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natsubeatsrock · 3 years

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Should Hiro Mashima die?

My answer is no.

Though, this isn't about actually killing Hiro Mashima. Kinda got you with the title, though, huh? (This was originally going to be titled “Is Hiro Mashima dead?” and released on his birthday. You’re welcome.)

This post is about a widely debated topic of analysis known as the "death of the author." I've talked about this a few different times in passing in a few posts over the years. You could argue that this belongs in my series rewriting Fairy Tail and I considered placing it there. However, I feel that it's better that I keep this detached from that series. This topic concerns criticism of any series. Naturally, being a Fairy Tail blog, I plan on engaging this with the context of Fairy Tail's author being dead or not, hence the title. Still, this is helpful to think about for analysis of plenty of other series.

Again, though, my answer is still no.

Let's start with the origin of this term. The term comes from an essay by Roland Barthes called "La mort de l'auteur". Use your best guess as to what that translates to. I highly encourage you to read the essay as it's pretty short. It's about six or seven pages, depending on the version. There are three main points to his essay.

Creative works are products of the culture they come from and less original than people expect.

The idea of the author as the sole creator and authority of creative works is fairly modern.

The author's interpretation of a work shouldn't be considered the main or only interpretation of a work.

Of these three points, I'm sure you recognize the last point. But first, I want to talk about the other points. I believe it is important to understand the arguments being made as a whole.

The first point should be fairly uncontroversial. The vast majority of creative works use established language, tropes, and elements to create a new thing. I wouldn't go as far as Barthes does in this regard. Not to mention, this is somewhat weird to know considering his third point. However, I agree that creative works should be considered products of the culture and genre they come from.

The second point is a bit trickier for me. To be clear, the point is true. You only have to look at various cultural mythologies as an example. There isn't a single version of the Greek myths. There are several versions and interpretations of the various stories and myths.

Even recent popular fictional characters have had several different interpretations. This is especially true with comics. There have been multiple different Batman interpretations, Spiderman runs, and X-Men teams that fans love. Fans even love and appreciate numerous forms of established characters like Frankenstein's monster and Sherlock Holmes. So, as a consumer and critic of art, I can understand this.

My problem is as a creator of art. I understand this being contentious when it comes to something like religious myths. But, if I create something, I want to get the credit for it. I want people to love my music or writing. But I also want people to recognize me for my skill in crafting it.

This is true even if you hold to the first point Barthes made. Even if you believe that no art is truly unique, isn't the skill of synthesizing the various tropes and influences around a person worthy of credit in and of itself?

Then again, I am not without bias in this. Barthes says that the modern interpretation of the author is a product of the Protestant Reformation. As a Protestant myself, I get that my background plays no part in my view of this. Barthes also blames English empiricism and French rationalism, but personal faith is the biggest influence on me that Barthes lists.

That being said, there's also something Barthes completely misses in his essay. In the past, stories were passed down by oral tradition. As the stories were passed down from generation to generation, they slowly evolved and became what they are known today. Scholars today can gather a general consensus of what a story was meant to be and some traditions were more faithful about passing traditions down than others. However, you can't always tell the original author of a mythological story the same way we know who gave us stuff like the Quran or the Bible.

As time passed, stories were written down. With this, it was easy to share single versions of a story and identify its creator. We know who made certain writing of works even before the 1500s. For example, we have the Travels of Marco Polo and Dante's Inferno and know their authors. We could tell the authors of works were before the Protestant Reformation.

By the way, the Reformation happened to coincide with one of the most important inventions in human history: the printing press. Now you can easily make copies of an individual's works and you don't have to rely on word of mouth to share stories.

I can't stress how important an omission this is. The printing press changed the way we interact with media as a whole and might be the most important invention on this side of the wheel. And yet Barthes doesn't even mention as even a potential factor in "the modern concept of the author"? In his essay about understanding written media? That’s like ignoring Jim Crow in your essay about Birth of a Nation bringing back the KKK.

Now, we get to the final point. The author's original intentions of their works are not the main interpretation. This is understood as being the case after they create the series. Once the work is written and sent into the public, they cease to be an authority on it.

It's worth recognizing how this flows from the other two points. Barthes argued that works of fiction are products of their culture and our current understanding of an author is fairly modern. Therefore, the interpretation of the reader is just as valuable as that of the author. As Barthes himself wrote, "the birth of the reader must be at cost of the death of the author."

At best, this means that a reader can come away with an interpretation of a work that isn't the one intended. With Fairy Tail, my mind goes to the final moments of the Grand Magic Games. My view of Gray's line "I've got to smile for her sake" has to do with romantic feelings for Ultear. I don't know of a single person who agrees with this. Mashima certainly hasn't come out and affirmed this as the right view.

It's good to recognize that a work can have more meanings behind it than the ones intended by its creator. Part of the performing process is coming to a personal interpretation of a work. In many cases, two different performances will have different interpretations of the same work, neither of which went through the creator's mind. At the same time, both work and are valid.

That being said, there is an obvious problem with this: readers are idiots. Not all readers are necessarily idiots. But enough of them are idiots. The views of idiots should have as much weight as that of the creator. Full stop. Frankly, I maintain that idiots are the worst possible sources to gauge anything of note. (At the very least, policy decisions.)

I know this as a reader who has not been alone in misunderstanding a work. I know this as an analyst who has had to sift through all kinds of cold takes on Fairy Tail. (Takes that are proven wrong simply by going through it a second time. Or a first.) And I definitely know this as a creator who has to see people butcher my works through nonsensical "interpretations."

At the same time, the argument Barthes made comes with an important caveat. He also argued that works are the products of the culture and surroundings of the author. Barthes isn’t making the argument that author’s arguments don’t matter.

As far as I can tell, Barthes doesn't take this to mean that those influences are worth analyzing. Doing so would be giving life to the author. However, there should be some recognition that a creative work didn't come to exist out of nowhere. There's a sense in which Fairy Tail didn't just wash up on the shore chapter by chapter or episode by episode. It came to be as part of the culture it came from.

Now, you'll never guess what happened. Over the years, the concept of "death of the author" lost its original intent. Nowadays, people usually only care about the third point. "Death of the author" is only brought up to dismiss "word of God" explanations of work, after its release. I'd venture to guess that most people using the term casually don't know anything about its roots. I honestly don't know how Barthes would feel about this.

I can understand what might fuel this view. A writer should do their best to write their intended meanings in a work. It would be wrong of a writer to make up for their poor writing after the fact. I don't love Mashima's "Lucy's dreams" explanation for omakes. I know Harry Potter fans don't love the stuff J.K. Rowling has said over the years.

At the same time, my (admittedly Protestant) understanding of "word of God" and "canon" is that they have the same authority. After all, the canon IS the word of God. It is a small section of what God has said, but it isn't less than that.

Of course, it's worth recognizing that nearly every writer we're talking about isn't even remotely divinely inspired or incapable of contradiction. This understanding should cut two ways. An author should never contradict their work in talking about it. Write what you want and make clear what you want to. On the other hand, writers can't fit everything they want to in a work. I'll get to this soon, but their interpretation should be treated with some value.

By the way, people will do this while throwing out the other arguments made by Barthes in the same essay. People will outright ignore the culture and context that a work comes from in order to justify their views. Creators are worshiped and praised for their works or seen as the sole problem for the bad views on works.

What worries me most about this modern interpretation of "the death of the author" is its use in fan analysis. People seem to outright not care about the author's intent in writing a story. They only care about their own interpretation of the work. Worse still, people will insist that any explanation an author gives is them covering up their mistakes. Naturally, this often leads to negative views of the work in question.

This is just something I'll never fully understand. It's one thing if you don't like something. If you don't get why something happened, shouldn't your first move be to figure out what the author was thinking? Instead, people move to the idea that it makes no sense and the writer's a hack.

If all of this seems too heady, let's try to bring this down to earth. Should Hiro Mashima die so that his readers can be born?

Hiro Mashima is one of many mangakas who were influenced by Akira and Dragon Ball. He considers J.R.R. Tolkien to be one of his favorite writers. Monster Hunter is one of his favorite game series. He's even written a manga series with the world in mind.

It would make sense to look at Fairy Tail purely through this lens. You could see Fairy Tail as a shonen action guild story. Rather than seeing the guild as a hub for its members, Fairy Tail's members treat those within it as family. Rather than focusing on one overarching quest, the story is about how various smaller quests relating to its main characters threaten their guild. Adopting this view wouldn't necessarily be an incorrect way to engage with the series. (Mind you, I haven’t seen this view shared by many people who “kill Mashima”.)

Though, there's more to Fairy Tail than the various tropes that make it up. If you were to divorce Fairy Tail entirely from its creator, you'd miss out on understanding them. There are ways Mashima has written bits of himself into the series. Things that go farther than Rave Master cameos and references.

My favorite example is motion sickness. I often think back to Craftsdwarf mocking motion sickness as a useless quirk Dragon Slayers have. It turns out that its origin comes from his personal life. Apparently, one of his friends gets motion sickness. He decided to write this as part of his world.

This gets to the biggest reason I don't love "death of the author" as a framework for analysis. I believe the biggest question analysts should answer is why. Why did an author make certain decisions? You can't do this kind of thing well if you shut out the author's interpretation of their own work. Maybe that can work for some things, but not everything.

I've had tons of fun going through Fairy Tail and talking about it over the past seven years. More recently, I've been going through the series with the intent to rewrite the series. I've made it clear multiple times in that series that I'm trying to understand and explain Mashima's decisions in the series. I don't always agree with what I find. However, trying to understand what happened in Fairy Tail is very important to me.

It's gotten to the point that I love interacting with Mashima's writing. I talk about EZ on my main blog. I can't tell you how much fun I've been having. I'll see things and go "man, that's so Mashima" or "wow, I didn't expect that from him." HERO'S was one of my favorite things of last year and I regularly revisit it for fun. It's the simplest microcosm of what makes each series which Mashima has made both similar and distinct.

Barthes was on to something with his essay. I think there should be a sense where people should feel that their views of the media they consume are valid. This should be true even if we disagree with the author's views on the series. But I don't know that the solution is to treat the author's word on their own work as irrelevant.

There's a sense where I think we should mesh the understandings of media engagement. We recognize that Mashima wrote Fairy Tail. There are reasons that he wrote the series as we got it and they're worth knowing and understanding. However, our own interpretation of the series doesn't have to be exactly what Mashima intended. We can even disagree with how Mashima did things.

I know fans who do this all the time. They love whatever series they follow, but wish things happened differently. Fans of Your Lie in April will joke about [situation redacted] as well as write stories where it never happens. You love a series, warts and all, but wish for the series to get cosmetic surgery, or take matters into your own hands.

And who knows? It's not as if fans haven't affected an author's writing of a series. Mashima's the perfect example. I've said this a few times before, but Fairy Tail has gone well past its original end at Phantom Lord (or Daphne for the anime fans). Levy rose to importance as fans wanted to see more of her.

Could Mashima have done that if we killed him?

Before the conclusion, I should mention another way “death of the author“ comes up. People will invoke “death of the author“ to encourage people to enjoy works they love made by messed up people. Given everything we’ve said up to this point, that’s obviously not what should be intended by its use. For now, though, I do think that we can admit that we like the works of someone even if we don’t agree with everything they did as a person. (Another rant for another day.)

In Conclusion:

“Death of the Author” is an imperfect concept, but it’s not without its points. I don’t think we should throw out the author’s intent behind a work. However, we should be able to have our disagreements with the author’s views without killing them.

#fairy tail #hiro mashima #death of the author #i'm back #and what a way to return #i've been meaning to do this forever #fav

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

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WORK ETHIC AND RELATIVITY

It's clearly an abuse of the system, and the latter is not simply a constant fraction of the size it turned out later to be useful in some worldly way. But there are limits to how well this can be done, no matter how small it is. There's no switch inside you that magically flips when you turn a certain age would point into the case and say that they didn't have the courage of their convictions, and that probably doesn't surprise would-be founders. Try a patent search for that phrase and see how many results you get. Fundraising is just a means to an end. The important thing is to be young. But once they get started, interest takes over, and discipline is no longer necessary. The way not to be desperate. What's lame is when they use the term Collison installation for the technique they invented. It has fabulous weather, which makes it significantly better than the soul-crushing sprawl of most other American cities.

Drew Houston did work on a problem you have? People who get rich from startups fund new ones. You can't afford the time it takes to talk to all potential investors in parallel and push back on exploding offers with excessively short deadlines, that will almost never happen.1 Both make it harder for new silicon valleys are Boulder and Portland. Whereas I suspect over at General Motors the marketing people are telling the designers, Most people who buy SUVs do it to seem manly, not to stop and fight.2 The most dynamic part of the conversation I'll be forced to come up with will not merely be an inborn trait in humans. You're also surrounded by other people trying to solve: how to have a web-based email service with good spam filtering. The centralizing effect of venture firms is a double one: they cause startups to form around them, and this trend has decades left to run.3 Since a successful startup is going to be entering a market that looks small but which will turn out to be bad.

You can see how great a hold taste is subjective and wanted to kill it once and for all. In either case you let yourself get far downwind of good places to land, your options narrow uncomfortably. Of course, a would-be silicon valley faces an obstacle the original one didn't: it has to grow organically. If you want to do.4 Mark Zuckerberg will never get to bum around a foreign country. There are more and bolder investors in Silicon Valley don't make anything, there's nothing they can be sued for. For Einstein, relativity wasn't a book full of hard ideas, in others they're deliberately written in an obscure way to seem as if they're committing, but which doesn't actually commit them. For example, in preindustrial societies, or how to program computers, or what life was really like in preindustrial societies, or how to program computers, or what constitutes a good dessert, but about whom they feel some misgivings personally. That is certainly true; in fact it will usually be enough to set things rolling. It only spread to places where there was a strong middle class—countries where a private citizen could make a fortune without having it confiscated. Some of the most successful companies we've funded, Octopart, is currently locked in a classic battle of good versus evil. It would be a great problem to have.

Colleges are similar enough that if you can.5 Plenty of people who are really good at lying to tell members of some profession the most common mistakes young founders make is not to try to figure something out. There's no reason to suppose there's any limit to the amount of effort a startup usually puts into a version one, it would be Fred. If you don't know who needs to know something.6 But even then, not immediately. Patents, like police, are involved in many abuses. There are too many dialects of Lisp. But none of the existing solutions are good enough. For nearly all of history the success of your company. You can see this most clearly in New York, recruiting new users and helping existing ones improve their listings. That principle, like the idea that professors should do research as well as money.7 They can teach students about startups?

Hardware startups face an obstacle that software startups don't. At most colleges, it's not surprising we find it funny when a character, even one we like, slips on a banana peel? Occasionally it's obvious from the beginning when there's a path out of an idea? In other words, no one knows who the best programmers are overall. He likes to observe startups for a while at least, tends to require long stretches of uninterrupted time to work. Well, therein lies half the work of essay writing.8 I just gave up. The two-job career. Inexperienced founders read about famous startups doing what was type A fundraising, and decide they should raise money too, since that seems to be how startups work. Colleges are similar enough that if you can't explain your plans concisely, you don't, and that's actually very valuable information.

That was all it took to start successful startups. And who can reasonably expect more of a self fulfilling prophecy than the uphills. The idea of them making startup investments is comic.9 That's how bad the problem has become.10 Fortunately you can also watch real doctors, by volunteering in hospitals. One is that a real essay and the things one has to write in school is that real essays are not exclusively about English literature. Whether cause or effect, this spirit pervaded early universities. Under the present rules, patents are part of the economy always does, in everything from salaries to standards of dress. Whereas I suspect over at General Motors the marketing people are telling the designers, Most people who buy SUVs do it to seem manly, not to stop and fight. But she never does.

Fortran isn't good enough at simulations. Interfaces, as Geoffrey James has said, should follow the principle of least astonishment. And what happens to the company during fundraising, growth will slow. I see someone laugh as they read a draft of an essay. The random college kid you talk to investors your m. 7% is the right amount of stock to give him. In the past this has not been a 100% indicator of success if only anything were but much better than random. How do you do? But that test is not as simple as it sounds.11 Understanding all the implications of what was said to them, they had the luxury of curiosity they rediscovered what we call the classics. And open and good. As usual, by Demo Day about half the startups were doing something significantly different than they started with.

Notes

Selina Tobaccowala stopped to think about, and the cost of writing software. This is an acceptable excuse, but they seem like I overstated the case. We Getting a Divorce? The company may not be led by a central authority according to certain somewhat depressing rules many of the reasons startups are competitive like running, not the primary cause.

