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pass-the-bechdel · 6 years

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Marvel Cinematic Universe: The Incredible Hulk (2008)

Does it pass the Bechdel Test?

No.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Two (20% of cast).

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Eight.

Positive Content Rating:

Three.

General Film Quality:

Not as bad as everyone seems to remember, but also, not good.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) UNDER THE CUT:

Passing the Bechdel:

Martina barely has lines to start with, and she’s not even in the same country as Betty, so...no.

Female characters:

Martina.

Betty Ross.

Male characters:

Bruce Banner.

General Ross.

Joe.

Emil Blonsky.

Stanley.

Jim Wilson.

Samuel Sterns.

Tony Stark.

OTHER NOTES:

Bruce sees a bunch of guys harrassing Martina, and he almost walks away to avoid a conflict that could set off the Hulk, but then he thinks better of it and comes back to confront the guys and save the girl. It’s a shorthand way of showing the audience that Bruce is a good guy, not letting his own fear get in the way of doing the right thing, blah blah. I support that message, obviously, but I do wish they wouldn’t use ‘woman in jeopardy’ as their go-to method for proving something about a man. Martina only exists in the film for this purpose, she’s just a pretty prop so Bruce can prove his morals, and that’s not cool. Female characters existing only as props is not cool, and violence against women being used to demonstrate/further a man’s story isn’t cool either. Get a better lazy shorthand, movie.

Lou Ferrigno cameo is clearly the highlight of the whole film.

At least 60% of Betty’s lines are just her saying ‘Bruce’ with different intonations, usually as a question. “Bruce?” she whispers. “Bruce?!” she calls. “BRUCE!!!” she screams. She also almost definitely yells it in slow motion with the sound cut out during dramatic climactic points in action scenes. I don’t know, I didn’t think to take note of that.

Oh. This movie. It might be the first of the MCU films I ever saw, back before they had committed to the idea of actually doing a Cinematic Universe, so it was just ‘a Hulk film’ that I watched, filed as ‘bad’ in my brain, and never revisited again, even after the MCU got going in earnest and - years later - I got sucked into the vortex and wound up watching and re-watching all the movies in order. It’s easy to leave this film out of the chronology (and many people do); despite a totally pointless scene with Tony Stark at the end of the movie, it doesn’t actually tie in to the rest of the MCU in any meaningful way, and as an intro to the Hulk it isn’t really necessary: firstly, because most people who don’t live under rocks already know who the Hulk is from popular culture, and secondly, for anyone else, they get a perfectly serviceable introduction to him in his next film appearance (The Avengers), in which the role has been recast with Mark Ruffalo, who plays Bruce Banner/Hulk in every future MCU film and leaves this Edward Norton vehicle as a weird outlier better forgotten than incorporated into one’s understanding of the character. Edward Norton is a fantastic actor who has done so much great work over the years, but this was not a good role for him, and having rewatched this movie now nearly a decade after seeing it the first time, I’ll probably go back to giving it a miss whenever I trawl through the MCU. It’s a film with, basically, nothing to offer, neither as a standalone nor as part of a wider franchise. That’s a pretty sad indictment, but there it is.

Is this the worst film in the MCU pantheon to date? Probably. Not absolutely - I think the door remains open for debate (the other contenders for the title, we’ll get to in due time). The thing is, this movie is not as bad as history remembers it: most of it is actually fairly decent. Not remarkable, not impressive, but decent in the sense that it is stock-standard playing to expectation, it isn’t making any negative waves, it’s just there. The bad rep this movie has is owed almost exclusively to the way it ends, with an embarassing and meaningless Hulk/Abomination battle in which the CGI is absolutely not capable of upholding even the basic visual storytelling of two beast-creatures whaling on each other. Bonus features of that fight include: Hulk clapping his hands to put out a fire and SAVE HIS LOVE, and a truly abysmal use of the iconic ‘HULK SMASH!’ line. By the time the final fight mercifully ends, any and all goodwill the rest of the film had built up has been obliterated, much like the neighbourhood and the lives of all those poor collateral-damage civilians that no one cares about. Some beast-creatures whaled on each other in shitty CGI. That’s what we came for, right?

What makes this ending so particularly bad is how out-of-place it is in the rest of the narrative. Yeah, we 100% EXPECT a Boss Battle at the end, because that’s the formula for these things, but the movie does a really awkward job of not actually building up to that climax in a meaningful way that lets it feel earned rather than perfunctory. Let’s rewind; the premise of the whole film is that Bruce Banner is trying to keep his Hulky genetics out of the hands of the military, specifically a program overseen by General Ross, who happens to be the father of Bruce’s former co-worker/lover Betty, because of course he is. This detail is not actually important for any reason, it’s just an excuse for Bruce and Ross to conflict over Betty like she’s a cool shiny object, because ultimately she has no more narrative function than Martina the hot Brazilian chick. Anyway: Bruce is on the run from Ross, Ross is on the hunt for Bruce so that he can experiment on him forevermore, and Betty is there sometimes to say Bruce’s name as a question. Ross chases Bruce with lots of army guys, Bruce Hulks out at various points so that the action sequences can involve more than Edward Norton running away, and there’s a long-term goal for Bruce in the form of getting some Science to another Scientist so that they can Science a cure for his Hulky genes and he can stop running once and for all (it doesn’t work). It’s not a very inspiring script. It’s fairly straight-forward and predictable, but there’s nothing especially bad about it other than the pointlessness of Betty (the same as this is a front-runner for the MCU’s worst film so far, Betty is a strong contender for Worst Inclusion of A Useless Love Interest). Norton may not be a great Bruce Banner, but he does a solid job of giving weight to Bruce’s plight, and the overall effect is at least passable as a film, if forgettable. The problem here is Emil Blonsky, the marine tasked by Ross to head the operation to capture Banner, and the man who eventually becomes the Abomination whom Hulk battles in that cringe-worthy film climax. And the problem with Blonsky is not that he’s some kind of weak link in the script. The problem is, he’s the best character in the movie.

