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Bioware employee Casey Hudson had an epiphany after playing the unfinished Dark Matter game on Steam today. He admitted that Dark Matter had a better ending than Mass Effect 3.With many gamers still angry over the Mass Effect 3 endings being relatively the same even with the Extended Cut DLC, some have compared the ending […]

(A NOTE: For the purposes of this list, the “Renaissance” begins with Little Mermaid in 1989 and ends with Home on the Range in 2004, when Disney first shut down their 2D animation unit. This means that the “proto-Renaissance” films (The Black Cauldron, The Great Mouse Detective and Oliver and Company) are not included. Also not included is Dinosaur, the first non-Pixar 3D film, since that is not properly part of the Renaissance era’s hand-drawn animation line. Also not included are Pixar films, because they obviously don’t count.)

17. Pocahontas. I actually watched Pocahontas all the way through for the first time this past Saturday and good lord is it awful. On Twitter it was pointed out that Pocahontas was put into development following the Best Picture nomination for Beauty and the Beast and that Jeff Katzenberg decided to turn Disney animated films into Prestige Events, but this isn’t just a bad Disney animated movie, it’s a terrible prestige event as well. The film’s visual style is reminscent of Don Bluth’s preferred animation style, but without any of Bluth’s signature energy; the visual staging is boring as sin (a total lack of immediacy or visual excitement in most shots). The pacing is terrible, the wacky cartoon animals are hatefully bad, the songs are range from average (“Just Around The Riverbend”) to amusingly bad failures (“Savages”) to “fuck this song forever it is the worst” (“Colours of the Wind,” the preachiest, most insipid song to ever be obviously written to win a Best Song award and still do it, because the Oscars are often bullshit in this way). The dialogue goes beyond trite to being redundant. Mel Gibson keeps forgetting to speak with an English accent. And having David Ogden Stiers voice the villain only two years after he voiced Cogsworth in Beauty was perhaps not the best choice even if Stiers is great, because all that happens is you’re reminded of a better movie. A much, much better movie. Pocahontas killed Disney’s animated momentum almost all by itself and the Disney Renaissance never really recovered. It is also the only movie on this list that is simply bad, plain and simple.

16. Atlantis: The Lost Empire. An attempt to turn the Disney animated powerhouse into a very pulpy boys’ adventure movie and it doesn’t really work. The Mike Mignola-influenced visual design is gorgeous to look at, certainly, and the action is spectacular, but the plot is basically paper-thin in the “you’ve seen a Star Wars, right, okay you can follow this” way and the voice acting talent is mostly wasted: Michael J. Fox’s Milo is the standout, but he gets most of the lines so that is to be expected, while the likes of Leonard Nimoy, James Garner and Claudia Christian are just sorta there. Atlantis is slight in so many ways that the spectacle it provides in mass amounts are nothing more than empty calories, an explosion of bombast and sound and fury signifying nothing.

15. Home on the Range. Fun fact: you probably don’t remember this exists. There’s a reason for that: the last Disney animated feature until the hand-drawn animated department was shut down is very forgettable. It’s competent, certainly, a perfectly adequate funny animal story (Judi Dench is in particular a treat), but it is somehow appropriate that the final “traditional” cartoon feature from Disney would be such a meaningless bit of fluff that it is barely remembered.

14. Fantasia 2000. Here’s the thing: F2K is certainly lushly animated and has a few good comedy bits (my favorite is when Donald does a double-take at the pair of normal ducks walking past during the Donald’s Ark sequence). But the problem with F2K is the music selection. Here are the songs selected for F2K:

Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, first movement
Pines of Rome by Respighi
Rhapsody in Blue by Gershwin
Piano Concerto no. 2, first movement, by Shostakovich
The Carnival of the Animals by Saint-Saens
Pomp and Circumstance by Elgar
Firebird Suite by Stravinsky

That’s a lot of very familiar classical music, isn’t it? With the exception of Pines it’s all very My First Classical Album. A not-too-challenging bit from a Beethoven symphony, George Gershwin, Igor “probably most important composer of the 20th century” Stravinsky and Pomp and fucking Circumstance, which gets played at every single high school graduation ever? I mean, the original Fantasia had Night on Bald Mountain as its closer – that’s out of left field. And “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” was definitely a daring choice in 1940. And the animation matchups are predictable too: an animal march for Pomp, scenes from New York for Rhapsody, dancing animals for Carnival, an actual firebird for Firebird. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not bad, it’s Fantasia, and the core concept is always going to be strong (come on, don’t you want a new Fantasia?) but F2K definitely undershoots the mark.