I know it's a significant number. They thought I was writing this.

The variation in productivity is the new top story. The Roman commander specifically ordered that he could accept it.

The real decline seems to them.

I was living in a series. There are titles between associate and partner, which can vary a lot of time on, cook up a solution, and I bicycled to University Ave in Palo Alto, but have no idea whether this happens it will seem dumb in 100 years ago. Startups that don't scale is to get users to observe—e. We didn't know ourselves which VC firms.

And the reason this subject is so contentious is that they can get cheap plane tickets, but suburbs are so intellectually dishonest in that so many trade publications nominally have a connection with Aristotle, but Joshua Schachter tells me it was not just on the cover story of Business Week, 31 Jan 2005.

Even if the value of their core values is Don't be evil, they could not have gotten away with dropping Java in the Neolithic period. In my current filter, dick has a similar logic, one could argue that the worm might have done all they could imagine needing in their experiences came not with the earlier stage startups, who've already made the decision. There need to, so they'll understand how lucky they are within any given time I know of no counterexamples, though, so they will fund you one day is the way we pitch startup school was that they use the name of a large chunk of this essay talks about the size of the funds we raised was difficult, and that there's no lower bound to its precision. In the early adopters.

It did not help, the higher the walls become. So what ends up happening is that the highest returns, it's easy for small children, with the buyer's picture on the relative weights?

It's a strange feeling of being absorbed by the financial controls of World War II had disappeared in a startup to an associate if you know about a related phenomenon: he found it easier to sell hardware without trying to capture the service revenue as well. Like the Aeneid, Paradise Lost is a cause.

In the thirties his support of the current edition, which are a small amount of stock the VCs should be. Give the founders of failing startups would even be symbiotic, because sometimes artists unconsciously use tricks by imitating art that does.

So much better than Jessica. So it is generally the common stock holders who take the hit.

Thanks to Ming-Hay Luk of the Berkeley CSUA, Paul Kedrosky, Peter Eng, Ed Dumbill, and Chris Dixon for smelling so good.

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illegiblewords · 6 years

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Fan Fiction VS Original Fiction

I don’t know how long this post will go, but this is an old question and I think I can actually examine it better at this point in my life.

As a teen, I saw a lot of people treat fanfic as if it was something shameful. Like it was less worthy of respect and easier than original fiction. At the time, that made me feel very indignant in part because I’d read plenty of shitty original fiction works and plenty of gorgeously executed fanworks. After I got more into comics, where the name of the game was essentially corporate-approved fanfiction with a rotating roster of writers and artists, the policy against respectability seemed dumber and dumber. Same with anti-OC mandates. Every single character had been an OC at some point, why should one human being be inherently more capable of doing a good job than another? Because of who a corporation chose to hire? What about all the shit comics and comic OCs out there?

If it all just comes down to craft and how cohesive, how powerful the story is at the end of the day, then I just didn’t see why fans should be given less respect as a person than any professional simply because one is getting paid. You have to earn respect by doing good work, and unfortunately not all professional creators do good work. Corruption is a helluva thing.

Whether fanfiction or original fiction is easier depends very much on what you’re trying to do, in my opinion. Each mode of storytelling carries its own challenges. You need to be a chameleon in fanfiction, and sometimes you need to be an architect or a repairman. You can’t get away with characters reading randomly OOC without getting critique or at least losing some traffic. If OOC happens because you are using critical skill to address a flaw you recognized in canon that can be a gamble all on its own.

Original fiction you’re not being compared to canon, but you have to build everything up from scratch. You are going to be judged based on if your characters are credible, if your societies are credible, if the world as a whole is consistent and has tangible stakes. You need to research whatever you need to research, there’s no one else to guide you, everything depends on your own choices. There is freedom, but you are also subject to even heavier quality standards in some ways due to the multitude of technical elements you are now responsible for.

Each form can be judged harshly according to its own criteria. They are related for sure, but not perfectly identical. Even trying to argue which deserves more respect or which is harder seems completely irrelevant because 1) depends what you’re trying to do 2) its such a petty, superficial thing to judge works on. The question itself to me suggests the person asking doesn’t actually have a true understanding of how fiction operates.

IMO this is a point in history when we need fanwork more than ever, and we need it to be uncensored and experimental, enthusiastic and unapologetic. I think it needs to happen for every medium that exists. Historically it’s a huge venue for writers to challenge themselves and each other in terms of craft. Right now though, we are in a period where fan work is becoming increasingly scarce and increasingly policed. What is put out is often homogenous and lacking in ambition while believing itself to be edgy in uniform ways.

This isn’t true of everywhere of course. But it’s more than I’ve ever witnessed in the past.

The places I’ve seen doing the best at avoiding this trend have been games that require some degree of character creation and roleplay, because they’ve let people know IT’S OKAY TO MAKE AN OC, IT’S OKAY TO DO WHAT MAKES YOU HAPPY AND MESS AROUND. WE’LL EVEN SET IN SOME STRUCTURE SO YOU CAN FEEL MORE CONFIDENT THAT YOU’RE NOT GOING COMPLETELY OFF THE RAILS. HAVE FUN!

Dungeons and Dragons accomplishes this. Frankly, a lot of Bioware games do this too. So do Bloodborne and Dark Souls. So do Final Fantasy XIV and Dragon’s Dogma.

I don’t think critique is what caused the fandom problem so much as authoritarianism. Entitled people who harass, insult, or accuse creators for making something not catered to THEIR individual taste. People who want to push anything not to their individual taste off the internet because they find it annoying, or frustrating, or even distasteful. This includes people who would flame and shame the shit out of Mary Sue authors. It also includes people who say stuff like...

“If you don’t make character X with Y quality you’re a coward!”

“So sick of seeing all these [insert superficial biological quality] characters smdh”

“If you portray X character with Y quality you are Z insult. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.”

It’s destructive. It terrifies people into silence and it’s killing fandom activity. Rather than generating more content in the vein of what entitled individuals want, it just makes less on the whole. The response never should have been to give creators who are making something for others to enjoy free of charge any kind of grief. Dissatisfied people should try making things themselves.

It might not always get attention. It might be hard, and it might not turn out exactly how you want. But if you are truly invested, if you pay attention to your technique and learn from both your own mistakes and the mistakes of others, if you practice regularly and do exercises to improve your weak points, you can get there. The targeted creators certainly had to do it.

Talent is, like respect, something you have to earn.

I don’t understand how anyone could have the GALL to demand another person do something for free that they aren’t ready to do themself.

Meanwhile, if you’re not sure how to start the creative process with an approach you haven’t seen before... just ask people! If you need research books or writing guides or art references or whatever, all the tools you need to succeed are there. Some is viewable for free on the internet. If you care to, you can have it.

But yeah, long story short the older I get the less important it is whether something is fan work or original work. A human being came up with it either way. Which one is the higher quality story in terms of technique matters to me, but for individual audience members I think as long as you aren’t trying to control another person you can let whatever version you want occupy space in your head.

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davidmann95 · 6 years

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What's your Marvel Starter Pack?

My Marvel knowledge isn’t nearly as extensive as what I have for DC, so this’ll be scaled back to 12 books from the 15 I had there (nevermind Superman and Batman’s own personal lists). Additionally, since Marvel’s even more about Right Now than DC, nothing here is earlier than the turn of the century; a lot of my older recommended reading is by my dad’s suggestion since he had plenty of firsthand experience with the Silver and Bronze ages. Also worth noting that my Marvel tastes don’t exactly fall in line with the general sensibilities of Tumblr or fandom at large - I’m not a big X-Men guy, for instance - so your results may vary. But anyway, again, if you’re following me but new to actually collecting comics and wondering what to look into to gauge your interests, I’ve got plenty for you.

1. Daredevil by Mark Waid

What it’s about: Blinded as a child pushing an old man out of the path of an oncoming truck transporting radioactive waste, Matt Murdock grew up to become a lawyer, encouraged by his pugilist father Battlin’ Jack Murdock not to rely on his fists as he had throughout life. But when Jack was murdered for refusing to throw a fight, Matt was forced to rely on the talents he had developed in secret under his sensei Stick - the same isotopes that took away his sight boosted his remaining four to superhuman levels, as well as granting him a 360° awareness of his surroundings he termed his ‘radar sense’ - to find justice for his father and those like him, becoming the vigilante Daredevil. Now, after a crimefighting career marked by agony, loss, and an increasingly deteriorating psyche, his identity has been unofficially exposed by the tabloid press…but attempting to turn around both his life and his mental health, Matt’s chosen to try and re-embrace the good in both his daytime career and in the thrill of his adventures as the Man Without Fear.

Why you should read it: Aside from being in my opinion the most influential superhero comic of the decade, Mark Waid’s tenure on Daredevil is the complete package of superhero comics. Energizing, gorgeous, accessible, character-driven, innovative, and bold, it’s a platonic ideal of Good Superhero Comics, and most especially Good Marvel Superhero Comics, and as such there’s little better place to start.

Further recommendations if you liked it: Shockingly, few modern Marvel titles seem to operate on a similar frequency to this run, even among those that clearly wouldn’t have existed without it; of those I don’t mention in one capacity or another below, the only modern books that leap out to me as being of a similar breed are Roger Langridge and Chris Samnee’s (the latter ending up the primary artist on Waid’s Daredevil) tragically cut short Thor: The Mighty Avenger, Dan Slott and Mike Allred’s Silver Surfer, and Al Ewing’s Contest of Champions. Given the classic mood it evokes, you might also be interested in some of Marvel’s older stuff in general - as probably most conveniently packaged in the Essential volumes - as well as the more recent Marvel Adventures line of all-ages titles. For hornhead himself, most of his classic work tends to operate in a pitch-black noir mood that much of Waid’s run is meant to contrast; if you want to delve into it, go to Frank Miller’s run (primarily Born Again), then Brian Bendis’s followed by Ed Brubaker’s and, following Waid, Chip Zdarsky’s (the Charles Soule run in the middle seems largely forgettable).

2. Marvels

What: Following the career of photojournalist Phil Sheldon - beginning in World War II with the rise of the likes of the Human Torch, Namor, and Captain America, and forward into the reemergence of superheroes with the Fantastic Four - Marvels shows what the battles that define a world look like to the helpless spectators, from the controversy surrounding mysterious vigilantes such as Spider-Man, the fear of the “mutant menace” represented by the X-Men, and the terror when the planet is first truly threatened at the hands of Galactus.

Why: As well as being one of Marvel’s best and most defining works period - this is Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross’s coming out party as two of the most significant names in the genre, and it articulates Marvel’s avowed “it’s the world outside your window!” philosophy better than perhaps any other title - Marvel is ruled by history and continuity in a way DC isn’t. The latter may have reboots to contend with, but Marvel has a much more upfront and consistently significant timeline of what happened when and what’s important, and if you’re going to have to immerse yourself in that ridiculous lore, there’s no more fulfilling way of getting an injection of pure backstory than this.

Recommendations: There’s a follow-up by Busiek, Roger Stern and Jay Anacleto titled Marvels: Eye of the Camera; I haven’t read it yet myself, but given the pedigree involved I can’t imagine it’s anything less than entirely solid. For other Major Marvel Events, the defining one of the 21st century is Mark Millar and Steve McNiven’s Civil War, which set a tone that still reverberates through the line; also worth checking out the recent Marvel Legacy oneshot, which seems to be laying the groundwork for things to come. Speaking of setting a tone, while it’s not directly ‘relevant’ continuity-wise, Millar also worked with Bryan Hitch on Ultimates 1 & 2, which proved to be the aesthetic model for the current wave of Marvel movies and added plenty of ideas that have been extensively mined since. History of the Marvel Universe by Mark Waid and Javier Rodriguez fits its title and is absolutely worth a library checkout, but is mainly a rote checklist elevated by all-timer artwork.

3. Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s Young Avengers

What: The heroes of the group once known as the ‘Young Avengers’ have gone their separate ways, each trying to figure things out on the cusp of adulthood. But when Wiccan’s attempt at helping his boyfriend goes horribly wrong - mixed in with a pint-sized god of mischief’s machinations, an interdimensional bruiser’s attempts at routing him, and non-Hawkguy Hawkeye’s extraterrestrial hookup - the gang’s forced back together again and on the run before old age literally swallows them whole.

Why: Here’s the bummer truth, daddy-o: I am not, in the common parlance, down with the hep cats, at least as far as gateway young-readers Marvel books go. I flipped through Runaways and wasn’t compelled to pick it up; I kept on with Ms. Marvel for a couple years but always on the edge of falling out of my monthly pile. Unless it’s truly next-level spectacular or heart-pouring-out sincere, gimme superfolks routing fiendish plots and going on trippy adventures any day over a bunch of sad kids in tights figuring out adolescence all over again: Spidey already did it first and better, and when emotionally-down-to-Earth superhero comics do get me fired up it’s usually set a little later on in life (even when I was the target audience for this sort of thing). But fire it through Gillen/McKelvie laser neon sexytime pop, and suddenly you’re in business. Slick, smart, raw, and wild, this was the best comic of 2013, and’ll certainly go down as one of the best superhero titles of this decade, Marvel as the Cool Kids of superherodom dialed up to 11.

Recommendations: Nothing else quite like this out there - the closest in feeling is Grant Morrison and J.G. Jones’ excellent original Marvel Boy miniseries, though that’s more about becoming a 20-something out in the world in the sense of wanting to burn it all down to the ground - but as I said, Runaways and Ms. Marvel do generally appeal to the same audience (and to be clear, I did like the latter just fine), as do the original Young Avengers run and Avengers Academy. Personally, I checked out and liked Avengers Arena, where all the fun teen heroes got forced into Hunger Gamsing each other on a murder island run by Arcade, followed up by them breaking bad in Avengers Undercover - please note that I’m like one of the three people on Earth who liked this book as opposed to ravenously despising it, which probably has in part do to with my lack of prior attachment to the characters involved. Also, important to note that this book is in the middle of a thematic Loki trilogy, preceded by Gillen’s Journey Into Mystery (which I haven’t read but don’t for a second doubt the quality of), and completed by Al Ewing and Lee Garbett’s truly magnificent Loki: Agent of Asgard; also worth noting that these books, and really modern Loki as a whole, are deeply rooted in Robert Rodi and Esad Ribic’s Thor & Loki: Blood Brothers. And for perfect entry books, I don’t think there’s much of anything better out there, especially for young readers, than Ryan North and Erica Henderson’s The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, one of Marvel’s most consistently high-quality ongoings of the last several years.

4. Hawkeye: My Life As A Weapon

What: Clint Barton, aka Hawkeye, aka Hawkguy, is the Avenger who’s Just A Dude. No super-steroids and vita-rays, no magic hammer or Pym particles, a distinct lack of multi-billion dollar armor or immortality serum. Dude has a bow and arrow, and while he is very, very good with that bow and arrow, he still gets his ass kicked a frankly disproportionate amount relative to his teammates. Between meeting a dog, buying a car, and hanging out with friends - even if each incident goes significantly more wrong that they would for anyone other than Clint Barton, with non-Hawkguy Hawkeye Kate Bishop typically along for the ride - this is what he gets up to when he’s not helping save the world.

Why: Gonna show my heresy again: I’m not actually over the moon about Fraction/Aja’s Hawkeye past the first arc. But that first arc? Man oh man oh man, are they about as good as Marvel gets. This is absolute next-level storytelling on every front, with Aja and Pulido pulling out all the stops and Fraction - who by all accounts thinks more about the process of how comics work than anyone else in the field - just pouring heart and style all over the thing. It’s as tight and energetic as comics get, and the perfect introduction to Marvel’s street-level corner.

Recommendations: Aside from the rest of this run, there’s the recent Hawkeye (starring the non-Hawkguy Hawkeye Kate Bishop) by Kelly Thompson and Leonardo Romero, and there’s a generous helping of Hawkguy in Ales Kot and Michael Walsh’s Secret Avengers, a book as tight and out-of-the-box and oddly joyous in its own way as this. If you’re looking for other Marvel material that gets this explicitly experimental and afield of the house style, go for Jim Steranko’s much-loved work with Nick Fury. And for the other, considerably grimmer side of the street, aside from the Daredevil stuff I mentioned above, check out anything and everything you can get your hands on from Garth Ennis’s work with the Punisher, along with Greg Rucka’s and Jason Aaron’s.