Maybe it’s just that Tim Roth is too good for the material (he is), but Blonsky is easily the most dynamic person in an otherwise flat film, and he’s the only character whose narrative arc isn’t instantly predictable the moment he steps on screen. He’s a consummate soldier, all about the job, and getting into the thick of things himself to make sure it gets done right. His road to becoming Abomination begins partway into the film, as Blonsky grapples with the aftermath of his first encounter with the Hulk - for which he was brutally unprepared due to Ross’ failure to provide essential mission intel - which led to the death of many of Blonsky’s men. As Ross comes clean about the super-soldier serum experiments that created the Hulk, he plucks at a few delicate nerves, noting the physical toll that years of service have taken on Blonsky’s body. Blonsky laments that he can’t take the experience he has now and put it into the body he had a decade ago; Ross suggests that, maybe, they can arrange something kinda like that. It isn’t played as outright manipulation - Ross has just told Blonsky that there were other experimental treatments in the same line as Banner’s work, and Blonsky knows what conversation they’re really having and has already seen what the side-effects could be if it goes badly - but there is plain prompting from Ross, to say nothing of the treatments he then actively facilitates, most notably the second dose which he offers despite having originally stated that if Blonsky experienced any adverse effects (which at that point he has, in limited capacity) the treatments would cease. It’s a situation in which Blonsky rapidly loses his agency, and for which Ross isn’t even a little bit blameless. What’s significant about this is not just that Ross is the ‘villain behind the villain’ in this case, but that Blonsky really...isn’t a villain in the first place.

Now, ‘villains’ in stories (and especially comics) who start out innocent/unlucky/well-intentioned and then become twisted are not uncommon, but the key to making those narratives work is that the story acknowledges the pathos of that journey; that this person never meant to end up as the villain, and it’s a sad turn of events that brought them down that road despite themselves. This is where things fall apart for this movie, because they kinda, oops, forgot to either (1) make Blonsky’s pre-serum behaviour clearly villainous, or (2) match his unwilling descent into villainy with a tone of empathy and regret for how his character has been turned astray. He isn’t presented as some paragon of goodness to be torn down, but he also doesn’t act maliciously or imply that he draws sadistic pleasure from his work. He consents to that first dose of serum, but it isn’t for evil reasons, he’s not bloodthirsty, he’s not going after the Hulk as a personal vendetta: the primary emotional motivation he displays is curiosity. He wants to get the job done, and he recognises the threat that Hulk represents, and he’s interested in finding out exactly what kind of a world he’s just been looped into. He may be antagonistically positioned against the protagonist of the film, but his intentions aren’t reprehensible from any angle. Thing is, the serum he takes is depicted as having a narcotic effect, impairing his judgment and fostering an escalating addiction that ultimately creates the Abomination; it’s all downhill for Blonsky after that first dose, the situation spins wildly out of his control, and he loses himself in the process. This is where the pathos should fit in as an essentially good (or at least neutral) person is lost to this drug, but it doesn’t. Instead, Blonsky becomes Abomination for the final act of the movie, and all of his characterisation evaporates so that he can just mindlessly smash things for no apparent reason. If he had been shown to be someone who engages in unnecessary violence and/or enjoys it at some prior point, then Abomination would be an escalation of existing villainous predilections, and it would work, but that isn’t the case. Where Hulk operates off an established base of anger/raised heart-rate/physiological response to heightened situations, and his destructive tendencies and absence of higher cognitive functions make sense in that context of reactionary hind-brain behaviour, Abomination has no established parameters or reasons for developing as he does, and searching the only information we have - Blonsky’s characterisation - for answers turns up no satisfactory results. Abomination’s rampage has nothing to do with ‘getting the job done’ (Banner is in Ross’ custody by that point in the film, in fact, so the job is already done), nor does it have anything to do with the Hulk himself - Blonsky and Banner never had specific personal beef with one another that would make a final confrontation meaningful (Bruce doesn’t even know who the Abomination is/was) - so Abomination’s entire existence feels pretty pointless. It’s just there so that Hulk can pick on someone his own size.

The final fight scene is objectively bad from a technical standpoint, with the dodgy CGI and the way-too-corny contrivances and the muddy uninspired visual mess of it all: it’s just plain bad to watch, but it is also not only devoid of emotional relevance or weight, it’s devoid of emotional logic. We’ve watched this process of Blonsky ‘becoming a monster’ in a literal sense, and it’s been the only part of the movie with any life in it (it’s not a deep well of complexity, but again, I think it works because Tim Roth is fucking making it work), but a boss fight is not a fulfilling conclusion to that narrative because we haven’t been given clear stakes in the outcome. Considering that Blonsky ends up a victim of Ross much the same as Bruce Banner is, it really should be Ross’ villainy that is ultimately defeated to bring us a satisfying conclusion, but the film forgets its own narrative in the course of pretending that Blonsky was the main bad guy all along, to such an extent that it bizarrely turns around and rewards Ross in the end. After transforming into Abomination, no one so much as suggests that Blonsky is still in there somewhere (his name is not even mentioned), he’s just a beast-creature now, and Ross gets to keep him and do all that fun experimenting that he wanted Hulk for this whole time, and no one challenges the idea. Remember how the whole movie was about Bruce trying NOT to get caught and experimented on forevermore by the military? Remember how that’s supposed to be a bad thing that Good Guys want to stop? Eh, who cares? Apparently not Bruce Banner, whose upstanding morals don’t extend far enough to want to save anyone else from the fate he has thwarted for himself. Not very heroic, just kinda leaving some other dude to take your place. As hardcore as Bruce was about keeping the formula out of Ross’ hands, etc, apparently he has no qualms about this derivative, and he just whistles on out of there, and that’s it. The end. Not a second thought for Blonsky’s fate, no fulfilling closure for Bruce’s ACTUAL villain beef with Ross, the bad guy gets what he wants and no one cares, the good guy completely forgets the ideals that he was fighting for the entire time and therefore kiiinda renders the whole journey of the film pointless, and worst of all, there’s no sense that the story comes to these conclusions deliberately, that it’s supposed to be off-kilter in any of these ways. It’s like they got to the final act and literally forgot everything that had happened in the film previously so they just stopped without actually closing any of the storylines, it’s a totally incongruous ending.

