Of course, realistically speaking, this post should really be titled, “Empirical Reasons Why The Silver Age Was More To My Personal Taste”, or perhaps if I wanted to come on strong, “Empirical Reasons Why The Silver Age Catered Better To A Mass Audience”. But this is the Internet, and we have proud traditions here. Stating an opinion modestly and without hyperbole is not the way of our people. (By the same token, just to forestall the response, I’m primarily talking about superhero comics here. I’m aware that superhero comics are not the only thing out on the stands right now, so let’s not be that person who points this out every time, thinking that they’re the first human being ever to make that statement, okay? Okay.)

The important point, though, is “empirical”. All too often, when I talk about how I really do think that the Silver Age was a better era of comics, with superior stories being done by superior talent, people respond by saying that nostalgia cheats. They say that everyone’s favorite age of comics is the one they had when they were young, and that I’m underestimating how many good writers and artists are working in the field these days and how hokey and lame some of those older comics could be when you come back and read them as an adult. There is, of course, only one problem with that statement. I did come to the Silver Age as an adult. I didn’t start really getting into Silver Age comics until I was in my 30s, after a lifetime of reading comics from the 80s, 90s and 2000s, and I was astonished to find that not only were most of the claims of hokiness and camp utter myths, the stories held up amazingly well even after decades of changes in language and style. They were a wonderful breath of fresh air, and frankly, the moment I found the Essentials and Showcases was the moment my interest in current comics died, never to be resurrected. And here’s why:

1) The stories had better pacing. For all the current insistence on “decompression” and “writing for the trade”, the big difference between a Silver Age story and a modern one is a refreshing lack of padding in the classic tales. Does anyone really want to sit down and try to claim that Ultimate Spider-Man #1-6 is superior to Amazing Fantasy #15 because it had a whole issue of Peter Parker being an unlikable douchebag instead of just a few panels? Did ‘Funeral for a Friend’ really need to be eight issues long in order to convince us that Superman was dead and certainly not coming back this time (wink wink nudge nudge)? When ‘Civil War’ has one good idea per issue, delivered in a full-page spread at the very end, it’s hard not to feel like they could have done the whole thing as a 64-page special if they’d been willing to work a little harder. Whereas by contrast, Silver Age stories frequently had three stories per issue. A well-told eight page story is a thing of beauty, and learning what to include and what to leave out improves a writer’s craft (and if you don’t believe me, just ask Alan Moore and Stephen King, both of whom have said that it’s harder to write a good short story than a novel/graphic novel.) For all that Silver Age stories could occasionally shortchange you on backstory and exposition, they more than made up for it with breakneck pace.

2) Comics were allowed to have a sense of humor. It’s not that humor has vanished entirely from comics these days, despite the best efforts of Dan Didio. But it has been greatly diminished by three decades of “Comics Aren’t Just For Kids!” and endless, stilted efforts to out-Watchmen Alan Moore (who’s since moved on to things like ‘Splash Brannigan’ and ‘Jack B. Quick’, written primarily to make a point that comics can be fun.) It’s always been hard to get something humorous and off-beat off the ground, as witnessed by the fact that Metamorpho doesn’t have a second volume, but at least the “serious” series weren’t so po-faced and drab. Captain America used to trash-talk, Superman used to be mischievous and capricious while he dispensed justice (there’s a great story where he winds up owing a crook a favor, and repays it…because he’s Superman…but in ways that give the guy the shaft…because he’s a dick.) Humor in comics nowadays consists of making fun of how stupid old comics were, which isn’t funny because the old comics were kidding and they knew it. Yes, the Hulk talked funny back then. Y’know what? The guy who came up with, “Hunters killed Bambi’s mom!” was fully aware of that.