13. The Hunchback of Notre Dame. This one gets a lot of flak because it was next in the pipeline after Pocahontas and people don’t remember it fondly. It’s honestly not that bad. Overly serious in tone, perhaps, as compared to most Disney flicks – the comedy bits with the gargoyles are definitely a little tacked-on as compared to Disney’s more organic efforts to integrate funny-animal comedy into a larger narrative, and the Esmerelda/Phoebus romance is predictable and bland. But the movie doesn’t shy away from its darker-than-average tone and Judge Frollo is a terrific villain. The songs are mostly bad, though (or at least mediocre as all get out) and at this point a Disney film with bad songs was in trouble from the get go, even though the score is comparatively pretty good. Hunchback suffers a lot from guilt-by-association with Pocahontas; if it had come between, say, Lion King and Hercules I think it would be better remembered. But it didn’t.

12. The Rescuers Down Under. This gets included in the Renaissance almost by default, as the film in between Mermaid and Beauty. It is perfectly acceptable franchise entertainment with some gorgeous visuals – Disney was definitely using the film as a testing ground for the CGI/hand-drawn art combination they would master in their later films, and the visual direction and staging of scenes is very skilled – but it’s nothing more than that, unfortunately.

11. Brother Bear. Disney’s last major 2D animated effort until The Princess and the Frog (I don’t count Home on the Range as “major”) has a nice story and good voice acting, but the animation is, let us be honest, second-tier: Disney cut back on the CGI elements it had been using with hand-drawn animation successfully in its previous features to cut costs, and the result is evident on the screen (and the choice of colour palette for the film veers sharply between drab and garish). Which is not to say the animation is bad, by any means, but it’s definitely simpler than many modern Disney features. And Phil Collins’ score is simply not as good as his excellent work on Tarzan. Brother Bear is fine, a decent little movie that transcends its limitations to an extent, but only an extent.

10. Treasure Planet. It flopped at the box office, but Planet is the delivery of what Atlantis promised: a great adventure story, told with amazing visuals. Planet has a more full plot, better realized characters (and better voice acting: I mean, Emma Thompson and David Hyde Pierce in the same movie?), more heart (the Jim/Long John Silver relationship really works beautifully) and the visuals go beyond the impressive stuff in Atlantis to some truly next-level stuff. The 3D backgrounds and 2D characters do clash at times (okay, more than a few times, probably about a third of the movie), but when they work it is seamless. It’s kind of a shame it bombed, because Treasure Planet was essentially a prototype for a new model of 2D animated film, something that shows like Justice League would later use as a template in many ways.

9. Hercules. It’s entertaining as all get out, one of the funnier “traditional-style” Disney flicks (James Woods in particular enjoys the hell out of himself), and wiser than me have pointed out previously that, when you get right down to it, Hercules is basically a Superman story in Greek drag. Which is great! So why isn’t it higher up? Mostly because Hercules tries too hard and aims to do too much. The R&B/gospel score is an interesting and exciting musical choice, but it is almost always cranked up to eleven – “Zero to Hero” in particular is so fast that you either miss half the lyrics or half the visual gags – and the rest of the movie is so, so fast that rewatches reveal literally hundreds of details, and I know we’re all supposed to say rewatches are great but there’s a difference between “going back and catching new layers” and “going back and rewatching because you were not physically capable of watching the entire thing in the first go.” And the whole movie is like this! (Also, let’s be honest, the Greek Gods are basically all pricks and that kind of detracts from Hercules’ quest.) But at this point we’re in the “differing levels of excellent,” anyway, so…

8. Aladdin. Aladdin has not aged as well as some Disney flicks, and the reason it is this far down is simple: the movie in large part lives and dies by Robin Williams’ Genie, and the Genie gets more and more dated with every year as Williams’ references get older and older. Of course, Aladdin still has much to recommend it: the last few songs of the Alan Menken/Howard Ashman team (and Menken never hit the musical heights he did with Ashman with his other collaborators), Jonathan Freeman reminding everybody why dedicated voice actors are important with his Jafar, Gilbert Gottfried’s great performance as Iago, the great animation work on the Carpet and Abu, and the “do ya trust me?” line that honestly just makes the flick. But yeah, it’s not what it was in 1993.

