Daniel154

Me, after New Comic Book Day:

Sigh...

From Detective Comics #105 (1945)

Douchebag aliens have been using a carnival fun-house to kidnap Happy Harbor residents and replace them with duplicates.

The Justice League gets wind of this, and goes to investigate in their civilian identities. Hal Jordan watches as an alien duplicate of himself is created...




Well, of course. There's absolutely no way out of this trap, because--

Jesus H. Christ, Hal--there's no ceiling. You could have just flown out of there!

(Not to mention he could have tunneled through the non-yellow floor...)

Hal Jordan, ladies and gentleman--the greatest Green Lantern ever!! Which leaves you wondering just how low that bar actually is...


From Justice League Of America #7 (1961)

Writer: Frederic L’Homme (Translated by Stephanie Logan)

Artist: Arnaud Boudoiron

Colorist: Boudoiron & KNESS

Publisher: Delcourt/Soleil

The High Concept: If Robocop was directed by Alexandro Jodorowsky.

Plot: Sarah is a maverick cop with an addicitive personality. She pilots an exoskeleton (called a “husk”) made by the Arnold Corporation that allows her to face down mutant criminals. Arnold is unwilling to admit that this year’s husk models may be developing sentience and overriding their pilots’ personalities with their own. In deciding how to handle this situation, the local police force must weigh its sterling reputation against the generous funding provided by the Arnold Corporation.

Simply put, this comic is the summer blockbuster you didn’t know you needed. It’s a bit of a trope salad, with cowboy cops, robotic exoskeletons, corrupt arms dealers, mad science, and mutants. Still, the first issue has enough stylized action, surrealism, and European debauchery to make these tropes feel fresh and exciting. Plus, having a female protagonist in the role of the cop on the edge is a novel twist not often seen in this kind of story.

Much of the appeal of this comic stems from the art. Boudoiron is adept at drawing interesting actions sequences, and evocative backgrounds. Boudoiron & KNESS’s colors give the story a noir atmosphere with candy-colored pastel highlights, kind of like 80’s French cinema. L’Homme does his best to sell the reader on this futuristic world, but some scenes tend to get bogged down in expository dialogue. With the exception of these scenes, Logan’s translation of L’Homme’s words sounds relatively smooth in the reader’s head.

Marvel attempted to bring a translation of this French series to America a few years ago by publishing it in a format similar to the European graphic album. Delcourt is going a different route by breaking the comic into the more traditional 22 page issues and releasing them on Comixology first. If the first issue is any indication, this series is definitely worth $2.99 an issue.

Recommended for: fans of Robocop, Pacific Rim, and/or Heavy Metal magazine.
Husk is available on Comixology starting July 22nd.

“There is Nothing More Important Than What You Are Doing Right Now.”

-written on the wall of the International Space Station, according to Chris Hadfield

Another Comic-Con has come and gone. Like recent years, Comic-Con has come to encompass more than what happens inside the San Diego Convention Center every July. Satellite events like Nerd HQ, Conival, tapings of Conan, industry parties, & tumblr meetups are all functionally a part of the greater Comic-Con experience.

It was at Nerd HQ, during a Nerds of Pop Culture panel,  where astronaut and internet sensation Hadfield referenced the aforementioned quote. He was answering a question about how he and other panelists (such as Adam Savage, Alton Brown & Alison Haislip) went about preparing for their current status as successful people. But the quote can also be applied as a description for Comic-Con itself and its surrounding shenanigans. In the context of Comic-Con,  this description has both positive and negative connotations.

First, let’s look at the cynical implications of that statement. For a week in San Diego, everybody you encounter wants your time and money, and they do it in a way that triggers your Fear Of Missing Out. Whether it be exclusive Funko toys, once-in-a-lifetime Hall H panels, or passes to Comic-Con itself, scarcity is played up so that you spend all of Friday (and possibly even all of Thursday) to try to get into the Star Wars panel. Or you try to get a ticket to wait in the Funko line to buy the exclusive Snuffleupagus. Or you refresh the NerdHQ website repeatedly to buy tickets for a panel that sells out in 30 seconds. It can be a colossal pain in the ass, but it’s totally worth it, because There Is Nothing More Important Than What You’re Doing Right Now.

(By now, you may have guessed that I was not one of the people in Hall H who got to be escorted by Stormtroopers to see a surprise Star Wars concert. I do have a few friends who were there, and I’m genuinely happy for them. Damn it.)

All that said, let’s try to examine the more positive aspects of the statement. There is no way to experience EVERYTHING that Comic-Con has to offer, but you can always find something if you know where to look. While the Star Wars concert was going on, I was enjoying the premiere of Justice League: Gods & Monsters (which is pretty great). My friends who didn’t have passes for every day of Con still came downtown and had fun at NerdHQ & Conival. Hell, even missing some early morning or afternoon panels for the sake of self-care (food, sleep, cleanliness, etc) was worth it to me, because There Is Nothing More Important Than What You’re Doing Right Now.

All in all, this was a great Comic-Con, although, since it was earlier than usual, many people (myself included) felt a little unprepared for it. But let’s try not to make the same mistake this year. If you have any interest in going, do yourself a favor. Start saving for it now. Start planning next year’s costumes now. Mentally prepare yourself for disappointment in not getting those Funko exclusives (I’m more bitter about that than Star Wars, truth be told), but Do It Now.

After all, there’s Nothing More Important.

I was the perfect age when Sesame Street first hit the airwaves and still remember watching those early episodes with my sister.  My favorite parts were anything animated and of course, the Muppet characters.  Grover became my quick favorite, mainly because I thought that he was really funny.  The fact that he would sometimes appear as Super Grover just put him over the top!

Looks like Chris Burnham got his DC comp copies of upcoming titles, including those ads running on the same page as the comic books that we’d talked about.

And appropriately enough they’re for Twix…

Though Burnham is more concerned with the ad quallity rather than the placement and media buying…

TO BE CLEAR, I’m more concerned about shitty photoshopping (which I guess my iPad pics didn’t capture) than splitting pages in half.

— Chris Burnham (@TheBurnham) May 28, 2015

I just googled Nick Lachey and regretted it. Look for this next Wednesday, and all through June…

@jameslucasjones looks like all the new DC #1s have it.

— Chris Burnham (@TheBurnham) May 28, 2015

DC Ads On The Same Page As The Comics, Confirmed For Next Week

Stephen King¹ has published over sixty books since 1974 and has at least five film adaptations in development purgatory at any given time. He has no shortage of opinions on his chosen field and the audience he sells it to, which he celebrated in his Entertainment Weekly column “The Pop of King” from 2003 to 2011. As an author he has achieved what would-be writers dream of: he is a household name for doing what he genuinely likes. What does he like? Scaring the bejeezus out of us.

But in a genre that is seen as predominantly male, it’s overlooked that King’s big career-making debut was Carrie, the traumatic coming-of-age story of a bullied teenage girl with telekinesis. The story only contains a handful of active male characters² and is centered around the difficulties that come with being an outsider and being a young woman. The fact that Carrie is such a female-centric novel, however, is easily ignored by even the most manly-man readers once they get their first taste of that patented King-style cruelty.

Carrie acts as an introduction to the world of King, not only for the recurring themes of fanaticism and alienation but also the female character models that have become commonplace in his forty years of work. These six archetypes have made their home in his writer’s toolkit.

1. The Victim Turned Victor

The 90’s saw the novels that fans have named the “abused wife trilogy.” While they weren’t the first time King’s audience saw a protagonist put through the wringer, they were the ones with the most heightened need for revenge for both protagonist and reader catharsis. The endings aren’t always happy, but damn you can’t look away.

In Dolores Claiborne, King goes to great lengths to show the abuses suffered by the title character at the hands of her brutish husband. When she decides he needs an untimely accident, the reader is not only behind her but also knows that it’s the only fitting way for the story to go.

2. The Roadblock Wife

While not always a wife, this character is almost always a woman. Their main purpose is to act as an obstacle for a male character trying to get from plot point A to plot point B. They’re not an active character so much as someone who just has the plot happen around them until they trip it up. They usually die.

Take Rachel Creed of Pet Sematary. She refuses to let her husband Louis talk with her precocious daughter Ellie about the workings of life and death. As such, when the family cat ends up as street pizza, her Louis buries the cat in the soured ground behind the nearby pet cemetery, bringing it back as a benign zombie. This gives him some bad ideas on how to deal when an even bigger loss strikes the family. In her case it’s her inaction that builds conflict and her actions that block progress.

3. The (S)mother

When a character as culturally revered as the mother figure falls into the hands of a sufficiently subversive mind, it can be feared for the same qualities that make it beloved. Look no further than Margaret White, the abusive matriarch of Carrie, for this one. She is willing to hit, belittle, and lie to her daughter in the name of a life of humble chastity. She thinks to do otherwise will send her daughter to hell. What makes her and her type so frightening is that all of the cruelty and abuses heaped upon her child come from love. It’s easy to hate a character who’s cruel out of plain malice, but the perversion of that misplaced affection is enough to make your stomach churn.

4. The Cannon Fodder

A universal truth to horror: by the end of the first act, you know that one chick is toast. Maybe she’s too nice to exist in a book where children are eaten by clowns; maybe she’s too darn sensible for an atmosphere of panic; maybe she’s clearly the main character’s sanity-tether; or maybe she’s just there. No matter what the gut reaction, there’s always that one character whose whole purpose is to soon be dearly departed. Let’s all take a minute and pour one out for those who were just too precious to see another chapter.

