See, I have a problem with this:

The problem is that I know I’m going to be all “but wait, if the games don’t work when the bad guys aren’t there, do the bad guys ever get, like, time off? What if the game is on all the time?”

And I know the answer is “shut up,” and normally I shunt disbelief aside pretty easily. But this one seems to be niggling at me for some reason.

This week Marvel is renaming Thunderbolts to Dark Avengers, presumably to boost sales by disguising the comic as an integral part of the Avengers franchise.  I’m not sure it’ll work, but Thunderbolts has always been my favorite comic book so I appreciate the effort.  Since I’m concerned that Dark Avengers #175 won’t exactly be a perfect jumping-on point, I’ve decided to help out with a quick introduction to what T-bolts has been about, and why I hope Dark Avengers will continue along the same themes.

Marvel readers probably know Thunderbolts best for its first storyline, about a team of new superheroes that turned out to be supervillains plotting to take over the world.1  Since then T-bolts has widely been regarded as a villain book, but I think that’s an inadequate description.   Thunderbolts is less about guys in black hats as what it means to wear the black hat, or to take it off and try on a white one.  This is where redemption is usually brought up as a major theme, but I don’t think the book is about becoming good any more or less than it’s about being bad.  It’s really about good and people put in a position where they must question their goodness or badness.  Thunderbolts is the comic where Baron Zemo found his principles and Henry Peter Gyrich abandoned his; where Hawkeye became received a 20-year prison sentence and Venom became a federal agent.  It’s where Radioactive Man developed into a three-dimensional protagonist and Speedball degenerated into a one-dimensional lunatic; where Songbird found a cause worth dedicating her life to and Nighthawk just found a bunch of assholes mooching off his money.  In short, saying Thunderbolts is about villains is like saying Legion of Super-Heroes is about teenagers.

That might sound like I’m knocking other well-known “villain books,” most notably Gail Simone’s Secret Six and John Ostrander’s Suicide Squad.  Far from it.  But what sets Thunderbolts apart is its central theme of hope–hope that bad guys can become better guys and the control of hope to influence the world for better or worse.  Ultimately the Suicide Squad is only trying to survive its next job to get a reduced prison sentence, and the Secret Six is only out to take care of themselves, but the Thunderbolts usually have loftier ambitions, even if they sometimes end up tilting at windmills.  The book plays upon multiple contradictions–villains as heroes, sociopaths as teammates, the forces of evil as a force for hope–and it tends to feature characters who can find methods in that madness; lateral thinkers looking to accomplish big things with unlikely resources.  The T-bolts are the kind of guys who plot to defeat an Elder of the Universe with a handgun and recruit the Man-Thing to be their Batmobile.

For most of the past fifteen years, Thunderbolts has been at the top of my reading pile.  It’s at its best when its cast is devious enough to be cunning, but not so professional that they could hack it as A-list heroes or villains.  The recently-concluded time-travel story arc (#163-174) is a perfect example: The Thunderbolts stomp around the past with little regard for the damage they might cause, but they prove surprisingly competent in overcoming whatever problems are thrown at them.  The appeal of a villainous character, as Jeff Parker recently observed, is that they can fail and make mistakes in ways that heroes won’t.  But more to the point, a villain playing hero can also think outside the box and make unexpected choices about both heroism and villainy.  Thunderbolts has tended to take flat or underutilized characters and revamp them in this way, giving them choices to ponder and problems to confront that are more stimulating than robbing a bank without being caught by Spider-Man.  Baron Zemo, for example, is a pretty decent antagonist, but he’s more interesting when he’s trying to be his own definition of a hero, and far more compelling when you’re not sure if he’s out to save the world, rule the world, or both.

There isn’t room here to relate the entire Thunderbolts backstory, so I’ll only briefly recap the past five years.  Originally the T-bolts were independent operators, but when Iron Man nationalized the superhero population in Civil War, the team was reorganized as a federal program for rehabilitating supervillains and putting them to good use doing superhero work.  Norman Osborn (of Green Goblin fame) was put in charge, and although he perverted the team’s mandate of redemption, he was eventually promoted to Iron Man’s job.  Osborn recreated the Avengers in his image, restaffing the team with several of his Thunderbolts in what is commonly called the “Dark” Avengers.  Eventually, the real superheroes put a stop to his psychotic notions of national security, and the Dark Avengers were disbanded.2

In the aftermath, the Thunderbolts program was revived with Luke Cage at the helm.  Along with longtime Thunderbolts like Mach-V and Songbird, Cage ran the team like a work release program, recruiting hardened criminals willing to do superhero jobs in exchange for preferential treatment.  But this setup was a little to Suicide Squad to work in Thunderbolts, and was doomed to fail–the chain gang found an opportunity to escape and took it.  At the same time, Norman Osborn came back with a second phony Avengers team, which was quickly defeated and incarcerated by the real ones.  This new Dark Avengers team has been assigned to Cage as replacements for his missing prisoners, and their first mission is to hunt down the Thunderbolts. 3

That brings us to Dark Avengers #175, which starts a storyline written by Jeff Parker and illustrated by Kev Walker and Declan Shalvey.  They’ve done a great job with T-bolts for several years, and by now they have my full confidence that they can take a new cast of obscure and unimpressive characters and come up with something fantastic.  (I never gave a crap about the Ghost or Boomerang before they joined the Thunderbolts, but under Parker they’ve become two of my favorites.)  Parker’s scripts are a perfect blend of the  ribald humor we got from Fabian Niceiza and the grim earnestness of Warren Ellis’s classic run, along with his own flair for the bizarre and grotesque.  Walker and Shalvey keep up with wherever the stories take them, from Satana’s harem of succubi to the inside the Juggernaut’s soul to the dungeons of Camelot.