7. Lilo and Stitch. I’ll admit that this movie is one that I never liked quite as much as other people did. I mean, I like it, don’t get me wrong, but Lilo and Stitch fans are, well, awfully fanatical about their fandom and I’m not at that level. It’s obviously a well-made movie, brilliant in many ways, and Stitch is funny, and the film manages to be sentimental without being maudlin (I defy anybody to hear Lilo explain how her parents died without getting at least a little catch, just because she does it so plainly and without drama, and that’s how kids talk about dead loved ones), and it manages to be sentimental while providing a ridiculous amount of slapstick. Out of all the movies in this list, this is the only one I really had trouble placing. I can see the argument for moving it up a notch or moving it down one. It, like Emperor’s New Groove, is very atypical in how it is a Disney movie, and that makes it harder to analyze.

6. The Little Mermaid. Another surprisingly low ranking to some people since Mermaid is what began the whole Renaissance in the first place, but I never thought Mermaid had the strongest story or the most engaging characters. It also doesn’t quite have what later Disney films mastered, which is the art of describing sexual tension between two animated characters, and that matters a great deal given the premise of the film. It does, however, have the best overall musical set-pieces in Disney history: “Under the Sea” is a deserved classic, of course, as is “Part of Your World,” but I actually think “Kiss the Girl” is the best (and most understated, underrated) song from the movie. And it has a good villain in Ursula, and an exciting ending. But I can’t get past Ariel’s overall lack of agency throughout the flick.

5. Tarzan. It still amazes me that Phil Collins – Phil “Do We Have A Horns Section In This Song? Maybe We Should Add A Horns Section” Collins – could put together a score and soundtrack as strong as the one he did for Tarzan. But he did, and that is far from the movie’s only wondrous surprise. Tarzan works astonishingly well, with two excellent villains, a willingness to engage in non-Disney-levels of violence (but sparsely, to maximize their effectiveness), near-perfect integration of wacky sidekick moments into the main plot, real emotional heft throughout the story and probably one of the loveliest endings of any Disney film ever, combined with absolutely gorgeous integration of CGI into a 2D world. Superb work.

4. The Emperor’s New Groove. This one is wildly atypical for Disney; a tailor-made Disney Epic called Kingdom of the Sun which was converted halfway through into a zany comedy, and normally that formula would spell disaster but Groove is a magnificent triumph, so good that I am quite certain Kingdom of the Sun would have been an immense Pocahontas-level disaster. Groove works because it doesn’t work the romance angle like practically every other Disney flick (this is the first non-sequel of the Renaissance era to have no princess in it!), it doesn’t have any big musical set-pieces at all, it basically jumps up and down on the Disney Formula until said formula is dead and bleeding, and that is what makes it truly great: it commits to laughs right from the beginning and never lets up, even during the moments of pathos that the story demands. And Patrick Warburton’s performance as Kronk is one of the all-time great voice acting triumphs.

3. The Lion King. This is generally the point where somebody snarky says “you mean Kimba the White Lion” but that line has always been mostly crap, based on a similarity between names and a couple of shots that look sort of the same. The Lion King draws its power not from those minor similarities, but from its riffing-on-Hamlet plot, probably one of the best voice casts in Disney history, certainly Disney’s single best villain in Jeremy Irons’ Scar, and songs that are… okay, “Circle of Life” and “Hakuna Matata” are probably top-10 Disney songs of all time, at least, and “Be Prepared” is top 20, and the rest are… not that. (Seriously, “I Just Can’t Wait To Be King” is so goddamn annoying. SO ANNOYING.) To sum up: Kimba was also kind of bad and Lion King is not.

