#You write crisis on infinite earths you get to have your 20 ongoings about your edgy antihero guys whos wives hate them

[robocops-a-christ-allegory]

It seems the most popular not-Adrian not-Greg Vigilantes Amongst Comic Readers are Patricia and then Dorian, which makes sense since they both got so many appearances in other peoples shit. I think they might also be the only ones who got a real chance to be characters instead of not really getting any appearances like Vigilante!2005 or getting their miniseries canceled 3 issues in like poor Donald

[davidmann95]

Got a 2020 Superman State of the Union assessment?

Not the most overtly monumental of years for big blue - a lot of the biggest news for Superman this year was about stuff we’ll see next year, which I’ll get into further below - but on the whole definitely a net positive!

Really, the only things I’d say counted ‘against’ this year were the back half of Rucka and Perkins’ Lois Lane and how badly that went off the rails - which for my money was more than counterbalanced by the conclusion to Fraction and Lieber’s Jimmy Olsen - and Romita Jr. turning in shoddy work on Action Comics. Otherwise? Bendis played out the consequences of Truth in fun ways and closed out his tenure on the main titles with a pair of artful final issues, we got Waid’s return to the character alongside Francis Manapul for a great short story, the last issue of the instantly iconic Superman Smashes The Klan, and several excellent installments in DC’s digital Man of Tomorrow series, while Commanders in Crisis introduced the Superman analogue to beat for the 2020s in Prizefighter. And in mass-media Routh’s Superman got a nice fly-by sendoff at the end of Crisis on Infinite Earths, there were two animated features in Red Son and Man of Tomorrow (the former of which I haven’t seen but the latter of which is probably the best official Superman movie, even if that says more about other Superman movies than anything else), and we naaaaarowly avoided the Superman logo being codified as fascist iconography for a generation. Oh and the comics industry did not in fact end due to Covid. So all-in-all a win.

Anonymous said: It’s almost New Year’s, what’s your predictions for Superman in 2021? (I guess you can do Batman too if you want)

So here’s what we do know officially for Superman in 2021:

* Superman & Lois will debut on the CW, the first Superman TV show (without substantial qualifiers) in 20+ years.

* Future State will feature Jon Kent taking on the mantle in Superman of Metropolis, Justice League, and Superman/Wonder Woman, while a now spacefaring Clark is in Worlds of War, Imperious Lex, Batman/Superman, and House of El. Meanwhile Kara graduates from Supergirl to Superwoman in her own two-parter as well as featuring in Superman of Metropolis, and Conner Kent appears to be acting as some kind of Superman in Suicide Squad.

* Phillip Kennedy Johnson takes over Action Comics and Superman in March, beginning with a two-part crossover The Golden Age illustrated by Phil Hester. After that Action Comics will be drawn by Daniel Sampere through around September, at which point Mikel Janin will be illustrating an event-scale arc for the book. Meanwhile Scott Godlewski will be the artist on Superman, but around the time of Janin’s arc on Action an entirely new, as yet unknown creative team will take over Superman while PKJ remains on Action. Both books will also have backup features spotlighting various Superman/Metropolis-adjacent characters as there’s little space for them in the cosmic direction the main story will be tilting towards for the time being.

* Superman: Red & Blue will debut in March as a counterpart to the various Batman: Black & White series over the years.

* Outside the main Superman books, Clark will star in Brian Bendis and David Marquez’s Justice League, as well as Gene Yang and Ivan Reis’s incredibly rad-looking dimension-hopping new take on Batman/Superman. Bendis is indicating we’ll be seeing the long-delayed Event Leviathan: Checkmate this year as well, which features Lois as one of the main characters.

* Not strictly Superman news, but apparently we’ll be seeing Netflix’s adaptation of Mark Millar and Frank Quitely’s Jupiter’s Legacy next year, which centers around the multi-generational drama of the family of Superman analogue Utopian.

* Zack Snyder’s Justice League, its hour come round at last, slouches towards HBO Max to be born.

As for predictions? Well for starters, pretty much everyone takes as a given that Mark Waid is putting together some long-form Superman project now that he’s working with DC again, and I expect to see something come of that next year; Tom King has also soft-announced he’s working on a Superman project since he’s done with scripting his three current DC minis, but I wouldn’t be surprised if nothing directly came of that until 2022. I’d also speculate that Scott Snyder has something in mind: he’s repeatedly said he’s planning on a major out-of-continuity project, and he’s made clear he’s done with Batman for the time being, I imagine he’s done whatever he wanted to for Wonder Woman with Death Metal, and anything he did with the JSA right now would be extremely in-continuity; I doubt he’s playing with anything less than the icons anytime soon and he definitely seems more engaged with Superman now than he was when he wrote Unchained (hell, the end of Last Knight on Earth can basically only be read as ‘I wanna write Superman now’). Again though, dunno that I’d put money on that being next year. 

Outside the theoretical prestige stuff, everything we’re hearing about Future State, Infinite Frontier, and PKJ’s barely-veiled discussion of his run seems to suggest Jon will end up sharing the Superman name in the present and probably taking over that book alongside the new creative team. If Batman: Urban Legends takes off then I wouldn’t be surprised if we got a Superman anthology given DC’s apparent current priorities of consolidating, testing a new publishing model, and putting the biggest names first. And maybe something will finally come of the back-and-forth over whether or not Cavill’s sticking around in the movies - if he is my first guess would be an appearance in DuVernay and King’s New Gods (which is still in progress per DuVernay as of this month) - but we can all I think be pretty sure he’s still not getting a video game anytime soon.

