at the same time you want to also make them care about the wrestling, which is what drives the program and the narratives. So you need a vehicle to do that. I would do it this way:

Recently the WWE has been running a “who will be the next General Manager” angle, bringing back all of the old former general managers. (For those not following: the General Manager is a sort of authority figure for the show who, story-wise, is the one who makes matches happen.) Now, all of the options are basically dreadful because the General Manager concept is so played out in wrestling generally at this point that it makes Jersey Shore seem underexposed in comparison: we’re on our seventh or eighth iteration of an imitation of Vince McMahon’s heel act by now and Vince McMahon knew well enough to get off the air before he got so stale himself that the fans would no longer cheer when he intermittently showed up. Every General Manager is the same: make matches, abuse authority against the people they don’t like (face GMs abuse heels, heel GMs abuse faces), generally be a waste of space otherwise. Nobody actually cheers Teddy Long, after all. He’s just sort of there.

So I would kill it. Not get rid of the GM position outright, but when Vince or HHH or whoever assembles the candidates, I would have a new character come out as well. Maybe he grabs a microphone and interrupts Vince as Vince is about to decide between Vickie Guerrero and Mick Foley or something. (“How did you get a microphone?” “Vince, your sound techs will give pretty much anybody a microphone.”) This new guy who we have never seen before would come down to the ring and make his pitch: he’s a guy WWE corporate recruited for an interview, but Vince has been blowing him off for weeks, et cetera. (Ideally we would get some vignettes of Vince blowing off the guy first so that the internet could go “wait, who is this guy?” But that is not necessary.)

And the new guy basically makes his case. Every GM Vince has hired has been a failure because he keeps hiring from within the business, and outside of the WWE you wouldn’t hire Teddy Long to manage a McDonald’s, much less a major sporting organization. But New Guy has sports management experience, and alternative dispute resolution experience, and most of all he doesn’t have any grudges towards any of the wrestlers. His strongest point is that, if Vince fires him, he’ll just shrug and go work somewhere else for half a million dollars. And that’s why he’s the guy Vince should hire. So he gets a tryout show, nails it, becomes the new GM, and thereafter his onscreen role is extremely limited: no speeches, maybe one appearance per RAW to set up matches or address a wrestler’s complaint in a completely neutral tone.

The New GM makes the following rule changes:

1.) From now on, one title – let’s say the US title – must be defended at every TV show and PPV. This is an old tradition going back to the early days of WCW and their TV title, and it’s a good one. Plus if it’s the US title we can get some amusement out of Santino in the ring before he finally drops it. To make it “fairer to the champion” who has to constantly defend the title, all of these title matches have a ten-minute time limit. Presto: the US title matters again. (You can even merge it with the Intercontinental title if you like – after all, WWE’s roster isn’t much larger than when they only had two singles titles. Right now they have four, which is the equal of WCW at its peak, and that organization had a roster of nearly 100 wrestlers at that point!)

2.) Second change: blatantly steal the Bound For Glory Title Series idea that TNA is currently doing, because fuck it, it’s a good idea and it turns non-title matches into important marquee matches, and the first rule of wrestling booking, I think, is that Every Match Should Matter As Much As Possible. You can have wrestlers competing for the opportunity to have a title series match, even – this would be a great way to put newbie wrestlers into matches that would have some appreciable stakes for the fans to root about, even if the next week they just get trounced by Established Superstar in said title series match. And the point of the title series is to get the other title shot at WrestleMania – you know, the one that the Royal Rumble winner doesn’t get.

3.) Final change: if you want a title shot, you have to win a lot of matches. No more heels or faces coming up and demanding a title shot just because – New GM will say “well, tough, you lost your last X matches except for this one, and that was only a DQ anyway. I’ll give the title match to Mister Winning A Lot Lately.”

That’s basically it. I don’t see the point of altering the booking much more than that; maybe make the comedy bits a bit less obviously dumb, make Cena’s character a bit less of a dick and more of a Superman-style face, and write angles more for the long term, but those are relatively minor things, much like bringing back King of the Ring (which I would also totally do). The important thing is to kill the authority figure angle as dead as possible, and to make individual matches on what is soon to be a 3-hour show matter in and of themselves so that viewer interest is retained.