Over the years people have wondered why I’m so crazy about Thunderbolts, but the simple fact is that the comic has had an almost uninterrupted streak of good-to-great creative teams, and it’s pretty hard to pick out a bad issue.4  As long as Dark Avengers remembers where it came from, I expect that it’ll continue that streak and be some damn good comics.  I highly recommend giving it a try this month.

1. They successfully conquered two thirds of the world, for a few hours, and I don’t think they get nearly enough credit for that.  That’s more than Lex Luthor ever did. [↩]
2. This is a very abbreviated summary of Thunderbolts #103-143, Dark Avengers #1-16, and Siege #1-4. [↩]
3. For more details, see Thunderbolts #144-174 and New Avengers vol. 2 #18-23. [↩]
4. Hell, even “Fightbolts” wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t a Thunderbolts story. [↩]

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

So last week, I made a post about women in fandom and the ways that they interact with canon. Many things were said in the comments, but one of them stuck in my mind particularly: Klytus, one of the commenters, said, “what makes me sad is that these girls could be reading the comics instead of just obsessing over the films.”

Setting aside the whole question of whether he refers to male comics fans as “boys”, even when some of them are in their forties, I have to ask: Why on Earth would you wish that on them? The question seems to imply that there’s some sort of inherent superiority in being a fan of the Avengers comic as opposed to “just” enjoying the movies, like there’s a whole world they’re missing out on if only they could be convinced to get into it. If only they could get into storylines like the Hood slapping around Tigra(1), or Jessica Jones getting raped and psychologically tortured by the Purple Man(2)…if only they’d really get to like the unrealistic depictions of hypersexualized female figures, drawn in poses that defy not just the laws of anatomy but quite possibly physics as well(3)…in short, if only they’d sit down and try to read a comic that has continually redefined itself to more narrowly appeal to an audience of adolescents and arrested adolescents, they’d be better fans! As defined, of course, by the shrinking-and-increasingly irrelevant audience of comics fans.(4)

To be fair, there is an alternative interpretation (albeit one that generously decides to ignore the pejorative connotations of “just obsessing” along with generously ignoring the pejorative connotations of “girls”, but never let it be said that I’m not generous…) Maybe Klytus was saying, “Boy, it’s really sad that there’s such a huge female audience for the Avengers, but the comics haven’t been able to capture any of them.” Which is absolutely true. I’m not going to get into question of “How did comics get to this point?”, because lots of blogs have had lots of long, sad conversations about it. But I will ask, “How did comics get to this point without anyone in the industry noticing?” Seriously, the Avengers movie just made a billion dollars. “Billion” with a B billion. That is 100 million tickets sold. Even if you assume that everyone who saw it was a sad obsessive who saw it five times apiece, that is 20 million discrete Avengers fans. Avengers moves about 100,000 copies a month. Not only does this mean they’re reaching one half of one percent of their potential audience, it also happens to be about half the numbers the series did at its peak in the 80s. These are the kinds of numbers that should get an entire building full of people fired, but Marvel actually seems happy with the status quo.

At that point, yes, the question “Why aren’t more women reading Avengers?” does need to be asked, along with the questions, “Why aren’t more kids reading Avengers?”, “Why aren’t more men reading Avengers?”, and “Why aren’t more (insert demographic here) reading Avengers?” But it needs to be asked from the perspective, “How can the miserably unsuccessful comics become more like the wildly successful move?” It’s time, in short, to stop assuming that the comics have narrative primacy, simply because they’ve been around longer. Right now, if you asked the average person on the street who the Avengers were, they’d tell you about the movie. We assume the comics are canon and the movies deviate from that canon because that’s how we’ve been following them, but let’s face facts. In terms of monetary success, public recognition, and number of fans, the Avengers are a series of movies that happens to have a lousy and inaccurate spin-off comic where Nick Fury is a white guy.

Right now, the people in charge of the comics are making only a superficial attempt to fix this(5), primarily because it’s been a point of pride for Marvel that they’ve never done a wholesale reboot like DC has. But when you think about it, it’s more than a little bit crazy that you are prioritizing the ability to read straight from issue #1 through issue #25 (taking in issue #500 along the way, because nothing gives the lie to the idea that you’re avoiding reboots for reasons of ‘accessibility’ quite like random renumbering schemes) than the ability to make a comic that actually reaches the vast audience of fans out there. In short, it might just be time to admit defeat and start working to make the comics more like the movies. Because the alternative is to eventually wind up selling comics to a group of about 10,000 sad obsessives who can’t understand why nobody else is an Avengers fan but them.

(1) It’s hard not to get even more irate about this storyline once you’re aware of Tigra’s backstory; this is one of the most explicitly, textually feminist characters in comics (one specifically created by women as part of an initiative by Marvel to appeal to female readers), and she has a long and unfortunate history of being abused in sexualized ways by writers who’ve had…shall we say, issues with women. Assuming these writers have been doing their homework when it comes to researching the characters they’re writing, which I generally do in all cases, one can’t help but feel like this is deliberate. Not necessarily “putting the womenfolk in their place by taking a feminist character down a peg or two” deliberate, but at the very least taking advantage of the character’s status as a feminist character in problematic ways.

(2) Yes, I know most of this happened in ‘Alias’, not in ‘Avengers’. Same writer, worked the character heavily into ‘Avengers’, let’s not split hairs.

(3) My wife commented on that this morning when we were discussing this. She said that one of her favorite comics was ‘Strangers in Paradise’, in no small part because the women in it looked like real people and not soft-core pin-ups. As for ‘Avengers’, well…how did she put it? “If the comic isn’t interested in me, why should I be interested in it?”