As for what we know for certain of Batman’s 2021:

* Future State has a whole slate of Batman-related books, but Tim Fox takes over the cape and cowl to fight the police state that’s taken over Gotham in John Ridley and Nick Derington/Laura Braga’s The Next Batman, while a resourceless Bruce on the run stars in Mariko Takaki and Dan Mora’s Dark Detective.

* James Tynion and Jorge Jimenez are solidified as the creative team on the now-monthly Batman, while Tamaki and Mora take Detective Comics, with a Damian backup by Joshua Williamson and Gleb Melnikov running through the first issues of each and apparently leading to something, probably a Robin book. Elsewhere Tom Taylor and Bruno Redondo take over Nightwing, Chip Zdarsky and Eddy Barrows spearhead the new anthology title Batman: Urban Legends, and Tynion and Gullem March launch a Joker ongoing, while Bruce also stars in the aforementioned Justice League and Batman/Superman.

* The Gotham Knights game is scheduled to drop next year.

Aside from the Infinite Frontier cover suggesting Tim Fox will take on a role in the present before long as (a) Batman same as Jon Kent as Superman, hopefully with Ridley and Derington coming back, it doesn’t feel like there’s a ton of big Batman stuff to speculate on? Aside from the inevitable unannounced Black Label stuff - including probably Scott Snyder’s Nightwing book - we know the basic shape of things. The Batman is inching closer, Tynion/Jimenez are probably on Batman through at least the end of the year, Mora I don’t think stays on Detective because he’s committed to Once & Future but Tamaki presumably does, Taylor/Redondo Nightwing is immediately going to be a fandom favorite, and Gotham Knights is probably gonna suck because boy that doesn’t look very good. We know the broad strokes of where he’s headed for the time being across all media. If I had to take a whack at a big guess, I’d say I’m a touch skeptical about that HBO GCPD show or the Batmobile cartoon reaching fruition, the former because that’s an incredibly charged premise that has to act perfectly in sync with another mass-media project in another medium AND we know there’s already been behind-the-scenes drama, and the latter because that sounds incredibly stupid.

EDIT: Forgot, Bendis said in 2019 he was working on a Black Label Batman book, so wouldn’t be surprised to see that too this year.

[comicsnsuch]

Tales from the Dark Multiverse

Hi! Thanks for finding this tumblr. The plan is to share and write about comic books, comic book art, other things that interest me and such, thus the name of the tumblr. Maybe you share some of the same interests, or maybe you’ll discover something new.

I’m going to try to post as frequently as possible, but that frequency will vary depending on what real life is like week to week. On slow weeks, there will be more stuff, on busy weeks less.  You get it.  Hopefully if you check in now and then you’ll find some new content.

I work (worked?) in a comic book shop, but as I have been recently reminded, due to the COVID-19/Coronavirus epidemic, I am non-essential.  Thanks State Government! Always good to have a self esteem boost! 

Anyway… I love comic books, reading them, talking about them, (thinking about) making them and so on. Always have, always will. I wanted to have an outlet for sharing that while I can’t be in the shop doing it face to face with customers and random strangers. 

I’ll be writing short reviews for what I’ve been reading, new stuff, old stuff, posting pics, etc.  

 Feel free to comment, but please keep it friendly. Assholery will not be tolerated.

To start with I just finished reading all of DC Comics Tales of the Dark Multiverse one shots. 

                                     I made this in MS Paint!

These started coming out in 2019 and the last one was released in early 2020. The idea behind each is Tempus Fuginaut, a sort of Watcher type character for the DCU (who I think debuted, or at least I fist remember seeing in the Sideways ongoing, a Dark Nights Metal spin off) observing the multiverse and introducing a story that takes an important moment in DC history and asks “what would have happened if things had gone differently?” DC’s version of What If?  in a nutshell.

       That’s Tempus Fuginauts big ol’ head in case you were wondering

 As the “Dark” in Tales of the Dark Multiverse might imply, these are not happy stories.

The first one shot that was released was Tales of the Dark Multiverse Batman Knightfall by Scott Snyder and Kyle Higgens with art by Javi Fernandez.  

This was probably my least favorite of the five issues. Since the “No Justice” mini series event I’m over Scott Snyder. I feel he has so many ideas rattling around in his head that he begins one story, gets too excited about the next one and leaves you underwhelmed with the current arc but dying to read the next. (That being said I of course checked out Batman Last Knight on Earth, having read his and Capullo’s entire New 52 Batman run I didn’t want to miss their “final” word on Batman, but have not read his just wrapped run on Justice League which I hear was quite good). 

I read this one right when it was released a few months ago, so my memory of it might not be the best.  

This one centers around the Knightfall event where Bane breaks Batman’s back and Jean Paul Valley/Azrael takes on the role of Batman. In this reality Bruce never recovers and Jean Paul remains Batman becoming Saint Batman, a Bats Azrael mash up. Javi Fernandez does a great job on the art and Snyder loves chopping people up. 

                                                      Gross.

Definitely worth the read if you’re interested in it or are a fan of Batman or just the Knightfall era. If you grab this series in collected format it’s not so bad that I recommend skipping it, just not my favorite from this batch of books. 

Next up is Tales of the Dark Multiverse Death of Superman by Jeff Loveness with art by Brad Walker and Andrew Hennessey. I really enjoyed this one, it was a good quick read and had a nice arc to it. One of the better issues from this series if you’re asking me.

Right after Superman dies defeating Doomsday in the Death of Superman story arc, the rest of the Justice League shows up, literally as the blood is drying.Ten seconds too late. Lois Lane blames Supes’ death on the heroes for not being there to aid him. 