5. Moon Knight: From The Dead

EDIT: This list was written prior to allegations made against Warren Ellis. It’s your money, but while I’d still recommend checking the book out of the library - the quality of the work isn’t going to change now that it’s out there in the universe - if you’re looking to pad your bookshelf I might recommend skipping to some of the books suggested below in its place.

What: Marc Spector was a mercenary until the day he died, betrayed in the desert before an Egyptian temple by his comrades…and then he kept going. No one knows for sure whether the truth is what his doctors have to say - that sharing his head with the likes of Steven Grant and Jake Lockley is a manifestation of DID, and he’s a profoundly sick man - or his own interpretation - that his fragile human personality buckled and shattered before the immensity when dying by its temple, he bowed his head at death’s door to the moon god Khonshu and let it seize his soul. Whatever the truth, he now knows his purpose: to defend travelers by night from whatever horrors would cross their path.

Why: There’s no story as such to be told here; Ellis and Shalvey simply show six adventures over six issues that establish Moon Knight and the scope of what he’s capable of when handled properly, ranging from straightforward detective work to psychedelic journeys through a rotting dream to a jaw-dropping issue-long fight scene. Marvel has a proud history of material skewing slightly to the left of the rest of their output, tonally and conceptually, and this is your ideal gateway to Weird Marvel.

Recommendations: For the further adventures of Moon Knight, by recommendation would be Max Bemis and Jacen Burrows’ current volume, which is following up on the seeds Ellis and Shalvey laid down quite satisfactorily, with a few twists of their own on top. Ellis himself used Moon Knight before this in his run on Secret Avengers with a number of different artists, which was very much a precursor to his work above in its high-concept done-in-one style; also check out his book Nextwave with Stuart Immonen, which is as out there as it gets for Marvel and also the best comic ever. Delving into Marvel’s spooky side, if this did anything at all for you absolutely get all of Al Ewing and Joe Bennett’s massively and rightfully acclaimed The Immortal Hulk (and if you’re looking for more something more traditional with the Green Goliath, Mark Waid’s The Indestructible Hulk is a hoot). If you really want to go to ground zero of Weird Marvel, you’re in the market for Steve Gerber’s work, primarily Defenders and his own creation Howard the Duck (who had another very entertaining via Chip Zdarsky and Joe Quinones recently worth checking out). Another notably out-there character worth checking out is She-Hulk, particularly in Dan Slott’s run and Charles Soule/Javier Pulido’s. Two more figures existing on Marvel’s weirder end are Doctor Strange - whose ‘classic’ work would as I understand it be Steve Englehart and Frank Brunner’s run, and who’s worth checking out more recently in Brian K. Vaughan and Marcos Martin’s miniseries The Oath, Jason Aaron and Chris Bachalo’s run, and Donny Cates and Gabriel Hernandez Walta’s - and the Inhumans - while contemporary attempts to push them have been a failure, there have been excellent individual successes in Ellis, Gerardo Zaffino, and Roland Boschi’s Karnak, Al Ewing and company’s Royals, and Saladin Ahmed and Christian Ward’s Black Bolt. And I’d be remiss in the extreme not to bring up Gabriel Walta and Tom King’s Vision, which I don’t want to give anything away of, but has a serious claim to being the best thing Marvel’s ever published.

6. Ultimate Spider-Man by Bendis & Bagley

What: When bitten by a genetically mutated spider Peter Parker thought he could use his newfound powers to make a quick buck, and come on, you already know this.

Why: This is the foundational modern Spider-Man. The first arc’s aged a little wonky in bits as Bendis was trying to make late-90s/early-00s Teen Slang work, but by and large, Brian Bendis and Mark Bagley’s original 111-issue tenure on Ultimate Spider-Man reimagining his early years was pound-for-pound one of Marvel’s all-time most engaging, exciting, dramatic, and authentic long-term runs. This is the template for every movie (especially Homecoming) and TV show he’s had in the last decade, a sizable part of what got me into comics in the first place, and one of the company’s most reliable perennials. You want to get onboard with maybe the most popular superhero in the world, you do it here.

Recommendations: With the remainder of the list I’m getting into more character/concept-specific reccs, and for other great Spider-Man, your best bet truly is the classic early material by Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, and John Romita as collected in the Essential volumes, which has aged unbelievably well compared to its contemporaries; Bendis’s post-Bagley material just doesn’t hold up, even with the introduction of fan-favorite Miles Morales. For other ‘classics’, your best bests are Spider-Man: Blue, and by my understanding the runs of Roger Stern and J.M. DeMatteis, particularly the latters’ Kraven’s Last Hunt. For the modern stuff, Chip Zdarksy’s current Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man is just getting better and better, I’ve heard very good things about Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane, I personally enjoyed Mark Millar and (at his peak) JMS’s runs, and while most agree Dan Slott’s soon-concluding decade-long tenure on the character has outstayed its welcome, he’s also turned in some stone-cold classics like No One Dies and Spider-Man/Human Torch, as well as other entertaining work such as the original Renew Your Vows and Superior Spider-Man. Most recently, Chip Zdarsky’s work with the character in The Spectacular Spider-Man and the high-concept out-of-continuity miniseries Spider-Man: Life Story are some of Mr. Parker’s all-time best, while Tom Taylor’s Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is a charming relatively small-scale superhero adventure book, and Saladin Ahmed and Javier Garron’s Miles Morales: Spider-Man is easily the best possible introduction to that guy.

7. Thor: God of Thunder Vol. 1

What: Though Thor, the god of thunder and mighty Avenger, has faced limitless threats to even divine life and limb over his many millennia, only one figure has ever truly frightened him. Now, as he discovers a serial killer of deities is loose in the cosmos, he must turn to his past and future alike in order to survive the coming of the God-Butcher.

Why: The pick on this list most directly relevant to those coming in from the movies right now, I’m afraid that while a bit of this was plucked for Ragnarok, this isn’t remotely on the same wavelength. This is black metal death opera screamed through the megaphone of wild space-spanning superheroics, and not only is it the best Thor comic, it’s the perfect introduction to Marvel’s cosmic side.

Recommendations: Along with the Loki books I namechecked above, the defining run on Thor (though the rest of his continuing work there is also very much worth checking out) is Walter Simonson, which laid down a lot of the fundamentals of the character as he exists today; along with that and the rest of Aaron’s run, my understanding is that Lee/Kirby’s original run holds up very well. For more satisfying fight comics, I’d also suggest World War Hulk, and I hear Marvel’s early Conan comics were standouts. On the cosmic end, I know the Guardians of the Galaxy are where it’s at these days; they sprang to life in their current incarnation in the much-loved Annihilation, and while I haven’t been reading their current Gerry Duggan/Aaron Kuder run, it’s well-liked and probably a good place to drop on, as would be the recent Chip Zdarsky/Kris Anka Starlord, and I’d personally recommend Al Ewing and Adam Gorhan’s Rocket. Beyond them, Jonathan Hickman’s comics are where it’s really at, from his Fantastic Four to S.H.I.E.L.D. to Ultimates to Avengers/New Avengers to the big finale to his overarching story in Secret Wars; it’s a complicated reading order to figure out, but oh-so-worth it.

8. Iron Man: Extremis

What: Faced with the horrors of his amoral past and the questions of a future coming quicker than he can manage, Tony Stark faces his most dangerous enemy yet when experimental post-human body modification tech is let loose into the world and lands in the hands of a white supremacist terrorist cell.

Why: More than anything other than Robert Downey Jr. smirking and quipping, this story is the definitive model for the modern Iron Man, taking a C-lister most notable for dealing with alcoholism decades earlier and hanging out on the B-list team in the Avengers (at least until 2012), and redefining his personality, aesthetic, and role in the 21st century as a man who might be smart enough to save the world if he can ever pull together enough to somehow save himself from his own compromises and weaknesses. The road to this guy becoming a household name is paved here.

Recommendations: Prior to this, his biggest stories were Demon in a Bottle, showing his first reckoning with his alcohol abuse, and Denny O’Neil’s 40-issue run introducing Obadiah Stane and showing Stark’s darkest hour as he sinks completely into his illness. Post-Ellis, the big run is Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca, which seizes both on the ideas here and the momentum granted by his Hollywood debut to cement his status as an A-lister; after that check out Kieron Gillen’s, which is not only a fun big-idea series in its own right but paves the way for Al Ewing’s spinoff Fatal Frontier, easily one of Iron Man’s best and most overlooked titles. Finally, while it was derided in its own time (that it was a spinoff of an event that turned him evil but the comic never especially explained the circumstances didn’t help), Superior Iron Man is also worth a look as a horrifying contrast to the rest of these.

9. Captain America: Man Out Of Time

What: A sickly young man who volunteered to participate in an experimental super-soldier program to serve his country in World War II, Steve Rogers became Captain America and protected the world from the Nazis with unimaginable courage and distinction, until the day he died disarming a drone plane rigged to blow aimed at America’s shores. He was honored throughout history…until the day he was found alive by the Avengers, frozen in the Atlantic and ready to emerge into the lights of the 21st century when needed most. Most people know that story. This is the story of what happened next.

Why: The search for the definitive statement on Captain America is one that’s driven his character for decades: after all, handling him doesn’t just mean talking about one man’s character, but the character of a nation. Successes are typically qualified, but one of the more successful creators in the pool is Mark Waid, who’s up to his fourth time at bat with Steve right now on the main book. His own most notable effort however is here, showing Rogers’ earliest days post-iceberg as he adjusts to living in what is to him the far-flung future, seeing the ways the nation has both surpassed his wildest dreams and fallen short of his humblest expectations, leaving him in the end to make the choice of whether this is truly the world he wants to defend.

Recommendations: As I mentioned, Waid’s had a few times up at bat with Captain America, and while he initial 90s stints might not be ideal for new readers for a number of reasons, his current run with frequent partner Chris Samnee is a solid crowdpleaser and a perfect place to jump onboard. Prior to that, worth checking out are Jim Steranko’s bizarre and transformative 3-issue run, Steve Englehart’s legendary Secret Empire (not the recent contentious Marvel event comic, to be clear), Ed Brubaker’s turn of the character towards grounded espionage, and his co-creator Jack Kirby’s bombastic, passionate 1970s tenure on the Captain. Currently, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ run is quite solid. Regarding related characters, for the Winter Soldier I’d suggest Ales Kot and Marco Rudy’s unconventional cosmic thriller Bucky Barnes: Winter Soldier; Black Widow had her own recent and excellent Mark Waid/Chris Samnee run, and I’d also recommend the one-shot Avengers Assemble 14AU by Al Ewing and Butch Guice, and issue #20 from Warren Ellis’s previously mentioned time on Secret Avengers; for Black Panther, his definitive runs are under Don McGregor and Christopher Priest, and I’d also note Jason Aaron and Jefte Palo’s Secret Invasion arc as showing T’Challa at his best.

10. Fantastic Four By Waid & Wieringo

What: Bathed in cosmic radiation on an ill-fated journey to the stars, Reed Richards, Sue and Johnny Storm, and Ben Grimm were transformed, and became the Fantastic Four, first family of an age of heroes! Now, years into their careers and with Reed and Sue’s young children in tow, they continue to explore new frontiers, whether battling a sentient equation gone mad, contending with an extradimensional roach infestation, or perhaps most perilous of all, Johnny trying to deal with getting a real job.

Why: Plenty consider the Fantastic Four one of Marvel’s most difficult groups to get right, but Waid and Wieringo nail the formula here as well as anyone ever has, just the right mix of high adventure and family dynamics to draw just about anyone in; this is as crowdpleasing as comics get and the perfect introduction to the best superhero team out there.

Recommendations: The FF’s another group where it’s worth going back to their earliest days of Lee and Kirby; while much of the writing’s aged awkwardly at best, they’re the absolute foundational comics of the entire universe and lay down concepts that are still getting use today throughout that universe. Past that initial run, John Byrne and Walter Simonson’s are among the best by reputation, as well as Jonathan Hickman’s as I discussed before (Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s is worth tracking down as well, especially since concepts there end up feeding directly into Hickman). For more outside-the-box material, Joe Casey and Chris Weston’s First Family is worth a look, as is Grant Morrison and Jae Lee’s 1234. And for the all-time best showing of bashful Benjamin J. Grimm, the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed Thing, find Marvel Two-In-One Annual #7 to see him defend the entire planet in a boxing match at Madison Square Garden. And while the team’s sadly off the table at the moment, Thing and the Torch are returning in Chip Zdarsky and Jim Cheung’s new volume of Marvel Two-In-One as they set out to find their missing family.

11. Mighty Avengers by Al Ewing

What: When Thanos takes to the skies as Earth’s Mightiest Heroes are off-planet, it’s a day unlike any other, as those left standing are forced to band together as the Mighty Avengers. And as the danger passes, the team remains, looking to truly work alongside those they protect rather than above them to make things better, even as forces conspire in the background to enslave them all.

Why: This title is something of a limitus test, in that it’s one where you’ll have to deal with it being constantly, infuriatingly forced to deal with crossover nonsense. It’s one of the big prices to pay for engaging with a larger universe, but the trade-off is that this is where Al Ewing gets set loose on the Marvel universe, drawing on every weird corner to pull together a run of genuine moral intent, note-perfect character work, and all-out adventure. This may be the ‘secondary’ team, but it’s as perfect as the Avengers have ever gotten.

Recommendations: The title itself is relaunched as Captain America and the Mighty Avengers, and as that ends but Ewing continues his time at Marvel, the characters and concepts end up divided among a number of titles: Contest of Champions, where a number of heroes are plucked from the timestream to duel for the power and amusement of the Grandmaster, New Avengers (later turned U.S.Avengers), where former X-Man Sunspot assembles a new team to act as a James Bond-ified international strike force, and Ultimates (later turned Ultimates2), where some of Earth’s most powerful and brilliant heroes band together to proactively defend against unimaginable cosmic threats; also try his mini-event Ultron Forever with Alan Davis sometime. Based on your response to numerous aspects of those titles, there’s a good chance you might be in the market for David Walker’s Luke Cage titles, Matt Fraction’s Defenders, and Jim Starlin’s cosmic 70s books such as Captain Marvel and Warlock (and make sure to read Nextwave at some point, Ewing actually follows up on that gonzo delight in some surprising ways here). For the ‘main’ team, aside from Hickman’s previously mentioned run - which while spectacular is pretty far afield of the usual tone - some suggestions might be Kurt Busiek and George Perez’s much-loved run, Roger Stern’s Under Siege, I have to imagine given the pedigree of the creators Earth’s Mightiest Heroes by Joe Casey and Scott Kolins, Brian Bendis’s extended ownership of the Avengers books, and The Kree-Skrull War.

12. Wolverine & The X-Men by Jason Aaron

What: Dwindled down to a few in a world that hates and fears them as much as ever, mutantkind has been split in two, with by-the-books Cyclops taking a hardline approach against oppression and feeling that the youth in the X-Men’s charge must be made ready to fight, while Wolverine has grown tired of throwing children into battle and has left to find a new way. Founding the Jean Gray School For Higher Learning, Logan’s found himself in the most unexpected role of all as a professor, fighting just has hard to keep the unimaginable high-tech academy and the hormonal super-powered student body in check as to fend off the supervillains inevitably sent their way.

Why: The X-Men aren’t exactly my forte, with a wobbly batting average at best over the years as the books devote at least as much effort to trying to juggle the continuity and soap opera demands as the actual sci-fi premise. There have been successes though, and few so geared towards new reader engagement as Wolverine & The X-Men, where Aaron strips the franchise down to the base essentials of a team living in a school for super-kids. It’s poppy, it’s weird, it’s touching, and it’s accessible. It’s the X-Men at its best.

Recommendations: The most direct predecessor to this run (aside from its actual lead-in miniseries X-Men: Schism, which is actually worth checking out) is Grant Morrison’s New X-Men, which takes the sci-fi aspects of the concept to the very limit in what I’m inclined to consider the best X-Men run, though it’s proven controversial over the years among longtime fans. The base of the team as it exists today is in Chris Clarmemont’s work, which I’m not wild about myself but has a few hits such as God Loves, Man Kills; if you’re looking for a modern update on the formula developed there, Astonishing X-Men by Joss Whedon and John Cassaday is probably your ticket (and the follow-up run by Warren Ellis is a great weird paramilitary sci-fi book for a bit). Jonathan Hickman’s relaunch is a radicaly and brilliant departure paving a new way forward; it’s perhaps best experienced after a bit of ‘traditional’ X-Men to understand the scale of the contrast, but check that out as soon as possible. For classic material, I understand the Roy Thomas/Neal Adams run was an early success, and Jeff Parker’s X-Men: First Class is by all accounts a charming look at the team’s earliest days. Jason Aaron’s work elsewhere on the X-Men proper was limited to the first 6 issues of the short-lived Amazing X-Men, but he had a very extended and successful tenure on Wolverine which would be my go-to recommendation for him; past that, Death of Wolverine actually satisfies, and All-New Wolverine starring his successor Laura Kinney was the best X-Men book on the stands for some time (writer Tom Taylor is also had a short-lived ‘proper’ X-book in X-Men: Red). As for the group’s many spin-offs, I’d suggest Rick Remender’s X-Force, Peter Milligan and Mike Allred’s X-Factor/X-Statix, and Joe Kelly and Ed McGuiness’s Spider-Man/Deadpool, which should serve as a decent introduction to the latter dude’s own oddball territory in the franchise along with the truly mad and utterly delightful You Are Deadpool.