I’ve focused largely on how much they screwed over Blonsky in this process because I considered him the film’s saving grace the rest of the time, but really, the ending screws over every character, theme, and narrative thread in the whole story, and that’s the huge disconnect that leaves the audience remembering a bad film, not just a bad ending. Granted, it wasn’t a good film to start with, and if you were less engaged with Blonsky than I was and you didn’t latch on to one of the other slim elements the story offered instead, then the whole thing turning to shit in the end really can’t have been much of a loss. It’s not that they didn’t, at moments, have the makings of something that might be good, or glimmers in scenes that suggested a quality idea that might have shone if someone had polished it a little better. For anyone reading this and going ‘well, don’t you know they had loads of behind-the-scenes issues with redrafting the script and other bullshit?’, yes, I am aware of that. Thing is, it shouldn’t matter. A 150-million dollar major Hollywood franchise project doesn’t get to use ‘oh, we just didn’t really bother making sure the script made basic sense before we filmed it’ as a valid excuse. If everyone’s doing their jobs properly the way they should be at this level of the industry, then the audience shouldn’t be able to see your BTS issues bleeding all over the finished product; major script redrafts should be a Did You Know? trivia point, not an ‘oh, NOW I get what went wrong here’ explanation. At the end of the day, no one cared enough about making this a movie that would matter in the long run for an expansive Cinematic Universe. Tanking the whole film into a forgettable mistake that viewers would gladly leave out of their Marvel marathons was, ultimately, the one thing they did successfully.

#Marvel Cinematic Universe #The Incredible Hulk #MCU #Bechdel Test #female representation

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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The Falcon and The Winter Soldier: What Do the Normies of the MCU Know About the MCU?

https://ift.tt/3rPtQbr

This article contains spoilers for The Falcon and The Winter Soldier.

Midway through The Falcon and The Winter Soldier’s third episode, “Power Broker,” Helmut Zemo (now fully recognized as a Baron) demonstrates some impressive quick thinking.

Alongside an undercover Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes, Zemo is in the Lowtown underworld of Madripoor trying to score a meeting with the Power Broker. When things are going poorly and the trio is forced to defend themselves, Zemo decides to pretend that Bucky is still the brainwashed Winter Soldier who can be controlled through some helpful Hydra keywords like “Winter Soldier. Attack.”

This is a fine plan that has its intended effect as the group is brought in to see one of the Power Broker’s underlings, Selby (Imelda Corcoran). But it also raises some questions as to how Zemo was so confident the ruse would work. How, exactly do the citizens of Madripoor not realize that Bucky Barnes isn’t in the brainwashed super soldier business anymore? Do they not clock the new haircut? Or more importantly, do they not recall six months ago when Bucky was on the side of the good guys in the climactic battle against Thanos? It appears to be common knowledge in the U.S. that Bucky is on probation and no longer subject to the whims of his Hydra programming thanks to his time in Wakanda. Did word of that just not reach Madripoor somehow?

The unclear nature as to what the people of Madripoor know about Bucky Barnes on The Falcon and The Winter Soldier is part of a larger series of questions about what the people of the Marvel Cinematic Universe know about their own universe itself. Simply put: what do these “normal” folks know about all the superheroics that have been happening all around them for the past decade?

A big part of the MCU’s appeal is the interconnected nature of its films, TV shows, and the extended universe in which they take place. It’s always fun when one hero crosses over into another hero’s story like The Hulk in Thor: Ragnarok or Black Widow in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. What’s even more interesting, however, is when those characters’ existences are acknowledged by the non super-powered everyday folks on the ground in unrelated movies.

The franchise’s two Spider-Man movies are particularly adept at pulling this “Marvel heroes as background noise” concept off. In Spider-Man: Homecoming, Spidey comes across a group of criminals robbing a bank while wearing cheap Avengers masks. In that same film, Peter’s class is subjected to boring public school PSAs from Captain America. Then, in Spider-Man: Far From Home, Peter becomes emotional upon seeing graffiti honoring the dearly departed Tony Stark.

The “normies” of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the everyday Janes and Joes who go to work, make Lean Cuisine dinners, and watch Jeopardy!, are all clearly aware of the dozens of superheroes around them. How could they not be – living in a world that seems to come under existential threat every few years. Five years ago half of them literally disappeared into dust! It’s a traumatic existence for your average MCU citizen.

While the existence of Avengers and other super-powered individuals as public figures and even celebrities has been a big aspect of MCU films thus far, Marvel’s first two TV Disney+ properties have expanded upon the concept even further.

In WandaVision, several of the non-hero characters have a surprisingly thorough understanding of what went down during the battle against Thanos. Monica Rambeau notes that Wanda came close to taking down the Mad Titan then FBI Agent Jimmy Woo follows up saying that Captain Marvel fared pretty well herself. It’s as though the pair bought tickets to Avengers: Endgame to view the action themselves.

Then in The Falcon and The Winter Soldier’s first episode, Sam Wilson is seen as a full-on celebrity. A bank loan officer wants to get a selfie with him, even after he denies his loan request. In episode 2, some local beat cops seem pretty embarrassed to have harassed the mighty Falcon rather than just some random, eminently harassable Black man. In that same incident, the officers recognize Bucky and say they must regretfully bring him into the station for violating his parole.