(4) Nothing quite brought home the status of comics as comics (rather than as fodder for adaptations into other media) quite like the famous clip from the San Diego local news a couple of years back where they talked about the flood of incoming comic book fans for SDCC…and the anchorman said, “Do they still make those?” Keeping in mind that the attendee count for SDCC is quite literally larger than the entire reading audience of ‘Avengers’ these days, and it fits into one large building, it’s not an unfair question.

(5) I think if you look up “half-assed” in the dictionary, there’s an actual picture of Nick Fury, Junior.

So the media are abuzz about new poll showing the NDP screeching ahead of the Tories in the hypothetical “if an election were held today” scenario, with the NDP in this fantasy scenario forming a minority federal government for the first time in the polling history of Canada. The NDP, polling-wise, now essentially own the Atlantic and Quebec, are dominant in BC and statistically tied with the Tories in Ontario and Saskatchewan.

To which I say: this should not be surprising. I mean, granted, we’re talking about the Canadian media here, who traditionally recoil from the idea of NDP governance like vampires do from garlic. But this was more or less inevitable given the combination of the fact that the Tories won with a little over forty percent of the vote (hitting what was arguably their ceiling) and the fact that, now that the Tories no longer have the excuse of minority governments to explain away their mediocre-to-shitty ability to govern, their general mendacity is starting to become quite obvious.

Let me put it this way: the average Canadian doesn’t really care that much about political foofaraw and they often don’t care about policy – except that they do care about those policies that directly impact them, and more pointedly they tend to care about those policies which they have personally experienced previously in their lives.1 This latter makes kind of a difference, because when the Tories proposed their plans to reform EI to basically make it more punitive on its users and Jim Flaherty said that there was no such thing as a bad job, that was stupid, because most people have either used EI to get by while they were in between jobs or know a friend who has, and the simple truth about employment insurance is that most people use it relatively responsibly and get themselves back on their feet, and the Tories making it more punitive is just a slap in the face to everybody who’s ever been on it. (There’s a real strong sentiment in this country that EI is perfectly fair and reasonable: you pay into it when you work, you get it when you lose your job.) The proposal to reform the Canada Pension Plan to revise the eligibility age upwards to 67 similarly hurt the Tories because, well, Canadians generally do expect the CPP to continue to exist (unlike Americans, who have basically bought into the “Social Security’s just not gonna be there for us” argument for the most part).

On top of that, the Tories then made two crucial errors, both of which made them seem comparable to U.S. Republicans. Bluntly: Canadians mostly hate Republicans. Although many Canadians may be fiscally conservative and be inclined to vote Tory accordingly, social conservatism is dying a long, slow and welcome death in this country – and even many Canadian social conservatives look at American social conservatives and blink. Therefore, the worst thing you can do in Canadian politics is seem like Republicans, and over the last decade Stephen Harper has masterfully downplayed the social-con aspect of the western Reform-a-Tories and put on a dumbshow of fiscal centrism, and it eventually worked well enough to get him his majority.

Unfortunately, the Tories then got themselves implicated in an election-tampering scandal. Granted, by American standards this is nothing: it’s a series of voter-suppression robocalls that look likely to trace back to Tory organizers. But Canadians enjoy making fun of broken American democracy,2, and even the slightest implication of stolen elections is enough to make Canadians say “well, let’s take this seriously and get to the bottom of this so it doesn’t happen again harumph harumph,” and then the Tories did the stupidest possible thing they could do: they started trying to get Elections Canada’s probe shut down in court. And when their first attempt didn’t work, they tried a second time, and now they have basically confirmed to the entire country that, yes, they fucked around with the election, and their forty percent support started getting woogy.

And then, while this was happening, the Auditor General came out and said that the Conservative government had wasted a shit-ton of money on the F-35 fighters they procured last year, to the tune of $25 billion. That is a lot of money. The NDP promptly made hay of it3 and Parliament began an inquiry into how this huge waste happened and who was responsible for it. Until this week, when the Tories moved to end the inquiry, and at this point we’re well into the “once is annoying, but twice is a pattern” stage for a lot of average Canadians who are only just starting to realize that the Tories pull this sort of thing all the time.

And the problem now is that every time the Tories do it, they’re reinforcing the narrative. When they fire scientists who disagree with their climate proposals, when they eliminate the watchdog agency they proposed – every story that can be simplified down to “the Tories don’t want you to know the truth” just reinforces those earlier stories. The average Canadian doesn’t care about government watchdogs that much, because that sort of thing operates on an abstract level to most people.4 But Canadians do care about not being Americans, and if you link these policy stories to the things they care about through common themes, the Tories will start taking a beating. Which is exactly what’s happening.

Of course, all of this is relatively meaningless because the Tories do have a majority government and therefore we’re not going to have an election for another four years…

…unless, of course. that Elections Canada probe concludes that misconduct was so severe that we need a do-over of last year’s election, in whole or in part. Which, I suspect, is the major reason the Tories keep trying to kill it.

1. Which often differentiates them from Americans, who can experience selective amnesia about such things. [↩]
2. Also: American beer. [↩]
3. Noting that the Conservatives had called Jack Layton’s plan to hire 1,000 new doctors across Canada every year for a decade financially unsound, and that plan would have cost maybe $1.5 billion tops. [↩]
4. Not to me, of course, but then again I’m a big policy nerd and atypical in that respect. [↩]

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Recently…well, probably not recently because it’s a very old debate but here’s another recent iteration of it…the discussion once again came up regarding slash fiction. In this particular case, for those of you not clicking the link, it’s a woman stating that she has just as much of a right to remix canon as anyone else, and any guy (and they do always seem to be guys) who gets creeped out, personally offended, emotionally disturbed, or just generally defensive on behalf of poor straight Captain America and Iron Man who can’t do anything about some gurl making them make out and stuff can lump it.

