#to this was fucking mark fucking millars stupid fucking ass being like

[cultofthepigeon]

FUCKING "guys its really bad to want the super powerful people running secret clandestine missions all over the planet to have any measure of accountability for what they do" would be maybe an interesting take in discussing superheros if it was written BY LITERALLY ANYONE ELSE BESIDES THE LITERAL CIA AGENT

[artbyblastweave]

So on balance I generally do enjoy Mark Millar, and a big part of why I enjoy Mark Millar is that a lot of his superhero stuff demonstrates the same awareness about the genre that Worm does- the sense of an unstable equilibrium, that the center cannot hold in the superhero universe as typically presented. Jupiter's Legacy, Super Crooks, Old Man Logan, Wanted, The Ultimates. Arguably Civil War. I have a whole other post buried in my drafts about how that bleak throughline keeps cropping up in his cape work. Specifically in his cape work, also- the man has written a lot of lighthearted, at times almost cloyingly sincere and optimistic one-off miniseries in other genres. Starlight: The Return Of Duke McQueen, Huck, Chrononauts, Beyond. In tension with this cynicism about the capes is the fact that he also clearly believes that superheroes are really cool, and on some fundamental level a really deeply noble and empowering idea. Even Wanted, which is probably the most thoroughly tasteless thing of his that I've read all the way through, I recall as having had this interesting subtext of anger over the fact that there's an audience for a superhero work as cynical and grotesque as Wanted. ("Fine. We took all the whimsy and wonder and derring-do you claim to have outgrown out back and shot it. The corpse is cooling. Are you happy yet? Dark enough yet? Mature enough yet? This is what you wanted right?") Anyway, I think Kick-Ass the comic suffers gigantically from a failure to break in one direction or another, in regard to that tension. It gets very, very close to saying useful and interesting things about the genre at several points but keeps undercutting itself by transforming back into the object of its own attack. There's this initial line of questioning, right, which is, "what kind of person, in real life, might actually try this? How would it go?" And the comic has some compellingly miserable answers to that question! Everyone in costume is chasing the same power fantasy, clinging to the idea of being somebody. Dave is, in his own words, motivated by "the right combination of loneliness and despair," and he's not competent. He alternates between minor wins and brutal hospitalizations, the first two issues and change is just the world punishing him for being dumb enough to try this, and for the most part he's a LARPer, a self-identified asshole. Red Mist is a rich kid playing with his father's money. Big Daddy and Hit-girl are framed as the "real deal", genuinely competent in their ability to dish out violence, and the comic to some extent has the self-awareness to recognize that people who were actually any good at this would be even more horrifying than the LARPers. The Reveal that Big Daddy was an accountant- that he made up a tragic backstory and made his daughter a human weapon in order to pursue an escapist fantasy- genuinely lands like a meteor! But it fucks it up, because it also needs to be cool, cool enough to keep our attention, and so it pulls an about face. The horror of Hit-girl gets subsumed by the realization that she's also the coolest thing in the whole book, almost loadbearing in terms of having actually cool and interesting things happen on-panel, and so the end of the book turns into the exact kind of superviolent revenge story it was initially skewering as unrealistic and disconnected from the much more grounded grief and loss Dave is experiencing at the start of the book. Dave's costumed escapades goes from being an obviously stupid and egotistical attempt to claw back control of his life to... an actual method by which he claws back control of his life, and not in a way that feels terribly well-earned!

The sequels double down on this- alternating between "in real life this would be cheap and stupid and tinged with anticlimax" and "woooo! Let's ape Tarantino until something cool happens!" and honestly, that feels less worthy of analysis because what I'm pretty sure happened there is that the movie blew up and created A Demand For More Kick-Ass. In general what it feels like fundamentally happened here is that you ask, "what if superheroes were real," you land on the answer of "they'd look stupid, be stupid and die badly," but what does that leave you with? It's not like that wasn't the obvious answer already and it's definitely not eight issues of material. He can't pull the trigger on having everyone involved die badly in meanspirited ways to drive the point home, and he never quite threads the needle back to the reconstructive middle ground he badly wants the book to inhabit, the "real heroes work in soup kitchens and look out for their neighbors" area. Things just happen.

That said, the gag about the astroturfed swear-word "Tunk" is fantastic. 10/10, no notes

[tessatechaitea]

Scarab #7

What a surreal cover. Babies don't have skeletons.