Which brings us back to The Falcon and The Winter Soldier’s third episode. Madripoor may be a fictional country within Marvel comics and the MCU, but can it really be so removed from the rest of the world that its citizens don’t know the status of Bucky Barnes’s brain? What on Earth do the people of this world actually know about all these heroes?

Well, we’re not just all about asking questions here, so I will endeavor to provide some educated guesses.

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Episode 3: Marvel and MCU Easter Eggs Guide

By Kirsten Howard and 3 others

Movies

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Episode 3 Ending Explained

By Jim Dandy

To imagine what living in the Marvel Cinematic Universe would be like, we don’t really have to think that hard. Sure, our own reality might not be nearly as chaotic as Marvel’s. Half of us didn’t suddenly disappear five years ago. But you know what our reality and the MCU’s have in common? The inescapable presence of lots and lots of Marvel superheroes.

Marvel is one of the most infamous pop culture entities on the planet right now. Since Iron Man first premiered in 2008, the MCU has featured 23 movies, two Disney+ TV shows, and many other tenuously connected series. All in all, these movies have grossed nearly $23 billion worldwide.

But for however massive Marvel is, it’s still not universal. There are more than 7 billion people on both our planet and presumably the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s as well. With a population that size, there are plenty of people who don’t know or care to know about the particulars of Marvel’s heroes.

Stan Lee liked to say that every comic is someone’s first comic and FWS appears to have taken that to heart with some highly expository dialogue throughout. Many viewers are certainly aware of The Winter Solider’s backstory and current mental state but not every viewer is. Why wouldn’t that be the same case within the MCU itself?

As agents of the federal government, characters like Jimmy Woo and Monica Rambeau may have access to privileged information about what really happened when the Avengers succeeded in restoring half the world’s population. Certainly plenty of the surviving Avengers had to be debriefed by SHIELD, SWORD, the FBI, the CIA, or whatever other government agency was around to hear their testimony.

Not everyone else in the Marvel world would be as lucky or as interested. Perhaps someone like Selby cannot be bothered to know whether Bucky Barnes remains a HYDRA asset or not. She’s got an underworld criminal empire to look after. And imagine what it would be like to be one of the 3.5 billion people in the Marvel universe who sprang back into existence after five years. The Falcon? The Winter Soldier? Zemo? Buddy, I’ve got to figure out what my tax situation is like right now.

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The Falcon and The Winter Soldier has three more episodes to go. That’s more than enough time for the normies of the Marvel universe to learn the ins and outs of Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes. And if they don’t? Well, that’s ok too. Superheroes aren’t for everyone. Even for the people who live in the world surrounded by them.

The post The Falcon and The Winter Soldier: What Do the Normies of the MCU Know About the MCU? appeared first on Den of Geek.

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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gokinjeespot · 6 years

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off the rack #1200

Monday, February 12, 2018

My old partner and dearly departed friend Ron Norton came up with the title of these weekly musings. I seem to remember that it was after I left Vancouver and The Comicshop and moved to Ottawa to manage The Silver Snail in 1990. I can't remember when I started numbering them but I was commenting on the comic books that I read for The Comicshpper, The Comicshop's monthly newsletter way before off the rack #1. This is some time during the 1980s so who knows what this latest off the rack should be numbered at. I've thought about quitting many times but a handful of people who read them every week keep me going. I'm grateful for their feedback and encouragement. Thanks to Chris R, Charles dL, Doug S, Tom Mc, and Ryan J. It looks like I'll stop when I'm no longer working.

X-Men Red #1 - Tom Taylor (writer) Mahmud Asrar (art) Ive Svorcina (colours) VC's Cory Petit (letters). If you read the 5-issue mini Phoenix Resurrection you'll not be surprised that the original Jean Grey is back on the racks. If you didn't, you should read it to find out how she comes back from the dead, or you can just accept the fact that she's back. This debut opens with a familiar situation where the X-Men rescue a young mutant from a mob of anti-mutant non-mutants. This leads to a flashback to another mutant rescue and the scary notion fostered by the general population that all mutants must be eliminated. That's the cue for Jean to gather her Red Team: Nightcrawler, Namor, Wolverine/Laura and Honey Badger/Gabby. Including Namor was a surprise to me. I can see where Jean and the King of Atlantis will butt heads later. Most of this issue seemed like the same old mutants trying to live in a world that fears and hates them and it is, but then the villain is revealed and I want to see what the bad guy wants.

Superman #40 - James Robinson (writer) Doug Mahnke (pencils) Jaime Mendoza & Scott Hanna (inks) Wil Quintana (colours) Rob Leigh (letters). The Last Days part 1. Mark your calendars, February 8 is the day that Krypton exploded. It's true. It says so in this comic book. This is a Superman and son story where Jon tags along to help save another planet on the verge of exploding. They run into a problem when they get there as the natives are not amenable to being saved. Me, I would have said suit yourselves, see you never and left them to their fate but not Superman. I would be a lousy super hero. I may mock this story but I really like Doug's art so I will keep reading.

VS #1 - Ivan Brandon (writer) Esad Ribic (art) Nic Klein (colours) Aditya Bidikar (letters). That's Versus in case you're old like me and don't get what the title stands for. I pulled this off the rack for the visual feast that is any comic book with art by Esad Ribic. The story is similar to The Hunger Games but with teams of soldiers fighting each other for fame and glory. I suppose video gamers would enjoy this but I'm reading this one because of the art.

Runaways #6 - Rainbow Rowell (writer) Kris Anka (art) Matthew Wilson (colours) VC's Joe Caramagna (letters). Find Your Way Home part 6. This relaunch is starting out similarly to the original but instead of fighting evil parents they're fighting an evil grandparent. The Runaway that saves the day surprised me. I can't wait for Victor to get a body.