#Marvel #Opinion

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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WandaVision Episode 7 Theories Explained

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This article contains WandaVision spoilers

After seven painfully short episodes of Marvel’s WandaVision, we’re still none the wiser about how exactly the Westview anomaly was created, and how Vision was brought back to life.

We’ve just been introduced to one potential villain in the form of nosy neighbor Agnes – unveiled as powerful Marvel Comics witch Agatha Harkness – and we’ve seen that Wanda is still far from a malevolent force. She has threatened people who’ve encroached on The Hex, but she hasn’t killed any of them, and we don’t know how aware she is about the true ramifications of her control over the town’s residents.

Meanwhile, we have some lingering Westview mysteries to uncover, and the true identity of “Pietro Maximoff” to contend with.

Here are some of the biggest theories swirling around what the final two episodes of WandaVision might reveal….

The Next Episode

Ah, it’s time to address the mythical tenth episode of WandaVision! We’ve avoided covering this for a while, because it has honestly felt like an additional instalment thrown in at the end of the nine-episode project would probably be consigned to the “unlikely” column, but let’s take a look at it now in the wake of some recent information from Marvel Studios.

Certain sites have noted that a few WandaVision actors have been listed to appear in ten episodes of the series and not nine, but this is easily explainable when you factor in the surprise announcement of Assembled, a new documentary run that will go behind the scenes of various Marvel Disney+ shows. It begins with The Making of WandaVision, which will begin streaming after this first MCU spinoff has concluded.

We think this is all there is to the various rumors of a tenth episode, but fans are still theorizing that it could happen. Ultimately, none of us will be proved right or wrong until WandaVision has finished, so this theory will probably keep doing the rounds for another couple of weeks.

Pinches of Paprika Out of 10: 9

The Parentals

There are still a lot of theories surrounding the nature of WandaVision’s commercials, but the idea that they’re somehow being created from Wanda’s overwhelming grief holds water. They do often seem to address various moments of Wanda’s traumatic past, including the incident in Lagos and her experimental history with Strucker.

But who are the man and woman that we see appearing time and again these ads? A swathe of fans think the answer is quite simple: they are Wanda’s deceased parents, Oleg and Irina Maximoff. But if there’s any truth to the theory that the commercial actors are the Maximoffs, would this eventually be revealed as a quick flashback, or would there be more to it?

i’m still laughing at the nexus side effects ad #WandaVision pic.twitter.com/zWzCB9ezz7

— 🛸 (@declineusername) February 20, 2021

Pinches of Paprika Out of Ten: 7

Testing, Testing

At the climax of episode 7, we found out that iconic Marvel Comics witch Agatha Harkness was responsible for a lot of meddling throughout many of the sitcom scenes in WandaVision. The reveal came complete with an earworm to end all earworms, ‘Agatha All Along’, but there’s a fascinating theory wafting about online that the TV signal itself wasn’t created by either Agatha or Wanda, but Doctor Strange, who was using it via a spell to monitor what was going on inside the Hex anomaly when he found himself unable to penetrate it.

Going further, some fans posit that the commercials are warnings that Strange has attempted to sew inside the broadcast to warn Wanda about the nefarious magicks being used against her inside The Hex by the likes of Agatha. They haven’t managed to get through to Wanda, but have instead played out as skewed variations on his attempt at contacting her through her subconscious.

Is Strange trying to pull Wanda back to reality by telling her what might happen if she doesn’t break the spell?

Dr. Strange watching Wanda mess with the fabric of reality. #WandaVision pic.twitter.com/O3U5ieKuBz

— Sir Pauer (@SirPauer) February 21, 2021

Pinches of Paprika Out of Ten: 7

Bait and Witch

How well does Agatha know Wanda? She certainly knows that Vision is dead, but it does seem like the new witch on the block has vastly underestimated the extent of Wanda’s powers.

If we go back to the episode where Agatha revealed Sparky’s death to Wanda and the twins, you might remember that she seemed genuinely unnerved when Billy and Tommy asked their mom to change the family dog’s grim fate. “You can do that?” she asked Wanda, and appeared lost in thought. Was this the actual moment she knew that Wanda had managed to bring Vision back from the dead inside the confines of The Hex, and that he wasn’t just another illusion?

The main theory surrounding the nature of Agatha’s powers is linked to her ability to plop the X-Men universe’s version of Pietro Maximoff into Westview at a crucial moment, as we saw during her catchy flashback montage.

Wanda definitely knows this incarnation isn’t Pietro, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he isn’t really Evan Peters’ beloved Peter Maximoff, does it? Perhaps Agatha is impressed by Wanda’s rumored resurrection powers because she herself isn’t able to bring people back from the dead. Instead of presenting Wanda with the real Pietro, she had to pull another variation in from the multiverse using The Hex’s rumored Nexus power.

Maybe Agatha is revealing herself to Wanda now because she wants Wanda to bring someone else back to life. Could it be someone who was once close to Agatha, or a villainous presence who will go on to make waves in the MCU? And if this does indeed turn out to be the X-Men version of Peter Maximoff, will he be able to break Agatha’s control over him and continue to be part of the MCU beyond WandaVision?

Her treachery knows no bounds. from WANDAVISION

Pinches of Paprika Out of Ten: 4

Vision Is Toast

Paul Bettany’s Vision has been trouncing about Westview trying to get to the bottom of how and why he’s back from the dead in the past couple of episodes, but the chances of him returning to active duty after all this is over are, to put it mildly, incredibly slim. We’ve already seen that he can’t make it through The Hex without falling to pieces – the magic inside is keeping him alive for now.

Yes, many fans sensed that Vision wasn’t likely to make past the final (final) credits of WandaVision since the show began, but there’s also some pretty solid MCU-based reasoning behind the theory if you take a small step back to the very beginning of Phase 4’s story.

During Spider-Man: Far From Home’s In Memoriam video, hilariously set to the strains of Whitney Houston’s power ballad ‘I Will Always Love You’, Vision is pictured as one of those Avengers who are “gone, but not forgotten” in a “touching tribute” to our fallen heroes.

According to public record, Tony Stark, Natasha Romanoff, Vision (and Cap, who is probably keeping a very low profile in his Old Cap guise) are all very much dead in the Peter Parker-centric blockbuster – which takes place some time after the events of WandaVision. Ergo, vis-a-vis, concordantly, etc, Vision will not spring back to life if and when The Hex breaks down.

So, should we just go ahead and assume we’re in for yet another Paul Bettany death scene? Maybe, but let’s not forget that Bettany has been part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe since its inception in 2008, and he’s already been nixed three times. First as the voice of Tony’s AI, JARVIS, then twice at the end of Avengers: Infinity War. Are they really going to cut him loose for good?

The actor clearly LOVES being part of the MCU. While we may well see the last of Vision in WandaVision, we reckon it’s time for Bettany to undergo another Marvel reincarnation.

Place your bets.

when vision stares into the camera like he's in an episode of the office #WandaVision pic.twitter.com/yCr2iRgTTi

— kathryn hahn fan club ✡︎ ⚢ (@fruitskywalker) February 19, 2021

Pinches of Paprika Out of 10: 3

You Don’t Have the Stones

We’ve yet to see a few moments that crop up in WandaVision’s mid-season trailer, and the most important of these appear to show Wanda in a prison or hospital outfit witnessing the recreation of at least one of the Infinity Stones.

There are plenty of theories that tackle whether Wanda herself is pulling the stone/s back from the atomic level that Thanos reduced them to at the start of Avengers: Endgame, or whether the Mind Stone is specifically is drawn to her since the stone was originally key to unlocking or enhancing her superpowers, but it’s hard to gauge the sequence of events that led to its re-emergence without defining where and when these moments play out in the MCU timeline.

Since WandaVision takes place pretty soon after Endgame, do these images depict Wanda, bruised and exhausted from battling Thanos, in a holding room awaiting treatment? It doesn’t exactly seem like she’s a prisoner here as these aren’t the kind of power-controlling restraints she was subjected to on The Raft in Captain America: Civil War.

The potentially mind-blowing reason we can’t wait to find out how Wanda comes to be in the presence of a reformed Infinity Stone is because her darker hair, ravaged look and outfit here almost exactly match her very first appearance inside a cell in Strucker’s lab at the end of Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

What the hell is going on?!

images of the last two episodes of #WandaVision (a real madness the images of the gems and #TheVision in black and white) | tt: daily.maximoff pic.twitter.com/IxvS6BM3eL

— joan⚝ | wv spoilers (@daily_maximoff) February 21, 2021

Pinches of Paprika Out of Ten: 1

Have you heard any compelling new WandaVision theories? Let us know in the comments.

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The post WandaVision Episode 7 Theories Explained appeared first on Den of Geek.

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charliejrogers · 3 years

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Paddington (2014)

Sometimes you watch a movie and want to be challenged. You want your head to explode. You want to get lost in a world of plot twists and double-crosses. Other times you don’t. TV more often than movies fills the role of comfort food for people looking for passive media, but let’s all take a moment to recognize the power of a good comfort movie. Sometimes your comfort movie is that dumb rom-com you’ve seen 1000 times, other times a mindless action movie of good vs. evil. Many comic book movies certainly can fall into this camp, but really any series like Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings can become comfort food whenever those fans begin to think of the characters more like old friends than avatars on a screen. And never is that more true than when a childhood friends makes their way onto the big screen.

I don’t believe I have ever read (or has someone read to me) a Paddington book. In fact, after writing that sentence I had to Google whether Paddington was a series or a single book. I’m not from the U.K. so please excuse my ignorance. It’s not that people in America don’t know Paddington he’s just not as popular here as he is across the pond. Therefore when this hit theater six years ago and I heard critics rave about it, I didn’t get it. Christ, it was even nominated for the best British film at the BAFTAs in 2015. There was Paddington, a family movie about a walking, talking bear, right next a serious drama about Stephen Hawking (The Theory of Everything) and the very adult ScarJo sci-fi film Under the Skin. Plus, think also I was at an age where I was “too cool” for kid’s stuff. I was in college, so why watch a movie that could make you happy when you could watch something that could project to others how smart you thought you were. All of this is to say that, I went into this movie without the advantage of nostalgia, something I suspected might have been boosting audiences’ and critics’ scores.

Paddington from director Paul King tells the story of one unnamed Peruvian bear who is among the last of his kind. What makes this particular species of bear so special is their uniquely high intelligence. The film starts with a black-and-white film reel documenting the journeys of the explorer who was the first among men to stumble upon this particular subset of bear, sometimes back in the early 1900s. The explorer first instinct is to hunt and kill the bear to bring back to a British museum, but he is eventually won over by the sheer intelligence of the bears. They are already master builders and have developed unique, modern-looking housing structures when the explorer first finds them, but quickly he discovers they can understand English, can even reproduce it to some extent, and are adept at new technologies. The explorer leaves them with a phonograph and a record of him talking about how to be a proper gentleperson in London.

Fast forward some hundred years, and the original two bears the explorer essentially perfected their understanding of English based off the explorer’s record. They also know quite a bit about early 20th-century etiquette and about a hundred different ways to tell fellow Londoners that it is raining outside. And though now aged and frail, they have passed much of this knowledge onto their young nephew whose character can be summed up by the following four traits: 1) undying love for his aunt and uncle who raise him 2) utmost and strict adherence to etiquette 3) deep desire to belong to a home 4) obsession with marmelaide.

All four of those things turn out to be of vital importance when disaster strikes his home in Peru and he is forced by his aunt to seek a new home in the only other place they know: London! With only his uncle’s hat and a marmelaide sandwich on his head, the bear stows away on a freighter to London. He heads to the nearest train station as he has heard stories about how during WWI, orphaned children would show up to train stations wearing certain necklaces to signify their need for a home. The bear does just that, but the world of 1914 is very much different from the world of 2014. People don’t so much as look at the bear. If they do, they assume he’s a poor beggar, vendor of cheap goods, or just a plain con-artist. They’re too busy rushing this way and that. “In the age of technology, Britain has lost its way” the film seems to suggest. Or, more cynically, it seems to make a comment (albeit) on xenophobia and Britain’s lack of openness to immigrants, especially prominent given the distinctly colonial feel of the explorer’s documentary and his attitudes towards these “primitive” creatures.

Except, of course, this is a light-hearted family film. A fantasy film at that. For example, no one is freaked the fuck out like they would in real life by a talking bear roaming around a major metropolitan area, in some cases doing serios damage (albeit accidentally) to various property throughout town. E.T. this is not, so there’s no plotline of the government trying to snatch him up for research purposes, nor does this apparently talk place in our reality where the bear would become an instant viral internet star.

Instead, as a family film, the movie mostly focuses on the idea of “family.” The bear is eventually approached by Mary Brown (Sally Hawkins), the matriarch of the Brown family who are a well-off family who live in a cozy townhouse in a quaint London neighborhood. Mary is more empathetic to the bear’s plight than her ill-tempered husband Henry (Hugh Bonneville) who is a risk analyst who sees the bear for what he is: a risk! Still, he begrudgingly agrees to let the bear, who names himself Paddington, stay with them for one night, but then he’s off to the orphanage institution for young souls whose parents have sadly passed on.

Mr. Brown’s not wrong about Paddington (voiced by Ben Whishaw) too. Despite his undeniably genuine nature and complete absence of my ill-will, he’s a natural klutz. His childlike innocence and curiosity finds him tinkering with things that just ought not to be tinkered leading to a movie defined by its many great misadventurous set pieces, such as when Paddington accidentally floods the Brown’s bathroom to when a pickpocket accidentally drops a wallet that he stole and Paddington begins chasing him around London in grand fashion, not understanding why the thief doesn’t want his wallet back.

More than anything, though, Mr. Brown’s hostility towards Paddington stems more from his concern for his children, specifically that his son Jonathan (Samuel Joslin) will end up being hurt either as a direct result of Paddington’s activities or will simply try more daring things inspired by Paddington’s free-wheeling and wild spirit.

What I love about the character of Mr. Brown, who truly seems to be the secondary character after the titular bear, is the way he is a true character and not a one-dimensional rule-follower. The way the film (comically) demonstrates that Henry Brown was not always Mr. Brown, but was a motorcycle-riding Wildman who was suddenly and permanently changed by fatherhood makes him an incredibly relatable character, and grounds this silly cartoon in something of a reality.

Less can be said about Mary Brown. Sally Hawkins does a wonderful job portraying her seemingly boundless kindness and love, but ultimately there’s not more to her character than just being nice and kind. Her only story arc revolves her relationship with the Browns’ daughter Judy (Madeleine Harris) who is a stereotypically moody teen who doesn’t want to introduce her boyfriend to her Mom because, as Paddington puts it, “she suffers from a terrible disease called embarrassment.”

But no one’s watching this movie to watch the Browns or learn about their characters. It’s nice that Mr.’s character is so well-established as it makes his little sacrifices and gestures to try to help Paddington so satisfying. One second he was pushing to get Paddington out of his home, the next he’s in a dress breaking into an archives to learn more about the explorer who originally visited Paddington’s aunt and uncle one hundred years prior.

This little detour to the archives relates to one of the two other sub-plots to the film. The first is how Paddington’s quest to find a new home (since Mr. Brown refuses to let him stay with his family forever) leads him to want to find the explorer (or at least the explorer’s family) since he figures they of all people would love to take in as family a bear whom their father had so loved. The second subplot (and the more hackneyed and boring plot) deals with Nicole Kidman’s Millicent, a deranged, taxidermist employee of London’s Natural History who has a nasty side hobby and collecting (and stuffing) rare animals. She hears rumors of a talking bear, she starts to hunt him. Kidman actually does a very good job leading a cartoonish seriousness to the role, but just the whole subplot feels very perfunctory, like the studio was afraid no one would want to watch a movie that didn’t have a clear bad guy. Add in a sub-plot to this sub-plot where the Browns’ sad-sack neighbor Mr. Curry (Peter Capaldi) teams up with Millicent in the hopes of being her lover, and you got my least favorite part of this movie.