Which is, of course, 99% correct. (It’d be 100%, except that I’ve always felt like Cap and Iron Man’s arguing doesn’t mask a simmering romantic tension between the two men that could erupt at any moment. Cap and Iron Man’s arguing actually masks a much deeper and more fundamental dislike that the two have for each other based on the fact that Iron Man really is a dangerous control freak whose actions, while well-meaning, betray the fact that he actually is so elitist that he thinks that he should be allowed to run other people’s lives, and Cap finds that morally abhorrent. A much better slash pairing would be Cap and Hawkeye, whose macho banter practically screams, “We’re boning each other in the locker room after missions.” But I digress.) The point is, arguing that “this isn’t canon!” or “these characters wouldn’t do that!” is a disingenuous mask that this particular breed of fanboys use to attack fiction that makes them uncomfortable. The same people are probably writing Black Canary/Oracle slash, or at the very least nodding approvingly at it while saying, “Yes, exactly. Good for you for having the courage to show what DC can’t show on the printed page regarding these two characters and their mutual love of kinky bondage games!”

People like that know (perhaps, if you want to give them the benefit of the doubt, you could say that they’re aware on a subconscious level, but I suspect that most of them are perfectly knowledgeable on a conscious level) that if they say, “Ick! Seeing gay male characters being physically affectionate makes me deeply uncomfortable, and I think that only sexy women should be publicly sexualized because that’s the sort of thing I enjoy and fandom is all about servicing me and people like me,” then they will get a pointed lack of sympathy. They also know that fans care deeply about canon, because we read comics as much to inhabit the fictional universe for a brief period as to read any particular story, and as a result we’re very bothered when that fictional universe lacks internal consistency. So by hiding behind, “So-and-so wouldn’t do that!”, they divert the discussion away from their own homophobia and dislike of females behaving as though they have just as much of a right to enjoy comics as males, and towards the question of whether or not Captain America would really sleep with Iron Man. (A discussion that, as shown above, I am not entirely immune to participating in.)

But, as the blogger above pointed out, that is not an honest argument. They don’t run around pointing to every single piece of non-canonical fan art or fanfiction and tell the people involved that they shouldn’t be coming up with a different interpretation of the character than tradtionally done. They don’t even go up to Frank Miller and say, “Hey, your relentlessly angry, anti-social, ruthless Batman is actually pretty fundamentally at odds with the character’s history, and is depressingly unsympathetic and one-note.” They save their ire for women, minorities, and alternative sexualities who insist that they should be represented in fandom as well. They are, in short, practicing enforcement of white male privilege, and that’s actually pretty pathetic.

So, to “Pathetic Avengers Fangirl”…you’re right. You should totally keep enjoying the Avengers in whatever way makes you feel happy. Because that’s what being a fan is about.

I’m not a movie guy.  I’m the guy who would watch Avengers at home, alone, on my 36″ TV if I didn’t have to wait four months to do it.  So I mostly only read movie reviews to see if some movie that actively annoys me is being panned.  Usually movies that annoy me are the ones that air too many obnoxious commercials, but in this case it’s Men in Black 3, which is a completely unecessary sequel to a completely unecessary sequel.

So I’m reading the MIB 3 review on Time.com and I come across this passage:

The average moviegoer is well educated in the particulars of time travel. Even if your high school curriculum didn’t include any H.G. Wells, thanks to Back to the Future, Terminator and dozens of other films, just about everyone knows how it works. Why don’t the fleet of screenwriters who cooked up this script? They have J wake up the morning after the bloodbath at the Chinese restaurant to a world already missing K. This makes no sense. Boris hasgone back in time, but given that he hasn’t found or killed young K yet, old K ought to be alive, well and doing that “sort of surly Elvis” thing he does in contemporary Manhattan. Instead he’s dead and gone, and at headquarters, only the boss and former paramour, O (Emma Thompson, 53 and playing 65 or so, every actress’s dream) even remembers old K.1

It says something about our society’s perception of time that the reviewer apparently thinks Back to the Future makes perfect sense and this plot does not.  Let’s be honest, most time travel stories are completely illogical poppcycock,2 but in general we do not care as long as we’re satisfied that the story follows certain rules we’ve come to expect, which I have given snazzy names because why the hell not:

1. Brown’s Law: A time traveler is capable of preventing events he has already witnessed, but it is extremely dangerous (in some nebulous, end-of-the-universe, don’t-cross-the-streams kind of way) and should be avoided.3
2. Connor’s Berth: The effects of a time traveler’s changes to the timestream are synchronized with the timeframe from which he departed.  That is, if I go back in time and a week after I arrive I prevent your conception, you have a week from my time of departure to send somebody to stop me before you cease to exist.
3. McFly’s Confidence: Time travelers are “immune” from the effects of changing history (even when the changes directly affect their own lives) and retain full knowledge of whatever nonexistent timelines they’ve witnessed.
4. Guinan’s Exception: “Stationary” observers are only “immune” to changes in history through extraordinary circumstances, like being a special kind of alien or standing next  to the Guardian of Forever.
5. Simpson’s Razor: The only changes a time traveler must concern himself with are the ones he can perceive; he needs only to make additional changes that restore history “close enough” to his personal satisfaction.
6. Beckett’s Mandate: The morality of altering the timeline is subjective and ultimately determined by the sympathies of the audience, represented within the story by the will of  “God, time, fate, or whatever.”4

So yes, the setup of Men In Black 3 apparently breaks several of these rules, but the rules are arbitrary to begin with–they have no logical basis and aren’t rigorously applied even in the stories that purportedly follow them.  As long as the good guy needs to fix time, the bad guys are trying to stop him, and the viewer isn’t completely lost, everything else is just gravy.  This is why so many Star Trek time travel episodes suck–not because they don’t play by the rules, but because the writers confuse themselves, give up, and end with an explosion that puts everything back to normal.5  In the end the only rule is to tell a good story, although I am dubious that the 10,000th variant of “Let’s go back in time to the late 1960s!” can do that.