Swamp Thing Winter Special #1 - There are two stories in this 80-page giant. The Talk of the Saints by Tom King (writer) Jason Fabok (art) Brad Anderson (colours) & Deron Bennett (letters) is swamp monster versus snow monster but not what you may think. It was actually a really cool story. The second story is a first issue of a new Swamp Thing series by Len Wein (writer) Kelley Jones (art) Michelle Madsen (colours) that was supposed to be the sequel to Swamp Thing: The Dead Don't Sleep the 6-issue mini that hit the racks in the spring of 2016. There is no letterer credit because the story is presented without words. Len had not completed a lettering script before he passed away. It is the power of his writing and Kelley's art that makes what you see a understandable story even without any words. Len's story pages are provided to fill things out for us and it's cool to see how Kelley brings the story to the pages of the comic book. The Swamp Thing is my favourite occult character because of all the creators that have told his stories.

Avengers #679 - Al Ewing, Jim Zub & Mark Waid (writers) Kim Jacinto (art) David Curiel (colours) VC's Cory Petit (letters). No Surrender part 5. This issue clears up two mysteries. Who is the Grandmaster's opponent and why they are playing this game. The change in art styles was made less annoying because of the consistent colouring of David Curiel. I also noticed a difference in the writing too and you can see that Al Ewing is listed first in the writing credits this issue after Mark Waid had been during the first four. It's interesting to me that I noticed these differences.

Infinity Countdown Adam Warlock #1 - Gerry Duggan (writer) Michael Allred (art) Laura Allred (colours) VC's Cory Petit (letters). I've know Adam Warlock since he went by just plain Him. My favourite run of stories was when Jim Starlin drew Adam and all the weird and wonderful alien cast like Pip the Troll and Gamora. The character is tied to the soul gems and with the new Avengers movie focusing on Thanos and the soul gems in the Infinity Gauntlet it's time to exploit the heightened interest by putting a bunch of Infinity Countdown books on the racks. This one teams Warlock with Kang and when Kang is involved time travel is sure to follow. Ugh. If you're nostalgic for the comic books that were written in the late sixties you'll like this. I'm going to read the next part in Infinity Countdown Prime, which hits the racks on February 21, but if it's as stilted as this book I won't be impressed enough to read the rest unless they have creative teams that interest me.

Daredevil #598 - Charles Soule (writer) Ron Garney (art) Matt Milla (colours) VC's Clayton Cowles (letters). Ron Garney is not a flashy artist like Jim Lee but his gritty style really fits the urban setting of this book. Now that Wilson Fisk is the mayor of New York City he will be appointing various commissioners to help him run the place. It's very interesting to see who the big man is inviting to the table. Meanwhile the artist villain Muse is getting under the mayor's skin but it looks like the Kingpin has plans to deal with him that are sure to make things deadly for Daredevil. I love all the shenanigans.

She-Hulk #162 - Mariko Tamaki (writer) Jahnoy Lindsay (art) Frederico Blee (colours) VC's Travis Lanham (letters). The banner across the top of the cover says "Jen Walters Must Die". That's pretty ominous. What we have this issue is a psychotherapy session where we get to see where Jen's head is at. It results in a minor transformation that will change the character. I look forward to seeing what's next.

Amazing Spider-Man #795 - Dan Slott & Christos Gage (writers) Mike Hawthorne (pencils) Terry Pallot (inks) Marte Gracia (colours) VC's Joe Caramagna (letters). Threat Level: Red part 2. What the hey? Loki is Sorcerer Supreme now? Then what is Doctor Strange up to? We find out what kind of red threat Spidey will be facing soon but the ads for Amazing Spider-Man #797 seems to indicate that it's only temporary. That kind of downplays the threat don't you think?

Spider-Man #237 - Brian Michael Bendis (writer) Oscar Bazaldua (art) Brian Reber (colours) VC's Cory Petit (letters). This issue is all about the difficulties with family ties. Miles and his evil uncle and Lana and her evil mother Bombshell don't see eye to eye but the adults are in control. You won't get Spider-Man fighting the Hobgoblin like it shows on the cover but Hobbie is in this issue at least.

Motor Girl Volumes 1 & 2 - Terry Moore (story & art). I started reading the story of Samantha Locklear as floppies but had to stop partway through because the store could only order the few subscription service copies that was needed and not even an extra rack copy or else we would not make a profit. I'm glad that the whole thing was collected quickly and made available in these two trade paperbacks so that I could finish reading. Sam is a marine vet who served in Iraq and came home scarred both physically and emotionally. It's a story of her struggle to heal. It's got apes and aliens and is a whole lot of fun. One of the perks of working in a comic book store is that I can read them without having to pay for them. I bought Terry's Rachel Rising omnibus soft cover when that was available and I bought these too. He is one of the very few comic book creators that I will spend my hard earned money on.

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oselatra · 7 years

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The incredible adventures of Nate Powell

The Little Rock native is the first cartoonist to win the National Book Award. His graphic novel 'March,' the memoir of U.S. Rep. John Lewis, may well be the mother text for a new era of nonviolent resistance.

If you've followed the quality and depth of graphic novels over the past 20 years, you'll know how odd it is to say that Little Rock native Nate Powell is the first cartoonist ever to win the National Book Award. That's no knock against Powell, by the way. As a longtime fan of the format, Powell admits it's surprising to him, too.

At the National Book Award ceremony in November 2016, Powell shared the prize with writer Andrew Aydin and U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) for the "March" trilogy. Part memoir, part history, part handbook for a new generation of nonviolent social activists to which the books are dedicated, the series employs Powell's black-and-white imagery and a moving script by Aydin and Lewis to powerfully chronicle Lewis' Alabama youth, his awakening to the injustices of Jim Crow, and his trial-by-fire young adulthood, when, as the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the future congressman helped spearhead the effort to break the back of institutionalized segregation in the South through nonviolent protest.