Taking away the villain plot would deny the Browns the opportunity to rescue their little friend from the jaws of danger, and prevent me from seeing that tear-jerking display of love with which the film ends, so I suppose it’s worth it. With snow falling around them and love in the air, Paddington with its focus on the importance of family, is almost a Christmas movie, or at the least is a perfect movie for the holiday season.

It’s also funny for all ages. I can imagine sitting in a theater with children and hearing the little cackles of children as Paddington fights a shower head using a toilet seat lid as shield and toilet brush as sword. The film does not go for easy jokes. Its physical comedy is often elaborate, and there are plenty of jokes meant for the adults in the room that aren’t necessarily sexual in nature. For example, the Browns’ daughter is learning Chinese “for business,” which means she’s learning phrases such as “How do I get to the business center?” and “I’m being investigated for tax fraud.” But more than anything, it’s a distinctly British film in its humor, favoring throw-away lines and sight-gags over fart jokes. One of my favorites in the idea that Millicent’s office is full of taxidermied heads of exotic animals, and when she walks into her workshop on the other side of the wall, we see all the rear-ends of these same animals. Another pitch perfect moment is when a downtrodden Paddington finds himself at Buckingham Palace and having revealed the sandwich he keeps under his hat for emergencies, we find out what things the Queen’s Guard keeps under their Bearskins. It’s silly and ridiculous in a way perfect for a kid’s film.

I also love how the film gives us a view of the world through Paddington’s eyes, and I give much credit to the film’s director Paul King for translating for us through film Paddington’s essential innocence. Twice, once towards the beginning, and once at the end, the film presents us with a toy-house that is an exact replica of the Brown’s home and we can actually see the Browns walking about and interacting in this odd meta-moment as Paddington narrates their goings on and provides his interpretation of what is happening. It lends an air of frivolity to our lives. Yes, the world is sad an hard, but for those innocents, the children, it’s a world of wonder and curiosity, a dollhouse in which anything is possible.

In the end, this movie is damn near perfect comfort food. It’s family focus creates a heart-warming tale that helps tries to inspire us that, despite our splintered isolated world, the world can be a place of love and welcoming. I wish the villain weren’t such a drag, but I am happy to report that despite not having any contact with Mr. Paddington in my life previously, I fell in love with his character almost instantly and am very happy to count him among my cinematic friends and follow him on any of his next adventures.

*** 1/4 (Three and one fourth stars out of four)

#paddington #paddington (2014)#paul king #ben whishaw #sally hawkins #hugh bonneville #nicole kidman #peter capaldi

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almostarchaeology · 6 years

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Before Conan the Barbarian, There Was Bran

By Adrián Maldonado

I write about medieval barbarians in my legit academic work, and use this blog to explore how they occasionally escape from our powerpoint slides into the public consciousness.

I recently realized that for all my degrees, I didn’t know a thing about one of history’s most famous barbarians. It was high time I looked up Conan.

Stock image of Dark Age Europe

In my 80s childhood, Conan the Barbarian was a kind of folk character – a stock image of a beefy white guy in a furry loincloth with a giant sword. (I would probably be picturing Conan the Librarian, to be honest.) But I already had He-Man in my life, a knock-off Conan cartoon made to sell toys, though I could not have known that because the cartoon was so unspeakably awesome it would brook no questioning. Indeed, I only discovered the Schwarzenegger Conan films later on, when I was old enough to realize he had made other weird, non-science fiction films back in the Reagan era. I knew vaguely that the character was based on a book, or was it a comic book? This was before the internet, and before I could ever give a shit about a character with no good action figures.

Flash forward twenty years or so, when I am a grizzled Xennial hunched over his computer, writing about depictions of the Picts in pop culture. Immersed in terrible filmic depictions of ancient Scottish warriors (always warriors), it struck me that I had never thought about Conan the Barbarian. What kind of barbarian was he meant to be? Did his story take place in some kind of historical epoch? Were there Picts in it that I could add to my list?

Imagine my shock when I did find a Pict down this rabbit hole (or souterrain?), and he looked like this:

Whatever else I was working on, stopped.

***

Robert E. Howard is best known today as the creator of Conan the Barbarian. But little did I know that he was one of the first pop culture appropriators of the Picts. Indeed, he was writing about the Picts long before he even conceived of Conan. The Picts were his muse. I feel like this is important, and I may need more than one blog post to say why. But first, an introduction.

I had seen some hilarious renderings of Picts over the years, but they always fell into the usual stereotype of tattooed maniacs hurling themselves onto Roman spears.

Tattooed maniacs hurling themselves onto Roman spears (source)

This 1960s paperback collection of stories by Howard entitled Bran Mak Morn, apparently the last king of the Picts, depicted this king Pict as a Neanderthal surrounded by howling ape-men. To me, this seemed like the purest distillation of the idea of the barbarians beyond the wall as sub-human, a trope developed in Roman imperial propaganda and continually reproduced today by the Hadrian’s Wall heritage ecosystem.

The paperback was one of a series of reprints of Howard’s genre-defining pulp fantasy of the 1920s and 1930s, brought back to life in the wake of the Tolkien wave of the 60s. Closer inspection revealed that Frank Frazetta’s 1969 cover image bore little resemblance to the description of Bran himself in Howard’s tales, even if his Pictish ‘race’ was certainly of a simian variety. More on this presently. What I wanted to know first was how a Texas kid learned about the Picts in the early 20th century, and came out with this.

***

Robert E Howard had a tough childhood in his native Texas. Coming from a broken home, he moved around a lot and read books to keep himself company. In 1919, at the age of 13, his father dragged him to New Orleans while he took classes, so he squirrelled himself away in a library on Canal Street. It was there that he first read about the Picts in a book about British history. The image of a little, dark race from the north that hassled the Romans but could never be conquered fascinated him. Perhaps due to the ray of light this book gave him at a sensitive point in his childhood, the Picts remained ingrained in his mind for the rest of his short life, which he would later take in 1936, at the age of 30.

Like many other nerdy kids, he wrote stories to pass the time. In his archive were found several early writings which reveal the impact the Picts had on him. There is a school paper from 1920-23 about the Picts. The first story he ever submitted for publication was about the Picts, ‘The Lost Race’, but it was rejected by the editor of Weird Tales in 1924. He sold his first story later that year, beginning his professional writing career. A revised version of ‘The Lost Race’ was finally published in Weird Tales in 1927, introducing the world to Bran Mak Morn, a Pictish king who fought the Romans. He would go on to make several more appearances in Howard’s swords-and-sorcery tales, and the Picts eventually became one of the myriad ‘races’ in Howard’s Hyborian Age, a proto-prehistoric shared universe inhabited by Conan the Barbarian.

Bran Mak Morn by Gary Gianni (source)

Howard’s Picts are a peculiar bunch. From his first essay on them, he describes them as the remnants of the stone age inhabitants of Britain, comparing their appearance to Native Americans. In this view, they were the ‘Mediterraneans’ (as opposed to Celts or Nordics) who first brought the knowledge of farming to Britain in the Neolithic. They were eventually swept aside by the fair-skinned ‘Celtic’ race of metalworkers, at which point they were forced to mingle and interbreed with the indigenous cavemen, a barely human simian-like race. This meant that by the arrival of the Romans, the Picts had become stunted, swarthy, long-armed ape-men. All except Bran Mak Morn, their king, who had kept his bloodline pure. All pretty disgusting racial logic now, but hey, so the argument goes, it was the 20s.

Except that here it was, unfiltered and raw, in a book released during the height of the civil rights struggle in the United States. I bought this ancient artefact off of Amazon for pennies, and holding it in 2017, it felt like I’d acquired an illicit antiquity. Plenty of writers have tripped over themselves to call out and defend Tolkien and Howard regarding the racial (if not always racist) component to their mythical prehistories, so I won’t go down that route just now. But that cover image haunted me.

***

In 2005, Bran Mak Morn received a brand-new edition, the Weird Tales stories now bundled with unpublished manuscripts, fragments of Howard’s correspondence, and critical essays by Rusty Burke and Patrice Louinet. Armed with an annotated timeline of Howard’s Pictish writings, which spanned his career, and supplemented with google-fu, I was able to clarify the genesis of Bran Mak Morn.

Former Canal Street public library, New Orleans, 1911 (source)

It is possible to trace the public library Howard visited when he was 13, when he first encountered a British history book and his vision of the dark, prehistoric Picts. The Canal Street public library in question must be the one that formerly stood at 2940 Canal Street at the corner of South Gayoso, opened in 1911. A photograph survives on the New Orleans library website, and Google Maps reveals it is now a Yoga studio.

Origin myths of the Picts (source)

Rusty Burke has also plausibly identified the very book that Howard seems to have read: The Romance of Early British Life (1909) by George Francis Scott Elliot. This is apparently one of the flashy, pulpy ‘Library of Romance’ published by London-based Seeley and Co, described as ‘profusely illustrated’ ‘gift books’, which included among their number volumes such as The Romance of Modern Mining and The Romance of the World’s Fisheries. The author Scott Elliot was a botanist and antiquarian, president of Dumfries and Galloway Natural History and Antiquarian Society during an apparent low point in its history.

The fairly ridiculous book in question seems to have been written for Edwardian teenage boys, and does indeed bear the DNA of Howard’s later writing on the Picts: “In very ancient times Britain had been twice conquered, first by the small, dark Picts of the Mediterranean, and later (about 2000 or 1000 B.C.) by the tall, brown-haired, Gaelic-speaking Celts (237).” The chapter on the introduction of farming to Britain is called ‘The coming of the Picts’, in which Scott Elliot explains that they have been called by several names before – Homo Mediterraneus, Basques, Iberians, Silurians, the Firbolg, the Dolmen-builders – but he calls them Picts to save on ink (80-1). He claims they are still readily identifiable in the present day, as the short, brunette people who are mostly found in towns and cities, unlike the fairer Teutons or Kelts who prefer the countryside (92-3).

Howard’s vision of the Picts was thus formulated by the equivalent of our contemporary public archaeology, an accessible potted prehistory of Britain by one of Scotland’s leading antiquaries. Why this particular image, of a dark, forgotten people without a history, resonated so deeply with him, is a subject to ponder. But he was clearly not alone in his fascination. While racial views of the past soon died out in archaeological writing, they would go on to have a tenacious grip on the fantasy world. And which of these two genres do you think has a greater influence on people’s image of the medieval past?

***

Why does any of this matter? It is a demonstration of the role of ‘the Picts’, in various guises, as the untermenschen of what you might call western folk history. The fact that a young boy in inter-war Louisiana could head to the nearest library, read about them in a cheap history book, and then build a world-beating fictional universe that is still beloved today based on this is remarkable. As I’ve spent some time documenting on these pages, that image of the Picts is still in a way with us. A recent article in the Glasgow Herald has the reporter coming to the shocking insight that the Picts were not ‘hairy savages’ after speaking briefly to a couple of scholars. I wonder if that means we are doing our job well, or terribly.

It also opens up questions about the central role of race at the origins of both archaeology and the fantasy genre, a sticky subject that will have to be the subject of future blog posts [Editor's note: now read the follow-up to this post]. In the meantime, go check out similar topics being covered over on The Public Medievalist.

And hey, why not donate to your local public library while you’re at it?

***

Header image via Jeff Black

#Robert E Howard #race #picts #bran mak morn

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marcjampole · 7 years

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If you want mainstream media to like your book on American decline, blame the 60’s. Fantasyland latest to do so

It seems as if no social critic can get a fair hearing in the mass media unless she-he blames it on the sixties. If you Google the expression “blame it on the sixties,” you summon up references to a wide range of articles and books in which experts and pundits blame a variety of current social and economic problems on changes in the attitudes, customs and mores of the 1960’s. My perusal of the first three pages of search results found the 1960’s and early 1970’s faulted for the rise in child abuse, our economic decline, political correctness, the vote in the Electoral College for Donald Trump, the increase in obesity, crime and growing drug abuse.

You’d think that most of the sixties-haters would be religious and social conservatives, because, say what you will about that decade, it did witness the sexual revolution that led to more open attitudes and greater social acceptance of sexual rights for women and all kinds of sexual experiences between all kinds of people. But as it turns out, a substantial number of sixties critics are self-flagellating liberals, you know, pundits who claim to be liberal but butter their bread by always blaming liberals for their own predicament. For example, after the election, a slew of Democrats blamed Clinton’s loss on the Democrats depending too much on “identity politics,” i.e., caring about civil rights. With friends like that…

The latest liberal self-flagellator to blame the sixties for the deplorable state of the world is novelist and journalist Kurt Andersen, in his glib and often superficial Fantasyland. Anderson’s description of today’s American Fantasyland is attractive and largely accurate. The insidious spread of fake news; the new level of lying by politicians; the basing of social and economic policy on disproven or bad science; the great numbers of Americans who believe in demons, the absolute existence of a god with male features and/or a literal interpretation of the Judeo-Christian genesis myth; the large number of adults whose lives revolve around electronic games, comic book superheroes, cosplay and other escapist fare; the climate change deniers, the evolution deniers, the birthers—these snapshots of the irrational are but a sampling of the evidence that Andersen musters to show that current American society is based on lies and myths, that we surround ourselves with fantasy.

Andersen is also right when he asserts that fantasy has played a major role in American society since the search for the Northwest Passage and the Salem witch trials. His history of irrational thought in America reads like an outline or a greatest hits list: each major figure in an irrational movement or trend gets a paragraph or so. For readers who want to delve into the long history of irrational thought in America, Fantasyland can serve as a syllabus that sends you to the right people and primary sources to read.

But the third part of Andersen’s thesis—that the sixties marked a turning point, after which instead of being a peripheral trend, irrationality took center stage—is dead wrong.

In sixties terminology, Andersen’s mistake is to conflate “do your own thing” with “believe your own thing.” Yes, a lot of people believed in some pretty weird stuff in the 1960’s. Like the First (1730-1740) and Second (1800-1860) Great Awakenings and the Roaring Twenties, the sixties saw an uptick in interest in the occult and the irrational. But lots of the doing of your own thing in the sixties and early seventies involved overthrowing old myths and lies and asserting the truth of empirical science, such as the anti-Vietnam War, Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, Gay Rights, environmental, anti-nuclear, organic gardening and sustainable living movements. All products of a very rational sixties. And in every case, it was the government or the majority of those with influence who were living in a fantasy.

Andersen takes particular note of the rise of the Pentecostal movement and televangelism in the 1960’s. True enough, but morality is not inherently contra-factual. Morality motivated a lot of the antiwar activists and poverty workers. Remember, too, that a Christian left and right wing have existed in this country since at least the abolitionist movement got its start. Even if we accept the core beliefs of the Christian right wing that have persisted for at least 140 years, a rise in a concern for moral issues doesn’t in and of itself suggest the society is entering a fantasyland. I can be against a woman’s right to control her body for moral reasons and still be living in the real world. I enter Fantasyland only when I believe that an abortion causes future health problems, that life begins at conception or that vaccines cause autism.

All of society bases part of its existence on fantastic notions, typically related to ethnic superiority, national character, religion and the convenience of rich folk. Certainly since Columbus made his voyages, religious and irrational beliefs have harmed the United States. Our economy before the 1860’s was largely based on the myth that Africans were inferior people who needed the white man’s guidance and therefore benefited from slavery. What about the medical, economic and social impact of the myths that led to the anti-marijuana laws of the 1930’s? TR, Henry Cabot Lodge and William Randolph Hearst shoveled a lot of bull hockey at Americans to build support for the Spanish-American War and our later atrocities in the Philippines. I would like to prove that the inflection point at which belief overran rationality was during the Reagan era, when so many edifices of lies were built and then used to justify horrific policies; lies and myths such as welfare queens, supply side economics, the failure of government, the failure of public schools and the benefits of the unimpeded free market. But reading history books like Stephen Kinzer’s The True Flag about the Spanish-American War epoch and Matthew Karp’s This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy about pre-Civil War U.S. foreign policy demonstrates that the Bush II and the current administrations aren’t the first times the United States has been run by a band of reality-denying ignoramuses guided by myths with no basis in reality and representing a sizable minority but not all the people.