1. If you’re wondering why I read Time’s movie reviews, it’s for the elitist attitude.  “Oh, your average mouth-breather at least saw an  Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, but my school could afford actual books by H.G. Wells!” [↩]
2. The Bill & Ted duology being a notable exception that follows Novikov’s self-consistency principle. [↩]
3. Incidentally, Thunderbolts #174 recently broached the subject of what the danger actually is, which was quite satisfying. [↩]
4. You might say “But the audience wanted Sam to save his dad!” but we really didn’t because that would fundamentally alter Sam’s history, and thus Sam as a character.  Similarly, Sam can’t fix Al’s past until the series is over and we don’t need Al to be a lovable creep anymore. [↩]
5. Jim’s Law of Time Travel clearly states that if you think your time travel story is so confusing that you decide to have a character point out how confusing it is,  you probably  should not be writing a time travel story. [↩]

Dustin Harbin wrote a very good post about yesterday’s Scott Kurtz dustup and I wanted to respond to it, because Harbin constructs a reasonable argument and I try to respond to reasonable arguments with honest dialogue. And, in fairness, Dustin is not the only one to take issue with the tone I used in writing it.

In fact, most of the time I will try to respond to arguments with honest dialogue. I still, on occasion, will lose my shit with somebody. But arguments tend to fall into four categories:

1. A rational argument written civilly. Even if I disagree with this, I generally will try to engage it as fairly and civilly as possible.

2. An irrational argument written civilly. I will usually try to engage this civilly as well. Not always, mind you – if an argument is gratituously stupid enough I will backslide into mockery (witness my response to that “If I Was A Poor Black Kid” thing a while back). But even then I’ll usually try to direct my ire at the argument rather than at the person making it. I will not always succeed, of course. But I’ll try.

3.) A rational argument written uncivilly. I can go either way with these. Sometimes I’ll be civil to be “the reasonable one.” Sometimes I will write a civil response and then go back and throw in some insults. It really depends a lot on the original argument being made and the person making it. Some people, when they are uncivil, will drop back and apologize if challenged. Some want you to rise up and engage in a boxing match. (My sense for this isn’t perfect – nobody’s is – but I tend to think it’s not bad.)

4.) An irrational argument written uncivilly. Short version: fuck these people. Long version:

I understand Dustin’s point. An offensive response to an offensive post can turn off those who would potentially agree with you. And you know what, he’s not wrong. But here’s the thing: for those people, there is David Brothers’ logical sledgehammer of a post at ComicsAlliance about creator abuse, or Tom Spurgeon’s essay about “more Watchmen“, or many others besides (although those are the most important, I think). Those are both calm, insightful pieces that lay out the ethical and moral failings that have led us to this point in comics history. Both were widely read. And, if you look at the comments on Brothers’ article, a lot of people still didn’t get it.

When I first read the Kurtz article, my initial response was to say “just go read Brothers and Spurgeon and the others and they will show why Kurtz is full of shit.” But after a second reread of Kurtz’ post I decided otherwise, and this is where Dustin will likely disagree with me: I do think there is value in the expression of anger and disgust. Simply saying that Kurtz’ article is morally abhorrent and full of wind is not enough to convince some people; there are those who will be swayed by the expression of how horrible you found it, and I think viscerality plays a part in this.

The Overton Window is one of those things that has been bandied about far, far too often in the past decade, to the point where many people would prefer the phrase never existed in the first place, but the Overton Window gets shifted when one makes an outrageous argument on the far side of an argumentative spectrum. Kurtz’ post fell into this category (“not only was Kirby not that important, but the people supporting his side of the story are bad people”). When an argument like that comes around, I think it must be engaged and driven down as forcefully as possible. And at a time like that, there is value in scorn.

That’s my two cents on it, anyways.

So I was watching The Avengers again over the weekend and during one of the fight sequences, there is of course a Wilhelm Scream. This was not something I failed to miss the first time I watched the movie. More precisely, when I watched The Avengers the first time through and the Wilhelm Scream happened, my reaction was “oh, Christ. The Wilhelm Scream.” And this is because the Wilhelm Scream now must be in every movie ever, because it’s stopped becoming an in-joke and started becoming a sign of nerd credibility. I mostly blame this Youtube video for that:

And now every action/blockbuster movie has to have a Wilhelm Scream in it somewhere. All of the Harry Potters had them, The Hunger Games had one, all of the Marvel flicks have one, I think The Expendables had about half a dozen, et cetera. But the problem is this: whenever I hear a Wilhelm Scream I am taken out of the movie experience. My suspense of disbelief ends and I am just a guy sitting in a movie theatre who realized he just heard the same damn scream for the umpteenth time, because I recognize it. Every time.