3) The environment was richer and more diverse. I’m not talking about race here, although it’s not exactly like modern comics can look down on the Silver Age when it comes to ethnic and gender diversity. Yes, heroes back then were predominantly white males, despite some great characters like Black Panther or Sue Storm. Not at all like nowadays, where the headlining Green Lantern is black Hispanic white again, or the Atom is Asian white again, or Green Arrow is Asian white again, or…

But I’m primarily talking about the diversity of stories and the richness of characters. Marvel and DC have both been concentrating on superheroes as their bread-and-butter since the introduction of the Direct Market to the point where we’re honestly trumpeting tiny independents with circulation numbers smaller than Texas towns as evidence of the richness of genres that comics can exhibit. Whereas in the Silver Age, superhero comics could barely elbow out Westerns, crime comics, horror comics, romance comics, comedy comics…Jerry Lewis and Bob Hope each had their own series, with circulation numbers higher than ‘X-Men’ have today.

And further, even within the superhero genre there were more characters. These days, after reboots and post-reboot reboots and deck-clearing event crossovers, half the B and C-listers are dead or evil or both, and efforts to create the next generation’s icons are few and far between. A while back, MGK posted about how hard it was for the WWE to write good stories when they aren’t working to groom their minor characters into fan favorites, and the same can be said of DC and Marvel. After you’ve killed off forty-seven heroes in your last crossover’s double-page spread, it’s hard to find good guest stars anymore. If you want to look at the big two as managers of intellectual properties, “Infinite Crisis” was intellectual arson.

4) They were more creative. The first twenty issues of ‘Amazing Spider-Man’ introduced the Chameleon, the Vulture, Doctor Octopus, the Sandman, the Lizard, the Enforcers, Electro, Mysterio, the Green Goblin, Kraven the Hunter, and the Scorpion. That’s probably more new villains than the series has introduced in the last hundred issues, even before you start comparing the quality of the villains. And Spider-Man wasn’t an outlier. Most of the enduring villains, heroes and supporting casts of comics nowadays are in the neighborhood of fifty years old; the last major addition to the publishing stable of the big two was probably the Punisher, and he’s tipping the scales past thirty. Comics nowadays are coasting on their back catalog, which is not inherently unforgiveable but is a huge disaster when paired with a marketing and distribution system that primarily caters to existing fans. Which leads to point five…

5) They weren’t imitating the Silver Age all the damn time. Once you scratch off the veneer of humorlessness, decompression and self-consciously “adult” storytelling that covers modern comics, what you basically get is a bunch of people trying very hard to recreate the comics that were popular when they were kids. Which is understandable, but one of the most wonderful, amazing, spectacular and fantastic things about the Silver Age is that they were doing things that nobody had tried before. They were ferociously experimental, pulling in ideas from other genres and deconstructing existing superhero tropes. They were constantly introducing new heroes, new villains, new worlds, new settings at a pace nobody could match. And now? Now all we get is an extended “house mix” of those new stories. The cool thing about the Justice League of America wasn’t that it had Kanjar Ro and his Gamma Gong, to pick a random element that Mark Waid brought back just to bring back at one point. It’s that nobody had ever seen anything like Kanjar Ro before. The Silver Age is best recreated by not repeating it.

There. Empirical reasons. Now, when you agree or disagree with me, we’ll at least be talking about something concrete.

As per yesterday:

Andrew Miller: What’s the best horror movie that most people haven’t heard of?

I’ll go with Demons 2, Dario Argento’s sequel to his somewhat more famous but less scary Demons. For those not in the know: the Demons films are essentially “fast zombie” films twenty years before fast zombie films became a thing – the titular demons attack and either kill their victims or turn them into more demons in a very zombie-like way, and the movies are gory and violent. The first one is okay, but the second one takes place entirely inside an apartment building where the demon attack begins when a girl watches a TV show with a demon in it and then the demon on the TV sees her and comes out of the TV – which is ridiculous, of course, but it sells the horror quite effectively and the movie as a whole is a pretty good take on the “locked in the building with zombies” genre. Except, as I said, twenty years before that was really a thing. The original Demons isn’t bad either, but I like the second one better.

What’s the best horror movie that has an undeservedly poor reputation?

Probably The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation. Yes, the one with Renee Zellweger and Matthew McConaughey. I’m not going to say it’s good exactly, but it got pilloried for being total shit because it’s not like the earlier films in the series – this one is just sort of insane in a weirdly entertaining way and I think it deserves to be resurrected as a bold failure if nothing else.

Goattoucher: Why, God? WHYYYYY?!?