If we, as I do, place primary blame for the growth of the American Fantasyland on the increase of lies and myths knowingly perpetrated by the news media, we can’t really locate in the 1960’s the inflection point after which fantasies begin to dominate the media and, by inference, American society. Since the original scandal sheets and yellow journalism of the Gilded Age, mass media has been growing inexorably, and as it does, so has the ubiquity of advertising, the focus on celebrity and the increase in myths being presented as truth—in commercials, by televangelists, well-funded rightwing think tanks and rightwing television and radio, on alt-right and UFO websites, in social media and fake news. Let’s look at some of major events in the history of media’s creation of Fantasyland: yellow journalism emerged at the end of 19th century, free market commercial radio developed in the 1920’s, the first radio evangelists started broadcasting in the 1930’s and 1940’s, the rise of commercial television and the beginning of the right wing creating alternative distribution channels for their myths occurred in the 1950’s, the federal law that allowed companies to own more TV and radio stations passed in the 1980’s, rightwing radio was born in the 1990’s, the Internet was the 2000’s, the Citizens United decision in 2010. You get the idea.

Why then blame the 1960’s? We would have to read into Kurt Andersen’s heart to know the answer as it pertains toFantasyland. I am, however, quite confident that the larger phenomenon of blaming the 1960’s (and early 1970’s) for every social and economic ill since then results from the mass media applying a screen: Blame the sixties—we like it; blame another decade—reject the article! For the most part rich folk who like the status quo own the mass media and the companies which support media outlets with advertising. While rich folk include a spectrum of beliefs from left-leaning to ultra-right (there are very few socialists of any ilk among this group), they mostly lean right and mostly want to protect the prerogatives of the wealthy.

And they don’t like the true story of what happened in the sixties: It was the absolute high point for equality of wealth and income in U. S. history and the high point of union power (if not of union membership, which occurred in the 1950’s). While not the inflection point for American irrationality, it certainly was for the movement to provide equal rights in courts, the marketplace and workplace to all Americans—plenty happened afterwards, but the turning point certainly came in the 1960’s with the maturing of the Civil Rights movement and the start of other inclusion movements. The 1960’s thus represent the start of the threat to the special position of white males.

In other words, the real “evil” of the 1960’s is not that it created an American Fantasyland, or that it led to a decline in morals or educational standards or the work ethic. No, what the mass media hates about the 1960’s is that for a few brief years we saw a way to institute a true social democracy in a fairly equitable society with a fairly level playing field, kind of like the model developed in Europe after World War II. The Reaganites saw another way, but to make it work, they had to denigrate the real ideals of the sixties—government spending to solve social problems, a level playing field that did not favor individuals of any group, the importance of ending poverty and giving people a hand up, enlightened stewardship of natural resources, a foreign policy not dependent on America bullying other nations. These core beliefs—all based on facts and science—contradict everything the right stands for. Thus the desire, even today, to blame everything on the 1960’s.

I stopped reading novels about writers or university teachers about 30 years ago. I think it might be time to stop reading books that blame the 60’s.

#mainstreammedia #60s #american decline

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tlatollotl · 7 years

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We had walked for five days through the mountainous rainforest of the Mosquitia region of eastern Honduras. My companions were five Pech men with whom I was working some 20-plus years ago. The Pech are an Indigenous group, and they almost certainly are descended from the people who built and inhabited the impressive archaeological sites we were visiting. It wasn’t raining at the moment, and we had a good fire going. We had harpooned some cuyamel fish in the river and were frying them along with green bananas, a Honduran staple. I never fantasized about food in the rainforest; we always had plenty, and it was good. I was daydreaming of dry clothes. My jungle boots had been soaked for weeks.

As we were eating, Don Cipriano, the oldest of the Pech and an expert on the region’s archaeological sites and forests, asked if I had heard the lost city legend—the one about La Ciudad Blanca, or the White City. “I have heard the stories,” I said. Everyone in the region has heard them.

“It’s nearby,” he told me. “Just up this river, up on top of a hill.” I asked him if we should go see it. He told me we couldn’t. The site was sacred, he explained, and was the refuge of Indigenous gods who had fled when the Europeans had arrived nearly 500 years earlier. There were gods from all seven Indigenous groups, and if you went there and couldn’t speak to each one, they wouldn’t allow you to leave, he added. You needed to know all seven Indigenous languages, and nobody knew them all—not even him.

My time as an archaeologist in Honduras began some 25 years ago when I did my dissertation research there. I worked intensively in the country for a decade and continued to research and take groups of students and tourists through the region after that. I lived in Central America for five or six years during that time. From the start, I knew that I could accomplish nothing without the Pech people. Over weeks-long expeditions, Pech guides taught me how to start fires in the rain, fish, find my way in the rainforest, gather food, and make a raft and a shelter. I got pretty good at these activities but nothing like the Pech. There was nothing they didn’t know about in their traditional territory. We might have walked six days into the forest, and they would tell me exactly what we would see tomorrow or what we would’ve seen if we had gone up that river or over that mountain.

“Undiscovered” artifacts, such as these grinding stones, or metates, are not as unknown as some outsiders assume.

Archaeological and linguistic data suggest the Pech have at least a thousand years of history in the region. They have lost much of their traditional lands to encroaching farmers and cattle ranchers, and now they primarily live on the edge of the rainforest in a handful of communities. But they have not lost their history—or their knowledge of the ruins that lie underneath the thick vegetation of the forest.

All told, Pech guides have taken me to see about 150 archaeological sites, and I have documented them, drawing maps, writing up notes, and taking photos. I have explored the relationship between this region and other areas, and how complex societies formed. I have interpreted and contextualized these sites—but I have “discovered” nothing.

My viewpoint contrasts sharply with that of others who have explored the region looking to make a “discovery.” Over the past century, there have been numerous expeditions to find a mythical lost city in the Mosquitia rainforest. La Ciudad Blanca keeps being discovered, over and over again; practically anytime anyone finds the remains of any settlement, they call it that. I know of a half-dozen large sites that have each been deemed “the White City”; there must be others. In all cases, the “discoverers” are outsiders, and their find is presented as a heroic accomplishment. They are seen as adventurers who have braved the impenetrable jungle and tropical diseases. They bring along military types and tough guys as part of their team, implying that such brute force and protection is what it takes to conquer the ferocious landscape. They want us to believe that they are intrepid explorers—achieving what others couldn’t because of their guts, money, technology, business acumen, and grit.

Nothing in their description is accurate. The cities aren’t lost; the people living in these areas know all about them. And they aren’t cities, by any reasonable definition. The original legends do not even reference cities; rather, they refer to locations that, for whatever reason, represent a golden age for Indigenous communities. Even the landscape is not particularly dangerous; children grow up there, after all.

Archaeologists often say, “It’s not what you find, it’s what you find out.” We are not in pursuit of objects but rather an understanding of the past. My work has never been about finding sites. It’s about finding out how leaders gained and maintained power, how these ancient societies interacted with other groups, and how such societies situated themselves across the landscape.

Most archaeologists spend a significant amount of time with local residents. They know that to understand a place you have to walk through it and you have to live in it. For many, their work requires not only an investment of time but also language skills, cultural competency, and trust built with residents. They are aware that such efforts are necessary for understanding and appreciating local knowledge.

But over the years, technologies and methods have emerged that help speed up archaeological investigations. First there was aerial photography, then satellite imagery, and most recently LIDAR (light detection and ranging), which uses millions of laser light pulses fired from a low-flying plane to get data about the landscape. So much data is captured, in fact, that you can remove some of it, like a representation of the forest canopy, and have more than enough to create a detailed 3-D map of the surface beneath. Rather than gathering all the data you can to inform your understanding of a place, you can pick and choose what you want to keep.

These are great technologies, and I wish I’d had them at the start of my career; everything would have been easier. But while they offer efficiency, such technologies have the potential to decrease critical interactions between an archaeologist and the community. “Finding” a lost city from the air allows the experience on the ground to be reduced to a short walk from the nearest road, landing zone, or navigable river. By failing to understand the depth and breadth of knowledge and experience that communities have of their place and their past, it is easy to imagine that you have discovered something unknown. After all, it’s not in the literature. It looks untouched. The illusory “finding” seems important. The “finding out,” the delayed gratification, is replaced by the immediacy of the “discovery.”

In addition to efficiency, such technologies also elevate the visual—and they provide a seemingly unobstructed view that comes from gazing upon the world from a rarified position. The observer, with this powerful view, assumes a de facto position of power and dominance over whatever is distantly viewed—their interpretation is not hindered by the messiness on the ground or challenged by other viewpoints. This focus on the visual, and the decontextualization that it allows, is fundamental to archaeological approaches that value a certain type of so-called discovery.

Feminist theorists have a long history of thinking about power imbalances like these. In the 1970s, similar observations led film critic Laura Mulvey to formulate the concept of the “male gaze”: film, she wrote, can render subjects as passive spectacles for viewers who occupy a male position of dominance over feminized others. As archaeologists, we reimagine this as the “hegemonic gaze,” wherein the explorer above is in a position of power and the landscape below is the object of desire to be documented.

Knowing this may not be enough to avoid these issues when I use such technologies. But some explorers have allowed such power imbalances to permeate their work. In 2012, for example, a group led by a filmmaker and a writer undertook a LIDAR-based expedition in the country, with the support of Honduran officials. They originally claimed to have found the lost White City of Honduras. After some initial backlash, the “lost city” was comically renamed the City of the Jaguar, which has no basis in local history, and it was also referred to as the City of the Monkey God, which has no grounding in real heritage either. Local Indigenous peoples maintain that they always knew about this place and had intentionally left it alone. Its “discovery” and naming by outsiders was offensive to them on many levels.

American feminist and legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon once challenged scholars to ask themselves how they know things: “Not exactly why should I believe you, but your account of why your account of reality is a true account.” The very idea of looking at the world objectively, she wrote, objectifies it in the same way that men have objectified women and Western thought has objectified knowledge. In other words, by claiming a nonsituated position, as if it were possible to operate free of perspective and bias, one is inherently supporting and reinforcing the status quo; this way of asserting power and privilege usually goes unchallenged—and is often unnoticed.

Thus, by interrogating the ways in which we conduct archaeology, we challenge the unexamined methods that favor the powerful.

“Sensory archaeologists” seek information on how a place smells, sounds, and feels—not simply how it looks.

Out of this type of questioning, some archaeologists have come up with an alternate mode of investigation known as “sensory archaeology”—that is, the practice of gathering not just visual information but also data on how a place feels, smells, and sounds. Sensory archaeologies challenge the “male” power-dominated fantasy of exploration seen in the 2012 lost city project and supplant it with a more nuanced and complex view of the past. This approach expands the parameters of discourse beyond the visual and helps to expose how a visual (or hypervisual) position creates and reflects a problematic relationship between the investigator and the subject of the investigation. Though my research is not explicitly sensory archaeology, my attempts to immerse myself in a place and within local communities and to contextualize discoveries follow similar guiding principles.

The focus on “finding” some hidden site rather than “finding out” about it has clear historical roots in colonialist approaches to exploration. Explorers representing colonial powers were often credited with “discoveries” that were well-known to local folks. By focusing on the discovery, we perpetuate vestiges of that colonial discourse, camouflaging privilege and oppression within the seemingly neutral language of science, technology, and exploration. This has real consequences. It perpetuates the idea that Westerners have some kind of superior type of knowledge. And it further undercuts the participation, influence, and knowledge of the most marginalized and least powerful folks in the region.

Sitting by the campfire with Cipriano and the other Pech men after days of exhausting trekking, I couldn’t help but recognize my limits. Nothing felt as straightforward as it looked on the map. La Ciudad Blanca that Cipriano pointed to at the top of the hill might have been nothing physical at all—none of us had seen it, after all—or it might have been a place that others had documented before. It wasn’t that important. What mattered, as I sat there, was living among these people, sharing the adventure of exploring the past, and understanding their ways of looking at the world. I still had so many languages to learn.

As someone who dabbles in remote sensing, this has given me a lot to think about. As much as I want to find sites, how many of them have already been found and by who?

Begley’s discussion of sensory archaeology also reminds me of my time on a survey in Jalisco. I felt so in tune with the area it felt like I already knew where we would find sites. On two occasions I can recall on insisting there was a site in our area despite not finding anything worth noting. On both instances I was proved correct at the end of the day. Definitely a topic worth exploring in the future.

#indigenous #archaeology #arqueologia #honduras #lost city #remote sensing #lidar #native american #history #historia

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bigskydreaming · 7 years

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princeescaluswords replied to your post: Yessssss….my hate for Hal Jordan is showing others...

I’ve never been into Green Lantern much – from where does the hate arise?

Hoo boy. So. It’s partly because of things Hal has done in the comics, but the other larger part is because of how his character has been handled and ‘redeemed’ and how the writers’ preference for him over the past 12 years has led to an erasure of my fave Kyle Rayner on a massive scale. (Like, look at how I am about Scott erasure in Teen Wolf fandom and the show, and magnify that by 100....because Scott and Kyle are largely the same character for me and their treatment is very comparable too).

Story Time!

So Hal’s character has always been a pretty bland, generic hyper-masculine dude whose notable attributes are that he’s fearless and a test pilot for his day job and blah blah. At least in my opinion. Not really that objectionable, plenty of characters fit that bill, but I never saw the appeal.

But then in the early 90s they decided to shake up the Green Lantern franchise in a major way. Not sure how much you know about the franchise, but essentially its a Corps of space cops, 3600 in number, and for decades in the comics Hal was considered ‘the best of them’, even by his fellow Green Lanterns.

Then the Death of Superman storyline happened, and Hal’s home Coast City was destroyed. And Hal went full dark side. It was honestly one of the best and most tragic ‘fall from grace’ storylines I’ve ever read or seen it mainstream media. It was what Anakin Skywalker’s story had the potential to be but was never quite realized, IMO. See, Green Lanterns can do just about anything with the right amount of power fueling them....and Hal became obsessed with resurrecting Coast City and everyone who’d died. Undoing the event, rewinding time. He was convinced he could do it with the right amount of power, but that his ring alone wouldn’t do it. So he went to Oa, the home base of the Green Lanterns and where the Central Battery that fueled all their rings was located. He asked the Guardians (the aliens who had created the rings and the Corps in the first place) to give him the power he needed, and they told him no, that time was not to be messed with in the ways he was picturing.

So Hal killed the Guardians. Killed the Green Lanterns who tried to get in his way, including some of his closest friends and allies. And then he drained the Central Battery, absorbing all its power into himself - and in the process draining the rings of all 3600 Corps members. Resulting in most of them dying, because they were off on official business, in life or death situations of their own when their rings suddenly stopped working, or many of them were in the void of space, flying between planets when they were just stranded their as their rings drained of juice.

But in Hal’s mind, all of this was just temporary. He was regretful as he did it all, but kept saying that none of this mattered, that it was all going to be undone anyway as soon as he had the power he needed to fix it all. He became the villain Parallax, even willingly calling himself a villain, because he had no illusions about how what he was doing looked, it was just he was fixated on the ends justifying the means, and that it would all be worth it in the end. He convinced himself there were no consequences to anything he did, because he intended it to just be temporary.

This was when I started reading comics, with this storyline (Emerald Twilight it was called). And so my very first superhero was Kyle Rayner, for a generation of readers, we watched his origin story unfold. One of the Guardians, Ganthet, had survived Hal’s attack, and he was able to keep one last ring intact. And he went to Earth and gave it to Kyle Rayner as he was leaving a concert one night. All the other Lanterns previously had been chosen for their great willpower or their ability to feel no fear or whatever, but Kyle was just this random guy who was in the right place at the right time (or wrong place at the wrong time, depending on your perspective). So from the start, Kyle was the everyman hero in a way Hal and other GLs had never been....this normal guy, a college dropout who suddenly had this enormous burden placed on him, the responsibility of being the Last Green Lantern, the only one left to do what an entire Corps had been tasked with before Hal’s fall. And being a hero didn’t come naturally to him, he didn’t just show up and save the day, he struggled with trying to figure out the right way to do things and if he were even the right person for the job. There were a number of times when he wanted to just give up the ring entirely, but then he found out it wouldn’t work for anyone else. If there was going to be a Green Lantern it was either going to be him or no one.

And Hal was like, his big villain from day one. For years his archnemesis was his own predecessor, who had become this symbol for how power can corrupt. His own personal bogeyman because Hal was what he could become if he let the power get to his head. Like, Hal would pop up all the time to tempt him, trying to convince him to give up the power he never really wanted to have in the first place. That with it, Hal could finally fix things, and he could even fix things for Kyle (like bring back his girlfriend, who died in one of his earliest stories). And he didn’t get along well with most other heroes because they had been Hal’s friends and allies and to them Kyle was just a reminder of everything that had happened. And all the aliens Kyle was supposed to help on his space adventures, since his responsibilities as a GL extended beyond just earth....none of them trusted him because they looked at a GL now and thought of Hal and everything he’d done.