I hate that feeling of being reminded I’m watching a movie, and for the sake of a cheap in-joke at that. When I watch a movie, I want to be thrilled during the fight scenes and exciting bits where a Wilhelm Scream might conceivably be heard. I want to experience that “ooooch” feeling when somebody really gets it, and if that moment is punctuated with a Wilhelm Scream then I’m not going to get that feeling. Instead, I’m just going to be thinking “oh, a Wilhelm Scream. Huh.” I mean, it would be as if a character stopped acting and suddenly just turned to the camera holding a handful of bacon and said “look! Bacon!” Because people love bacon. You would want to smack them if they did that, right? I mean, I already want to smack every webcomic artist who uses “bacon” as a punchline, and I’m not even paying for the webcomic, whereas I am typically paying in some manner for the movie.

Seriously. Sound people in Hollywood. Go find some other scream noise. Don’t use the Wilhelm Scream for another ten years at least. We all need a break from it.

So yesterday Scott Kurtz posted a typically Kurtzian post about how those who were arguing that:

1.) Jack Kirby’s estate is not getting the share of funds derived from the various properties Kirby helped create for Marvel, and
2.) this is wrong,

are, basically, self-important assholes. Of course, because this is Scott Kurtz, it’s not terribly well written or intelligent. But hey, let’s have at it.

You may not know it, but in many comic book industry circles, there’s a lot of hand-wringing going on about how all that money is being generated by Jack Kirby’s creations and none of it is going to his estate. And there’s a lot of slacktivism happening in the facetweets and twitsbooks trying to get people to boycott the movie or give to the Hero Initiative to counterbalance the karma-carbon footprint you left when you saw the movie three times and enjoyed it. You monster. Don’t you know that you’re just filling the coffers of an evil corporation while the estate of Jack Kirby goes unpaid. He created ALL THOSE GUYS!

It wouldn’t be a Scott Kurtz post if it didn’t start out with a gratituous amount of pre-emptive whining, would it? Also, note that he’s complaining about the Hero Initiative idea. This will be important a bit later on.

Even Thor (which was incidentally created by the Norse).

Also derived from ancient Norse myth: Jane Foster, the Warriors Three, the Destroyer armor, Sif as a warrior maiden (as opposed to the demure earth goddess she was in the Norse Eddas), only Thor (or someone worthy) being able to lift Mjolnir, the Odinsleep, the Bifrost being a wormhole… really, one could go on at length about all the things Stan and Jack lifted directly from Norse mythology!

Now some people are saying “hey, this isn’t about the money. It’s about proper credit. It’s about Jack Kirby’s legacy. About how he created the Marvel Universe and nobody cares. This is about creator rights.”

Except wait. Here’s a picture of the Avengers from Jack Kirby’s Avenger’s #1. And here’s a picture of The Ultimates from Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch. Which looks more like the movie you saw?

This isn’t terribly relevant – never mind that Movie Cap was much closer to being “classic” Captain America than Ultimate (a more “classic” costume, not a jingoistic asshole but instead a peaceful idealist forced into battle by ethics), ditto the Hulk (green and not grey, not a rape-obsessed killing machine when Hulked out), ditto Thor (Thor’s whole movie was a glowing paean to the Kirby vision of Asgard, right down to emphasizing that the Asgardians were super-science aliens rather than actual gods), with Black Widow and Iron Man splitting the difference and Hawkeye being the closest Ultimates analogue – because, wait for it, Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch did not create the characters in question. As I am sure they would be the first to admit.

Jack Kirby worked for Marvel until 1970, and then he returned for another three years in 1975. But since then. in the 30 some-odd years since he left Marvel, hundreds of creators have added to the mythos and stories of the characters that Marvel owns and Jack helped create. Hundreds. And many of them added integral aspects to these characters which are just as important to their legacy as Jack and Stan ever did Take a look at Walter Simonson’s run on Thor and tell me that he doesn’t deserve as much credit as Jack or Stan when it comes to the lasting mythos of that character as a modern day super-hero. Or how could you have the Tony Stark we saw on screen in Iron Man without David Michelinie and Bob Layton’s “Demon in a bottle” run on Iron Man in the late 70’s?

Certainly all the other creators who have added their own little touches to the characters since they were created are to be appreciated as well. But there is a difference between putting an awesome flame-job on your car, and building the car. It is easier to build on established work than to create something effectively from scratch – it just is. Any creator should know this in their bones. Scott Kurtz should know it better than most, as he created a whole lot of original characters (even though he relies on cheap pop culture references for many of his punchlines).

I don’t like that Jack Kirby got screwed over by Marvel back in the day. I don’t like it at all. It’s a sad story. It’s as tragic as the story of the men who created Superman. These guys got screwed over. But that was over 40 years go,guys. The men involved are dead and buried. The policies that screwed them over were changed decades ago. Things have changed for the better, even when it comes to doing work-for-hire with the big two.

This is a classic “look, I’m not unreasonable, but…” paragraph right here. Kurtz concedes that Kirby got screwed over by Marvel and that this was tragic and wrong (after arguing for several paragraphs that it wasn’t because Kirby was no big deal really but, whatever, it’s not like expecting Kurtz to be internally consistent within a single blogpost is a good bet), but then goes for the “this is not a big deal, because it’s all in the past and things are better now.”

Of course, Alan Moore is still being screwed over by DC today, and Chris Roberson was booted off his titles post-haste when he said he wouldn’t re-up with DC because their actions were, you know, wrong and stuff, but I guess we have all learned since that happened a couple months ago and now it’s all in the past and DC isn’t going to release Before Watchmen after all. And of course Marvel isn’t going to attack sketchbook artists at conventions who draw Marvel characters, even though they’ve asserted that they have the right to do that if they ever chose to exercise it, because that’s all in the past and things are better now; I mean, just because Disney has a long track record of harassing absolutely anybody who uses their characters without permission (right down to unauthorized nursery school murals) doesn’t mean that they’re going to force Marvel to follow suit. Also, Alan Moore is (let’s be honest) kind of a dickbag, so it’s not really a big deal that DC is screwing him over.1

In fact, the comics industry has screwed so many people over that there is an entire charity dedicated to helping destitute comics creators. It is called the Hero Initiative. You may have heard of it because Kurtz mocked the idea of donating to it in tandem with going to see The Avengers – not boycotting the movie, simply donating to charity in recognition of creator’s rights.2 Because donating to a charity is, apparently, now a selfish thing to do somehow. I’m not sure how the moral math in Scott Kurtz’ head works here.