Bud Dry.

Darren K: Do you like travelling? Have you done much of it? Left the continent? Been to Winnipeg?

Yes, no, yes (Australia, Bolivia, and South Africa when I was little), and yes (it’s quite pretty along the river, but other than that – sorry, too small for me).

Bret: Pete Ross (The Superman supporting character): Why doesn’t he work?

Pete Ross doesn’t work because there is nothing special about him; he learns that Clark Kent is Superboy completely by accident and that is basically all there ever has been to the character, and it’s simply not enough because A) Lois either already knows or will eventually figure out that Clark is Superman, B) there’s a strong argument that Perry White and Jimmy Olsen know (or have at least guessed) and are just playing along because Clark is their friend and they’re covering his ass, as friends do, and C) Batman knows, and if you’re gonna write a Superman story, are you going to team him up with Batman or Pete Ross? The answer to that question is never going to be Pete Ross.

mason stormchild: Do you think reddit is basically becoming 4chan with a veneer of respectability?

“Becoming”?

Brendan: What do you think the best policy is for coming up with fantasy names/words without making them sound too silly?

Take a name from the culture you want the character to reflect/imitate (since nobody is really imaginative enough to truly come up with their own completely original culture, when you get down to it). Change 1-3 consonants depending on how many syllables the name has (if it’s two syllables or less, only one), keep the vowel sounds intact, and you’re done.

Kai: Marvel Studios, riding high on their successful series of movies all leading up to the Avengers (which is going to be a hit whether it’s actually awesome or manages to totally suck, let’s be honest here), is looking for their next big Marvel-verse thing and comes to your door with a dump truck full of cash and a request for you to take the helm of their newest project, a Doctor Strange movie. So how do you do it? Who do you cast? What’s your script breakdown look like? Bear in mind that you have to try and keep things roughly within the style and tone of the Marvel movies we’ve seen so far, but beyond that you can tackle it however you like.

Dr. Strange is, I think, one of the great unexploited origin stories in comics and a film version of it would be the wisest course for an initial Dr. Strange film: a bad (but not irredeemable) person becomes a good one when his quest to make himself whole becomes a quest of an entirely different sort. The overall tone would be more contemplative than your average Marvel film (although still with comic moments) and lean more in the direction of Guillermo del Toro visuals than Joss Whedon-style wit because you really have to sell the otherworldliness of Dr. Strange in order to make him stand out from the superheroic crowd, but you’d still have the vicious and awesome magical battle with Dormammu as your closing piece. I would probably borrow a few story elements from JMS’s Strange miniseries since it had some excellent ideas in it.

And: Benedict Cumberbatch as Strange, Daniel Dae-Kim as Wong, James Hong as the Ancient One, August Diehl (from The Counterfeiters) as Baron Mordo and Rosario Dawson as Clea.

Ask me anything. *

*Where “anything” means “anything that isn’t wildly inappropriate,” of course.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Also, that Married… With Children is 25 years old today makes me feel very old indeed.

First two acts are perfectly serviceable and okay meta-commentary on horror tropes that some will claim are more clever than they in fact are; third act is some of the most ambitious, exciting horror filmmaking in years, and since it’s the last bit, you’ll forget that the first two-thirds of it was only okay.

Back in 2005 or so, when I actually cared enough about DC to pay attention to them, it occurred to me that there was an interesting vacancy created by the departure of Wally West as the Flash and the arrival of Bart Allen. Specifically, it meant that the identity of Impulse was just floating around loose, looking for a legacy hero to step into the role. So I came up with some ideas that I thought would make for a good ‘Impulse’ series, one I hoped to someday submit, should I get the time, energy and confidence to do so. Obviously, that was back in 2005, and at this point there’ve been so many cast changes in the Flash family’s story, including one complete reboot, that the idea is pretty much moot. Nonetheless, I still have some fondness for the idea, so I thought I’d share it here: My plans for the all-new, all-different Impulse!