So basically, for a decade, pretty much every one of Kyle’s actions and choices as a hero revolved around trying to repair the damage Hal had done, as well as try and protect everyone the GLs had been responsible for before Emerald Twilight, only do it all by himself, because it was because of Hal there was no one to help shoulder the work.

Hal eventually sacrificed himself to save the day from a galaxy-wide threat (largely thanks to Kyle’s influence). Even without him though, his influence was still a driving force for Kyle’s stories. At one point, finally, Kyle absorbed a huge amount of power that turned him into a god, basically, and it was because he didn’t trust himself with it and feared he’d end up like Hal that he gave it all away, and instead used it to restart the Central Battery and in the process he kinda recreated the Guardians - it wasn’t like what Hal had wanted to do, undoing everything, these new Guardians weren’t as they’d been previously, they were children who needed someone to guide them and help them grow into people who would in turn guide a new GL Corps, and that was basically Kyle and Ganthet who did that.

ANYWAY, so here’s why I really hate Hal. Because Geoff Johns took over the GL franchise then, and Hal was his all time favorite character. So his priority was ‘redeeming’ Hal so he could be a hero again and take center stage at the GL franchise. And to do that, Johns basically said....none of it was ever Hal’s fault. He resurrected Hal and then introduced the idea that Parallax was actually an alien entity, the embodiment of fear, and that he’d possessed Hal and was the real reason Hal had done everything he’d done. So Hal defeated Parallax, locked him away, and became a GL again and took his ‘rightful place’ as the greatest GL ever, despite umm, the fact that he was the one who’d destroyed the Corps in the first place.

And in the process, Kyle was inevitably shuffled off stage. He’s appeared in a number of stories since then, because he’s a huge part of the GL franchise and has a ton of fans, but despite the fact that he WAS the entire franchise for 15 years, he takes a backseat to Hal and most of the other GLs wheneevr he shows up. There’s a lot of talk and references to how Kyle’s such a great GL and he did such a good job of representing the Corps by himself while he was the only one, but its all very round about and vague, just kinda a ‘oh yeah, he’s important’ without ever really specifying why he’s important or specifically what he did (like restart the Corps by himself).

Thing is though....there’s literally no way around this, not if you’re going to choose to prioritize Hal over Kyle. Because while Johns wrote a story saying that nothing Hal did was really his fault, that still only works if you quickly move past the specifics of what Hal did and don’t make readers focus on it too much. Narratively, to pull off that kind of twist, you need to put distance between the character and the events, and you have to ‘unlink’ the two in readers’ minds. The more people associate Hal with the fall of the Corps, the harder it is to say ‘but remember, it just looked and sounded like Hal, it wasn’t him really.’

And Kyle, by his very existence, makes it hard to forget what Hal’s character was responsible for in the past. Because Kyle’s character and his existence in the franchise is entirely rooted in what Hal did in the past, while his character certainly exists independent of Hal and doesn’t need him to be a great character, his HISTORY is inextricably linked with the part of Hal’s that Johns wanted people to move past. You can’t craft a story about how important Kyle is to the mythos as the Torchbearer, the guy who restored the Battery and brought back the Guardians, without highlighting the reminder that Hal was the one who destroyed them in the first place.

So the writers have done various things with Kyle over the past decade, he’s mastered all the other colors of the emotional spectrum and he became the White Lantern and at other times he was the host for the avatar or embodiment of the energy the GLs draw from - always big, important stuff, but the kind of stuff that means he only shows up in the final stories of an arc or for big important events, and when he does show up the focus is always on what he’s doing right now rather than his actual character. For the most part, he’s kept out of sight, out of mind or specifically written in such a way as to just be here to play support staff to whatever Hal has to do....because they don’t know how to write Kyle taking center stage again without reminding people that Kyle is only the hero he is because of the fifteen years he spent being the only Green Lantern and trying to make up for Hal’s legacy.

Sooooo....yeah. He’s been sidelined hard, and with definite intent, all because Johns wanted his personal fave redeemed. And he always will be, as long as Hal is considered the ‘heart’ of the franchise. And so I am forever bitter, because Kyle is my favorite hero ever and deserves better, and I don’t want to read Green Lantern stories, I want to read Kyle Rayner stories and the best I’ve gotten for the past twelve years are Kyle Rayner appearances in Hal Jordan stories, lol. Booooo.

And the fact that Hal is SO BORING and generic doesn’t really help at all because I mostly just flail my arms around a lot and wildly shout THIS GUY? THIS IS THE GUY YOU UNDID ONE OF YOUR GREATEST STORIES AND SIDELINED ONE OF YOUR GREATEST HEROES FOR? THIS GUYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY?

LOL. Anyway. That’s the story. That’s why I can’t stand Hal Jordan.

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jakelace · 7 years

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Marvel Ranked: Part 3 (22-12)

The night of the Spider-Man: Homecoming premier is upon us now, so again Aaron Hahn and I are going through our rankings of all of the Marvel movies since 1998. In case you have missed any of the previous installments, you can read Part 1 here, and Part 2 on Aaron’s blog here. Without any further ado, lets dig into those Marvel films that are just on the verge of being some of the best of all time.

22. THE WOLVERINE

“Eternity can be a curse. It hasn't been easy for you, living without time. The losses you have had to suffer. A man can run out of things to live for. Lose his purpose. Become a ronin. A samurai without a master.”

Jacob: The train scene, Aaron! The train scene! It was moments like that that left me so high after viewing this film. In fact, the first two acts of this film are really great. James Mangold was on his way to directing one of the greatest X-Men films ever! Sure, we can say he’s done that now, but not with The Wolverine. It is really a shame how quickly this film goes downhill once the final battle begins. While the film doesn’t squander all of its goodwill it had with me, it certainly tries by including last minute villains and plot twists that were so obvious they barely felt like twists at all.

Aaron: Yes, yes, the train scene is an innovative and thrilling action scene, as are many of the early samurai-inspired battles, but they’re almost drowned out by the goofy, muddled CGI climax. For the first two thirds of the movie, starting with that harrowing Hiroshima opening, James Mangold’s Noir-influenced character study is a refreshingly nuanced, involving superhero flick. Hugh Jackman is great as always, as are Tao Okamoto and Rila Fukushima. It really is such a shame about the third act being so overblown, but thankfully Mangold and Jackman took this film as a learning opportunity, and fixed those tonal inconsistencies the second time around.

21. X-MEN

“I feel a great swell of pity for the poor soul who comes to that school… looking for trouble.”

Aaron: A lot of the commendation for the original X-Men film is directed towards its significance in the history of comic book adaptations. Fueled by some pitch perfect casting choices that went on to pervade the venerable franchise, including Hugh Jackman as Wolverine and Patrick Stewart as Professor X, X-Men was the first successful superhero blockbusters in the modern era, paving the way for the MCU and more to follow. It’s a significant film, but also a pretty good one. Beyond the excellent cast, the film features plenty of exciting (though dated) action, and there’s a lot of charm in its plot’s embrace of comic-book wackiness. While the X-Men franchise would have better (and worse) entries later on, the original film remains a well-made, enjoyable foundation.

Jacob: Of all the X-Men films, this is the one I’ve seen the most by far. While I would never claim it is the best, there is something to it that I just can’t stop coming back to. I love our introduction to Jackman’s Wolverine, the villains’ oddly convoluted plot, the oddly inconsistent accents of Rogue and Storm, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t love the “toad and lightning” line in some dark and twisted part of my soul. That line is absolutely horrible, from the writing to the stilted delivery of it, but I consistently laugh at it every time. Not for the right reasons, mind you, but I still laugh. I think that’s the best way to describe my feelings for this film honestly. It isn’t always good, but it has charmed me to the point where I can forgive its shortcomings and laugh along with it.

20. ANT-MAN

“Baskin-Robbins always finds out.”

Jacob: Just so everyone knows, it kills Aaron that Ant-Man is this high on the list. I, however, had fallen for Ant-Man the minute the credits rolled. It is flawed, sure, but there is a lot here that works. Paul Rudd is a charismatic lead, Ant-Man’s power set makes for interesting and often times hilarious set pieces, and the bits left over from Edgar Wright’s original vision for the film are sublime. On top of that, it was the first film in the MCU that really made the universe feel like a living, breathing world, and that is no simple tasks. It’s hard to shake the thoughts of how great this film could have been if Wright had stayed on the project, but if you can manage, there is a lot to love underneath.

Aaron: Going in, we both knew this was going to be one of the most contentious films to place, and, yes, I’d personally put it lower. Ant-Man was one of the first films I reviewed for my blog, and I received a lot of flak for my indifferent response to it. Sure, Paul Rudd, the humor, and the set-pieces are great, but all these elements are just loosely strung together by a series of forced emotional beats and clunky “Hey, this will be important later!” dialogues. I like what you said about it making the MCU feel more like an authentic world though, as the film’s small-scale stakes are refreshing (and fitting for the character). It’s noticeably clunkier than your average MCU film (that Falcon detour is so contrived), but hey, that Thomas the Tank Engine gag never fails to make me laugh.

19. AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON

“The city is flying and we're fighting an army of robots. And I have a bow and arrow. Nothing makes sense.”

Aaron: Avengers: Age of Ultron’s reception was perhaps unfairly damaged by the inescapable pressure put on it following the all-out success of the first film. It could never have completely recaptured the magic of watching these various heroes unite on the big screen for the first time, but that doesn’t stop it from trying, to marginal success. The quipy writing and excellent chemistry of the all-star cast once again shines, especially in quieter moments that ended up being the best parts of the film, such as the roundtable attempts to lift Thor’s hammer. There’s plenty of cool visuals and dynamic team-up action, and while Ultron’s inconsistent characterization is disappointing, one can’t deny that James Spader was absolutely perfect casting. Age of Ultron can’t help but pale in comparison to its predecessor, but is still a blast for comic-book fans.

Jacob: Speaking of the inescapable pressure of the original, poor Joss Whedon, man. Nearly everything that doesn’t work in this movie can be directly traced back to Marvel mandated content that he had fought against during the film’s production, to the point where it burned him out on working with them altogether (although now he’s with DC, so it couldn’t have burned him out too badly). When this movie shines though, it’s fluorescent. The attempts to lift Thor’s hammer are certainly fantastic, but the moment that shined through the most to me was the introduction to the Barton farm. It’s scenes like those that really prove what Whedon is capable of. He can take characters who we know or care very little for and turn them into some of the most fleshed out and cared for in the series, and that’s really something special...or Thor can take a bath in some cave or something. Not entirely sure what was happening there, but that was in this movie for some reason.

18. IRON MAN 3

“Is that all you've got? A cheap trick and a cheesy one-liner?” “Sweetheart, that could be the name of my autobiography.”

Jacob: Let’s continue the train of Marvel films Jacob loves that Aaron barely tolerates! Next stop: Iron Man 3! Man, I really dig this movie. From Shane Black’s excellent direction to another show-stopping performance from RDJ, it’s hard for me to believe that people hate this movie. I mean, I even like the parts that people hate, like the Mandarin reveal and the fact that Iron Man is barely in it. This is partially helped by the fact that I love watching films where characters who are out of their element have to find creative ways to solve their problems, and the whole second act fits the bill for me there. On top of that, the finale is bonkers and is everything I wanted from the final solo Iron Man outing. House Party Protocol anyone?

Aaron: Yeah, that “need to find creative ways to solve problems when out of their element” part doesn’t really work. In the first one, Tony Stark is able to create the Mark 1 suit as a captive in a cave in Afghanistan. Here, with access to an entire hardware store, he makes… a electrocuting glove..? And couldn’t we have traded that annoying kid’s screen-time for more Iron Man action? Nevertheless, I have become a lot more favorable to this film after embracing the fact that this is more a Shane Black film than your typical Marvel one. The humor’s great, the parade of new Iron Man suits is delightful, and the examination of Tony’s PTSD is surprisingly heavy material for a summer blockbuster. The Mandarin twist even adds some fascinating political commentary to the mix. It’s too bad it also leaves us with Guy Pearce’s bland villain.

17. THOR

“Your ancestors called it magic, but you call it science. I come from a land where they are one and the same.”

Aaron: I remember, back before the MCU carried a sense of obligation, being very hesitant to see Thor in theaters, having never been a huge fan of the comic character. However, I ended up loving the film, even more than most, as it still ranks as one of my favorite MCU films. The casting is solid all around, including the charismatic performance of the at-the-time relatively unknown Chris Hemsworth, the gravitas generating presence of Anthony Hopkins, and, of course, the introduction of surprise fan-favorite Loki, played by Tom HIddleston. From the elaborate costumes to the various unearthly realms, the film is visually fantastic, embracing its colorful comic book roots. Sure, the detour to Earth slows down the film significantly, but when swept up in fantasy drama of Asgard, imbued with the excellent Shakespearean sensibilities of director Kenneth Branagh, the film is magical.

Jacob: Alright, it’s been a while, so I guess it’s time for me to have another confession time: I don’t really like this movie. I think it might have something to do with not really liking Asgard as a setting, but I find it hard to feel connected to this film and its stakes. On top of that, this is easily Hemsworth’s worst go at the character, and I find it hard to put my finger on as to why that is. Perhaps it’s because Thor is really whiny in this movie? Oh yeah, that’s it. As much as I could nitpick at this film, it’s hard to dismiss it entirely. There are some fun moments like anything with Agent Coulson and our short introduction to Hawkeye, and of course this film introduces us to Hiddleston’s Loki, but on the whole, this is a film I’m content to skip when looking through the MCU’s filmography.

16. BIG HERO 6

“Hello. I am Baymax, your personal healthcare companion.”

Jacob: A Disney team-up was practically inevitable from the moment Marvel was acquired by them. I wasn’t expecting much from this film, but thankfully, Big Hero 6 is way better than it has any right to be. A lot of this is helped by a great voice cast including Scott Adsit as Baymax and Alan Tudyk as Alistair Krei (side note: why is Tudyk so fantastically talented? There’s no reason for that.) This film is gorgeous, hilarious, heart-warming, tear-jerking, and pretty much everything else that we’ve come to expect from this most recent string of Disney films. Thankfully for Marvel they were lucky enough to be along for the ride.

Aaron: I guess I’m the opposite in that I expected great things from this film, and was left somewhat disappointed. The story was far too predictable, and for a film called Big Hero 6, the rest of the team are completely overshadowed by Hiro and Baymax. Still, this imbalance is understandable, given how absolutely hilarious and lovable Baymax is. His antics never fail to make me smile, and Scott Adsit is fantastic in the role. It has the expected gorgeous animation of your standard Disney film, and its exploration of grief and depression represents another emotionally mature, yet still fun for the whole family, effort from Disney. I hope we get a sequel to this wonderful, heartwarming film someday, one that moves us further away from this one’s familiar material.

15. DEADPOOL

“You're probably thinking, ‘My boyfriend said this was a superhero movie but that guy in the suit just turned that other guy into a f***ing kabab!’ Well, I may be super, but I'm no hero.”

Aaron: Deadpool is perhaps the most accurate comic book adaptation ever made. After four failed comic book entries (including #39 on this list, Blade: Trinity), Ryan Reynolds found the role he was born to play, perfectly embodying the manic eccentricities of the anti-hero, uninhibited by the unnecessary muting the character received in X-Men: Origins: Wolverine (#36 on this list!). Mocking everything from the X-Men franchise’s convoluted timeline, to the film’s low budget, to Green Lantern, Deadpool is a riotous blast, with plenty of inventiveness in the action scenes as well. Considering how well it sends up the superhero genre, it is a bit disappointing that it’s clichéd origin story takes up so much of the runtime, but the film packs in enough jokes and absurdities into its brisk runtime to more than make up for all of its shortcomings. Deadpool was a breath of fresh air for the superhero movie genre, and its risk-taking was thankfully rewarded with critical and commercial success.

Jacob: Thankfully is right. Remember when there was a time where Deadpool wasn’t one of the biggest heroes in the world? Well, keep that memory close, because I’m pretty certain we won’t be seeing anything like that again for years to come. Whenever Deadpool is actually being Deadpool in this film, you can’t help but smile from ear to ear. This film is unbelievably gory, raunchy, and hilarious in all of the best ways, but all of that is set to the side for about twenty minutes or so of runtime. While that might not sound like a lot, it’s enough to have you begging for more action, based on the fact that all of it is so good. It’s those twenty minutes that keep this film out of the running for the top ten Marvel films, and that’s no joke. Deadpool is really that good.