Bluntly: Kurtz’ argument here is so dense that it’s hard to imagine anybody seriously interested in actual argument making it. Corporate control over their IP is growing more grasping and tenacious, not less, and it is corporate IP that dominates comics even today, thirty years after the independent comics movement first began to pick up steam in the 1980s. That IP is so dominant that it reflects upon a good chunk of the “independent” comics scene – how much of said scene consists of reactions to or riffs upon those characters owned by DC and Marvel? Most indie superhero books (and there are so very many of them) read like DC/Marvel fanfic with the labels buffed off. (This isn’t to say that many of those books aren’t excellent. There are some true gems in there. But consider that Alan Moore’s run on Supreme, one of the most highly praised “indie” superhero comic book runs ever, is widely acknowledged as “Alan Moore’s never-going-to-happen extended run on Superman.”)

How many comic strips less would Kurtz have drawn, if he was forced to delete every single strip containing a reference to Marvel Comics? It would be a fair chunk of them.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t learn from this. I’m saying we’ve ALREADY learned from it. I have no doubt that we learned from it. The black and white creator-owned books of the 80s. The exodus of Marvel creators to form Image in the 90s. The indy comics movement now. Webcomics. Kickstarter. We’ve learned this lesson, folks. You’re getting angry over nothing. You’re suiting up for a battle we’ve already won.

Now, don’t get me wrong: it’s good that indie comics creators can use the internet to promote their work. Heck, I do it. But whenever people make this argument as a solution to the problem of corporate control of IP that has become part of the common ground of our culture, it’s inevitably someone who has already made it. The phrase we are looking for here is “confirmation bias,” and it becomes more and more obvious as fewer and fewer webcomics “make it” to the webcomicking big leagues. I’ve discussed Kickstarter here previously and that’s not an answer either – again, Kickstarter is fine for delivering product to an established fanbase, but by its very nature it isn’t great for trying out new stuff (and looking at Kickstarter funding lately, it seems the market has started figuring this out as funders get more selective).3

But even were indie comics to be flourishing – and let’s just say they are rather than diving into numbers to see if they in fact are flourishing or just scraping by, because that whole issue is a major derail – the issue here is that a significant part of our common cultural language (and as noted above, common cultural language Kurtz frequently uses himself) is private property, and how we choose to engage with that fact. Some of us think that the private-property nature of the beast is fine – these are the comics fans who bitched endlessly when the Siegel estate exercised its rights over the Superman copyrights. Some think that the public domain needs to be more aggressively pursued. Some want a middle ground. And some, like Kurtz, have chosen to bury their heads in the ground and assert that there is no problem.

It’s a child’s argument to say that Marvel is the bad guy and the Kirby estate is the good guy. It’s just infinitely more complicated than that.

It really isn’t. Marvel aggressively did their best to browbeat Kirby, during his lifetime, out of rights that were his by any reasonable moral standard.

Now, granted, there is an argument against Kirby-screwage. It demands that you take the position that we must all be eternally vigilant against others who might try to screw us over or exploit our weakness for their own advantage rather than believe that we should rightly expect some sense of community and fellowship even from corporate entities. It is Randian and it is cold and it is heartless, but it is intellectually consistent and had Kurtz made it, I could at least maintain some respect for him even if I thought making it made him, by default, kind of an asshole. But Kurtz hasn’t made that argument (I expect in part because he recognizes that it is cold and heartless and doesn’t want to be thought of that way) and has instead defaulted to the “come on, guys, can’t we all just get along?” whine of the enabler. Which also means he’s still kind of an asshole.

And to say that Jack Kirby is responsible for that Avengers movie is a ridiculous notion and insulting to the combined hard work of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of creators who have put their efforts into keeping our modern mythos of super-heroes alive and well.

I don’t think anybody is saying Kirby is solely responsible for the Avengers movie. Because that would be stupid. But Kirby created the characters, so maybe, just maybe it is worthwhile to argue that he (or his estate) should be justly compensated for creating the characters which have starred in a movie that has made one billion dollars in its first month of release, as opposed to the share of profits from the film the Kirby estate has currently received, which is… let me check my figures here… ah, yes, nothing.4

And these are men and women who are well aware of Jack Kirby. They’re doing this in the spirit of Jack Kirby, not to spite him.

Of course! Spiting Jack Kirby is apparently Scott Kurtz’ job.

Am I really expected to be angry at Joe Quesada for something that happened before he was even born? Just because he’s a big-wig at Marvel now?

Of course Joe Quesada bears no responsibility for Marvel screwing over Kirby back in the day. However, Quesada certainly bears responsibility for how Marvel chooses to conduct itself now. Addressing the issue of fans being upset that the Kirby estate is not being justly compensated for Marvel’s success is, when you get down to it, part of Joe’s job. It is not in any way a repugnant or inflammatory act to address the major executive of a company and say “your company is not behaving as I would like it to behave,” no matter how much Kurtz wants that to be the case.

Part of the change in comics culture over the last couple of decades has been the transformation of Marvel and DC from being relatively small-potatoes publishing concerns into massive corporate IP farms, and the con atmosphere where All Comic Creators Are Buddies often obscures the fact that Joe Quesada is the chief creative officer for a company worth billions of dollars rather than just another pencil-jockey. But Joe Quesada isn’t just another pencil-jockey. He’s a major player in a large entertainment conglomerate. It’s perfectly reasonable to request that he address concerns about the company’s behavior.

Am I really expected to be upset with Stan Lee for deciding to stop writing comics and get paid to be a tireless ambassador for Marvel? The man earns every penny he gets paid at that job. Ask anyone who knows him or spends any amount of time around him. Are YOU going to be traveling the globe at 89 with infinite patience and enthusiasm for every person that approaches you? Hell no you won’t. Nor will I. But Stan does. And that’s why he gets paid. And that’s why he get the cameos every movie. I’m sorry that I can’t muster the energy to be angry at Stan Lee for having some business sense and not dying.

In the words of Darrell Hammond playing Sean Connery in “Celebrity Jeopardy” sketches on Saturday Night Live: “Boy, I believe you may be functionally retarded.”

Seriously, what the fuck is this? I’ve read all of the major critical pieces arguing that Jack Kirby’s estate deserves greater compensation than what he and it received, and not in a single one of them has anybody ever attacked Stan Lee for starring in movies or argued that Lee had anything to do with Kirby getting screwed over. I’ve read more than a few articles and essays which argued that Stan Lee over-emphasized his role in creating all the great Marvel characters (which is probably true to some extent because Lee’s always been a self-promoter, although I’ve never bought the argument that some have made that Kirby/Ditko did all the work and Lee was just a glorified scripter), but I don’t think any of them ever said “and that’s why Jack Kirby got screwed.”

But even if Lee somehow was to blame for it, how would his actions as an “ambassador for Marvel” (which is a formless fictional entity designed to hold intellectual property to provide value to shareholders) mean anything? Jesus, Kurtz can’t even win the arguments he’s making up in his head.

I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not going to argue the merits of the Kirby estate’s case against Marvel. I’m not a theologist, so I’m not going to debate whether it’s a moral imperative for Marvel to just GIVE the estate a couple million dollars cause they can afford it.

“Look, this entire debate functions on two basic levels, but I don’t want to engage on either of those levels because… I don’t want to, okay?”

(Only theologists can discuss morality, you see.)

But I am a grown ass man, and I can tell you this: the real world does not operate like the morality plays we see acted out on the silver screen in movies like “The Avengers.” Life can not be summed up by “that’s not fair.” It’s not as simple as “Give Jack’s estate some money, Marvel. You can afford it.” That’s not pragmatic thinking. That’s cynicism. And I’m so tired of the cynicism.

I have read this half a dozen times and, putting aside the fact that Kurtz has argued a moral position right after saying he wasn’t going to argue a moral position, it still doesn’t make any sense. Seriously, what is he blathering about here? How is one position or the other “pragmatic thinking” or “cynicism”? Which of the two applies to people encouraging other people to donate to charity or put pressure on corporate officials? How are these even applicable terms? Scott Kurtz writes shit for a living! How can he write a sentence this meaningless?

Guys, learn from the Avengers movie. The real villains here are the cynics. They are our Loki. The people looking to pit fandom and an entire industry against itself to make themselves feel powerful. The worms who never had the courage to create anything themselves looking to forge an identity on the internet by getting in a good dig. By being the guy who got the awesome last word in. These are the real bad guys of our world. Not Marvel executives. Not movie studios. Not the hundreds and thousands of creatives who make movies. Don’t fall for it.

This paragraph strongly makes me suspect that Kurtz got in an internet slapfight with some nerd somewhere who said he was a shitty comicker and who, at some other point, also said Kirby got screwed, because this last paragraph is positively Kevin-Smithian in its levels of pre-emptive defensiveness. It’s the fans who are at fault here, because the fans are pointing out the entirely reasonable argument that Kirby got screwed and that’s making it harder for all of us (and especially Scott Kurtz) to enjoy watching The Avengers.

Chris Roberson, on Twitter, responded to this by saying “Standing up for fairness makes you a cynic and “bad guy,” but accepting inequity with a shrug makes you an “adult”? Do I have that right?” And that is basically accurate and much more concise than what I have written here, not least because Kurtz’ post is mostly empty wind and on its own merits isn’t really worth addressing. But a lot of people will read his stupid bullshit and think “well, he’s got some good points,” because if someone writes enough paragraphs about anything, there will be people who decide that he has written something of substance based on the number of words produced.

But Kurtz doesn’t have any substance. He’s just got attitude. And that’s not enough.

UPDATE: In comments, Pete notes that Scott Kurtz, in 2010, said this:

“If you’re a member of an industry that let Dave Cockrum die in a VA hospital after helping give us most of the X-Men characters that comprised three blockbuster films and you get pissy about what Mark Waid said, then you deserve to remain on this sinking ship.”

That Scott Kurtz! He’s so cynical.

1. I have honestly lost count of the number of times I have heard variations on this in the last few months. If DC was doing to Neil Gaiman a tenth of what they’re doing to Alan Moore, the nerdrage would measure on the upper end of the Richter scale. [↩]
2. Full disclosure: I donated the cost of my Avengers ticket to the Hero Initiative. [↩]
3. And besides, it’s not even good confirmation bias because when a Scott Kurtz or whoever “makes it,” they’re at best finding their own survivable little niche. There is not gonna be a PVP movie anytime soon. [↩]
4. The combined worldwide box-office revenue for the “Avengers universe” films is over $3.3 billion dollars. That doesn’t count the Fantastic Four films, which would take you to the $4 billion mark. Or any of the DVD/merchandise sales. [↩]