In this case, “all-different” definitely describes the character. Her name is Hannah Hunter (I’m sticking with “is” here, because “would have been” is such an awkward bit of sentence construction), and she’s a teenage high school student; both her parents are devoted to their careers, leaving her as pretty much a latchkey kid. There are pretty much two ways you can go when your parents barely pay any attention to you, and Hannah went the second direction; she’s hyper-responsible, almost an adult in miniature. She cooks her own meals, does her own laundry, and basically has a house to herself with parents she only occasionally sees. (The fact that she doesn’t use this house for wild, frequent parties tells you what the other direction was, the one she didn’t go.)

As can happen with children like this, she gets along much better with adults than other teenagers her own age; it doesn’t help that she’s somewhat bookish and has never had much luck trying out for sports teams. She almost made it onto the varsity softball team due to her pitching skills, but they had no designated hitter rule and she was too slow on the base paths. She tried out for the basketball team, but despite being a great shooter, she’s too slow on the fast-break. In short, she’s not unathletic, she just has lousy foot-speed. She idolizes the Flashes because they can do the one thing she desperately wants to: Run.

As a result of the above, she spends the after-school hours at the Flash Museum, doing her homework and chatting with the staff (who, as with many adults, admire precocious and mature teenagers.) She knows every exhibit inside and out (at one point in the development of the idea, she idolized Barry best of all because he was also a police scientist. When they reconcealed his identity, she idolized him as a person without even knowing he’s the Flash because she wants to get into forensics someday and admires his work. Yes, she is a teenager geeky enough and focused enough to know about prominent forensics experts. Unfortunately, she doesn’t know who Justin Bieber is.)

She gets her powers when the Flash Museum gets attacked by Rogues’ Gallery members who want to make a statement about their feelings towards their arch-nemesis…the Flash shows up to foil them, there’s a fight, innocent bystanders get endangered, and Hannah winds up taking an inadvertent spin on the Flash’s Time Treadmill. She winds up back in the 30s, with all the powers of the Silver Age Flash…

…except one. She can’t think at superhuman speeds. Without the ability to process information and perceive time the way the Flashes do, her super-speed is utterly useless to her; the second she tries to run, she’s impacting into a solid object before she knows it’s even there. (Luckily, she has Wally’s super-fast healing. Even so, she spends time in the hospital in the 30s, as well.) As a result, she’s forced to use her speed-powers creatively, adding and subtracting speed from objects around her instead of using it just to speed herself up. (That’s why she calls herself Impulse–because momentum is mass times velocity and impulse is the physics term for an object’s change in momentum. Have I mentioned geeky?)

Her first story arc, where she learns to use her powers, involves her “bouncing” through time on her way back to the Flash Museum in the present. She meets the Golden Age Flash, the Legion of Super-Heroes, and comes back to the present day with a reasonable amount of skill at fighting and so forth (so as to gloss over some of the learning curve of being a superhero. Karate Kid teaches her judo, because using someone’s own leverage against them is a good fighting style for a scrawny teenager, and because throws and flips become extra-nasty when you can pump an extra 500 miles per hour of velocity into someone on their way out.) She helps the Flash defeat the Rogues’ Gallery, and becomes a crime-fighter in Central City when not attending classes.

I thought it had some potential; since she doesn’t have “run really fast” to fall back on, the character has to use her super-powers creatively to defeat bad guys. The high school setting is always fun for a comic book hero, and let’s face it, comics fans dig geeky teenage girls with weird senses of humor. But of course, at this point I’m not even sure whether there ever was an Impulse, let alone whether another one would be welcomed by comics fans. But I’m sure the current direction of DC makes perfect sense to someone.

A couple weeks back Alyssa Rosenberg wrote a great piece about white actors Hollywood keeps trying to push despite their continuing failure to succeed. (For those who quibble about Sam Worthington’s inclusion: watch Man on a Ledge and then try to tell me differently.) These actors are not bad actors per se (although I would argue Jason O’Mara is pretty bad), but they are pointedly non-special-in-any-way actors who keep getting breaks until something happens for them. Alex O’Loughlin is a good example of this: he was boring in Moonlight and then he was boring in Three Rivers and now he is boring in Hawaii Five-O, but on that show he is surrounded by more entertaining actors and pretty scenery so it has become successful and now O’Loughlin is the Hollywood equivalent of a made guy. The point is that minority actors, by and large, do not get these same types of chances. Idris Elba in particular should be huge now. Morris Chestnut seemed tailor-made to be an action star – muscular, attractive, charismatic, – but it never happened and he got shunted into “urban” romcoms. And so forth.