14. DOCTOR STRANGE

“Dormammu, I've come to bargain!”

Jacob: It was only a matter of time until the MCU started to dive into the mystical side of the Marvel-verse, and it was a moment I had been eagerly anticipating. Before Doctor Strange was released I did my best to stay away from promotional materials, and I’m thankful I did, because I was completely blown away by what I had seen in that theater. While the story is fairly well- worn in its genre and beyond, Strange differentiates itself by being a spectacle to look at. The way the rooms and cities fold in upon each other all while containing well shot action is nothing less than kaleidoscopic and mesmerizing. That’s without even mention the climax which is the most original in Marvel’s history bar none.

Aaron: The fourteenth film in the MCU, Doctor Strange both adheres strongly to the established studio template, and completely breaks the mold. The story bears strong similarities to the likes of Iron Man and Ant-Man, but, man, those M.C. Escher/Inception-esque kaleidoscopic set-pieces really are just some of the coolest, most visually arresting action scenes ever put to film. There’s also a fantastic cast, with Benedict Cumberbatch doing the type of arrogant genius role he does best, Mads Mikkelsen elevating his underdeveloped villainous role with sheer talent (Man, that “Mr. Doctor” exchange is just sublime), and Tilda Swinton once again proving she’s one of the best actors currently working. And that climactic showdown was fantastically surprising, inventive, and perfectly fitting for the hero. Just wish the rest of the plot had shown that much risk-taking.

13. GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2

“He says, Welcome to the frickin' Guardians of the Galaxy! Only he didn't use ‘frickin'.”

Aaron: It’s always hardest ranking the newest entries for a list like this, as they hasn’t been enough time for their impact to be fully gauged. However, it seems like a safe bet to place Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 this high on the list, considering it fully delivers on more of the same irreverent humor, colorful visuals, and rockin’ 70s tunes that made the first film such an unexpected success, even if it is a bit too much of the same. The plot may be a bit sluggish, but that allows the film to spend lots of time further developing the wonderful character dynamics between the fantastic cast, and engaging in extended comedic beats. It doesn’t quite recapture the magic of the first film, but at the end of the day, getting to go on another zany adventure with the endearing Guardians is just an absolutely great time at the movies.

Jacob: I think you’re right in assuming that this placement is somewhat free of a recency bias. Now is it free of my bias for these characters? No…no, it probably isn’t, but man it’s hard to argue against just how much fun this movie is. From the very opening battle to the five (yes, five) after credits scenes I couldn’t help but be fully engrossed in this world and its characters. James Gunn has done such a fantastic job with writing and directing these movies, and though the plot takes a backseat in this entry, it allows Gunn to prove just how much he adores these characters by giving nearly everyone a moment in the spotlight. Oh, and I’ll put the “Come A Little Bit Closer” scene up against nearly any other MCU scene. Don’t @ me.

12. X2: X-MEN UNITED

“The war has begun.”

Jacob: Despite the original X-Men still being quite good and a landmark for superhero cinema, X2 is a quantum leap forward in quality. In fact, a lot of people cite this as their favorite superhero film of all, and while I certainly don’t agree, I can see exactly where they’re coming from. X2 takes the groundwork of the original and builds upon it with great characterization for the series mainstays and newcomers alike (Nightcrawler especially), and well-choreographed action sequences for all of the mutants. Plus, Brian Cox’s Stryker is one of those great villains that I absolutely love to hate.

Aaron: That wicked, intense opening scene of Nightcrawler in the White House is just such a perfect way to kickstart this great movie, and then it’s followed up by that Magneto prison escape, the X-Men Mansion invasion, and that Wolverine/Lady Deathstrike battle? X2 not only contains a plethora of magnificent action scenes, but a lot of strong character work as well, particularly the exploration of Wolverine’s origin (If only that hadn’t felt the need to follow it up with that Origins film…) Plus, Magneto’s betrayal and ultimate master plan is legitimately haunting, helping make X2 not only one of the best X-Men films still, but also one of the best superhero movies ever.

That’s all for today, but be sure to check back tomorrow on https://thiscleverblognameisalreadytaken.tumblr.com/ for the final part of our Marvel Ranked series, where we talk about the best Marvel has to offer in the realm of film.

#Wolverine #X-Men #MCU #spider-man: homecoming #Guardians of the Galaxy #Vol. 2 #Doctor Strange #The Avengers #Thor #Deadpool #Disney #Big Hero 6

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wavenetinfo · 7 years

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For more on the heroine, pick up Entertainment Weekly’s The Ultimate Guide to Wonder Woman, featuring the cast and creators of the new film and the character’s long history, on sale now.

It’s been more than 40 years since Lynda Carter leaped into action as the most famous daughter of Paradise Island, but rarely a day goes by when the actress isn’t reminded of her superhero tour of duty. “If I’m in the airport, people will come up and just hug me because they feel like they can — and that’s the greatest,” says Carter, the singer and actress who became a tele- vision icon thanks to her starring turn as Wonder Woman. “They just want to hug because some place, some memory in their lives, I meant something to them.”

Brash and brave, fierce and fearless, Carter’s Wonder Woman meant everything to young fans who were mesmerized by her work on the hit series (which premiered on ABC in 1975 before moving to CBS for two more seasons). Her Amazon was unfailingly capable — stopping bullets cold, making liars tell the truth — and Carter embraced the role with gusto. The actress thought up the famous spin by which Diana Prince transformed into her powerful alter ego: “In the comic book, Diana Prince just left and came back as Wonder Woman. But for the show, they couldn’t figure out how I would make the change.” And she enthusiastically performed her own stunts, including one in which she was suspended from a helicopter as it flew through a canyon, all while rock- ing skin-tight satin hot pants and a bustier. Try that, superfellas. Despite hanging up her golden lasso in 1979, Carter has remained committed to Wonder Woman’s ideals of justice, equality and love, working on behalf of progressive causes with her husband of 33 years, attorney Robert Altman. “I try to inform,” says the actress, who has acknowledged that her recent guest-starring turn as the pantsuit-clad President Marsdin on the CW’s Supergirl is inspired by Hillary Clinton.

She has continued to make her voice heard in other ways too. Carter, who began her career as a vocalist, has released three studio albums — her latest collection, The Other Side of Trouble, is due this year — and she can be heard in popular video games such as the Elder Scrolls series and Fallout 4 (for the latter, she wrote and sang five original songs). “I’m always working on something new,” she says.

Nevertheless, Carter’s happy to revisit her most immediately recognizable role, the valiant, larger-than-life character whose presence figures even in some of her earliest memories.

ABC Photo Archives/ABC via Getty Images

CARTER I was very young. I had read the Wonder Woman comic books when I was a child; I was much more interested in those than I was in Betty and Veronica, even though I liked those as well. Just the whole idea of a superhero . . . I grew up in the era of women who were young and vibrant during World War II. They were doing all this work for men, and then the [men] tried to put the genie back in the bottle—and they couldn’t. My mother said, “Oh, you can do anything that you set your mind to. We women were out there in the factories and were doing all these jobs that we were always told that we couldn’t do. And when they needed us, we were right there.”

The character resonated strongly with that audience. It’s the idea of intelligence as well, inner strength. …It is about thinking much more than might. We contribute a different element to life around us than men do. When we look at countries that suppress women’s rights, I think that they are missing the point. Women have so much to offer.

That’s at the core of the character. She’s strong, she’s smart… She’s just intrinsically good. She’s about truth and people doing the right thing and not for personal gain or profit. That’s why she’s got her Lasso of Truth. “Okay, let’s just cut the bulls—. You don’t want to tell me the truth?” [Laughs] “Okay, here we go.”

You brought many of your own ideas to the character. What do you think was important for the audience to see? It was about feminism and women’s rights. [The producers] got a lot of blowback for that. But I said it’s ridiculous to dumb [Diana] down. She’s not wearing something over her face. You don’t suspend belief that [Diana and Wonder Woman are] not the same person. I wanted to make her smart.

Bettina Strauss/The CW

Even though it was packed with ridiculous moments involving brainwashed gorillas, time-travel plots and campy disco parties, the show was groundbreaking in terms of its depiction of an empowered female lead. Still, Carter was one of only a few women on-set.

CARTER There were no other women on the set besides the script supervisor and myself. The hair people were usually women, but there were no makeup women —there were makeup men. One of the things I’m most proud of is that my show [helped in the early years to promote] a stuntwomen’s association; the stunt – women’s union. [Before that,] they didn’t have women doing stunts, they had men doing stunts in wigs.

I don’t see how that would have worked. No. The hair was popping up the top, and they were very uncomfortable in tights. And their bodies [didn’t look right;] I don’t care how far away you got the camera!

Have you ever regretted accepting the role? No, no, no, no. It was a breakthrough for women on television. It was a breakthrough certainly for my career. Yes, it cast a long shadow, but it really did mold my whole career, and I’ve never regretted it. I always talk about Wonder Woman. There’s a new girl on the block now, and she will have plenty of time to talk about it.

In October 2016, to commemorate Wonder Woman’s 75th anniversary, Carter met “new girl” Gal Gadot at the United Nations as they bestowed the rank of Honorary Ambassador on the heroine. Intended to honor the character and bring attention to such issues as gender-based discrimination and violence against women and girls, the announcement did not quite go as planned; the move drew protest from opponents who criticized the decision to select a “character with an overtly sexual- ized image” for such a role. (Wonder Woman’s U.N. tenure ended in December.)

CARTER All this stuff about costumes — “Oh, it’s exploitive and blah blah blah.” Give me a break. You can’t say that the sock in the pants of Superman wasn’t. Get over it. That’s a woman’s body. We are all that. We’ve always been that, but we’re also every other shape and color and size. It’s not our problem [what we look like], it’s yours. I am a woman. This is how I look. I’m smart, and I’m this and I’m that as well.

I don’t understand the threat that women represent. We’re not a threat. We complete the whole picture. I’ve got a great father, brother, son, husband, great male friends, wonderful men in my life, and I embrace them all. Their brain goes one direction, and mine goes another. They do think differently than us. I, for one, always expect my husband to read my mind.

Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images

While Carter and Gadot spent time together at the U.N., they had little opportunity to discuss their mutual role. But Carter, who was outspoken about the importance of having a woman at the helm of a Wonder Woman film, did talk at length with director Patty Jenkins.

CARTER Over a period of quite a few months, we talked on the phone. It really was [about] why I thought my portrayal worked, why it lived, what my intentions were from the beginning about the charac- ter. We were so much on the same page of the interpretation of what embodies this character. [Wonder Woman is] not thinking she’s all that. She’s powerful, but…

She’s sensitive. Right.

Why do you think it took so long for this character to get a movie? They were, I think, struggling to cast it and struggling to get the story right. I think they wanted to distance it from anything I did in the past. They have gone back to more of a historical story, which I think is good.

What do you hope to see in Gal Gadot’s version of Wonder Woman? I like her. I just hope it’s successful, that’s all. I think she’s probably pretty kick-ass, and it’s a whole new way to empower women. …We’re not black or white or brown or orange or ginger hair or gray hair or short or skinny or tall or fat. We’re women, and we relate to one another in a very human, sisterly way.

I wanted to know if you were ready at any time to hand off the Lasso of Truth. Anyone can borrow it at any time.

I hope you’ll be fighting for us for many years to come. No one’s going to keep me down.

Clay Enos/Warner Bros.

29 May 2017 | 1:00 pm

Alyssa Smith

Source : EW.com

>>>Click Here To View Original Press Release>>>

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aion-rsa · 4 years

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Best Stan Lee Comics: A Marvel Reading Guide

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If you only know of Stan Lee from his MCU cameos, you need to read his Marvel Comics work with Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and others.

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It’s tricky to pinpoint what would be considered the best Stan Lee stories, because he was a consummate collaborator. Lee was a writer, an idea man, and scripter who worked with some of the greatest storytellers in the business to bring characters to life in tales that were greater than the sum of their parts. And thus, a history of the best Stan Lee Marvel comics is also a showcase of some of the other historic talents in comic book history as well, with two looming larger than any others: Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.

With apologies to Don Heck, John Buscema, John Romita, and many others, it was with Kirby and Ditko that Lee did his best work. There are, of course, controversies surrounding all of these collaborations. Lee's working relationship with Ditko was particularly contentious, and the issue of the Kirby/Lee partnership is still the subject of heated debate to this day, and will remain so for all time. I’m not here to unpack any of that. I’m just here to outline what, for someone who may not be overly familiar with the early days of Marvel, are the most essential segments of an impossibly large body of work.

I hit the big ones here. It’s not that I forgot about the early Hulk, Avengers, Iron Man, or Daredevil comics so much as I never considered those, especially when taken as a whole, to be the best work of Lee and his respective collaborators. And before you kill me, I'm not talking about the characters themselves, I'm just talking about the body of work Stan Lee did on those characters with his collaborators. It's good stuff, but little of it, in total, is the kind of legendary, essential reading I feel these other books are. The same goes for the Lee/Kirby X-Men series. While the essential elements of the X-Men as the ultimate metaphor for the ongoing fight against bigotry in all its forms was more or less in place early on, the concept (and the overall quality of the stories) didn’t really come into its own until the 1970s, under the guidance of other creators. That’s just my opinion, of course, and by all means, feel free to seek out all of the above, but in terms of sheer scope, and as the best possible showcase of the kind of power contained in Marvel’s early days, I give you these stories by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, John Buscema, John Romita, and others...

Fantastic Four

For some modern readers, the earliest Fantastic Four tales might not land with the kind of impact that you would expect, considering that they essentially redefined superhero comics. But rest assured, this is the foundation of the entire Marvel Universe, and the proper beginning of one of the greatest collaborations in all of comics with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

But if the first two volumes (Fantastic Four Epic Collection: The World's Greatest Comics Magazine and Fantastic Four Epic Collection: The Master Plan of Doctor Doom, which make up roughly the first three years of the book) are too dry for you, then just go ahead and jump right into Fantastic Four Epic Collection: The Coming of Galactus, which is really when Lee and Kirby find themselves in full flower. By this point in the series, you’ll find more ideas per page than most comics usually crank out in a year, and the book truly earns the title of “World’s Greatest Comics Magazine” with the legendary "Galactus Trilogy." And while the “Galactus Trilogy” itself is often (rightly) cited as the pinnacle of the Lee/Kirby team, this volume ends with “This Man, This Monster” which is possibly an even better example of what Lee and Kirby could do with extraordinary characters, even when the fate of the planet wasn’t at stake.

And the amazing thing about that volume? It’s still only the halfway point of the Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four stories. But before I dive deeper into the Lee/Kirby partnership, or the Lee/Ditko years, there is one brief diversion worth taking...

Silver Surfer

At the moment, there isn’t yet an Epic Collection for the second half of the Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four run (you can find them in assorted Marvel Masterworks volumes, though). But what there is is Silver Surfer Epic Collection: When Calls Galactus. What this volume does is reprint all of the early Silver Surfer appearances in the next two years or so of Fantastic Four. The Surfer here is a much more alien figure than he would later become, owing more to Jack Kirby’s continued influence on the character he created.

Follow that up with Silver Surfer Masterworks Vol. 1, where Lee and artist John Buscema fleshed out Norrin Radd’s backstory and gave him a little bit more of an interior life. These are really the tales that have essentially defined the Surfer for the rest of his pop culture history, and John Buscema at the height of his own artistic powers is a real treat to behold, even as Lee took the Surfer character a little further afield from the roots that Jack Kirby had tried to imbue him with. Still, key to these early Surfer tales is "The Power and the Prize," the first appearance of Marvel's Mephisto, and an important example of Lee's gift for high drama and melodramatic dialogue.

As a bonus, you absolutely should check out Silver Surfer: Parable, in which Lee partnered with visionary French comics artist Moebius, to tell a short, but weighty and compelling, tale that melds the end times imagery of Galactus with religious fanaticism.

Thor

While the earliest Thor stories (collected in Thor Epic Collection: God of Thunder) might feel a little tough to take for modern readers, often utilizing relatively traditional superhero storytelling tropes combined with faux-Shakespearean “elevated” dialogue, stick with ‘em and you’ll be rewarded. But really, starting at the beginning is overrated. You know the broad strokes of all these characters otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this site, right?