The award was a bright way station on a still-winding road for Powell, who has been playing in punk bands and writing and drawing underground comics and graphic novels of his own since he was a teenager growing up in North Little Rock. While the National Book Award is a silver feather in the cap of the 38-year-old artist, Powell sees the bigger accomplishment of the "March" trilogy — with its account of how patriotic Americans once met hate, police batons and fire hoses with love and open hands and somehow won the day — in what it may mean to readers-turned-leaders in the next four years. With President-elect Donald Trump ascendant and progressives warning that nonviolent protests of a size and vigor unseen since the 1960s are necessary if we are to preserve not only the nation's social progress but perhaps the American experiment in representative democracy itself, Powell hopes "March" may someday be seen not just as a piece of history, but as one of the principal texts in the coming fight for the soul of the nation.

Lewis, repeatedly jailed, fined and beaten as a young man in his quest for equality, has called that kind of protest "good trouble." Powell has been getting up to that kind of trouble for years, and shows no signs of stopping any time soon.

Soophie

Born in Little Rock in 1978, Powell grew up all over America. His father was career Air Force, and Powell's boyhood included stints living near bases in Montana and Alabama. When he was 10, his dad retired from the military, and the family returned to Arkansas and settled in North Little Rock.

By then, Powell said, he'd been into comics for years, thanks mostly to 1980s TV shows featuring the Incredible Hulk, Wonder Woman and Spider-Man. He's been drawing since he was a small child, and began to take seriously the idea of writing and drawing his own comics in the sixth grade.

Very much a part of the 1980s generation obsessed with toy-centric kids' shows like "G.I. Joe" and "Transformers," Powell soon started buying the comics associated with those brands, along with the early "independent, gravelly, black-and-white" incarnation of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles before the series hit the big time and became lunchbox worthy. Looking around in the local comic book store for another series in the same vein of "G.I. Joe," Powell came upon "The 'Nam" by writer Doug Murray, a series that ran between 1986 and 1993.

"It was fiction, but it was more or less a realistic, unflinching account of drafted teenagers who were forced to serve in the Vietnam War," Powell said. "Growing up in a military family, being a G.I. Joe kid in the Reagan era, this comic, 'The 'Nam,' really opened a lot of doors to me to begin having real conversations with my dad, to understand stuff like cognitive dissonance, and to understand the moral and ethical quandaries of war and political structure."

Powell said the comic book and the conversations it spawned with his father also opened his eyes to the idea that a lot of what he had read about war in "G.I. Joe" comics had nothing to do with the reality of war. Those realizations were soon buttressed by other, gritty titles in the more realistic comics of the late Reagan era. Soon, Powell was reading edgier underground comics by artists like Chester Brown, Geof Darrow and Frank Miller while expanding his artistic horizons through the well-stocked Japanese anime section of a neighborhood video store.

"That kind of changed my path in life," he said. Powell, along with his friends Mike Lierly and Nate Wilson, would go on to write and self-publish a comic book series called "D.O.A.," with the first issue appearing in September 1992.

The same year, Lierly, Powell and other friends at North Little Rock High founded the pioneering and beloved local punk band Soophie Nun Squad, which didn't formally call it quits until 2006. Part band, part arts collective, part performance art troupe, Soophie's shows were an explosion of expression and creativity, with most songs driven by a chorus of voices. The band recorded almost incessantly, and after Powell graduated from North Little Rock High in 1996 — after which he attended George Washington University in D.C. before transferring to the cartooning program at the School of Visual Arts in New York — Soophie toured annually between 1997 and 2006, including three tours of Europe in 2002, 2003 and 2006. In all, the band played over 400 gigs in the U.S. and 14 countries.

Powell remembers his time with Soophie fondly. During the latter half of the 1990s, he would work six months out of the year in different places throughout the country, then rendezvous with bandmates in Central Arkansas to record and plan the next tour.

Even as he was living the punk band dream with his friends, the urge to be a comic book artist never left him. Powell said that as high school came to a close, he took his cartooning to the next level by dedicating himself to art as a career. Powell remembered that his parents, while always supportive of his art, weren't immediately on board.

"You've got to remember this was 1996," he said. "This is peak Clinton era, middle-of-the-road, middle-class prosperity. There was definitely a comfort zone that I was in danger of violating by saying, 'Well, I'm going to throw it all away and go to art school so I can be a comic book artist.' There were definitely some intergenerational issues and some class issues there between my parents and I. It was a bit of a struggle to actually push my way through and convince them of my argument." Powell said that struggle would continue to some extent until 2003, when his first commercially produced book, "Tiny Giants," a collection of his previously self-produced comics, was published by Soft Skull Press.

"From my parents' perspective, it was the first time they could have a tangible example of something they could be proud of," Powell said. "I think once they got over that hump, by seeing a physical product that someone else had lent some approval by publishing, then they were like, 'OK, this really is something that's serious.' " From then on, Powell said, his parents were "staunch allies" of his cartooning career.

Maralie Armstrong-Rial became a member of Soophie Nun Squad in 1997, soon after starting at North Little Rock High in the ninth grade. Powell, she said, was one of the first people she met after moving to North Little Rock. She remembers Powell and the circle of friends who formed the core of Soophie as friendly and welcoming. "They were hilarious," she said. "I didn't like going to school, but I liked going because it meant I could see them and hang out."

Soophie was like an extended family, Armstrong-Rial said. While every member had his or her own level of influence over what she called "the project" that was Soophie Nun Squad, she said, Powell was the one who pushed for action over talk.

"He helped organize all the energy people had," Armstrong-Rial said. "We'd talk about a tour, about this, about that, and he would say, 'Let's get it done.' He handled some of the nitty-gritty things people didn't jump to so much."

Armstrong-Rial said she was first exposed to Powell's cartoons through his work as an illustrator with the North Little Rock High School newspaper. "I'd keep those," she said. "They were very much in line with what he cared about in the world."