Readers of Firestarter only get a brief look at the McGee family’s domestic life before they are hunted down by a shady government agency. But even that glimpse is enough to know that things can’t end well for Vicki, the loving wife and mother of the main characters. Not if said agency is going to scare them out of suburbia. Once she is dead, so are both the McGee’s nuclear family and their illusion of safety, leaving them to mourn while they scramble to escape.

5. The Karma Fodder

As opposed to the cannon fodder, where the character is set from the beginning to be someone the reader will hate to see go, this is the character who they just can’t wait to see bite the big one. She also serves as a necessary function of the above mentioned “Victor turned victim.”

King has a definite penchant for writing the unlikable. Through the course of Misery, antagonist Annie tortures her captured house guest with such a degree of sadism that the reader is right there with him as he repeatedly tries to kill her. Every blow is an act of retribution that the reader has wanted to dole out from the start.

Killing an intensely bad guy can be used in a few ways: 1) catharsis 2) giving the reader the gift of enjoying a grisly end guilt-free 3) making said grisly ending morally justified in the name of good versus evil.

6. The S**t-Creek Survivor

The s**t-creek survivor is the literary equivalent of dropping a mouse into the center of a terrifying maze to see how it works its way out. A character is put into a life or death scenario and has to figure out how to survive through their knowledge and creativity.

King’s stream-of-consciousness writing style benefits what would otherwise be unbelievably level-headed characters mid-crisis. The reader gets a stream of panic and rambling before any good ideas are considered. After all, even a reader with the world’s strongest suspension of disbelief can only accept so much pragmatism in the face of the shrieking madness from beyond.

Though ideally, we’d all like to think we could MacGyver our way out of a bad scene like Jessie of Gerald’s Game. She spends the majority of the book handcuffed naked to a bed. Between hallucinations and painful childhood flashbacks, she not only keeps herself alive but frees herself, from both the bed and the lifetime of self-doubt that led her there. It’s proof that in a King book, when you get pragmatism, you get PRAGMATISM.

Stephen King readers will see female characters ranging from ones that aren’t much more than stock figures to ones that are fully realized and formed. Since even the stock figures built his horror legacy, you have to wonder: is it his skills or the tastes of horror readers? Either way, he is guaranteed to have his readers coming back for more, flaws and all.

---

1. For those of you who live in caves without access to libraries or daytime cable.
2. Less than half a dozen, and that’s counting Jesus.

 

I know that there is a tendency amongst some of our ilk to show disdain for Carmine Infantino's work, especially in the latter days of his career.

But I defy anyone to tell me that this isn't a freakin' great cover (inks by Murphy Anderson):

I'm just sayin'.

New Comic: mistaken identity

Menage a 3 - That I had in this room actually

A few months ago, I released a short, autobiographical comic called Something Terrible, about my life growing up with fictional heroes, and how imaginary heroes had somehow managed to rescue me here in the real world. In the story, there’s a page I call “You’ll Be Safe Here,” an image that has bounced around a good bit on the internet on its own. This one page took me thirteen days to draw, working eight to fourteen hours per day.

Because of my association with the idea of superhero redesigns, I didn’t want these to just be the current or most popular versions of the major characters shown here, but rather to look like I’d been in charge of their stories for a little while, so I came up with little ideas for each redesign. There are well over a hundred characters in this image (you can check the guide here), but with the already-funded Kickstarter for the print edition of Something Terrible only a few days from ending, I thought I’d finally do a little spotlight on my own redesigns. So here we go!

Catwoman: One of my main themes with these redesigns was the familiar Waid/Morrison mantra of “include and transcend,” so you can see here I tried to find a winding middle-path here, combining my favorite elements of Bruce Timm’s Animated Series Catwoman with Darwyn Cooke’s 2001 redesign, and Anne Hathaway’s Selina Kyle from The Dark Knight Rises. With all of these redesigns, I wanted them to have a distinctive look, but be very clearly recognizable.

Nightwing: There’s not a lot you can do to improve upon Brian Stellfreeze’s Nightwing redesign from the late 90s, so I didn’t fool with it too much. I added a ring of pouches like the ones on his gloves to his biceps and created a slight indication that the v-points coming off his shoulders are overlaid pieces, maybe snapping into place. A lot of folks try to give him a belt or incorporate the Animated Series bird emblem, but I just don’t see that as an improvement. His black and blue costume was perfection.

Oracle: This whole scene takes place in the TARDIS, so I was able to pluck characters from my favorite eras, and while Batgirl getting paralyzed was maybe not the best choice at the time, I grew up with Oracle, one of the few women powerful and vital enough in the fight against supercrime to be a member of the JLA. A simple black and gray outfit with a gold bat pendant to remind folks where she’s from. I always liked Dick and Barbara together, so here they are.

Batwoman: I couldn’t fit everyone in this piece, and I already was getting pretty heavy on Bat-Family characters, so I decided to nab the next Batwoman out of the timestream, Stephanie Brown. At some point, Kate took her under her wing-shaped cape and now Steph’s got the mantle, honoring Kate’s uniform and bringing her own trademark colors into it.

Robin: OH DID YOU REALLY THINK DAMIAN WAS GONE FOREVER? Nope. He’s totally fine and back in uniform, this time going a bit more superhero-y, with a look combining the best elements of Dick’s, Tim’s, and Damian’s own original uniform.

Captain America: For Cap, I tried to find a simple middle ground between the Avengers movie costume and his classic uniform. I slanted the stripes and changed the font of his “A” just to be different.

Wonder Woman: I basically combined the promo version of the New 52 Wonder Woman with the Terry Dodson hybridized emblems version I liked a lot from the last version of the DCU, and I made her tiara star metal rather than jeweled just to be different.

Doctor Strange: The cape and Eye of Agamotto are too distinctive to fool with, so I just gave him a classy suit to wear when he’s not battling myriad magical monstrosities.

Impulse: Bart was always my favorite Flash sidekick. I remember picking up his first issue. I redesigned him years ago in our tribute to Mike Wieringo, so in this update, I just modified that slightly, with a new white jacket.

The Flash: Too much detail distracts from how good the Flash costume is, so I kept it simple. I added a lightning bolt shape to the form of the cowl and gave it the shiny look he often had in the 90s.

Aquaman: For Arthur, I really just wanted to incorporate Daniel Govar’s symbol move from his winning Aquaman: Sea Change redesign with the classic look.

The Fantastic Four: Here, I just wanted to imply the white costumes of the Future Foundation with the very classic look Mike Wieringo drew them wearing. I gave the Thing an emblem of his own, finally. Do you really think Reed can’t make a removable quantum magnet version for Ben?

Dream: I just wanted to include the Sandman here, so I gave him planets, stars, and moons! Dream is now part of a complete breakfast.

Green Lantern: As you’ve likely been beat over the head with by now, I’m a 90s fan. Kyle’s my GL. I’m an artist, he’s an artist. I’m an interplanetary crime-fighter, he’s an interplanetary crime-fighter. Wait. Forget that. Secret identity, Trippe! Get it together. Anyway, I’m not sure this look is the best Lantern redesign ever or anything, but I wanted to imply some elements from Kyle’s original uniform and make him look a bit more like THE Green Lantern, by centering his emblem and using the Timm Animated symbol.

Spider-Man: Peter Parker’s another guy whose costume is a bit too perfect to mess with, but I took a shot at tilting his symbol and having the legs stretch out into the blue areas. I don’t know if this is entirely successful, but it’s different. At least you can tell it’s him.

Hulk: I gave Bruce a dogtag that lets him calm down and remain Hulk’d out so he doesn’t have to stay angry all the time. Haha. I don’t know. I got a lot of comments calling this “Emo Hulk,” and dudes, like, it’s okay for Hulk to smile. IT HAPPENS.

Iron Man: My favorite comic book look until Adi Granov’s mid-2000s redesign, which went on to be the main influence in his movie looks, was the Silver Centurion. So this is like that, with some glowy red lines and a big repulsor array on the chest.

Martian Manhunter: I gave J’onn a blue uniform with a red X, similar to his last look before the New 52, I guess, but gave him a white cape like Miss Martian, and toned down the collar a bit. I think this looks pretty slick and is clearly the Martian Manhunter. I think I’d go with sleeveless or shortsleeves just to show off his big, beefy, green, shape-changing arm muscles. The X on the cape mirrors around on the back, btw, stretching down to the points.

The X-Men: I had an idea for the X-Books back at SCAD I always wanted to do, with major characters leading their own teams, so I swiped that for this, in the hope that the current mutant schism (which I am LOVING) is eventually resolved. The underlying theme elements are from the Morrison/Quitely run, but with more interchangeable pieces and team theme colors. Red Team leader, handling worldwide mutant threats is Cyclops, zipped all the way up. Gold Team leader at the school is Wolverine, and Storm leads the Blue Team which works more closely with the Avengers and other superhuman groups. Black Team not pictured, not acknowledged, and where are you even hearing these rumors? There is no Black Team.

Captain Picard and Ensign Crusher: These are little edits, but I wanted to put my own spin on these uniforms. Again, just a combination of various eras for Picard, and for Wesley’s, I just made it complement the official uniforms a little more.

Batman Beyond: Probably the most frequent mildly negative comment besides “Emo Hulk!” and “Where’s Deadpool!?” I got on this piece was “Batman Beyond didn’t have a cape!” Yeah. I know. This is Terry after Bruce has died. (GASP! BRUCE CAN NEVER DIE!) So here, his uniform is showing a lot of wear and tear, as Mister McGinnis continues the fight without Wayne to help him repair the suit. He’s becoming more of a force in the shadows. Wayne Manor is gone. The Batcave is still accessible, but he’s operating mostly out of makeshift outposts around New Gotham.

Superman: I don’t like too much fooling around with Superman’s uniform, so I tend to draw a fairly classic version with a bit of obvious influence with the Superman Returns costume’s belt, minus the belt-loops.

Supergirl: I’ve had this in mind for a really long time, but I honestly think this is Supergirl costume perfection. Shoulder sleeves, red skirt, blue tights. It’s youthful, feminine, tough, and fun to draw. This is the only costume I’ve drawn on Supergirl for years. Don’t stop redesigning her, Cory, but I already figured this one out.

Superboy: Okay, so this one’s more of a story, but this is Chris Kent, back from the Phantom Zone, having been stripped of his powers in the escape, now wearing a silver Superman ring that replicates Conner Kent’s powers, which he picked up in the future in the Fortress of Solitude, now holographically maintained by Kal-El, whose real self is presently in the sun. This is the Superboy I’d write.

Well, as you can see from scanning around this page, I did a lot of redesigns for this piece, and while not all of them are that noticeable or revolutionary, the slight updates to the uniforms that are, are pretty cool, I think. I hope you enjoyed this look around You’ll Be Safe Here, and if you haven’t read Something Terrible yet, you can check it out here. -Dean

The Ship of Theseus Paradox is a philosophical conundrum about identity and change that goes back to the Ancient Greek writer Plutarch. He related a scenario regarding the ship on which the mythical Theseus sailed from Crete back to Athens, the city that he founded. According to Plutarch’s account, the ship itself was preserved for its historical significance, but over the years as it fell apart and decayed with age, pieces of it were replaced – a plank here, a…I don’t know…a stern there (a stern is a thing that ships have, right? I’m pretty sure most ships have a stern) – until, eventually, there was nothing original left. Every part of the ship was “new,” in that there was no longer even a single board that had been in the ship at the time Theseus had sailed on it.

Is it the same ship or not? Given that it’s a completely different constellation of materials, does it matter that its parts were replaced only gradually? Is there a real sense in which we can say that, yes, this is the Ship of Theseus, even though it’s a completely different constellation of materials, sharing no components with the vessel on which Theseus sailed?

Plutarch tells us that the philosophers were pretty much evenly split when it comes to their intuitions about the Ship of Theseus. Over the millennia since he first elucidated the paradox, philosophers have struggled with trying to resolve it, and their beliefs on the subject have more or less stayed the way Plutarch described them: some say yes, some say no.

But here, today, on this very website, I am here to report: don’t worry, you guys. I’ve totally got this. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, I have resolved the Ship of Theseus Paradox once and for all, and as soon as this article goes live I can categorically guarantee that no man, woman, or child will ever have to worry about it for the remainder of humanity’s existence in this physical realm. The Ship of Theseus Paradox is over and you can finally get on with your life. You’re welcome.

 

 

 

 

 

Oh, right, I should probably tell you the solution.

Okay, so I was thinking about hockey. As a Canadian this is a legal obligation to maintain citizenship. Our Prime Minister – and this is not a joke – even wrote a book about the history of the sport.  And as a fan of the Toronto Maple Leafs, thinking about hockey mostly just makes me sad. If you’re not familiar with the National Hockey League, suffice it to say that the Leafs are not only the most profitable team in the NHL and number 31 of the 50 most valuable sports franchises in the world, but they are also an organization acclaimed in the annals of professional hockey for finding new and exciting ways to lose, spectacularly annihilating the perennial hopes of its infinitely forbearing devotees every single year. Being a Leafs fan is a lot like being in a relationship with someone you know is really bad for you: they keep saying that they’ll change, and you keep believing them.

Wayne Gretzky, I know you are the greatest hockey player of all time, but I will never forgive you for this.

And but here’s the thing: they have changed. Since the formation of the NHL in 1917, the team now known as the Maple Leafs have won 13 Stanley Cup Championships, second only to the damned Montreal Canadiens who have 23. All of those Stanley Cups, though, were won prior to 1968. Toronto has not won a championship or even made the finals since winning in 1967. The team went from consistent contenders to predictable losers overnight, and have stayed that way – and this is the part that’s relevant to the topic at hand – despite the fact that the composition of the team is completely different than it was in 1968.

They have had good seasons and bad seasons, but they’re always the same Leafs. The 2012/13 season is the perfect example of that: after making the playoffs for the first time since 2004, the Leafs faced the Boston Bruins in the first round; they managed to roar back from a 3-1 deficit in the best-of-seven series to force game 7, were up three goals to one going into the third period, and then totally and catastrophically collapsed, letting in three goals to tie it up before losing in overtime. The entire Leafs Nation felt like we’d been sucker punched. Not just because we lost, but because this was exactly what we should have expected.

No matter how many times the team reinvents itself, it is still the same team. Every player, coach, manager, trainer, and scout, is periodically replaced, one by one, until there is no similarity in the makeup of the team to what it was at an earlier time. But just watching them year after year, that they are the same team is readily apparent – which makes absolutely no sense. Just like a person whose cells all die and are replaced over years and decades and yet someone, we insist, remains the same person.

This realization led me to understand that the professional sports team is our age’s Ship of Theseus. And we can use that to do philosophy. We can look at the Toronto Maple Leafs to consider the Ship of Theseus Paradox from a different perspective, and maybe discover some truths about identity and change that have gone heretofore unconsidered.

So let’s take a look here. As we can see, between 1927 and 2013 there have so far been five complete roster turnovers (Official Pastry of the National Hockey League). The first question this raises is: is this actually the same team or not? Is that chart an actual representation of the evolution of something, or are we imagining continuity when what we’re dealing with is just a bunch of discrete items temporarily associated with one another? My intuition is that, yes, “The Toronto Maple Leafs” is a real thing, and despite the fact that none of its constituent pieces remain from when they became the Maple Leafs in 1927 (before that they were called the Toronto St. Patricks, and before that, the Toronto Arenas – in case you thought that “Maple Leafs” was a dumb name, you don’t know how lucky we actually are these days) – and in fact that there’s nothing left of the Maple Leafs of only seven years ago – somehow it’s still the same team.

What does that mean? Why do I (and obviously most of sports in general is modeled after that notion of continuity) feel that there’s something that persists across the decades even though there isn’t really anything that’s actually persisted?

But that’s not actually true, is it, that nothing has persisted. They are still the Toronto Maple Leafs. Why?

It’s at least in part because they are still called the Toronto Maple Leafs. A name is part of what gives something its identity. When Conn Smythe took control of the team in 1927 and renamed it the Maple Leafs, there really wasn’t any difference between the team before and after the name change, but the name became part of the team anyway. The philosophy of the semantics of names is a complicated issue in and of itself, but suffice it to say that when someone refers to the Toronto Maple Leafs, we know what they’re talking about. We gain more information if they give us a specific year or range of dates, but that roster data is not strictly necessary to convey what’s trying to be communicated by the name “Toronto Maple Leafs.” That is to say, no single player, coach, manager, or particular collection thereof, are essential components of the team such that without them it ceases to be the Maple Leafs. But the name is not the only thing, either, and the players are not incidental to the team’s identity – when ownership changed in 1927 and the name changed to the Maple Leafs from the St. Patricks, but none of the players changed, really it was only the name that changed and not the team in any essential way. What we’re beginning to see is that a name is at least as important as a player – in fact more important than any particular constellation of players – but not more important than the entirety of everything else about the team. My intuition is that, had every single player also been replaced in 1927 when the team’s name changed, it would no longer have been the same team. “Toronto Maple Leafs” is an indexical utterance that points to a specific collection of individual hockey players at a given time, but it also carries part of the weight of identity in itself.

Then again, there are other factors too that are, in some sense, external to the actual composition of a team that nevertheless also carry some of that weight of identity. The Toronto Maple Leafs are based in Toronto. So location is another of those essential characteristics. They also have a distinct fanbase. The Toronto Maple Leafs is the team that is rooted for by anyone who self-describes as a Leafs fan. That also has absolutely nothing to do with who is on the ice at any given time, or even what arena they’re playing in. So collective allegiance is another external factor that contributes to the team’s identity as an entity distinct from others.

To further demonstrate that these things (name, location, and fanbase) are essential characteristics of identity, we can contrast by looking at a team that has lost all of those things in addition to its players: The Winnipeg Jets.

In 1972, the Winnipeg Jets joined the NHL after the rival World Hockey Association, of which it was originally a member, folded. They operated in Winnipeg until 1996; the small population of the city relative to most NHL markets, combined with the effect of the weak Canadian dollar (all NHL player contracts are in U.S. currency, but income for Canadian teams is, of course, in Canadian currency, putting Canadian teams at an economic disadvantage when the exchange rate fluctuates) had made the team unprofitable. The owner of the Jets sold them, and the new owner moved the team to Arizona, renaming them the Phoenix Coyotes.

Now, the team’s location and name had both changed, but all the players remained the same. Was the 1997 Phoenix Coyotes the same team as the 1996 Winnipeg Jets? This seems like a much more difficult question to answer intuitively than our previous question about the Maple Leafs. I don’t know how many Jets fans became Coyotes fans, but I suspect it’s not many – almost certainly not a critical mass of them, anyway. What it looks like, then, is that player composition is a much less sufficient factor for continuity of identity than team name, location, and fanbase. The Phoenix Coyotes have less claim to be heir to the identity of the Winnipeg Jets even when all their players are the same than the Toronto Maple Leafs have to their identity even when all their players are different.

Further reinforcing that point is the fact that in 2011, Winnipeg got their team back. The city’s population had grown, making it a much larger market than it had been, and the Canadian dollar was now much closer to parity with the U.S. dollar, making it more economically feasible for a team to operate there. The embattled Atlanta Thrashers moved to Winnipeg and were renamed the Jets! After 15 years, Winnipeg has its Jets back – but does it really? Is the team that’s currently playing under the name The Winnipeg Jets in any way the same team as the one that departed in 1996 and may or may not be still playing under the name the Phoenix Coyotes? No, and yet kind of yes. Because look, either way it’s unlikely that there would be any players, coaches, or managers in common between 1996 and now even if the Jets had stayed put in the first place. But we’ve already seen that that doesn’t really matter, or at least that it’s not the only factor, or even a major factor in what determines the team’s identity. Both teams play in Winnipeg, both teams are called The Jets, and both teams share the same fanbase (more or less). Meaning that there is pretty much no difference between the current actual Winnipeg Jets and what would have been the current Winnipeg Jets in a universe where they’d never moved to Phoenix. For all intents and purposes, ontologically there’s no way you can say that they are not the real Jets, even though their compositional continuity is completely broken.

The same thing applies to the Maple Leafs (and every other team, obviously). How can they be the same team even though every player is different? The same way that you are the same person even though you share zero cells in common with yourself at birth. The same way that the Ship of Theseus really is still the Ship of Theseus even without a single board remaining from the ship on which Theseus sailed. Because there are necessary metaphysical factors that are collectively more important contributors to the object’s identity than its physical composition. The physical composition is, in fact, kind of arbitrary. The 1927 Toronto Maple Leafs could have been anyone and still been the Leafs. But they couldn’t have been based in, say, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Having a certain name, being in a certain place at a certain time, and being in a certain type of relationship with a number of other individuals who self-associate with that name, place, and a configuration of parts (but not any specific configuration in particular) is what creates identity. Physical continuity contributes, but is not and cannot be the make-or-break factor in determining identity.

This is a modification of Leibniz’s Law, or the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles, which states that two objects are identical if and only if they share all the same properties and relations. Obviously the 2013 Maple Leafs don’t share all the same properties and relations as the 1927 Maple Leafs. But they do share all the essential properties and relations, some of which are themselves built of up smaller inessential properties.

The Ship of Theseus, then, is not, and cannot be, just the sum of its parts. Its identity is part physical, part historical, part semantic/referential (which it itself a gigantic problem in philosophy because we don’t really know what names are, but for the purposes of this argument, we know a name when we see it and we know what it does and what it points to), and in part just a tiny piece of an immensely complicated web of relations that needn’t be physical or even directly causal in any way.

There’s something weirdly mystical about that realization. On the ice, when today’s Leafs look disturbingly similar to the Leafs of 1995, there’s a reason for it. When we can’t understand how it’s possible that they haven’t won a Stanley Cup since 1967, it’s not a senseless thought. The Toronto Maple Leafs has a soul that transcends its physical body or bodies. Part of that soul certainly exists inside every player, past and present, who has been part of the organization. But part of the soul exists in the city itself, and part in the weird Platonic realm where names live. I guess what I’m trying to say is that we are all Horcruxes; that part of that soul, of the transcendent identity that makes the Leafs the Leafs (and makes other teams whatever they are too, I guess) is also inside every long-suffering fan. Which explains why watching the Leafs lose season after season hurts so much. It’s not just happening to them. It’s happening to us too. The Toronto Maple Leafs is the thing that makes Leafs fan cheer when they win, and cry when they lose.

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These two both fall under the broad category of "super-hero", but are quite different from one another. I think that the differences they have are what would make for an interesting pairing, though.  I am sure they could eventually find some common ground, as they are both virtually indestructible and age more slowly than those around them.  Plus, when you get down to it, both of them are all about doing the right thing no matter what the personal sacrifice may be. Yeah, the more I think about it. the more I would like to see them interact.

Dear DC Comics,

I know this is harder on me than it is on you. I am just one woman among countless fans, and it’s starting to be pretty apparent how much you care about your fans. So, after more than twenty years of loyalty and love, I’m going to be frank with you. Our relationship is in trouble.

I was so young when my cousin introduced us, and I’d sneak looks at you until I was old enough to get an allowance and have you for myself. I loved your late 80s and early 90s style. I still have some copies of Wonder Woman, The New Teen Titans, Justice League (America, Europe, International, and even Task Force), and Batman & the Outsiders to remember the good times. Through all the changes, I stood beside you. I was there when Eclipso attacked, when Gotham was declared No Man’s Land, and I hung in there for every “crisis” you could come up with. I watched Superman die and Metropolis try to cope with his loss. I followed along as Dick finally took up the cowl, and then put it down again. So many stories. Some were good, some were bad, but through it all I still felt like part of something wonderful.

Then you had some work done. The new 52 hit, and you became a hot ticket item. Suddenly, my friends who had never read comics before had a lot to say about you! It was nice to feel like my passion was spreading to new people. Like always, some stories were great and some sucked, but there were a lot of our old friends who weren’t happy. I went to bat for you. I defended you to my friends and family! I pointed out all your good qualities, and whitewashed the bad because I wanted you to do well. Sadly, it was soon obvious that you didn’t care about my feelings.

Great characters never reappeared, and fan favorites started acting completely counter to their normal behavior. Quality character arcs fell by the wayside in favor of shock value and company profit. It was clear that the bottom line and the big bosses’ ideas were more important than treating your creators well. Lots of amazing creators disappeared for a variety of reasons which reflected very badly on your management. Your choices didn’t make sense and started driving away the writers and artists who kept us reading! Fans read a comic when the character they love is well written and drawn. Your talented creators make your company, not the other way around.

Most upsetting is your overall attitude towards women readers and female characters. Comics have always been over-sexualized, but your unending trail of insults over the last few years has gone beyond what we’ve come to expect, even from this industry. Many great characters’ personalities were tweaked and flattened so that they can fit into what you thought was a sexier mold. The fact that you assume that women need a Superman/Wonder Woman Twilight-inspired romance to become interested in comics is just one recent example of how your female stereotyping has reached ridiculous levels. Finally, when you asked thousands of amateur artists to draw one of your most prominent female characters about to commit suicide in a bathtub, it’s flat out insulting. Can something like that be part of a tasteful storyline? Sure, but asking non-professionals to take on such sensitive subject matter is inappropriate. I cringe just imagining some of the entries you must have received. AND THEN some of your big-wigs took to social networking to make excuses and play down the incident. Jim Lee (who I basically hate at this point) blamed US for not waiting around to see the rest of the story. I don’t care how the panels fit into the (unexplained) context of the story, you could have easily gleaned their drawing abilities from a more appropriate panel. You picked a horrendously irresponsible topic for this contest. It’s downright disgusting. Apologize like an adult, hire a PR department, and move on.

Grow up. Stop blaming your audience for not liking your choices, and start making choices your customers will like.

I don’t really know where this leaves us. I’m embarrassed to admit that I’m still with you when I’m in public. I’ve always flirted with Marvel, Dark Horse, and others, but now I’m seriously considering ending my monthly commitment to you. It breaks my heart, but even the good memories from our early days aren’t enough to make up for the choices you are making. Shape up, or it’s over.

Sincerely,

Kimi
A DC Fangirl
www.goldenlasso.net

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I’m going to need to lay a little groundwork for this one.

Back in the early Nineties, a group of superstar creators rose to prominence at Marvel. They practically reinvented storytelling in comics, breaking a lot of rules that the established writers, artists and editors at Marvel believed at the time were vitally important to telling good comic-book stories. Their art was, for the most part, totally different from the style that Neal Adams and Jim Aparo had popularized, and frequently broke rules of anatomy and perspective. Their stories shook up the established status quos of many series, introducing overt anti-heroes who grew to dominate the landscape of comics (like Cable and Venom, to name two quick examples.) The older guard of editors who ran the company didn’t really understand why these younger creators were popular; they didn’t even like the books they were publishing, in some cases. But they sold like hotcakes, they were incredibly popular with Marvel’s target audience, and the young men seemed to know what they were doing.

Then, almost literally overnight, the superstar creators all quit. Worse, they started their own competing company. To say that this caused some problems at Marvel would be a titanic understatement.

In essence, Image changed all the rules for what creators were allowed to do on a comic. Because Marvel’s editorial staff looked at the Image books and saw nothing but crap. Whether it actually was crap is almost irrelevant to the conversation; the point is that Marvel was put into the position of trying to emulate Image, and they patently did not understand what made Image books popular and held the comics in question in no small amount of contempt. To them, “make it more like Image” meant “make it louder and shittier.” And they proceeded to do just that. This is not to say that there were no good comics in the Nineties, but Marvel did make a lot of mistakes in their attempt to imitate the Image creators’ style, because they were deliberately trying to do bad comics in the mistaken belief that this is what their audience was into at that point.

I won’t go over the mistakes in detail, but I will mention enough to (hopefully) forestall people coming to the defense of these books. Ben Grimm wearing a giant metal bucket on his head because Wolverine had disfigured him. The Wasp as a literal insect woman with yellow skin and antennae. Teen Iron Man. The Clone Saga. X-Cutioner’s Song, a story with a denouement that is literally incomprehensible to modern readers because they were writing dialogue related to Cable and Stryfe’s origin without having actually agreed on what that was yet. The Legacy Virus, a plotline that managed to last six years without ever actually going anywhere. The Upstarts and the Gamesmaster, ditto. Sabretooth, the White Queen and Mystique all joining the X-Men within months of each other. Joseph, a Magneto clone who never had a point or a purpose beyond being in the series. X-Man, a spin-off book with no central concept and a character whose origins were a convoluted nightmare. Wolverine losing his adamantium claws and slowly mutating into a thing that looked like a feral weasel wearing a bandana over his head. Captain America wearing power armor. Force Works and Fantastic Force. The Crossing. Starblast. If you haven’t had enough yet, I could probably dredge up some more.

The point is, Marvel was at this point desperately flailing for a direction. They literally had no idea what would appeal to their audience, their creative vision was completely undercut by self-doubt, and they had made a number of major, seemingly irrevocable creative missteps. Onslaught, a character who they’d already introduced as the main villain behind their next crossover, was quite literally nobody–behind the scenes, the only decision that had been finalized was that they needed to follow up the Age of Apocalypse with something big, and they needed to start selling it right away before the people who’d been reading that crossover drifted away. There was no planning, no cohesion, no direction, nothing but throwing shit against the wall to see what stuck.

In that light, it’s amazing how well ‘Onslaught’ turned out.

‘Onslaught’, the storyline, probably wasn’t intended as a metaphor for the direction that the company had taken the last five years. For that matter, neither was Onslaught, the character. But it worked perfectly for that. Onslaught was the ultimate evolution of the pointless heel turns, the random and unmotivated shock plots, the endless raising of the stakes and the unearned “big moments”, all wrapped up in Liefeldian armor and given a life of its own. His whole origin was tied up in the biggest, most pointless, least comprehensible and most off-model moments in the post-Claremont era of the series, and when he finally broke free of Charles Xavier, his host, it felt strangely appropriate. It was as if everything bad about the Nineties had broken free and given itself flesh, and was stalking the Marvel Universe in an attempt to inflict its awful, poorly thought out paradigm shifts on every single character and series.

In that light, the character’s bastardized mess of an origin actually made sense, as did his shifting and incoherent goals. He was the living embodiment of everything bad about Nineties Marvel, of course he was going to be pointlessly convoluted and inconsistent! Again, I’m not saying that any of this was intended by the writers on the series or the crossovers, but it fit the metatextual concept of the series so well that it almost bleeds out of the cracks. When the heroes of the Marvel Universe finally defeat Onslaught, not through brutality or pointless violence but through nobility and self-sacrifice, it feels like they’re actually taking a stand for everything that superheroes are supposed to believe in. They’re saying, “No, this is what we’re about. Doing the right thing, no matter what the cost.”

And on that level, ‘Onslaught’ really did work. It was a Viking funeral for everything shitty about Nineties comics, wrapping up the X-Traitor plot and tying off the bloody stump of all the attempts to rewrite Xavier as a manipulative bastard. It ended by almost literally throwing all the crappy Nineties versions of the Avengers and the Fantastic Four onto a massive bonfire, burning away Teen Iron Man and the Malice Invisible Woman and the disfigured Thing and the what-the-fuck-was-that-even-about Thor and allowing us a full year of real time to forget it all like a bad dream. It allowed the Image creators to write Marvel’s flagship titles for a full year, just to show us all that they really had no idea what to do with any of them beyond simply aping other people’s ideas less well. (‘Heroes Reborn’ really was the point where Image ceased being taken seriously as a threat to Marvel and DC. They remained a solid company, and have gone on to do some really good work, but 1997 ended talk of the Image style being the new paradigm for comics.) The only thing that would have made it better was if Peter Parker and Ben Reilly had fallen into the ‘Heroes Reborn’ universe together, and come out as a single character.

And Marvel did some really interesting things around the edges of the ‘Heroes Reborn’ event. For a full year, they told stories in a Marvel Universe without the Avengers and the FF, and they seemed to actually be thinking about what that might mean instead of just using it as the starting point for another goddamn crossover. This was where the Thunderbolts started, for example. When they did bring back the Avengers and the FF, it was with some actual talent behind it, although Waid’s ‘Captain America’ and Busiek’s ‘Avengers’ and ‘Iron Man’ clearly worked better than Lobdell or Claremont’s ‘Fantastic Four’. The beginnings of Marvel’s resurgence under Quesada came in the wake of ‘Onslaught’. It didn’t all come at once; the X-books were still suffering from the deeper lack of direction caused by the departure of long-time writer Chris Claremont, a problem that wasn’t even solved when Claremont returned to the books a few years later. But in a lot of ways, the fever had broken.

‘Onslaught’ was everything we thought we wanted out of comics in 1996. If nothing else, it deserves credit for snapping us out of that.

Stan Lee expertly blended the trials and tribulations of teenage life with slam bang superhero action in his groundbreaking work on The Amazing Spider-Man and that has been a recipe for successful comics ever since.  Marvel has used it well in titles like Nova, New Mutants, and New Warriors.  DC's New Teen Titans by Marv Wolfman and George Perez was one of the best examples of the formula.  The first 50 issues of that title have stood the test of time, and are still fondly remembered today.

Note: As we work behind the scenes to judge, jury and comment on the entries for our Green Lantern: Emerald Ensemble contest, we present you another great article on the Emerald Sentinel’s colored costume history. This time out, Jon Morris wrote a piece about the many designs for the original Green Lantern, Alan Scott. – Chris A.

Green Lantern’s unique look was, according to creator Martin Nodell, inspired by the uniform of an employee of the New York Subway system and his own interest in the costuming of Greek mythology. The hybrid outfit, filtered through his own imagination, was as outlandish and memorable as his protagonist Scott anticipates it will be in a thought balloon at the end of his first appearance.

A red blouse dotted with yellow insignia, a purple collared cape with emerald green lining, forest green pants, red boots, yellow laces and a broad leather belt made up most of the outlandish costume, accented with his purple domino mask and, lest anyone mistake his color scheme or purpose, a detailed image of a green lantern smack in the middle of his chest.

The costume served Alan Scott well enough through the end of his popularity, at which point he was effectively replaced in the pages of his own book by a crime-fighting dog (and in many ways, aren’t we all?). Fading away after that low point, Scott was given an entre back to comics via the Silver Age revival of his concept, where his costume received some sleek tweaks to make it align a little better with his successor’s space age togs.

The blouse was made skin-tight, the lantern insignia was simplified, and the laces were turned into boot accents. The cape was toned down dramatically, as well, but Scott’s new duds might have passed for contemporary costuming if he’d ditched it altogether.

Those minor changes remained the rule until the (dunh dunh dunnh) 1990s, when total change became the order of the day. Made younger by the “Starheart” magic of his power ring, the rejuvenated Green Lantern goes out into the night with teeth gritted and seemingly endlessly long cape going all crazy behind him all the time for no reason.

The 90s incarnation included a very simplified logo, red boots, green opera gloves, a body-hugging one-piece bodysuit employing a restricted color scheme (unfortunately evocative of Christmas), an all-over body shine and – since gothic capes were now fashionable again, thanks to Todd McFarlane – a voluminous cloak that might either be scalloped or simply folding in on itself so often that it’s effectively without physical limit.

A slightly streamlined version of the same costume – now with a “Starheart” logo – was adopted when Scott transitioned to his “Sentinel” codename a little while later.

Scott eventually returned to his original costume for the majority of his run as a member of the revived JSA, but in the interim he sported a literal knight-in-shining-armor look in Waid and Ross’ Elseworlds series (and apparently also on the post-Infinite Crisis but pre-DCNu52 Earth-22, which is whatever-it-is now as far as I know).

Like a lot of Alex Ross’ designs, it looked lovely under the guiding hand of his realistic, gouache-painted style but unfortunately didn’t translate to traditional pen and ink renderings by other artists (see also: Captain Atom, seriously, just see him). Modeled after an idealized form of the armor of medieval knights, the costume expressed the idea of Green Lantern as a hero and protector, but didn’t do much to convey “Lantern” any more than his other costumes (That the lantern’s origin was original Chinese and the ring was inspired by Aladdin, the medieval European motif does seem to come out of nowhere)

But speaking of conveying the idea of a Green Lantern, let’s be sure to acknowledge Scott’s last costume change before Flashpoint, when he cosplayed as a Coleman camping supply.

Paralyzed by the amount of will necessary to contain the power of his Starheart, Scott uses the power of the ring to create a suit of armor which will grant him sufficient mobility – apparently it takes less willpower to imagine a suit that lets you walk than it does to just walk, we should all try it someday. In any case, the answer to this problem involves a suit of armor over a flowing material which evokes the blouse of his original costume combined with a more sensible color scheme. Unfortunately, he also looks like a lamp in a cape.

It’s too bad this costume didn’t catch on, I would have loved to have seen the Flash dressed as a foot.

Of course, that leads us to Scott’s most recent incarnation as a brand-spankin’ new superhero on DC’s Earth-2.

Bearing probably the only costume in the Earth-2 catalogue that isn’t a complete eyesore, Alan Scott now wears a sleek, simplified bodysuit with armor accents. It’s a pretty clever compromise, actually, because the new costume isn’t visually that far removed from a traditional Green Lantern Corps uniform, but the power effects – his green flame – makes him distinct enough to behave as a separate character. There’s nothing about it that is – as the original story put it – so bizarre that once seen he will never be forgotten, but it’s not the worst thing he’s ever worn (reminder: The worst is the big lamp).

Lastly, no survey of the original Green Lantern’s costume would be complete without a nod to the animated Justice League’s Green Guardian, a hero who can really pull off chartreuse.

And even lastlier than that, let’s not forget that Alan Scott’s costume isn’t complete without a rug.

Geoff Johns is about to wrap up his time as writer of Green Lantern after several years, and it is pretty impressive to look back and see what he has done with the franchise during his tenure.  Among the highlights of his run were the revival and redemption of Hal Jordan, the revitalization of most of the GL rogues gallery, two of DC's best crossovers ever (Sinestro Corps War and Blackest Night) and the introduction of dozens of new characters from Simon Baz to the Red, Blue, Orange and White Lanterns.  Sure, some of the rainbow-lantern corps shenanigans got a little repetitive and the movie adaptation wasn't the home run I was hoping for, but for the most part Johns was the best thing to happen to the Green Lantern franchise in decades.  I look forward to his future endeavors and  hope that the new creative teams will be able to keep the Corps flying high!

[NOTE: Towards the end of this article, I spoil the film's one really interesting plot twist, and I assume throughout that you already know the characters and the plot.]

As we discussed on the podcast, Iron Man 3 is probably about overcoming traumatic events both personal and geopolitical. It’s not really about disability as such. But it features disabled characters more prominently than any other blockbuster action movie I can think of. Nearly every character, in fact, ends up facing down some kind of physical or mental impairment. And the film is informed by a particular axiomatic theory of what it means to be disabled, which — although never directly stated — must be accepted by the audience on some level in order for the narrative to function as well as it does.

There are three central points to this, as far as I can see (two of which are highly dodgy in political terms, and one of which is a little harder to come to grips with):

1)  Dodgy assumption no. 1:  disability is intolerable.

We touched on this in the podcast a little bit.  The extremis soldiers are amputees who signed up for a medical trial that compromises their safety, their autonomy, and their moral capacity, all because the prospect of living as an amputee was intolerable. The Vice President is willing to help terrorists assassinate the President if it will eventually let his daughter can grow a new leg. And even the good characters, Tony and Pepper, can’t have a happy ending until he ditches his electronic pacemaker (at the cost of a risky medical procedure), and she purges the extremis from her system (at the cost of her newfound superpowers). The film doesn’t work unless we believe that all of these are acceptable tradeoffs. Not right decisions, necessarily, but understandable ones. Notably, the reveal of the Vice President’s disabled daughter is meant to make us sympathize with that character. If we could tolerate disability, if we thought that life in a wheelchair could still be as valid, important, and meaningful as life in any other kind of chair, it wouldn’t have that effect at all.

But like I said, Iron Man 3 isn’t really about disability. This all seems, to me, to be part of the film’s broader concern with purity. So it’s not okay for Tony to have night terrors or a plate in his chest, but it’s also not okay for Maya to want to stop Aldrich’s evil plan in a way that still lets her make tons of money. Morality, like physical and mental wholeness, is an all or nothing affair. She doesn’t get redeemed until she’s willing to walk away from her invention and her profits altogether, seconds before she gets killed.

2)  Dodgy assumption no. 2:  All forms of disability are equivalent, and indeed bleed into each other — including some that we would not typically think of as a disabilities.

When we first meet Aldrich, he seems to be suffering from some kind of neuromuscular disorder. It’s not really explained, but he has tremors, and walks with a cane. He’s also unkempt, with long greasy hair. The disability and the lack of style are not meant to be read as two unrelated traits. Rather, they are two facets of the character’s overall physicality, which is meant to distinguish him from Tony, who is immaculately coiffed and moves like a ballroom dancer. Aldrich’s physical symptoms go away, later on, but they’re replaced by a pervasive moral rot, and, as Fenzel explained eloquently on the podcast, the film tells us in no uncertain terms that if Aldrich wasn’t evil when Tony first met him, he was already unsound. Some moral fault, some fissure, existed in the man, or else he would not have crumbled when put to the test. And again, it seems doubtful that we’re really meant to read his physical impairment and his moral weakness as two unrelated features of the character.

This is reinforced again by the extremis soldiers, all of whom come back from war with physical and psychological wounds. Also interesting:  the people who take extremis because they need to, because they have a missing limb or whatever, all end up acting like drug addicts, suggesting that they have only displaced their disability, not actually overcome it. Pepper, who was “already perfect” when she took the shot, has much less trouble with its effects. And Tony himself can only purge himself of the shrapnel and the electromagnetic pacemaker once he’s overcome his PTSD. As long as he’s mentally damaged, he will be damaged physically; fixing the one fixes the other. This reinforces the general point that all disability is equivalent and interrelated — and note that part of the reason his cure does work, where Aldrich’s doesn’t, is that he fixes both conditions rather than only one.

This transitions nicely into my third point, which is:

 3) The film depends on a stringently policed non-Cartesian self-other dualism.

Where the other two are so clearly dodgy that I haven’t even bothered to explain why, this one is more ambiguous. It’s also a lot less obvious what the hell I even mean by it, so let’s nail down some terms. Self-other dualism divides the world between that which is me and that which is not, and generally treats anything that is not me as a kind of pollutant, or at least a potential pollutant.  This is baked into our culture on a pretty deep level — you occasionally find mystical religious leaders, continental philosophers, and pot-addled college freshmen making statements about the essential connectedness of all things, but at the end of the day if you’re walking down the street and a bird poops on your hand, you are going to wash “all things” right the hell off of you (and feel no small level of psychological distress until you do so).  Cartesian dualism, on the other hand, is the separation of mind from body. Generally speaking, mind also means soul, subjectivity, and essence,  while body implies not only the human body but the entire physical world. And many forms of self-other dualism are also Cartesian, meaning that the only thing that’s really ME is my mind, and even my body is kind of a contaminant if it starts to interfere with that.

The film, like I said, puts forward a non-Cartesian self-other dualism, which is a logical consequence of the two points that I made above. The film’s rhetoric of purity, which makes disability intolerable, also demands a rigid self-other dualism. But the film’s sloppy conflation of the characters’ physical, mental, and moral states prevents any kind of Cartesian sense of self-as-mind. Mind and body in Iron Man 3 are an irreducible unit — a bodymind — but anything that interferes with that unit is a toxic contaminant.

This has interesting implications for the conversation we had on the podcast, about the proper way to heal from traumatic events. Tony, remember, has both physical and mental disabilities, and at the start of the film he leans on technology to respond to both of these.  For his shrapnel-mangled heart, he sticks a little robot in his chest; for his vision-haunted dreams, he sticks big robots in his house. But this is only a coping strategy. At the end, he’s able to dispense with all of the robots and move forward on his own. And as someone pointed out on the podcast, there are dozens of shots in the film where Tony stares poignantly at the Iron Man helmet… the message, in the end, is that the suit is a prosthesis, and Tony is not his suit.

Tony is not his suit. It bears repeating. Generally what we mean by that kind of statement, in a superhero movie, is that the suit is not the sum total of who Tony is, the same way that Peter Parker is not Spiderman and Superman is not Clark Kent. That the human being Tony Stark is more important than the symbol Iron Man, and that his human wants and loves are as important as his responsibility to defend the public. But in this case, the purity rhetoric kicks in. It’s not just that the suit isn’t all Tony is. The suit is no part of Tony:  neither body nor mind, it is a contaminant and a distraction. “You can take away my toys,” Tony says at the end of the movie, “but I’m still Iron Man.” (It’s also interesting in this light that out of the three Iron Man movies, this is the only one that treats the suits as inherently disposable. In 1 and 2, there are multiple suits, but Tony exchanges them the way that a lobster exchanges its carapaces. Each is his skin until he discards it, and there’s really only one viable suit at a time. Here, though, he exchanges them pretty much the way we exchange our clothes, which are necessary for daily life, but not part of us. The fact that the suits can move around on their own, animated by Jarvis, surely reinforces this point.)

Tony is not his suit. Now, on the face of it, this seems like a more or less positive message, right? Step back from superhero-world for a minute, and consider a man who uses a wheelchair. To say that the man is not his chair, to look to the man and not see the chair, is generally something we ought to aspire to, isn’t it? On the other hand, when we say that we see a “man” in this context (or a woman, as the case may be), taking the disability away… are we fundamentally thinking of a man (or woman) who can walk? That is, if you view a person’s disability as somehow incidental to their true being, is there a sense in which that involves conceiving of “true being” as a fully able state?

This is an honest question, and probably one that theorists of disability have already grappled with. I know for a fact that some of our readers are better-informed than I am about this sort of thing, so I hope they’ll use the comments thread to educate me a little. But certainly the film suggests a particular answer to the question, in that Tony’s journey of self-actualization is only complete when he discards his prosthesis.

But what implications does this have for Aldrich, and the rest of the extremis soldiers? If Tony can become whole by getting rid of his heart defect, why can’t they become whole by regrowing their limbs? A crucial point here, I think, is that Extremis is a treatment, not a cure. You have to keep taking it, like quinine (or like cocaine — more on that in a minute). The drug, then, is just as much of a prosthetic as Tony’s suit ever was, and although the extremis soldiers seem like specimens of bodily perfection, if you needed a pharmaceutical boost to get there, it was never really BODILY perfection in the first place. It’s just another contaminant. (See also Lance Armstrong, Barry Bonds, etc. For a contrasting view, possibly, see Flowers for Algernon.) Tony’s disability has a physical form:  it’s the shrapnel in his chest that’s killing him, not anything about his chest itself. For the extremis soldiers, disability is not a presence but an absence. The implication is that although a contaminated bodymind can be purged, a bodymind with a deficit can never be made whole. To do that, you’d need to bring in something from the outside — a mechanical or pharmaceutical prosthesis — and this would not leave you with an unwholesome mixture of incompatible essences.

Generalizing still further, and leaving the sorts of things that we generally call “disability” behind, Iron Man 3 is arguing that a problem can never be a relatively unimportant part of who you fundamentally are. Either it’s your ENTIRE being and will destroy you eventually (like Aldrich’s problem), or it’s entirely incidental and can be almost trivially overcome (like Tony’s). It’s not an acceptable happy ending if Tony is a brilliant, incredibly charming guy who sometimes suffers from night terrors, and leans heavily on his girlfriend to cope. Pepper can’t fundamentally be a woman who runs a company, looks like Gwyneth Paltrow, and takes injections every day to avoid exploding into a cloud of hot gas. Furthermore, Tony can’t fundamentally be a bad widdle boy, irresponsible and hedonistic, the way that he is in the 1999 party sequence. This too must be only a distortion of his true self, which is mature and reliable…

… and as a consequence (stay with me here), Robert Downey Junior cannot fundamentally be a cocaine addict.

 

Iron Man doesn’t just square Tony Stark off against his opposite/nemesis Aldrich Killian, right? It also squares Robert Downey Junior off against his opposite/nemesis Trevor Slattery, a once-promising actor who developed a drug problem, fell off the map, and, unlike Downey, kept right on falling. Slattery is not a total monster, like the other villains in the film, but he’s a tool of monsters, and he’s become a pretty wretched person in his own right. “Irresponsible drug-addled manchild” is the core of who he is, physically and mentally, to the point where all other aspects of his character — the menacing speeches, the central-casting terrorist beard — are simply fraudulent. Downey, on the other hand, has become Iron Man. For him, the cocaine was just a contaminant. Sure, it got pretty close to his heart. But somewhere along the line he had an operation to remove it, and he’s whole now. He is not an addict — he never was! He’s a person, who at some point along the line was temporarily afflicted with an addiction. (The corollary:  addicts, true addicts, are not people.)

And this is exactly the way that we aren’t supposed to think about addiction! It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been sober, you go into the meetings every week and tell them “I’m an alcoholic.” Because some problems have to be managed, not solved, and because people, even good people, are never really perfect. Iron Man 3 doesn’t recognize this. But maybe it doesn’t have to. It’s a superhero movie, after all, and utopian escape is what superhero movies are all about. Well, utopian escape and explosions. Iron Man 3 delivers on both fronts, so I suppose I’ve got no real complaints… here in the real world, after all, we can choose to take the good along with the bad.

 

Well, the summer movie season has officially kicked off in style with Iron Man 3.  I found the movie to be a big improvement over the second installment, although the first is still my favorite in the trilogy.  I really enjoyed the dialogue and the way the film focused on Tony Stark this time around, who has had to share screen time with lots of other colorful characters in his last two film outings.  The action was very inventive as well, with three major sequences and a lot of cool new gadgets.  Guy Pearce and Ben Kingsley seemed to be having a great time in their villainous roles, and they provided some of the more surprising moments. Supporting characters Happy Hogan and Pepper Potts get a little more to do this time around, and  Jon Favreau and Gwyneth Paltrow give solid performances.  The movie is not perfect - it has a slow first half hour of build up and just not enough of Iron Man in costume.  I figured with the head's up display view of the helmet, it wouldn't be an issue, but the movie finds a way to keep Tony out of the suit for much of the running time.  I wish that Rhodey had been a little better utilized as well, Don Cheadle does a lot with what he is given, but the character comes out looking like a bit of a chump. Still, those are small nitpicks and should not dissuade you from checking out Marvel's latest cinematic outing.  It's very interesting where they leave the characters and I am intrigued to see where they go next.

I’ve thought for a long while that any long-running series eventually stops being about anything other than itself. Each individual story might be about something; “Let This Be Your Last Battlefield”, for example, is about the absurdity of racial prejudice. But that’s not what ‘Star Trek’ is about. Other episodes of the series were about friendship, or about sexism, or about obsession…until eventually, all you could really say about the series was that it was about the Enterprise crew and the things that happened to them. Each episode was like a color transparency, laid over each other episode until all you could see was a character-shaped hole.

You could say the same thing about ‘Buffy’, about ‘Highlander’, about just about every long-running series…in the end, the changes forced on them by circumstance and the need to keep the show creatively fresh made them less about high school or the Gathering or the alien conspiracy or the fall of the Greek gods and more, eventually, about a person to whom things happen. A season might have an arc, an episode might have a point, but ‘Buffy’ is about a young woman named Buffy.

I’ve come to the conclusion, recently, that ‘Doctor Who’ is (as always, it seems, among science-ficton/fantasy series) an exception. ‘Doctor Who’ is about something, all the way through its fifty-year history, and it’s not the Doctor. In fact, the key to realizing what it’s about is to realize that the Doctor isn’t really what the series is about at all. It’s about the people around him. The Doctor is a catalyst, an agent of change, and the show ‘Doctor Who’ is about the way that people deal with him (and by extension, the monsters he fights and the strangeness of his universe) being thrust into their worldview.

Because everyone has a worldview, a collection of concepts and information that forms the underpinning to their mental existence. Things fall down, cars take you places, jobs pay you money, and the world works the way you’ve come to expect it to each day. We all form an opinion about the Way Things Are…and crucially, we all deal in different ways when that worldview is disrupted.

Some people become angry. Obama becoming President, for example, created a kind of hysterical rage in a certain type of person, because in their world black people did not become President. Obama wasn’t just a man who disagreed with them, he was a sign that their entire existence had come to an end, to be replaced by a strange new world where all their old certainties had dissolved. These people have to believe that he somehow cheated his way into the Oval Office, because they can’t accept the fundamental idea of his legitimacy.

Other people become elated by the change. The unexpected fills them with delight, tells them that there are still surprises left in a boring and predictable world. Seeing a paralyzed woman pick up a cup with a robot arm controlled entirely by her mind elicits a sort of giddiness, a sense that you’re taking a step into a bigger and stranger and more wonderful universe than you previously knew existed.

And many people, to quote the ‘Doctor Who’ story “The Face of Evil”, “rework the facts to fit their views.” Information that changes their worldview too much becomes false, even if the logic required to fit the lie into their head becomes strained to the point of absurdity. People are willing to imagine vast and shadowy conspiracies of government coups and secret shadow agencies if the alternative is accepting that a President can get his head blown clean off by a stranger with a rifle and a grudge.

This is what ‘Doctor Who’ is about. It’s about the ways that people deal with situations that challenge their worldviews. Each story establishes a world, whether it be 1960s London or an alien planet thousands of years in the future, and then it drops the Doctor–a tiny piece of impossibility–into that world. Just to see what happens. (This is one reason why the series can run for so long on such a premise…it’s inherently new-viewer friendly. Since you have to establish the world before you can change it, you’re constantly creating entry points for people who’ve never seen the show before.)

Sometimes people cope with the changes. The first two seasons of the series were about Ian and Barbara, two normal 60s schoolteachers, dealing with situation after situation that was entirely outside of their experience. Rose gleefully embraces the strangeness, Dodo freaks out and leaves the second she gets the chance, and Tegan treats it like a package tour until the point where it all gets to be too much for her.

Other people try to slot the Doctor into their worldview. The new show makes it explicit with the psychic paper–when the Doctor shows it to you, you see what you expect him to be reflected back at you–but even in the old series, the Doctor was always treated like what he was expected to be. Authoritarians saw him as a rebel, police slotted him in as a criminal, scientists expected him to be a kindred spirit. People have tried, desperately and endlessly, to make him fit. Only to find, to their frustration, that’s he’s exactly what he says he is, and nothing else.

The people who can’t accept that, in ‘Doctor Who’, tend to come to unpleasant ends. If you can’t accept that a Dalek or an Ice Warrior isn’t something familiar and acceptable, something you can fit into your worldview by negotiating with them or threatening them or ignoring them, they will probably kill you. The only chance you have to survive in ‘Doctor Who’ is to keep an open mind, to accept that the universe is bigger and stranger and more wonderful than you previously imagined, and to believe the facts when they’re right in front of your face, even if they’re not pleasant. And that’s a premise big enough to last fifty years and then some.

I'm not sure who I would pick in a battle between these two groups.  The Defenders have more experience and raw power, but the Titans work together as a team much better than they do.  If the Titans were able to use the Defenders' dysfunction against them, they might just have a fighting chance to take the day.  Whoever came out on top, it would be a blast to read about!

(from Captain Marvel Adventures #58, April 1946; by Otto Binder and C.C. Beck)

America isn’t a flag.

America isn’t a drunken chant.

America isn’t some hazy platitudes about liberty and freedom spouted by cynically ignorant demagogues.

America is as America does.

Related posts:

1. A battle for the (Marvel) ages
2. A high potential and a low resistance point
3. Stop it if you dare

I'm still waiting to see what Marvel is going to do now that they have the rights to Marvelman/Miracleman.  I have still never read the acclaimed Alan Moore issues and hopefully reasonably priced reprints will be available soon.  Will the character be integrated into the Marvel Universe?  There was some speculation that that would happen at the end of the current Age of Ultron series, but that has been since denied (although Angela, formerly of Image's Spawn, will be making her Marvel debut there).  Whatever they decide, it is going to be a big event, and I can't wait to see what creators will be involved.

A San Diego cop beat up a man whom he was ticketing for illegal smoking, after the man refused to stop video-recording the experience. The cop told the man that he feared the phone might actually be a gun disguised as a phone, before smashing the phone and tackling the man and smashing his face into the boardwalk. He was taken away in an ambulance.

It all seemed pretty civil until the cop writing the citation told him to stop recording, which Pringle refused to do.

“Phones can be converted into weapons …. look it up online,” the cop told him.

Last month, a South Florida cop confiscated a man’s phone citing the same reason, so maybe this is a new trend.

When Pringle tried to talk sense into the cop, the cop slapped the phone out of his hand where it fell onto the boardwalk and broke apart.

The other cop then pounced on him, slamming him down on the boardwalk where he ended up with a laceration on his chin.

“Blood was everywhere,” Pringle said. “I was laying on my stomach and he had one knee on my back and the other knee on the side of my face.

“They kept telling me ‘to calm down,’ that ‘you’re making this worse for yourself,’ that ‘you have no right to record us.’”

He didn't get the cop's name, and the SDPD won't give it to him.

San Diego Police Attack and Arrest Man Video Recording Them, Claiming Phone Could be a Weapon (Updated) 294 (via Techdirt)

As of this very minute, as I’m writing, the number one and number three songs on the Billboard Hot 100 are about clothes:  Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop” and Justin Timberlake’s “Suit and Tie.” (Number two, naturally, is “The Harlem Shake.”)

There’s something kind of perfect about this pairing. Obviously, “Thrift Shop” is meant as a jokey commentary on the generally materialistic nature of hip hop, so there are thousands of songs about bling, status, and designer labels that it could be balanced against, but “Suit and Tie” is a better fit than most. Consider:  one is basically a R&B song with a guest rapper, while the other is basically a rap song with a guest R&B singer.* In both cases, the lead artist is white, and has a relatively high voice; the guest artist is black, with a relatively low voice. Musically, the end of each song is marked by a moody breakdown where the music gets rhythmically stripped-down and harmonically beefed up.  (Although “Thrift Shop” is generally the more interesting song, there’s something kind of special about “Suit and Tie’s” breakdown:  the change in the rhythmic surface is so severe that when the vocal hook comes back in, the song effectively transforms into a slow jam, thus inscribing the essential script of every Justin Timberlake song — i.e., “after we dance to this club hit, I’m gonna take you home for hot sexings” — into the music itself.)

Finally, if we consider the lyrics of the songs more closely, we find that they are opposed to each other in a more interesting and specific way that then simple materialism/antimaterialism argument that’s implicit in the songs’ titles.

Let’s start with “Suit and Tie.”

Thesis

Most materialistic rap and R&B songs are about conspicuous consumption, and have a very clear understanding of the point of conspicuous consumption. When people fly in a G6, or drink Cristal, or whatever, it’s not because they are aficionados of champagne and high-end aircraft. The whole making it rain thing — look, I don’t know enough about strip clubs to know why (or even whether) people actually make it rain, but as it’s presented to us in music videos, the goal is not to coax a more energetic performance out of the ecdysiasts. It’s to show off the fact that you can make it rain. “Suit & Tie” is quite unusual, then, in that the affluent surface is actually meant to demonstrate something other than wealth:  at the end of each verse, the lyrics swerve away from the materialistic to the idealistic, and more specifically the romantic.  By throwing on a suit and tie, Timberlake is attempting to “show [us] a few thangs about love,” (emphasis added). Not wealth, not style. Love. This is not exactly a new message — it is for instance the main way that diamonds have ever been marketed. But it’s new in hip-hop, even for a diamond merchant like Paul Wall, whose greatest couplet is “people’s feelings get hurt/ when they realize what I’m worth,” not “people’s feelings get hurt/ when they realize how much I love my wife.”

“Suit and Tie” is not even a materialistic song, really. Rather, it’s… Calvinist might be the word that I’m looking for? Certainly that’s what begins to emerge towards the end of Jay-Z’s verse, where he tries to get Beyoncé’s parents to bless their union by pointing out that, as a couple, they’ll go farther in their chosen careers. This is why Timberlake’s being on his suit and tie [expletive] qualifies him to teach us something about love, I think:  the signifiers of wealth don’t just mark him as wealthy, they mark him as part of the spiritual elect. But note that it is only “as long as [he's] got his suit and tie” that Timberlake is qualified to teach us anything about love. When he takes them off — as he does for sizable chunks of the video — we have no reason to believe him about anything. Clothes make the man… capable of exemplary romantic sentiment.

As exclusive clubs go, however, the Suit and Tie club is pretty easy to get into.The ritziest products mentioned in the song are Alexander Wang dresses, which go on eBay for something like $200-$500. That’s more than I’d generally pay for an outfit — but as a pricetag for love, it’s quite a markdown from traditional market values like “all the stars in the sky” or “unconditional acceptance.” And again, that’s the MOST expensive product they talk about. All Timberlake wants is a suit and tie. The thing we’re supposed to learn about love, I guess, is that as long as you’re willing to do your shopping online, it costs about $100 plus tax?

This, in the end, may be why “Suit & Tie” is such an effective pop song. It’s democratic. You too can teach people something about love! You don’t need to break the bank or anything — just put in a little effort. As long as you don’t roll into the club wearing nothing but a grungy undershirt and a ketchup-stained pear of sweatpants, it’ll be an educational evening for everyone concerned. This is, incidentally, the most bourgeois version of egalitarianism imaginable. You too can be affluent enough to serve as a shining beacon to the great unwashed! Live the dream, American.

Antithesis

But if “Suit and Tie” argues that clothes make the man, “Thrift Shop” argues that man makes the clothes. The first time I heard “Thrift Shop,” I bobbed along with the music because I thought “Hey, shopping for party outfits at a thrift store! I can relate to that.” But the more carefully I listened, the more I became aware that thrift shopping, for Macklemore, is not really about the thing that thrift shopping always was about for me. I would dig through those mounds of trash hoping to find some rare and wonderful outfit that, through its funky kickiness, would transform me into the sort of person that kicks funk unstoppably. Ideally I was looking for something inherently cool, something no sane person would ever have thrown out. But if we are to believe Macklemore’s lyrics, he goes about it in quite a different way.  The most telling line in the song is “they had a broken keyboard; I bought a broken keyboard.” A broken keyboard is hardly a find! But Macklemore buys it anyway. He buys whatever they have, pretty much. How does that make him cool? Well, it doesn’t, because it doesn’t have to. He’s cool already. Consider the Pro Wing sneakers:  Macklemore asserts that he could “make them cool, sell those” (emphasis added). He is not transformed by his thrift shop clothes, rather, the thrift shop clothes are transformed by him.

The song is not about finding surprisingly good clothes in the thrift shop. It can’t be, because it is inimical to the very idea that clothes can be good! Macklemore lists a lot of clothes, but he doesn’t make any positive or negative aesthetic judgements about any of them. This is true even of the clothes that he rejects:  he “passes up on those moccasins someone else has been walkin’ in,” and suggests that wearing the same shirt as six other people in this club is “a hella don’t.” The aesthetic merits of the clothing are irrelevant. What matters is that someone else is associated with the clothing, making it less irreducibly linked to Macklemore himself — for it is only by being linked with Macklemore that clothing takes on value. What looks incredible? I look incredible. I might be in a big-ass coat, but that’s beside the point.

Synthesis

So far, ironically enough, the materialistic song has turned out to be democratic, while the antimaterialistic song has turned out to be meritocratic. On the face of it, “Suit and Tie” and “Thrift Shop” seem to offer contradictory ideas about how fashion works. But one could also argue that neither idea is coherent without the other.

It may seem risible that an Alexander Wang dress can show us something about as private an emotion as love, but if some part of what makes the dress noteworthy is the unknowable essence of its wearer — Beyoncé, in this case — then the clothing’s ability to communicate is no longer so mysterious. By the same token, the reaction that Macklemore posits in his audience is not the sort of meta-aware one I’ve been suggesting here. The sneaker-heads would not be like “damn, he’s wearing some fundamentally stupid and outdated apparel, but the outsized force of his personality, coupled with the peacock-effect of wearing something nobody else is wearing, causes me to reevaluate his aesthetically jarring fashion choice as a ‘come up’.” No, they’re like “Velcros? Well dang, I bet those have didactic value for my love life.” So rather than showing us two different ideas about the nature of fashion, these songs show us two stages on the lifestyle of a fashion trend. And of course, that’s sort of how it works with coolness, isn’t it? Not just with fashion trends, but with hip hop music, and music in general, and really almost anything else. Nothing is ab nihilo trendy. Someone must cause it to trend.

*Actually calling “Suit & Tie” an R&B song isn’t quite specific enough. It’s a disco song. In fact, it’s a Bee Gees song. Listen to those electric piano arpeggios. Listen to that little brass section fill in the second part of the chorus. Listen to the close-voiced vocal harmonies. Listen to the way JT shifts into the extreme high register on “I guess they’re just mad cause they wish they had it.” Between this, and the “Call Me Maybe” beat, and Daft Punk issuing a collaboration with Gorgio Moroder, it seems like Disco may be having a covert little cultural moment.

 

Related Posts

• The 10 Easiest Things Dance Songs Ask of You
• The Musical Talmud: Like a G6
• The Musical Talmud: Do You Remember
• The Musical Talmud: I Gotta Feeling
• The Musical Talmud, Think/Counter-Think Edition: “Party in the USA”

Musical Talmud: “Suit and Tie” vs. “Thrift Shop” originally appeared on Overthinking It, the site subjecting the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve. [Latest Posts | Podcast (iTunes Link)]

Well, that trailer got just about everything absolutely right. The music is appropriately triumphant. The overall message is about the hope Superman instills in others. Most of the action shots are of him saving people (well, except for where he is super-fighting Zod and holy shit does that ever look great).

I am stoked. I’m going to have to donate money to the CBLDF or some other comics-related charity in the cost of my ticket to feel okay with giving DC any of my money with all of their bullshit treatment of creators (and particularly the Siegel and Shuster estates in this case), but daaaaaaaamn.

Superman was the first hero and probably still the most recognizable, so it is no surprise that every comic company seems to want their own analogue of the Man of Steel. It's all in the execution, though, and while some Superman knock-offs come and go, others have been able to star in some memorable stories of their own.  Alan Moore's run on Supreme is a great tribute to Superman throughout the ages, just bursting with cool ideas.  I also quite liked Kurt Busiek's Samaritan tales, and I am glad that he and the rest of the Astro City gang will be returning via DC's Vertigo imprint.