And here was my reply:

I don't blame him for blocking me. Twitter is a giant shithole where nobody should be spending any time at all and the block feature is all that makes it bearable. He probably couldn't see just how funny I was being about how boring his fact was because he was — inexplicably — fascinated with it! It was so boring that I'd already forgotten it the next day when I discovered Millar had blocked me! And since he blocked me, I couldn't see the tweet which I had responded to. Which worried me because I thought, "Damn. What kind of a dick was I being?!" But then my friend Doom Bunny took a screenshot of the boring fact and I was relieved. I read it and thought, "Oh yeah! My response was hilarious! That fact was so boring I'm going to forget about it again almost immediately!" I guess I should apologize to Mark Millar. But should I be sincere or should I do one of those wise-ass apologies where I say something like, "I'm sorry you were so thin-skinned that my totally hilarious joke on Hellspace...I mean Twitter hurt your stupid feelings." Or I could just go on living as I had been living where I never see anything Millar tweets anyway because I don't follow him and haven't cared about anything he's written since he did the whole Todd McFarlane thing and started having other people write Hit-Girl and Kick-Ass while still somehow taking all the credit. Some day in my reading of old issues, I'll get around to The Ultimates and then I'll remember this day! I remember loving that series back around the turn of the Millennium but oh boy will I give it what for this time around! I'm already remembering that it probably sucked! My brain is really terrible with remembering names and even words that I often know I want to use but have to reverse Google search them by looking up the definition to give me the word I can't come up with. So when I was trying to remember who wrote Spawn, I just couldn't come up with Todd McFarlane. So I Googled him and this is the picture Google decided was the fucking Platonic ideal of Todd McFarlane:

I believe I own zero comic books by Todd so this is the only chance I have to look at his picture and think, "Really? REALLY? No, no. But really?!"

You know who I blame for me thinking I'm funny when I'm probably just a huge Internet troll that's making life miserable for a ton of comic book creators? Fucking Gail Simone! Why did she have to have such a good sense of humor about my blog?! Now I expect that kind of good natured ability to laugh at oneself from all creators instead of this tired pretentious bullshit that their art is above making dick jokes about! I should get blocked by somebody on Twitter every few days! It really gives me something to write about! Apparently the "Scream Over Hiroshima" story isn't finished. I guess Scarab still has a chance to do something — anything! — before this is over.

Russians super excited that their pacifist weapon destroyed London and taught everybody that war is Hell.

British Madame Xanadu fills Scarab in on what's happening so he can stop the next Scream Over Hiroshima attack. Not that she's worried about it destroying Reykjavik. She's more worried about what it's going to do to the astral plane. And, well, we all know how important the astral plane is having spent all those years playing Dungeons & Dragons instead of jerking off some peer in the bushes outside of the junior high school cafeteria. The astral plane is like the connective tissue of all the other planes, like The Happy Hunting Ground and the Abyss and the Negative Plane and Acheron and Gehenna and all the elemental planes too! This Scream Over Hiroshima situation is dire! It's also a good idea for my next Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Louis isn't really worried about saving the astral plane. Remember, he's spent the last six issues not giving a shit about anything except saving Eleanor.

See? Exactly like that barn owl Madame Xanadu!