Eli Milholland, an early member of Soophie who has been married to Armstrong-Rial for 15 years, said that Powell became a source of creative inspiration soon after he met the young Nate in elementary school. "He drew every day, every chance he could find, during school and at home," Milholland said. "In the following summers, he and his other comic book friends started to flesh out what would become his first self-published comics. Throughout the next six years, he produced comic books, poetic and emotional zines, social and political cartoons for school newspapers, and self-published cassettes and records of local bands."

Milholland said the bonds of his Soophie family are still as strong as his blood family, even though they're scattered across the country. That includes Powell, who now lives with his wife, Rachel, and two children in Bloomington, Ind. Like Powell, Milholland remembers the Soophie tours as a time of exuberant creativity.

"I recall being on what I imagine was our third European tour with Soophie and I looked over at Nate, gazing out of the window of the van at some mountains as we were driving across whatever country," Milholland said, "and I saw him as the 12-year-old that I had met many years prior. I started to wonder how we got all the way across the globe in a van full of kids, performing music to strangers based on the desire alone. It was because of Nate. He had the drive and courage to contact strangers and set up those tours, the practical and the philosophical abilities to make them all run so smoothly. We all had the desire to see them happen, but it was Nate that made sure that they did."

While Powell wouldn't trade his time in Soophie for a different past, he said he can't help but wonder how his present might have been different had he farmed all his creative energy into cartooning and building his comic book career, as did many of his classmates at the School for Visual Arts. Almost every decision of his early life, he said, was structured around recording or touring with Soophie Nun Squad.

"One reason I think my comic career didn't really take off until about 2008 was this structure built around Soophie Nun Squad," he said. "Once we stopped being an active band in 2006, all of a sudden it became very clear to me that I was now free to structure my time any way I wanted. ... There is a part of me that wonders about that alternative timeline where I would have put everything in the comic basket, but Soophie Nun Squad is a very special entity. It's one that — especially in hindsight — is so centered around this familial bond that we all shared. The level of love and dedication and friendship among band members of Soophie is so strong."

'The Nine Word Problem'

Powell graduated from SVA in New York in 2000 after winning awards and grants for his work as a student cartoonist. Having started work as a caregiver for the developmentally disabled the previous year, Powell would work in the field as his day job for most of the next decade, taking jobs all over the country for several months a year before regrouping with his bandmates for what he called "Soophie time." Meanwhile, Powell continued self-publishing comics through his Food Chain imprint in the early years. While at SVA, Powell had made contacts that would be crucial to his future career in the arts, including befriending Chris Staros and Brett Warnock, who would go on to become the founders of the small graphic novel publisher Top Shelf Productions, based in Marietta, Ga. Top Shelf would eventually publish Powell's award-winning graphic story collections "Swallow Me Whole" in 2008 and "Any Empire" in 2011.

Powell quit his career as a caregiver in early 2009 and started working as a cartoonist full-time. It's a job that requires him to constantly work on at least two projects to stay above water financially. Unbeknownst to Powell, by the time he dived into life as a full-time illustrator, the project that would eventually win him the National Book Award had been in the works for years.

Andrew Aydin is the digital director and policy adviser for Lewis, who represents Georgia's 5th Congressional District. An avid comic book reader and collector since he was a youngster, Aydin was already working for Lewis when he came across a historical oddity that melded his interests in comics and the history of civil rights struggle, a title called "Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story."

Long out of print, the short 1957 comic book played a crucial role in the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and '60s by telling the story of the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56. Published on pulp paper by the hundreds of thousands, the comic was used as a teaching tool in the early days of the civil rights movement, handed out to young people who wished to join the struggle against segregation. Aydin would go on to write about the importance of the comic book to the movement in his graduate thesis at Georgetown University.

Spurred by the idea of teaching nonviolence through comic books, Aydin spoke to Lewis about doing a similar project: a graphic novel version of his story to help a new generation of activists. With some badgering, Aydin eventually convinced Lewis of the value of the project, and would later conduct over 30 hours of interviews with the congressman. He turned those interviews into the 300-page script for what would become the first book of the "March" trilogy.

With a draft of the script in hand, Lewis and Aydin signed with Top Shelf Comics in late 2010, and the search was on for an illustrator who could strike just the right tone. Presented with the work of several artists who had previously worked with Top Shelf, Aydin and Lewis eventually settled on the art of Powell. Working in Powell's favor was that he was then finishing up work on another graphic novel, "The Silence of Our Friends," a fictional story of the civil rights movement set in Texas.

"We got the final versions back, and we were like, OK, that's it," Aydin said. "Maybe two or three of the pages that Nate did to try out for 'March' actually ended up in the final version of book one." Powell formally signed on with the project in November 2011.

Like a lot of Americans, Powell said he had a bare outline of the history of the civil rights struggle but was light on specifics. It's an issue that is so prevalent, Powell said, that the Southern Poverty Law Center calls it "The Nine Word Problem."

"It's the idea that most kids graduate from high school knowing nine words about the civil rights movement: 'Rosa Parks,' 'Martin Luther King,' 'I have a dream.' That's absolutely true, if your history class even gets to the movement, which mine never did."

Armed with Aydin's script, an original copy of the "Montgomery Story" comic Aydin had bought him on eBay, and a copy of Lewis' best-selling 1998 autobiography, "Walking with the Wind," Powell set about educating himself. Having spent part of his childhood in Montgomery, just 40 miles from the little farm in Troy, Ala., where Lewis grew up, Powell said many of the locations in the script and memoir were immediately familiar.

"The landscapes that he was describing from his childhood were things that I literally knew like the back of my hand," he said. "A lot of the locations in the 'March' trilogy, I'd spent time there. I'd grown up down the street from them. I was able to explore them in my own memory as much as I was able to explore them through the archives."

Focusing mainly on Lewis' Alabama childhood and coming of age in an era of unrest, the first book of "March" helped Aydin and Powell learn the collaborative process. "I was able to learn a lot about how Nate functions," Aydin said. "What his skills are, where he likes to put a splash page or things like that. I tried to write it best I could to fit with Nate's talents."