She makes her way to the Fortress of Solitude and thanks to the Eradicator gets herself all the powers of Superman. She then goes about dishing out justice, with extreme prejudice, to the villains the heroes normally let the revolving doors of the DC justice system handle. This involves a couple of great scenes with Batman and Lex Luthor. Loveness nails the dialogue and the character arc he puts Lois on is great to read. 

                                  Walker and Hennesey do it again!

There’s more to this story than I’ve put here, but I don’t want to say too much and ruin your enjoyment of it if/when you read it.

Special shout out to the art team of Brad Walker and Andrew Hennessey. I feel like they don’t get enough love. They killed it on the Demon Hell is Earth mini, and from what I can tell are crushing it on Detective Comics. Dudes can draw. Spread the word!

Then we move onto Tales of the Dark Multiverse Blackest Night by Tim Seeley and Kyle Hotz. 

This one was a bit wordy, but a lot of fun! I would put this one in the middle of the pack. 

Seeley brings together an interesting bunch of characters including Sinestro, Dove, Lobo and the New Gods! The plot is a little complex, but basically after the Color Corps lose the battle against Nekron in Blackest Night, Sinestro is looking for a way to undo the damage done and becomes a pawn in Scott Free’s plot to do the same. 

Give Seeley a Lobo book or a Hawk and Dove book, or a Mister Miracle book!. He gives each character a unique voice which makes their joint travels through the plot that much more fun to read.

Kyle Hotz’s  art in this issue reminds of a 90’s Image Comic in the best possible way. Lots of detail and cool poses. I also see a lot of Bernie Wrightson in there with Hotz’s heavy use of black and the sinewy musculature of the characters. The book is worth the price of admission to see his renditions of Dove and Mister Miracle. 

                                                          kewl!

 I’m glad to see Hotz working more or just seeing more of Hotz’s work. I don’t know if he fell out of the industry after drawing the original The Hood mini for Marvel with Brian K. Vaughan, working with Eric “The Goon” Powell on Billy the Kid’s Old Timey Odditys, doing art on Carnage Mind Bomb and more I’m sure ( I just can’t remember it all), or I just wasn’t paying attention to what he was working on. If it’s the later, shame on me, if it’s the former, welcome back Mr. Hotz, you’re crushing it and I look forward to seeing more from you. Check out more Kyle Hotz work by following him on Instagram @kylehotzcomics.

Let’s not neglect the oft overlooked inkers! I’m not sure who inked what, but on a guess, Dexter Vines and Walden Wong brought a smooth, cleanness to the proceedings with lots of nicely tapered lines. Again just guessing here, because I don’t know for sure, but Danny Miki used a finer line bringing a scratchy-ness the others didn’t but also amazing detail and clarity on some of the portraiture in the later half of the book. 

Who’s next? Why it’s Tales of the Dark Multiverse Infinite Crisis!

This one may have been my favorite. When the original Infinite Crisis series came out it was a period  where, due to personal lack of enjoyment, I wasn’t reading much of DC’s output, but I did read the Countdown to Infinite Crisis one shot this issue takes as it’s jumping off point. After having read this issue, it makes me want to go back and read Infinite Crisis. I would say that’s the sign of a good issue.

In this alternate reality Blue Beetle, Ted Kord, kills Maxwell Lord instead of vice versa, making himself the head of Checkmate. He then goes about trying to prevent the coming crisis. It’s kind of a tale about absolute power corrupting absolutely, it’s also an underdog tale about getting in over your head.

                Sorry if these images aren’t the best, I’m new at this!

James Tynion IV does a great job catching you up on any old DC continuity plot points you may have forgotten or never knew about in the first place.If you’re reading Tynion’s current run on Batman, or his work on Detective Comics and Justice League Dark, you know he can handle a complex plot like this and does a great job condensing it all down to a single issue.  Aaron Lopresti and Matt Ryan handle the art and they do a great job. Always happy to see Lopresti’s name on a book I want to read.

Bonus points: You can never have too many Ted Kord, Blue Beetle comics, especially when Booster Gold pops up, even if only momentarily. 

If this series leaves you wanting more Blue and Gold action may I direct you to Booster Gold (2nd series) #32 thru about 38ish for some quality comics.

Final one, Tales from the Dark Multiverse the Judas Contract!

I’m not as old as my writing may imply so I had to read the Judas Contract in collected format about 20 years after it was originally released and after having seen it on many a fanzine’s (Wizard) best of list.  When I finally got to read it I wasn’t super familiar with the Titans of the era and already knew the big twist in the story, so it just washed over me without any great effect. None of the shock that someone who was reading it fresh in the 80’s might have experienced. 

I ended up liking this twisted take on the Judas Contract much more than when I read the original. “Sacrilege!” I know, I know, but like I said there was no surprise when I first read it, while this one zigged instead of zagging multiple times and kept upping the ante in scale. 

Kyle Higgins and Matt Groom do a great job reinventing a classic that I’m sure many people had high expectations for. This was a fun faced paced tale.  I enjoyed the hero moments Dick Grayson and Wally West were given. Like the Knightfall one shot Higgins co-wrote with Snyder there’s no shortage of dismemberment and disfiguration, which is neither a plus or minus in this situation, just thought it was worth noting.

Tom Raney handles the art chores here and he does a fine job.  Some of the figures seem a little squat, and their heads are too big in certain panels. Could I do better? No, so who am I to say anything? I just noticed it, here and there, it took me out of the flow of the story every now and then. That’s all. Big fan of his work on Stormwatch and Outsiders with Judd Winick. I also hear he’s super nice, so if you’re ever at a convention where Tom Raney is, seek him out! 

                                      They seem squat, right?

It’s worth mentioning these books are all done in DC’s prestige format and are extra long at about 48 pages each. All covers are by the fantastic Lee Weeks. A nice way to spend the afternoon.