Anyway, I mention all of this because I just saw the extended trailer for Step Up: Revolution. (Yes, I know some of you are going to just click over to Reddit instead of reading the rest of this post, but try to bear with me.)

Now, if you are not familiar with the Step Up films, there is a simple pattern to them: boy meets girl, they are both dancers, one or the other has a crew and for some reason that crew has to win a big dance battle which is awesome, Love Conquers All, happy ending. Now, the first Step Up starred Charming Potato but since Mr. Potato was not available to do Step Up 2 The Streets, as he was now rich and famous and too important for such things, instead the film transitioned to his character’s previously unmentioned little sister analogue and she took the role of The Girl in the second movie.

Since all of the Step Up films take place in the same universe where dance battles are bigger than UFC, the third film, Step Up 3D had to be connected to the second and this time around the primary transition character was Adam Sevani’s Moose. Now, Sevani is a pretty badass dancer, and in fact he gets a romance subplot, but instead of being the lead he is secondary to some blandly attractive model-esque dancers who aren’t bad or anything but certainly aren’t the sick dancers that the rest of the cast are – and really aren’t so amazing as actors that they merit any additional consideration on that front. But they’re definitely attractive and Sevani is, let us be honest, geek chic rather than traditional leading man.

However, Step Up 3D also introduced Stephen “Twitch” Boss to the cast, and Twitch, as any fan of So You Think You Can Dance knows, is charismatic, articulate, a decent actor, a ridiculously good dancer, has an existing fanbase, and most importantly for our considerations at this point is quite handsome:

And producers promised that Twitch would get a greatly expanded role in Step Up 4 (which later got renamed to Step Up Revolution as they jiggered the plot to tie it into Occupy Wall Street, sort of, if Occupy Wall Street danced in far more badass ways than they usually do), so a lot of people, myself included, naturally assumed that he would be the transition character into the fourth film. But instead of this happening, Twitch is still a supporting character and the leads are going to be a white girl and a not-terribly-dark Hispanic guy.

Granted, one can’t get too upset about Kathryn McCormick playing the lead white girl, because she is totally awesome in her own right, but why can’t she just romance Twitch instead? I mean, interracial relationships are common nowadays – particularly in the dance community. But this is one area where Hollywood continues to be weirdly reactionary.

Now that Mitt Romney is the Republicanc candidate for president in all but name, the nation turns to consider his nominee for Vice-President. Who should fill the role? There are, of course, many possibilities.

Senator Marco Rubio

PROS:
– Shores up the conservative base
– Extremely telegenic
– Guarantees that at least a half-dozen Hispanic people will vote for Mitt Romney

CONS:
– Problematic backstory
– Far-right positions potentially alienating to centrists
– Does not appear to, like, know a lot of things

Representative Paul Ryan

PROS:
– Young and energetic
– Beloved by media types who enjoy that he makes right-wing economic theory seem reasonable and practical in a Mr. Rogers Repossesses Your House sort of way
– Really good at holding up charts, graphs, or anything made of paper

CONS:
– Kind of emphasizes how rich Mitt Romney really is
– Gets pissy whenever anybody points out that his budget plan will make poor people eat dog food even though dog food these days is healthy and good for you
– Two words: death stare

Rick Santorum

PROS:
– Is white and male, which helps with white male people and also people who like sweater-vests
– Would really piss off Dan Savage, and the base likes that
– Would give Andy Samberg many more opportunities to work on his lousy Santorum impression

CONS:
– Unpopular in his home state of Pennsylvania
– Religious extremism is kind of creepy
– Is a giant fucking asshole

Kcarab Amabo, The Mirror Universe Barack Obama

PROS:
– Combines Barack Obama’s charisma with the soul-destroying ruthless drive for power necessary to thrive in the modern GOP
– Proven track record of leadership in the Mirror Universe, which still totally exists and has not collapsed into a singularity due to Presidential science experiments that went against God Himself
– Has memorized all of the Evil Overlord List and in fact has added entries of his own, mostly about singularities