Aydin and Powell said that from the beginning, one of the main challenges of the trilogy was humanizing figures that have long since been enshrined as legends, including Lewis. "What we were trying very hard to show and to show fairly was, who were the real people in '63, in '64, in '65?" Aydin said. "Not how they're seen today, but who were they then based on their actions and words? Who were they when they were on the front lines? They're different people."

Powell agreed. "We wanted to actively reject this urge to make the civil rights movement a story, in hindsight, of gods and kings," Powell said. "We wanted to try and illuminate the people who had been swept under the rug, like the Bayard Rustins and the entire female makeup of the movement."

"Part of what helps people gravitate toward 'March' and feel a deep connection to it," Aydin said, "was that we showed human beings before they'd been turned into gods. We need that. When we put them on a pedestal, we remove our own responsibility to be able to do something with hard work in the same way."

"March" was initially conceived as a single, massive book, but a decision was made to split the project into a trilogy. Both Aydin and Powell agreed that worked to the benefit of the project as a whole. The first book of "March" was published in August 2013 to almost immediate critical acclaim. While Powell said graphic novels are a "small pond" where it's hard to find either lasting success or failure, something was clearly different about the appeal of "March," especially in the way it quickly made the jump outside normal audiences of the medium.

"Once that book came out," Powell said, "the real game-changer was when we realized what it meant that teachers and librarians were incorporating the book into schools and institutional settings. English teachers were using "March," but it was kind of a shock that history teachers were using "March" as history. It is history, that's true. But it meant we had to give ourselves a crash course in what it meant to follow historical guidelines to make sure it stayed in history classes."

That realization led to what Powell called "a radical shift" in the amount of research they did for books two and three. While book one, which mostly dealt with Lewis' childhood and coming of age, could rely largely on Lewis' accounts, as the focus of the trilogy pivoted toward well-known historical events, including the 1963 March on Washington and the Freedom Rides that challenged segregated interstate public transportation, Powell said he, Aydin and their editor at Top Shelf were forced to take on what he called the "second full-time job" of researching every aspect of the period and the events they were describing.

"It was this increasing shift by which the books were being taken more seriously as history, and as memoir, and as fine art, but then the responsibilities on the creative and editorial end were increasing radically. By the end of 'March: Book Two,' and during all of 'March: Book Three,' we were spending so much time digging into the rabbit hole of history and uncovering things [that it] was kind of like pushing along this giant snowball that was 'March' as an entity."

That quest for historical accuracy included not just reading every published book they could find about the movement, but digging into primary source documents as well. Doing so allowed 'March' to actually move the ball on the documented history of the time. In one case, Powell said, the minutes of a SNCC meeting held just before the first Freedom Ride in 1961 revealed that every other historical text available had erroneously named the wrong person as one of the original 13 participants. In another instance, a deep dive into FBI documents obtained by Top Shelf editors through the Freedom of Information Act revealed that Rosa Parks, whose simple act of defiance had sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, was a keynote speaker during an event on the steps of the Alabama Capitol after the bloody 1965 Selma to Montgomery march that spurred President Lyndon Johnson to sign the Voting Rights Act.

"If Rosa Parks decided to bookend the civil rights movement by speaking at this event on the Alabama state Capitol steps," Powell said, "one would think history would have that well-documented. ... That's a perfect example of how history is a living creature. We were actually able to find some photo stills that may have been FBI shots from observers in the crowd that actually showed what Rosa Parks was wearing. So 'March: Book Three' is the first book that actually transcribes and gets into Rosa Parks' speech on the steps. It's transcribed from FBI surveillance documents, but it just got lost in the shuffle."

Time and time again

The second volume of "March" was released in January 2015 to huge critical acclaim, and went on to win the Eisner Award for the year's best reality-based graphic novel. When the third book appeared on Aug. 2 last year, it immediately shot to the top of the New York Times' best sellers list, where it and the other two books in the series stayed for six weeks. Nominated for the National Book Award for Young Peoples' Literature, Book Three — which ends with images of Lewis attending the 2008 inauguration of Barack Obama — won the prize Nov. 16, a week and a day after the surprise election of Donald Trump as president. Aydin sees that as the culmination of a trend that had dogged the publication of the three books, and which reveals their necessity.

"When Book One came out, the Supreme Court had struck down a section of the Voting Rights Act," Aydin said. "When Book Two came out, Ferguson happened. And when book three came out, Donald Trump happened," Aydin said. "I think what's happening in our nation has been this steady progression toward a necessity for 'March' ... . There is immediacy to it that we didn't expect. We always pitched 'March' as being a handbook. That was the idea. But we're lucky we had the idea when we did so it's available and it's out there. If we were just starting it now, it wouldn't be there to help, or at least be a founding document in whatever this new struggle will be."

"I felt increasingly, especially while we were making Book Three, that we felt like we were watching something unavoidable unfold, and we had to get in and push back against it," Powell said. "We had to push with a particular side of history to make a future that wasn't as dark as maybe it appears to be right now. It's been very intense."

Powell, who is working on a new graphic novel of his own called "Come Again," along with a project with writer Van Jensen called "Two Dead," agreed that the "March" trilogy has a new power and relevance since the election. America just made a collective choice to wind back the clock on social reform several decades, he said, but the books can serve as a guide to turn the nation away from the dark future he fears.

"It shows the successes and failures of a massive social movement to make the world more balanced and more just for everyone," he said. "But particularly, it shows a roadmap by which people can learn from those mistakes, can adapt, with a lot of the successes, and push them in new creative ways. ... We're living in such an urgent, grave time. This is not a drill. That's where I kind of return to the recognition that 'March' is a tool. It's personal, it's political, it applies to all of us, but at the same time it's the document of a group of young people and their experiences changing the world, as young people have done time and time again."

The incredible adventures of Nate Powell

#The incredible adventures of Nate Powell

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