While Scarab begins to realize that Madame Xanadu (even the British version!) always gets her way because how can you prove she's not being totally honest and just manipulating you for her own ends unless you risk the entire world by not doing as she says, one of the Russian scientists begins to have doubts about their plans for world peace. He's suddenly gotten philosophical and he's all, "How many dead babies is world peace worth?!" And his assistant is all, "All of them, you idiot! Every single one! Because all of the new babies won't have to worry about war anymore!" And the one feeling doubts is all, "But why do we have to be responsible for killing all of the babies?!" And the other guy is all, "We're not responsible! Science is responsible! Fucking murderer! But, you know, a necessary murderer! Because science is important!" Then the other guy starts losing his doubts and he's all, "You're right! Science is important! Imagine not having toasters! I'd probably kill three or four babies just to make sure science created toasters!" And then the other guy is all, "That's the spirit! Let's kill more babies for world peace!" Just to be clear, I was paraphrasing the actual conversation in the comic book! I know it was probably hard to tell because I used the word "fucking" and discussed killing babies and since this is a Vertigo comic, those kinds of things are totally expected. Actually, the scientists never really have time to come to grips with what they're doing before the Russian General shoots them both in the face. His mind has been taken over by the Glory Boys which probably means the entire world is in some serious shit now. Scarab travels through the astral plane to arrive in Russia so he can stop the Glory Boys from destroying the world. It'll probably be the easiest fight of his life because I'm sure the Glory Boys simply want to die. Except Scarab fucks it all up and his kill shot on the General just knocks the General into the lever which fires up the Glory Boys and releases the Scream Over Hiroshima over Reykjavik. That's where all the world leaders are meeting for some summit. The whole purpose of the Scream is to hit them with their own abuse of power. So maybe Scarab fucking up is good. Fuck the politicians! I hope the Scream Over Hiroshima makes them feel as bad as I felt when I realized Mark Millar blocked me on Twitter! The Earth is fucked and Scarab couldn't help. The issue ends with two cosmic dudes walking out of the chaos to fix everything. They claim they're Bobby Dazzler and Benedict Creed. They're cosmic plumbers or something. They work for the Cosmic Coincidence Control Center. Sounds like some real Doom Patrol shit. Scarab #7 Rating: B-. Once again, Scarab doesn't do shit. He's mostly just an observer of the horrors of the cosmos. He didn't even have to be in this story! And it looks like he doesn't need to be in the next issue either because those cosmic plumbers are there to stop the astral plane from overflowing into our reality. Unless they're actually the bad guys and Scarab needs to punch them a few times!

[crinosg]

There are writers for whom a lack of subtlety is a boon, a charming characteristic. Jack Kirby did not do subtlety. His ultimate villain was named Darkseid and he was very clearly openly the god of Fascism, and his enemies were all hippies and bohemian space gods.

However in some cases a lack of subtlety is a bad thing, especially when you're the kind of person who thinks they are much clever than they actually are.

Enter Mark "This is me fucking you in the ass" Millar, the so called 'mind' behind the original Civil War comic. A guy who was utterly convinced he was writing sharp political commentary when he made Tony Stark into a villain so horrible he had to wipe his own memory in order to bring it back, who had an extradimensional gulag, who killed off the New Warriors as the catalyst for this stupid event (Which at the time was a fun, light comic about super heroes doing a reality show and had a guy whose super power was talking to germs) and turned them into in universe pariahs to the point their name was being used by a slur (And then turned Speedball into a chracter so overwrought and edgy and full of angst I am amazed anyone could ever take him seriously ever). Oh, and a reporter yelling at Cap for being out of touch with the modern world because he wasn't on Myspace (And wow that's a reference that aged well didn't it?)

(The thing about the New Warriors is apparently just before the Civil War event started Millar went up to the team on the New Warriors comic and said he really liked it and admired their work. Knowing that and knowing what he would eventually do to those characters makes me feel like I'm watching Buffalo Bill complimenting a lady about how clear her skin is. )

But yeah that's Civil War, a terrible terrible event that led to a pretty terrible era of comics for Marvel, and ended with Captain America coming back to fix things AFTER EVERY SINGLE MISGIVING HE HAD ABOUT THE SHRA WAS PROVEN 100% RIGHT.

Like every adaptation of Civil War ever done has basically been Marvel going (Look, we know, but its gonna be good this time we swear). And for what its worth they were: Ultimate Alliance 2 was pretty good. The movie was okay. Better than the comic whose name they took, and that's mainly because they mostly ignored the comics (The game actually ends because Tony Stark accidentally invents the Borg and everyone has to team up to stop them, then the SHRA either gets repealed or rewritten depending on which faction you joined).

Thinking about the Marvel™ Civil War again, I might read the second one.

It feels unreal how tone deaf and ridiculous it is that all that happened.

The idea of there being an outcry on the dangers of super people because of a mass killing? Fine.

The idea that EVERY hero is responsible in the eyes of the people? Stupid.

Like if The Hulk got into a fight with the X-Men with the Green Goblin and Magneto involved and people got hurt, no one would be like "That bastard Spider-man and that rat Ghost Rider those @#!$ old lady killers!"

As someone pointed out, at one point the Juggernaut destroyed the Twin Towers trying to get at Spider-man. Like "That bug sniffer web-head, you're gonna pay for Jugg-11!"