There’s the first post. A little longer than I thought it would be. If you made it this far, I hope it was clear and you understood what I was saying and I hope you liked it and want to return for more. 

Until next time!

[hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger]

7) He’s a Team player

 “He may have been the face of “Marvel Team-Up” during the ‘70s and holds an ongoing reserve Avengers membership card, but Peter Parker is mostly a lone wolf.”

 Not really.

 Peter was a member of the Avengers from 2004 up until very recently and served as a member of the FF during that time too.

 He also formed his own team the Outsiders for awhile, is currently working alongside the Prowler on and off and has formed partnerships with Ben Reilly and Black Cat at various points, the latter for 25 straight issues.

  “Even excepting the extended family of Spider-People, he tends to prefer to work alone, as much about protecting those around him (who have a notably high mortality rate) as it is about how his wise-cracking patter irritates anybody who spends an extended period of time with him.  The irony of it is that he is at his best when he’s bouncing his particular foibles and personality off of somebody else.”

 Yeah. Those ‘somebody else’ being his villains. He’s at his best as a solo hero cracking wise against his villains.

  “Readers have gotten a chance to see the different sides of Miles — that is, how he works differently in a team situation compared to alone — plenty of times.”

 Hooray! We get to see Miles share the spotlight instead of develop his own character and skills and relationships with his supporting characters and villains as much as he could!

 “The underrated “All-New Ultimates” had him band together with some street-level fellow teen heroes, and the current “Champions” book revolves around a similarly adolescent hang-out situation with Ms Marvel, Nova and the newly Amadeus Cho’d Hulk.”

 All-New Ultimates wasn’t underrated. It just sucked shit.

 And what does he even do in Champions besides exist?

 “Placing the character in different contexts allows his personality to be thoroughly rounded out in a way that Peter sticking to himself doesn’t necessarily.”

 Yeah except Peter’s personality was able to be well rounded because we could develop his character from his thought captions and his relationships with his villains and supporting cast members.

 Heads up fellas! In a superhero narrative about a solo superhero it’s actually you know, BETTER, if things are more cohesive and self-contained to their own characters and world rather than roping in people from other parts of the universe regularly for interrupting crap.

  6) Lasting Character Progression

 “The basic root of all stories is to put your hero through the ringer, and have them emerge at the other end not only having achieved their goal (saving the world, getting the girl etc,) but also having gone through some evolution and maturation. Character progression, the boys in the biz call it.”

 We’ve already established the author’s grasp of this concept is flimsy at best. But let’s go on...

 “One of the issues of comic books, a serialized form where multiple different authors will work on the same character over the course of years, even decades, is consistency of character and creating lasting change in them.”

 Uh huh...hasn’t there been multiple examples of characters and franchises being enriched through multiple voices trying their hand at the series and often times developing the series and characters even though they are far from the latest guy to work on them?

 Wasn’t Chris Claremont like the fourth guy to regularly write X-Men?

 Didn’t Tom DeFalco develop Spider-Man and his world over 20 years after they were invented in really awesome ‘has made it into other media multiple times’ kind of way?

 Didn’t fucking DAREDEVIL become what we know him as today 20+ years and multiple writers later?

  “Unlike Peter Parker, who has admittedly moved on considerably since his introduction as a teen milquetoast but has nonetheless fallen prey to retcons, re-imaginings and really bad story arcs up the wazoo, Miles has benefited from his core solo book being almost entirely with the Bendis/Pichelli/David Marquez creative team.”

 Yeah those guys plus any ghostwriters Bendis might’ve used.

 This argument is such shit.

 First of all consistent creative teams don’t matter as much if they consistently aren’t that great. Marquez and PIchelli rock...Bendis sucks hard and began Miles existence in a way that could’ve been much better.

 This argument is also asinine because of course Peter has more bad stories and retcons he’s been around for nearly x10 the amount of time!

 This is like saying Spider-Man is just inherently better than Wonder Woman or Superman because he never existed in the 1950s when comic book writing sucked and where nothing ever lasted and has never gone through multiple full scale Earth 1, Earth 2, Crisis on Infinite Earths, Zero Hour, Infinite Crisis, New 52 timeline rewrites.

 It’s stupid, cheap and utterly desperate.

 It is also utterly dishonest.

 To begin with maybe Miles has never had any stories which are as bad as the worst Peter Parker has to offer.

 But he’s also got absolutely nothing which hits the heights of runs like the Roger Stern run, the DeFalco run, the DeMatteis Spec run (either of them) or baller stories like many of the ones I listed above.

 And worst of all HE’S BEEN RETCONNED TO SHIT TOO!

 In Spider-Men Miles is shown getting Peter’s web shooters in a completely different way to how he did in the main series and that was from allegedly the exact same writer.

 Miles’ mother was DEAD for what, like a year in-universe and even longer than that in real time but now she’s magically alive again as if that never happened.

 Oh but some of the ramifications from after she died are still here.

 And Miles’ history is fucked because he’s been transferred to the mainstream 616 universe so how the Hell does his origin story even work now that there is a whole other person who is the Prowler?

 Shit, his backstory hinged upon Peter Parker being DEAD. That got retconned long before Secret Wars and now he’s in a universe where there is another Peter Parker who’s completely different and who never died to motivate him.

 Miles by virtue of Secret Wars and stuff even before that has had his whole goddam history BROKEN and it took less than 10 fucking years.

 Peter’s history took at least 34-45 years to get this convoluted and most of that at least made sense when you thought about and is even now easily fixable. Every day Miles spends in 616 is another day it becomes harder to fix his character and his history.

  “Not only have readers watched him grow and change over time, he’s done so with consistency and not without consequences which stick.”

 Again his mother and the guy who’s death motivated him were dead then came back to life.

 You can’t say THAT about Uncle Ben or Gwen Stacy.

  5) A SINGLE VISUAL STYLE

 “Besides the consistency in character, the solid stalwart creative team behind the Miles Morales “Spider-Man” books has also resulted in a consistency of visual style.”

 Marquez and Pichelli ARE NOT THE ONLY ARTISTS TO HAVE WORKED ON MILES!

 I’m not even talking about people on team books or books where Miles has guest starred in.

 I’m talking about actual Miles Morales solo books. There are multiple issues which were not drawn by either of those artists.

 “In the early days of Peter Parker, the art was one of the real strengths, even above the classic plots of Stan Lee. Steve Ditko’s still-unusual style was tamed a little when John Romita, Sr. came on board, but there was a continuity in the look of “The Amazing Spider-Man” throughout the ‘60s which made for a clear, definable signature.”

 No there wasn’t.

 Spider-Man blossomed in popularity when Romita Senior showed up, and a lot of that was to do with his art.

 The female characters in particular looked nothing like they did under Ditko.

 Spider-Man and especially Peter Parker changed how they looked under Romita from Ditko.

 Whilst the differences aren’t as drastic as say comparing Bagley to Immonen back in the USM days, it was nevertheless very obviously different so no there really wasn’t any continuity.

 “In the age of rotating creative teams and fill-in artists, that kind of consistency is a rare thing. Peter’s certainly not been with such a steady pair of hands since, perhaps, John Romita, Jr. followed in his father’s footsteps during the ‘90s or Mark Bagley on the original “Ultimate Spider-Man.””

 Bullshit.

 John Romita Senior was the art director of Marvel for years and whilst the trained eye could distinguish the styles Spider-Man as drawn by basically every artist ever until the black costume or arguably Ron Frenz showed up consistently cut close to Romita Senior’s rendition of the character as the in house style.

 Laying Ross Andru and Keith Pollard Spider-Man next to Romita Senior’s Spidey doesn’t immediately raise any red flags for inconsistencies.

 Then you have the fact that Bagley drew Amazing Spider-Man for around 60 issues in the early-mid 1990s and Sal Buscema drew Spectacular Spider-Man for something almost 10 years straight.

 “Nearly all of Miles’s appearances in his own series have been drawn by Sara Pichelli and David Marquez, however, who each bring a bold line and cartoonish, manga-influenced energy to the character.”

 Whilst it happening too frequently is a bad thing different artistic styles add variety and flare to a character.

 If Spider-Man had stayed more or less consistent we’d never have witnessed the bold experimentation of Todd McFarlane or Romita Junior or the raw unadulterated awesomeness of Mark Bagley.

 None of their renditions of Spidey and his world look the same as one another or Romita Senior’s but they are all resonant with somebody and all capture the the characters in different ways.

 In fact from time to time changing creative teams can be immensely helpful for injecting energy into a series and for catching the appeal of new readers. If Pichelli and Marquez’s styles turn a group of people off staying consistent to it screws Miles more than it helps him.

 The argument here is basically Miles looks fairly similar every time you see him in his own series therefore he’s better than Peter who’s had multiple artistic greats work on him and bring different touches and flares to the character.

   4) The Supporting Cast

 “One of Peter Parker’s great strengths as a character was always his supporting cast. Outside of the tights, he had plenty of interpersonal drama to contend with between his extended family, colleagues and romantic interests. Back on patrol, he also had a varied and well-defined collection of loved ones for whom maintaining a secret identity and keeping them safe was paramount. In recent years, between “Brand New Day” and other continuity finagling, that’s fallen by the wayside.”

 First of all saying the supporting cast fell by the wayside indicates the author never read BND though I cannot say I blame them.

 There was an active effort to reintroduce and expand the supporting cast in BND and it was actually often at the expense of Peter Parker himself.

 Second of all there is 100% a supporting cast in Slott’s current run, just not the old one people like but rather the new crappy one filled with Slott’s pet characters. Again I forgive the author for not reading Slott’s crap but then they shouldn’t talk about it as if they have and get stuff wrong.

 Third Peter Parker’s character shouldn’t be judged upon the last 10 years alone or what’s current. The character is the sum of his experiences not whatever the Hell is happening this second. That’s like saying Wonder Woman inherently sucked more than Miles Morales in 2013 because she was living through the shitty Azzarello run.

  “Aunt May has passed away and been resurrected more times than Superman, most of his pals have moved on, and nobody’s really stepped in to fill that gap.”

 Again, only in the last few years which isn’t the majority of the character’s history.

 And Aunt May has never died. She’s only had her death faked and it was only three times. Superman only seemed to die legitimately the once to my knowledge.

 “Miles, meanwhile, has been party to plenty of teen crushes, has had to reckon with not only his own fraught familial situation but also that of Peter, and has to balance his superheroics with attending a private school for the gifted.”

 Peter meanwhile across his history has:

 Had to contend with his best friend and roommate’s father being a villain who knows his identity.

 His BFF being in love with the same girl as him.

 His friend’s girlfriend flirting with him and later them falling in love as his friend goes insane.

 Multiple romantic interests,

 His aunt nearly marrying one of his villains

 One of his villains being his boss.

 His friend thinking he’s having an affair with their girlfriend when he was actually trying to help them but then he finds out said friend is actually having an affair themselves with one of his ex girlfriends.

 His girlfriend hating his alter ego because she thinks that they killed their father who already knew his secret identity and asked him to look after his daughter.

 Falling in love with a reforming costumed criminal who only loves Spider-Man not his own identity and who went behind his back to criminals to get super powers.

 His boss using the photos he gets paid for to slander his name

 And more than I could ever list here.

 So Peter has conceptually done...basically all the shit that Miles has done...only first and better in most respects.

 “Best of all, though, is Ganke: his LEGO-obsessed best friend and confidant, an endearingly dorky rock to lean on that readers also can’t help loving.”

 Best of all though is Mary Jane Watson Parker Peter’s party loving best friend, confidant, lover and once wife, an endearingly complex, heartbreakingly flawed, genre defying female character with a decades long organically unfolding character arc who was a rock to lean on but who also saved Peter’s life physically, mentally and emotionally multiple times who most readers can’t help loving but who gets fucked by sexist people who actually work for Marvel.

[helenawaynehuntress]

Women's Bodies Are Not Tools For Male Agency - An Open Letter To Peter Tomasi And Patrick Gleason

Dear Peter Tomasi and Patrick Gleason,

Last Wednesday, Superman #23 hit stores. For the most part, Superman and Action Comics have been among the bright spots of DC's Rebirth initiative. Lois and Clark are back together again, the super couple have a new addition to their small family, and their personalities are back to where they need to be.

Superman is once again embodying the hope and optimism that have been staple to his character for all of his publication history. Lois Lane is once again his co-star, and she is once again the "top-of-her game", pulitzer-winning, badass journalist that's she's always been. The first woman of comics is once again the superhero we all need her to be: the ordinary human who uses all of her resources to dig up the truth and expose crime and corruption through her own super power: journalism.

Lois is very much an action girl. She just doesn't come with weapons, a costume, and special gadgets to get the job done. Even when situations get dangerous, she doesn't stand by and wait to be rescued. She gets creative. She uses everything that is available to her to make her escape before Superman even arrives at the scene. She embodies everything most people love about Bruce Wayne, minus the toxic masculinity and his need to dress up like a giant bat (complete with bat-themed gadgets, vehicles, and an actual bat cave) to intimidate criminals every night.

All that I've described above is what I've loved about Lois Lane ever since I saw her portrayed by Teri Hatcher in Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman when I was 07 years old. When I started reading the character in various DC books (not just the Superman books) at the age of 20, I was very happy to see that comic book Lois was every bit as awesome as the versions of her I saw on the telly as a kid. I am 30 now.  

I think we can all agree at this point that the idea behind the New 52 was a good one in the sense that it came from a place of DC wanting to expand its readership by giving everyone a new starting point. It was especially done invite new readers to these characters, which was one of the high points of the initiative. Where it misfired was in its execution. Too much of what people loved about these characters for decades got jettisoned and replaced with wholly unrecognisable versions of these characters.

The wholesale jettisoning of character growth in favour of establishing "darker characters" is a big part of what I feel drove away many longtime readers, resulting in lower sales for DC in the span of five years. Rebirth has been a tremendous blessing in carefully reinstating what's been missing from these characters without another reboot, and sales are back up. You and Dan Jurgens have played an important role in bringing Lois and Clark back to their core, for which I am most grateful. But this now brings us back to Superman #23 and the unnecessary dismemberment of Lois Lane in a story arc that frankly did not require it.

Aside from this being another standard fridging for shock value and manpain, what was most infuriating about your decision to dismember Lois is that it continued a long standing problem in mainstream superhero comics to use women's bodies as tools for male agency. Even if this gets retconned before the story arc concludes (and I'm sure it will), the fact is it's still a dehumanising plot device that reduces a woman's importance to how she is valued by the men in her life.

Lois' dismemberment was not about Lois making a heroic sacrifice for what she believes in or protecting the people she loves. Her mutilation was ALL about shocking and traumatising the most important men in her life: her husband and son. It was both gratuitous and traumatising for me to see. It actually made me physically nauseous and caused my heart to palpitate when I read it on Wednesday. Literally. That is not what I expected to get from a Superman comic last Wednesday--a comic that I feel should be accessible to everyone.

When DC launched Rebirth last year, Geoff Johns did so with the promise of confronting the legacy of Watchmen, and with the promise of restoring hope and optimism to the DC Universe. I was very grateful to hear those words, because while I feel Watchmen is being scapegoated here, DC--with some exceptions-- has collectively not embodied that idea in the last 30 years. It's as if Crisis on Infinite Earths did more than just jettison the last 50 years of DC continuity in favour of a completely new direction. It also did away with the idea of heroes being good people who did what they did out of a strong desire to make their world a better place, and not because of a tragic event in their lives that set them on that path. It especially fared worse for the women characters who thrived during the Bronze Age as characters with agency and meaningful storylines.

The tragic origin story became the norm in superhero narratives and the "darkening" of superheroes became the recurring trend. That tragic event in the lives of many iconic male superheroes almost always centred on the death or violent fridging of a woman in their lives, whether that'd be their mother, daughter, sister, friend, or romantic partner. If it was a female superhero, her origin story would almost always be tied to a violent past involving abuse from men--including sexual abuse--or an actual fridging like in the case of Barbara Gordon. If it wasn't a dark origin story, eventually a story arc would come along where a male villain would brutalise a woman as a way of raising the stakes for the affected male hero.  

Notice how much of this darkening of the DC Universe in the last 30 years has involved normalising violence against women? This disturbing trend became so prominent within the first decade of the post-Crisis universe alone, a whole website got made around that same time frame to document all the instances in which female characters have been "depowered, raped, and cut up" in a mainstream superhero comic.

This wasn't the sort of thing that just happened in elseworlds stories anymore. It literally became mainstream DC continuity, ironically, often inspired by elseworlds stories. This is what the last 30 years of DC storylines consisted of, I would almost argue the New 52 was actually the culmination of this style of storytelling for so long. Is it really surprising that women don't stay quiet anymore whenever we see violent misogyny used casually in the stories we're invested in, especially against the female characters we identify with for shock value and manpain? Is it really surprising we respond with anger when fridging is used over and over and over again against the same heroine as a plot device? Can you understand how dismembering Lois this past Wednesday cheapens her character and continues this disturbing trend of the last 30 years, especially given the promise of Rebirth?

When it comes to the representation of women in superhero comics, our anger towards the use of violent misogyny in stories to give them a gritty texture goes way beyond our investment in the characters themselves. It is also very personal to us because it helps to normalise real life misogyny. Normalisation of misogyny in comics is what invites men with toxic attitudes towards women to these characters, and helps to foster a comics community that is actively hostile to women. It especially fosters a community where male harassment of women in comic spaces is very common place, even for being invested these stories and characters. Some of these men even become future writers and editors for comics publishers to the point where it limits women's opportunities to work for these publishers.

When given the privilege to write iconic DC characters in particular, women are rarely afforded the opportunity to develop their stories as creators and editors except in small doses. When men are given the privilege to write and edit these characters, they rarely write and edit them with women and other diverse fans in mind as part of the larger DC reading audience. We're rarely seen as an audience worth connecting with at best (even though we've always been here), and we are seen as "bad for business" at worst. That last one is especially true in the case of female fans and creators who are vocal about these ongoing problems and would like for them to change so that they are no longer a problem.

I realise that as a customer it is not my place to tell you what types of stories to write, and I am more than aware that I don't have to invest money in anything I don't want to support. All of that is true. But here's the thing: I'm not a casual customer. I am a DC Comics fan who wants to invest in these characters and books just like every other fan. They have been my heroes since I was a kid and they still mean a lot to me as an adult. 

This may sound like a naive thing to say, but I believe strongly in DC's potential to be a publisher that is inclusive of everyone, given the diversity of intellectual properties and the fans they invite. I strongly believe that Rebirth is worth supporting because it's seeking to make DC less divisive and more inviting of various groups of people, older fans and newer fans alike. I strongly believe that if the quality of the stories Rebirth is pumping out continues to inspire and invite diverse audiences and creative talents to the fold, we could get to a point where we don’t need to keep having this conversation about representation in comics. It would be a thing of the past. For real!

In the same way that you wouldn't make creative choices that would offend and alienate male fans of any DC property you work on, I ask that you afford women and other marginalised communities that same respect by being more thoughtful of the way you use women and marginalised communities in your stories. To be more aware of the ongoing problems with diverse representation so that you are not unwittingly repeating these same problems in the otherwise good stories you're writing. If Rebirth is about restoring hope and optimism to the DC Universe, please honour that promise by representing women's heroes better. Specifically by writing them as characters with agency and their own storylines, and not as tools for male character development. That is all I want to see happen.

Thank you for your time, and have a wonderful rest of your week.

Sincerely,

Diane Darcy

[ruminativerabbi]

The Rising Sea

I am old enough, but just barely, to remember Robert Frost reading his poem, “The Gift Outright,” from memory at President Kennedy’s inauguration on January 20, 1961. (I was just in second grade, but our teacher, Mrs. Slass, made sure—apparently successfully—that we would remember both that day and that poem for the rest of our lives.) But far more important to me in Frost’s magnificent body of work, at least later on, was his poem “Fire and Ice,” which I memorized in high school and still know by heart. True, it’s only five lines long. But even at that length, it is still very satisfying to read along as the poet famously wonders whether the world will one day end in a fiery conflagration that consumes all that humankind shall by then have built or in a new Ice Age that will simply overwhelm the peoples of the earth with a lifeless blanket of frozen water. I hadn’t thought about “Fire and Ice” for a while, though, until it suddenly resurfaced in my consciousness the other day as I was reading—coincidentally just days before hearing the story of Noah read aloud in synagogue—an article in the New York Times reporting on a new scientific study published just last week in the journal Nature Communications. (To read the study in Nature Communications, click here. To read the summary report in the New York Times by Denise Lu and Christopher Flavelle, click here.)

The Nature Communications study, by Scott A. Kulp and Benjamin H. Strauss, determined that previous methods of calculating the effects of rising sea levels were seriously inaccurate, and that the correct figures are infinitely more devastating than the ones formerly proffered: the study concluded that 150 million people are currently living on land that will be submerged beneath the rising sea by 2050, a mere thirty-one years from now. They are not necessarily doomed, of course. There are, for example, about 110 million people already living on land below sea-level but whose dry-land habitat has been secured through artificially constructed sea walls and barriers of various sorts. The same could theoretically be done in the course of the next three decades for a significant portion of the 150 million people whose land will be flooded by mid-century. The questions, therefore, are as few as they are sharp. Do we have the knowledge to prepare in advance for this almost unimaginable catastrophe hovering over the horizon? Do we have the skill to translate theory into practice and to pre-rescue the land on which so many millions live while we still can? And, most unsettling of all to ask out loud and seriously and honestly to attempt to answer: do we have the collective will to address this issue on a global scale and in a way that sets aside the petty concerns of individuals and single nations in order to respond to a humanity-wide crisis in a way that encompasses the collective will of all humankind to act forcefully, thoughtfully, and successfully on its own behalf?

Looking further into the future only yields an even more unimaginable prognosis: Kulp and Strauss predict that a plausible, albeit worst-case, scenario puts 630 million people living today on land that will be submerged by 2100, a year that only sounds distant until you begin to figure how old your grandchildren’s grandchildren will be around the turn of the next century. To describe the situation even more starkly (and without relying on projections or estimations at all), a full billion people live right now on land less than ten meters above sea level, of whom a full quarter (i.e., 250 million people) occupy land currently less than one single meter above sea level.