CONS:
– Birth certificate may lead some to believe he is actually Yrrab Oreteos, a citizen of Aisenodni, rather than a full-blooded Nacirema
– All the backwards spelling will eventually get on people’s nerves
– You don’t want to put someone more talented than you in the #2 spot, Mitt Romney, even if he is evil and ambitious
– Horrifying fascination with gravitational anomalies

A Sexy Pirate

PROS:
– Sexy
– So sexy
– Women voters will love the sexy

CONS:
– Pirates so 2005
– Constantly calling the US Armed Forces “the ARRRRRRmy” will get old real fast
– Will suggest to corporate America a lack of concern over intellectual property rights

Jason Sudeikis

PROS:
– Would stop Jason Sudeikis from impersonating Mitt Romney
– Much more charming than Mitt Romney
– Captures vital “people who still think Saturday Night Live is cool” demographic

CONS:
– Hollywood elite
– Sudeikis’ Romney impersonation more likeable than Mitt Romney and its loss may hurt the campaign
– Will hurt Romney with those sectors of the Republican base who hate laughter when it is not directed at minorities

Pope Benedict XVI

PROS:
– Puts the whole “Mormon issue” to rest and provides the campaign a clear answer re: separation of church and state
– Catholics will be told to vote Romney/Benedict or be cast into the pits of Hell
– Mitt likes eating fish on Friday already anyhow

CONS:
– Really old – like, “stinky” old
– Likely to cause a religious war of some kind
– Jedi will rise up to support Barack Obama in the general election and the Stormtroopers are not yet ready

A Giant Novelty Can of Tab

PROS:
– Increases Romney’s appeal to 40something women
– Who could have a problem with Tab?
– No calories!

CONS:
– Kind of out of date
– Nobody really likes Tab
– Pink can problematic in the Deep South

T-Pain

PROS:
– Kind of awesome even though he is killing music as we know it
– Impeccable dresser, will lend sense of style to the campaign
– Wobbly techno-voice could subliminally reassure people who think Romney is already inclined to be shaky on the issues by making wobbliness cool

CONS:
– Well, he’s black, for a start
– Association with “hippity-hop” music problematic with GOP base, who only like that sort of music when it is performed ironically by white suburban guys talking about the Founding Fathers
– Mitt Romney will not be able to tell the difference between him and Will.I.Am

One Of The Ponies From My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic

PROS:
– Guarantees “brony” vote
– Appeal to younger voters hits Obama in key demographic
– Was cool about a year ago, which for a Republican campaign is amazingly up-to-date

CONS:
– “Brony” vote outnumbered by “we hate bronies” vote
– Republicans traditionally terrified of bright colours
– Seriously, which one is that? We can never remember

An Oil Tanker

PROS:
– Is very, very big and will impress voters
– Gets all the subtext out of the way
– Like, all of it

CONS:
– Leaky
– May explode
– Sort of a “high risk, high reward” candidate

Mayor of Toronto Rob Ford

PROS:
– Is white and male and fat and very conservative – he’s like a less-moderate Chris Christie!
– Anti-elitist in all the ways that Republicans like
– Complete disregard for “facts” will work well in debates when his claims of things that are obviously and wildly untrue will confound Joe Biden

CONS:
– None at all
– Seriously
– Please, take him

A Woman

PROS:
– Shows that the campaign is open to modern thinking
– May help the campaign win back female voters alienated by the GOP’s track record on, well, everything
– Probably will smell better than Mitt Romney

CONS:
– Could potentially wear immodest clothing
– Republicans already tried this once and it didn’t so much work that time
– Might get all the other women jealous, because you know how women are, am I right, fellows?

A Clone of Mitt Romney Grown In A Vat

PROS:
– Allows Mitt Romney to take wildly differing positions on any issue simultaneously

CONS:
– Means that there are two of Mitt Romney

(previously)

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For those keeping track, this officially marks one hundred pages of Al’Rashad. So, you know. Go us.

Dammit, this hits me right in my sweet spot: