firehose

Hawkeye has led the way for a solo title renaissance at Marvel. The publisher had of late placed an emphasis on team books — mostly iterations of the Avengers and the X-Men — and scaled back on solo titles, even reducing Spider-Man to just two books (one double shipping).

Then Hawkeye came along, and things changed. Thanks to the unique voice and style of the creative team, Matt Fraction and David Aja, a character who seemed unlikely to sustain a solo title became both a critical and commercial hit. Marvel has been trying to recapture that magic ever since, and the first of a new wave of solo titles hit stores this week; Black Widow #1 by Nathan Edmondson and Phil Noto.

If there’s a formula to Hawkeye’s success, it’s “let the creators be themselves.” Fraction and Aja did not produce the kind of superhero book that they could plug any hero into. Aja created a visual language that spoke to marksman Hawkeye’s perception of space and time. Fraction paced and framed his story as the everyday adventures of a blue collar man. If Marvel has a “house style” it’s a broad one, and even then Hawkeye sits far wide of it.

So the challenge for Marvel is to create other solo books that are just as quintessentially different, just as completely true to their lead characters, and yet somehow also Hawkeye. The brain-breaking internal memo might read, “Let’s create a dozen new books that are unique just like that one.”

Many of the first wave of Marvel Now solo books felt like well executed examples of traditional superhero fare, typically starring dependably commercial leading men. Aaron and Ribic’s grandly epic Thor and Spurrier and Huat’s X-Men: Legacy stood out as bespoke products.

The “all-new” wave of Marvel Now solo books is much more obvious in its desire to seed new Hawkeyes in the market. The original line had eleven solo titles, six of them starring Marvel heroes with current solo movie franchises. All-New Marvel Now has fourteen solo titles (and counting), and none of them can claim that kind of marquee support.

Like Hawkeye, these are second-stringers, and like Hawkeye they’ve been given creative teams that might impose a strong authorial vision: Felipe Smith and Tradd Moore on Ghost Rider; Zeb Wells and Mike Del Mundo on Elektra; Warren Ellis and Declan Shalvey on Moon Knight; G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona on Ms Marvel; Dan Slott and Mike Allred on Silver Surfer. In every case the book seems to exist because of the talent attached; and might even cease to exist when that talent leaves.

And in every case the artist is at least as important as the writer. That feels like a departure for Marvel, which only a few years ago hailed its writing talent as “architects” of its universe. Now it seems that designers are just as important. There is no such book as “Matt Fraction’s Hawkeye”; it is absolutely David Aja’s Hawkeye as well, even when a guest artist takes over, because his influence is a constant presence. My hope and expectation is that we’ll see a similar sense of a signature look from Tradd Moore, Mike Del Mundo, Declan Shalvey and all the rest.

And so we come to Black Widow #1, which relaunches the solo adventures of Russian superspy Natasha Romanova.

This is a book that absolutely claims the benefit of an artist with a unique and instantly recognizable style. Phil Noto doesn’t seem like the obvious choice for a Black Widow solo series; his subjects often have a delicate, ephemeral quality to them. One fears they would collapse like underbaked souffles if forced to undertake an action sequence.

Yet it’s the vulnerability in his work, the fragility of it, that makes Black Widow #1 effective. His painted art evokes a 70s cinema world of honeyed sunlight and faded palettes. It creates stillness, a suspended space where the reflexively ferocious Widow can excel.

As realized by Noto, the world of the Black Widow is cold when it needs to be, warm when it needs to be, and most of all hard when it needs to be. Much of the storytelling occurs through a gauzy filter, but the blacks stiffen when the pace or action demands it. In the book’s key fight scene the color also flashes to danger-red as Widow takes down a team of goons — but the black-ink intensity is just as emphatic when she’s walking with purpose to an elevator shaft or “remembering” a painful past that supposedly is not real.

The pains of the past are crucial to this series — Natasha’s need to atone for her wrongs is the driving force of writer Nathan Edmondson’s narrative — and yet the facts of Natasha’s past remain mysterious. There’s a tension here between motive and mystery, and it’s not clear which way Edmondson will go. If he reveals too much, it may take away some of the character’s edge. Too little, and the story becomes abstract.

This first issue hints that the veracity of anything we learn may be left ambiguous, which would be a cunning way to play it, and an apt device for a book that steers readers away from the clarity of Black Widow the Avenger towards the uncertainty of Black Widow the covert operative.

That’s the pitch laid out in Black Widow #1. It’s not as immediately arresting or as different in feel as Hawkeye #1 was back in 2012, but it’s an intriguing premise and a promising start for the Hawkeyzation of Black Widow, and for fans of Phil Noto — old and new — it’s a superb showcase of his talents. If Marvel has another half dozen books on the horizon that capture their artists’ styles so perfectly, it’s going to be a very good year.

By Nathan Grayson on January 10th, 2014 at 9:00 pm.

Valve is a strange company. The mega-dev has always paddled against the inundating current of conventional wisdom, but it gets especially odd when it defies its own internal logic. Oh yeah, also infuriating. As we’ve observed on multiple occasions, the house that Newell built is often extremely open, responsive, and communicative… except when it’s really, really not. Half-Life 3, a recent bout of (still-unexplained) layoffs, Diretide, etc. These lapses don’t make Valve a Bad Guy or anything, but they do strain the developer’s relationship with its 65-million-strong audience. It’s an odd dichotomy that’s more relevant than ever with the evolution of Steam Machines and SteamOS apparently in the community’s hands. So I decided to ask Valve a simple question: What gives?

RPS: So the general plan for the future of SteamOS and Steam Machines is to listen to community feedback and evolve them from there. How hands-on is that process for you? How often are you in direct communication with users?

Jan-Peter Ewert, business development: We don’t really ask. It’s more that they tell us. Literally, I’ve seen [Valve] people pick up a magazine article with pros and cons and go, “OK, we have to address those cons.” More often than that, it’s our customers. We read our own forums. They complain to each other, and we try to fix that.

RPS: And it does often seem like Valve is listening – at least, from a distance. But it doesn’t feel like a two-way street. Even if you’re always listening, you don’t respond much, and in some cases the lack of direct communication leaves your community in the dark. DOTA 2′s Diretide event is the most recent example. While you ultimately gave fans another Diretide, they spent days angry when Valve opted not to respond initially, assuming you just didn’t care. Valve could’ve informed fans that there wouldn’t be a Diretide event when the decision to forgo it was originally made, too. I mean, I appreciate good surprises and all, but only when they’re not, you know, bad. Why not let fans see what’s going on behind-the-scenes just a little more?   

Jan-Peter Ewert: I don’t think there is a lot of improvement to be made there. The thing is, if you feel something is wrong and your customers tell you something should be fixed, the right response is to fix it – not to tell them, “Yeah, at some point in time we’ll fix it.” Because that’s expectation. And if you’re ultimately not able to fix it, then that only makes people even more angry.

So I think the right response around SteamOS or anything we do will be what we did with Diretide, which is to bring out the thing people want [if it works out behind-the-scenes], not just tell them we’ll fix it.

Jeff Cain, business development: Reactions start even if people don’t hear anything. We’re listening. Things happen.

RPS: But especially in those cases, is it really so difficult to say, “Hey, we’re working on this. It might not end up being super successful, and we might not release it, but we’re trying”? I think gamers are warming to that mentality, especially now that crowdfunding has made open development so popular. Not that Valve should go fully open, but maybe just keep people in the loop a bit better. 

Louis Barinaga, hardware engineer: So hardware-wise, at least in the hardware betas, there’s a lot of that going back-and-forth. That’s all I can speak to, though.

Jeff Cain: I just think people would rather see action. They don’t necessarily care if we tell them we’re working on something so much as they see the results.

RPS: Again, though, what about reactions to things like Half-Life – a third episode of which you told them to expect years ago – and Diretide and even your recent round of lay-offs? People clearly care, and they get upset when they’re rewarded with total silence. It gives a general impression that Valve is listening except when you’re really not. It makes the proposition of offering feedback less appealing.

Jan-Peter Ewert: Well, I think those are different things. When it comes to people, we will not discuss them. We will not stand in their way or [air their dirty laundry]. When it comes to hardware or software, I think we do talk to our community. We read our forums and we post in our forums.

So should there be a big PR announcement around everything? We don’t have a huge PR department. Everyone at Valve deals with issues [individually] as they come up. Whether it’s one of us reading a blog post, knowing he’s working on that, and answering a forum post or people just doubling down on finishing something [in reaction to said blog post], it’s obvious we’ll always try to make the right choice.  

[Event staff motions that time's up.]

RPS: Thank you for your time.

In January 2006, I was a student at NYU School of Law, home for holiday break. I had just gotten my wisdom teeth out. I remember that, because I was on a lot of painkillers, and I kept thinking that maybe my cloudy brain just wasn’t comprehending what I was reading on an anonymous message board created for law students, called AutoAdmit. There were hundreds of threads about me, with comments including:

"Official Jill Filipovic RAPE thread"

"I want to brutally rape that Jill slut"

"I'm 98% sure that she should be raped"

“that nose ring is fucking money, rape her immediately”

“what a useless guttertrash whore, I hope that someone uses my pink, fleshy-textured cylindrical body to violate her”

“she deserves a brutal raping”

“Legal liability from posting pic of Jill fucking?”

“she’s a normal-sized girl that I’d bang violently, maybe you’d have to kill her afterwards”

Stuck at home and going swiftly down an online rabbit hole, I spent hours reading posts that extended beyond commenting on my rape-ability into users posting dozens of photos of me, commenting on my body, rating my physical attractiveness and listing my contact information. And halfway down one of those threads, I got to this:

“I actually happen to have met her before. She’s extremely pretty in person.”

It was an innocuous comment, even a kind one. But more followed, in other threads – people who claimed to know me in real life, or said they had at least met me, or seen me, or maybe talked to an ex boyfriend of mine. They had details about what I wore to class and what I said. I felt very suddenly like there wasn’t enough oxygen in the room to fill my lungs.

The only thing I really remember when I returned to school a few days later is my head feeling detached from my body. I had a bizarre mental image of myself walking around with my skull in a fishbowl, separated from my shoulders, like a deranged skeletal astronaut. It was partly the painkillers. But it was also a mental shortcut -- a short-circuit -- to protect my own mind from the trauma that quickly ate away at my confidence, my intelligence and my basic sense of safety.

This week, Amanda Hess published an extraordinary piece in Pacific Standard on gender harassment online. She weaves her own experience with a Twitter stalker into a broader narrative of incompetent law enforcement, inadequate laws and dismissive online communities. She quotes feminist bloggers who left their homes to hide from stalkers, and police officers who don’t know what Twitter is. She breathes life into the statistic that some three-quarters of online abuse targets women, and that the very act of going online with a female name often means sexually violent comments are lobbed in your direction. She outlines legal challenges to the status quo. And she points to the psychic cost of living in a world where you are constantly told you’re a target for violence.

“When people say you should be raped and killed for years on end, it takes a toll on your soul,” Hess quotes feminist writer Jessica Valenti as saying.

We want to believe that the Internet is different from “real life,” that “virtual reality” is a separate sphere from reality-reality. But increasingly, virtual space is just as “real” as life off of the computer. We talk to our closest friends all day long on G-Chat. We engage with political allies and enemies on Twitter and in blog comment sections. We email our moms and our boyfriends. We like photos of our cousin’s cute baby on Facebook. And if we’re writers, we research, publish and promote our work online. My office is a corner of my apartment, and my laptop is my portal into my professional world. There’s nothing “virtual” about it.

For me, it has been almost eight years to the day since I sat at that old desktop and read through those AutoAdmit posts. I have since graduated law school. I worked as a corporate lawyer for almost four years, and now I have the privilege of writing full time and pursuing a career and a life that I love. I’ve been running a feminist blog for almost a decade. I’m a 30-year-old woman who has been writing online long enough to be called every name in the book – I get so many insults I’ve even turned it into a contest on my blog (all-time favorite: “lesbian ham-beast”).

And yet writing about AutoAdmit, Googling the old posts to pull up the insults and the comments and the threats — essentially re-living that trauma from years ago — has my stomach in knots.

Imagine going to work and every few days having people in the hallway walk up to you and say things like, “Die, you dumb cunt” and “you deserve to be raped” and, if you’re a woman of color, adding in the n-word and other racial slurs for good measure. Consider how that would impact your performance and your sense of safety. But you still love your job and your co-workers. That’s how the Internet feels for many of us.

I know how quickly the lines between the “real” and the virtual can blur. Before I discovered the AutoAdmit threads, I had already been blogging about feminism for a little while, and rape and murder threats weren’t new. It remains standard for people to leave comments like, “Here, babycakes, let me give you some roofies and fuck you up the ass, in the ear and up your nose until you weep and bleed” on my site. For the first year or two they shook me up. Then I learned how to roll my eyes, copy and paste them into a dedicated folder and hit the delete key. I did what all the male bloggers told me to do: I ignored the bullies, I grew such thick skin that now I worry about my lack of a fight-or-flight fear reflex, my ability to eat whatever shit is put in front of my face, how in real-life arguments with loved ones and moments of trauma I go stone-cold and it’s almost like my heart shuts off. But I bucked up. I knew how to be tough on the Internet.

And then, the summer after I graduated and was studying for the bar exam, one of the AutoAdmit posters showed up at my door.

To be more specific, he showed up at the door of my clinic office, where I was studying on a nearly empty floor at the law school. I’m keeping details spare, but he was there, and he was having a psychological breakdown for which he was later hospitalized, but of course I didn’t know that at the time. He was ranting about AutoAdmit, how I misunderstood him, how I was sending him coded messages and how he knew that I had told the whole Internet he was a bad person. I had no memory of ever seeing this person before, and I couldn’t figure out if he had come in from the street or if he was a student. He was a big dude and he was blocking the doorway, and a friend of mine and I were inside the room, she sitting at her desk, paralyzed, and me standing with him towering over me, his pupils dilated and his fists clenched and his face bright red and sweaty, and I remember very calmly thinking: “This is how it happens. This is what happens right before someone hits you.” I was doing the calculations in my head: No one will hear me if I scream, so how fast can I get to the phone before he grabs me? What number do I even call? It’s an NYU phone – what’s NYU security’s number? Do I have to dial 9 before I call 911?

He didn’t hit me. When he took a breath from yelling, I interrupted him and said I didn’t think we had actually met, and that my name was Jill, and what was his? He was confused, and eventually he backed down and he left. I went home. I became more careful about locking the door.

He showed up again last year, this time in the Feministe comment section and later in my email inbox. This time, he was threatening to kill a variety of people. This time, he threatened the wrong person – not me – and this time, he was arrested.

Of course, he’s not the only one. There was the guy who showed up my law school to tell my professors how terrible I was, and who later emailed my entire law firm at least a dozen times in an attempt to get me fired. The endless anonymous Twitter accounts set up to harass feminist bloggers. The phone calls from strangers. The comments, still, on blogs and the ones I’m sure get left on the sites of bigger publications but that my editors now mercifully delete – because deleting awful comments is someone’s actual job, now.

Most of the time, it’s fine. Delete. Ignore. Retweet for a laugh. But every once in a while, when someone says something a little too personal or that suggests they know too much, I feel like that fishbowl-headed law student again.

Trauma affects the brain in a lot of different ways, and here’s how those AutoAdmit threads affected mine: I don’t remember most of law school, except for the sharp retreat inward. As a college student, I was a self-confident loud-mouth. By that second semester of law school, nothing terrified me more than speaking in class – not only because I knew whatever I said would show up on the message board, although that was true, but because the people on the message board were probably right: I was a fat idiot, a dumb cunt who had no business being here. I wore a lot of hoodies to school because they shielded my face. I skipped classes if I suspected I would be called on. I glared at anyone who made eye contact with me. I made no friends.

As a practicing attorney, the inward turn faded a little, but it never completely went away. I avoided professional events, feeling immediately self-conscious if someone looked at my name tag a little bit too long – the legal world is small, so did they know me from the AutoAdmit boards? I dreaded the thought of clients or other counsel Googling me. I felt like an impostor, too dumb for the job I was given, a stupid interlocutor into the legal world, and someone who any day now would be discovered as a fraud.

It crept into my ability to interact rationally online and off. I knew how to take a fighter’s stance, but not how to back down. I knew how to turn my insides into steel, to weather any blow and keep going without crying or really without thinking. I figured out how to almost entirely disassociate with what was being said to me or about me. And every two or three years, something small would set me off, and it was like I had spent so long turning my entire body into ice that suddenly someone stuck a pick in me and I was cracking and splintering into thousands of little shards.

I’d take a few days off, pledge to do better on the self-care front, drink a lot of wine and put myself back together. I’d be back online with only little time lost.

I’d go to therapy, I’d go to yoga, I’d even go to a spinal surgeon who coolly informed me that law school related stress had pulled two discs in my neck out of place and contributed to a nice case of spinal arthritis, which could be managed but would cause me physical pain for the rest of my life.

I’d go back online.

I know these harassment stories are ubiquitous to the point of being boring. “Women get rape threats” is not news. Amanda Hess helpfully details the actual costs of these threats: The hours of work lost to tracking someone down online, to reporting someone to the police, to developing self-protection mechanisms when the police fail, to, in extreme cases, hiring professional enforcement for speaking gigs. For me, the costs included a law school education, professional contacts, and a robust work life.

But what about the things you can’t put a price on? How many stories weren’t written because the women who could best tell them were too afraid? How many people like me, damaged and lashing out, paid their online cruelties forward? How many women look back at the person they were before their skin thickened, before they learned how to deal, when they were a little more sure-footed, and how many of them grieve a little bit for all the good things that got lost in the process of surviving?

What does an online landscape look like when the women most able to tolerate it are the same ones who are best capable of bucking up and shutting parts of themselves down?

Jill Filipovic is a regular columnist for the Guardian's Comment is free and a blogger at Feministe. She holds a JD and BA from New York University.

--

"Stock Photo: Beautiful Business Woman Scared Using Laptop Looking At Screen." on Shutterstock

Aiming to combine the comedic chemistry of the National Lampoon’s Vacation movies with the comedic chemistry of those National Lampoon’s Vacation ads for Old Navy, Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo are reuniting, again, to develop a new family sitcom for ABC. Though they were recently waylaid along their path toward reconvening as Clark and Ellen Griswold—whereupon New Line shouted “Fuck yo mama” to their planned Vacation reboot—the two nevertheless realized they still shared an interest in getting paid. So they’ll couple up again, this time playing sixty-somethings whose golden years are interrupted after they’re forced to take over raising their grandchildren, whose youthful rambunctiousness and sexting on their Xboxphones will cause Chase to get hurt a lot. The show already has a production commitment under the direction of The Neighbors’ Aaron Kaplan, and will mark the first TV series Chevy Chase hasn’t ...

In an attempt to appeal to "older viewers," according to the L.A. Times, Bruno Mars has reportedly asked the wrinkled, leathery husks of the Red Hot Chili Peppers to join him during this year’s Super Bowl halftime show. While the majority of people who like the Red Hot Chili Peppers probably aren’t rocking chair-ready just yet, it’s worth noting that both Flea and Anthony Kiedis are 51 years old, making them absolutely eligible to receive all the discounted coffee and driving safety courses AARP membership allows. Drummer Chad Smith is 52, putting him that much closer to death and 4 p.m. dinner.

There’s no word yet about just how the Peps will contribute to the Pepsi halftime show, but the merger is expected to be officially announced on Fox during Saturday’s playoff game between the New Orleans Saints and the Seattle Seahawks. 

Moonbase Alpha player Mike Cothren extracted some David Bowie from NASA's space simulator game and published the results on YouTube this week.

The result is "Moonbase Oddity," a cover of Bowie's "Space Oddity" created using Moonbase Alpha's built-in text-to-speech capabilities. Check out the video above to see the cover of the 1969 song, which is probably best known for its first line, "Ground control to Major Tom." If you like what you hear, you can find a link to download "Moonbase Oddity" on the video's YouTube page.

It was also covered last year by Commander Chris Hadfield aboard the International Space Station. You can download Moonbase Alpha, which tasks players with colonizing the moon, for Windows PC through Steam.

Maybe it’s the economy; maybe it’s the political climate. Maybe it’s the 40 percent increase in the number of exhibitors from China, as one attendee suggested to The Verge. Just as suddenly as she left, the CES booth babe is back. DTS, 808, and Canon had dancers, GoDirectInc had girls in fuzzy lion outfits with bare midriffs, and the convention center was riddled with girls in tight dresses.

The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) doesn’t track the gender ratio at its annual trade show, but in 2014 it still draws an overwhelmingly male crowd. The number of female attendees is increasing, but CES is still a boys’ club. There’s the Japanese businessman; the bald, white American IT guy; and the nerdy college student, all yearning for a pretty girl to talk to them about technology.

Janelle Taylor was wearing a tiny silver skirt, neon pink heels, and a tiny string bikini top when I met her at the booth for Xtreme, an accessories company. She has an MBA and was attending trade shows for her marketing company when she decided to make a slight career change. "I saw girls being booth babes and I thought wow, I would be amazing at that," she says. "I get to work with amazing companies and travel and basically be their billboard."

Good booth babes know the product, and they know how to entertain. Taylor has to look good, pose for pictures, and lure people into the booth, while diplomatically deflecting their amorous advances. She believes discipline is the most important quality in a booth babe. "There’s a lot of girls that are flaky, and I think that sets a bad name for booth babes," she says. "It takes a lot. Usually we’re on our feet for about 10 hours."

I talked to about a dozen booth models at CES 2014 and observed them making small talk with attendees about where they go to school and how often they do things "like this." The booth models for CES and other Vegas conventions come from all over: some are professional models, some are students, some are locals picking up extra cash, others are actors from LA. They all complained about the same two things: having to stand all day, and getting hit on.

The perfect blonde at the TCL booth in Central Hall didn’t have to worry about the latter, however — her job came with a stool. She was not a booth babe, she insisted, although "I know exactly what you’re talking about." Her agency had gotten her the gig and all she had to do was walk visitors into meetings with executives.

The models at Sonic Emotion, who had been recruited through Facebook, agencies, and friends, had it much harder. This year’s CES has a significant contingent of booth bros — shoutout to the studs at the Samsung booth dressed as galactic soccer players — and Sonic had employed equal numbers of male and female models for a traveling skit: groups of soldiers crawled around the show floor until they were rescued by a group of nurses handing out prescriptions for "soundicide."

After his son suffered a severe brain injury in a fall, Walter De Brouwer spent nearly a year in the hospital watching over his child's recovery. The daily routine inspired him to create a simple mobile device that could assess the same vital signs nurses checked each day on his son. "As a big Star Trek fan, I wanted to challenge myself to build something that made the 'tricorder' a reality." And so Scanadu was born.

The company went on to set a record with its $1.6 million Indiegogo campaign, followed by $14 million in venture capital funding. At CES this year it showed off its new prototype for the tricorder, which it calls the Scanadu Scout. You place the device on your temple and it measures your heart rate, temperature, oxygen levels, blood pressure, and gives an electrocardiogram reading. The information is sent via Bluetooth and displayed on a smartphone app which can track your health over time and send you alerts if a vital sign looks troubling.

I tested the Scanadu Scout and was impressed with the immediacy. The second I touched it to my temple it fed back a reading for temperature and heart rate that I could see live in the app. The other vital stats took a few seconds longer to register but nothing that felt like a wait. It was a light plastic, nothing especially impressive in terms of design, but the device was easy to place and the metal felt cool and soothing when pressed against my temple, throbbing from a hangover.

Scanadu plans to begin shipping units to Indiegogo backers in March, but unfortunately they won't be available for retail for a while. The company is seeking FDA approval and is using its Indiegogo backers as a test cohort. In the meantime you can try and get in early on the waiting list for its next product, the Scanaflo, a high-tech urine-testing kit the company hopes people will use at home to monitor their health.