And so we finally have an answer to Frost’s question. Yes, the world will be toast (in both senses of the expression) in five billion years when the sun turns into what astronomers call a “red giant” that, as it expands into its next stage of being, will engulf first Mercury and Venus, and then Earth in a thermal cocoon of almost unimaginable heat. Perhaps we will by then have long since decamped to some alternate planet with a better prognosis for long-term survival. But long before that (and in our own lifetimes), human life as we know it will be disrupted by water as the seas rise and we either do or don’t find the wherewithal to stem off at least the most potentially devastating of the effects that the rising sea will bring in its wake. So what if Frost and Dante were wrong in supposing the devastating water would come all froze up? They had the right basic idea! So at least that’s settled.

Poets vied with themselves in ancient times—or at least in Israelite ancient times—to find an appropriate metaphoric range along which to describe the great goal of all mystic endeavor, the attainment of a state of ongoing communion with God. It sounds almost simple when written out so plainly, but the journey to God was (and is) truly daunting—and for one single reason: since God by definition exists outside human experience and since all human language is rooted precisely in the warp and woof of human experience, any effort to speak honestly and clearly in any human language about God should be impossible. And, ultimately speaking, it probably is impossible…but only for writers of prose. Poets are used to using language somehow to describe the essentially indescribable and so, at least in theory, the task should not be beyond the best of them. Nor was it beyond the poets of ancient Israel, as the various efforts in the Book of Psalms to describe what it would be like experientially and sensually to know God—or at least to know of God—seem unequivocally to prove.

Different ancient poets choose different metaphoric ranges along which to express themselves and more than a few described the experience as one of drowning and then, at the very last moment, feeling oneself miraculously saved from certain death. The poet whose ode to God encountered is our eighteenth psalm, for example, writes movingly about the sense of being lifted up by divine hands from a sea in which he was at that very moment about to perish. The author of the sixty-ninth psalm writes about waiting for God to speak as he sensed himself sinking slowly into the seabed and the water rising all around him. The authors of the 88th and 124th psalms wander the same metaphoric path, as does the author of the psalm that appears as the second chapter of the Book of Jonah. These odes to God’s palpable presence are different in lots of ways, but they all have in common this single feature of likening the experience of God to the sensation of being almost drowned and then being miraculously being saved. And, of course, this was the Israelites’ story as well: they too almost drowned in the Sea of Reeds on their way to their experience of intimate communion with God at Sinai. (One of my earlier essays in the journal Conservative Judaism was about this notion of drowning in God; click here to read what I wrote back in 1999.)

Along with Frost’s, these poems too came to me after I read that piece in the paper about the Nature Communications study. At first, they seemed antithetical: the biblical poets were using the notion of being almost drowned and then at the very last moment rescued to describe how it felt to them to be elevated out of mundane reality and—even if just for a long moment—ushered into the reality of the divine, whereas the authors of the Nature Communications study were talking about the possibility of countless numbers of people drowning—or almost drowning—as they flee their homes for higher ground that they either will or will not actually reach in time. But then I changed my mind and in an uncharacteristically hopeful way: perhaps, it struck me, the ancient poets were actually offering us the wherewithal to deal with this new study productively and meaningfully.

The waters are rising, that much seems certain. Nor is there any question that the seas are rising because of human intervention in the natural eco-system of our planet. (Click here to visit the website of the National Ocean Service of the U.S. Department of Commerce if you still need convincing on either of those assertions.) And so the only real question is whether humankind can respond meaningfully to the implications of a changing climate and a changing environment without becoming mired in a swamp of indulgent self-interest from which ultimately none will get out alive. If we just apply to everybody’s better angels to get on board, I suppose we will end up with nothing at all. But if the faithful of the world—and particularly those whose Bibles feature the full text of the Book of Psalms—were to understand that the rising sea actually is God speaking to us, warning us, remonstrating with us, reminding us of our responsibilities to all who bear the divine image (which is every living soul on earth) and to the planet on which all those people bearing God’s image live—then perhaps we can still act meaningfully, and as one, to save ourselves before it really is too late. As all my readers know, the Book of Psalms is primarily a prophetic work. But even the most authentic prophetic prediction can be averted through concerted human action. The Book of Jonah teaches that clearly enough. So the question is only really whether we are prepared to act on that lesson or not.

I close with another favorite poem. In the fifth book of his “The Prelude,” William Wordsworth describes a strange encounter he had in a dream with a mysterious stranger. In the dream, his gaze is drawn in the direction of the stranger’s. “And looking backwards when he look’d, I saw / A glittering light, and ask’d him whence it came. / ‘It is,’ said he, ‘the waters of the deep / Gathering upon us,’ quickening his pace / He left me: I call’d after him aloud; / He heeded me not; but with his twofold charge / Beneath his arm, before me in full view / I saw him riding o’er the Desart Sands / With the fleet waters of the drowning  world / In chase of him, whereat I waked in terror, / And saw the Sea before me; and the Book, / In which I had been reading, at my side.’  I first encountered those lines in W. H Auden’s remarkable book, The Enchafèd Sea, then sought them out in their original context. I offer them to you all today, however, not as poetry but—in the style of the ancient bards who created the Psalter—as prophecy. And so are we just where the poet himself also was: between the word (in our case, as published last week in Nature Communications) and the sea itself. Shall we just read? Or shall we act? That wasn’t precisely the poet’s question to his readers back in 1805, but it is mine to all of you this week.

So what else happened this week? Oh yes, the United States began the procedure intended formally to withdraw our nation from the Paris Climate Accord.