2. Beauty and the Beast. The purest fairytale of any of the Disney films by far. Easily the best overall soundtrack – the Ashman/Menken team hit their peak with this and has never been surpassed, and frankly Beauty‘s soundtrack is so strong it deserves ranking among top musicals of all time, not just Disney cartoons. The setpiece for “Be Our Guest” is an all-time classic in film history. Remarkable vocal performances throughout. The gags are perfectly written into the script, but more important the romance that is the core of the story is completely real and believable on every level, which ultimately leads to what can only be described as the sexiest kiss Disney ever animated, as part of the best ending they ever wrote. There’s a reason this one got the Best Picture nod. (Even if the fairy that cursed the Beast was really a total dick.)

1. Mulan. Mulan is unique in that she is the only Disney “princess” whose agency is her own throughout the story. Belle is a prisoner, Ariel a pawn, Jasmine and Megara and Esmerelda are all tokens to be won for the most part, but not Mulan. Hell, Mulan has more agency than most of the male Disney protagonists, who mostly react heroically. Mulan, though, goes out and proactively self-sacrifices, first for her family and then for her country. The fact that Mulan the film has a strong soundtrack, excellent voice acting, a solid and entertaining plot and good visuals are almost besides the point, because the reason Mulan is the best Disney Renaissance film is simple: Mulan isn’t a Disney Princess, no matter how much they want to make her one. She’s a Disney hero, and that makes all the difference.

Jim Shooter, for all that he is a legendarily controversial figure who was practically burned in effigy when he was booted out of Marvel and who made life miserable for a lot of people during his time as editor-in-chief, was a very smart guy and a pretty good writer. Dialogue was never his strength, but he’s always had a knack for coming up with big, interesting ideas and relating them in an accessible way. And I have to say, ‘Secret Wars’ was one of his triumphs on that score.

It started much the same way that DC’s ‘Super Powers’ mini-series did; they were doing a toy line, and they wanted to tie it in to a single storyline that featured as many of Marvel’s big guns as possible so that you would read the comic and then buy the toys…or possibly vice versa. Either way, it was a much bigger success as a comic than a toy line; the ‘Super Powers’ toys did far better business than ‘Secret Wars’ ever did. But as a comic, there’s no question which was better.

For one thing, it worked really well as a Big Event. The way that Shooter handled it made it remarkably a) non-intrusive for a crossover that involved Spider-Man, the Hulk, Iron Man, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, and pretty much every single big-name villain including one who was notoriously dead at the time, and b) caused a lot of anticipation among comics fans. Shooter had the heroes disappear at the end of one issue (being the EIC of Marvel meant it was a lot easier to get people to participate in your crossover) and reappear at the beginning of the next…but as with DC’s ‘One Year Later’, a lot had clearly happened between those two issues, and the only way to find out what was to buy ‘Secret Wars’. Why did Spider-Man have a new costume? Why was the Hulk’s leg in a cast? Why was the Thing off on another planet? Why was She-Hulk now a member of the FF? Why did Colossus break up with Kitty Pryde? These were the kind of questions that Marvel could reasonably expect fans to want to know the answers to, and it was smart to structure the series this way. (And for the most part, the answers even made sense. Although the Hulk didn’t stay in the cast for long.)

But for another thing, it had some interesting themes. First, the Beyonder worked perfectly for this crossover. It made sense, on a metatextual level, that a series that was a tie-in to a toy line would involve an impossibly powerful alien playing with Marvel’s heroes and villains as if they were his action figures. But more than that, Shooter decided to ask questions about why kids enact such complicated play activities with their toys, especially ones that are emblematic of struggles over good and evil. He suggested that maybe the play activity helped sort out moral questions on a level accessible to children, and structured the series around an alien that was trying to figure out what good and evil actually were, and around an omnipotent alien whose every desire was instantly fulfilled trying to figure out what it was like to want things.

The answers he came up with were pretty interesting. For starters, although it was never made explicit, the heroes and villains weren’t grouped according to our complex moral frameworks, but according to the very simple question, “Are their desires selfish?” The people who were predominantly selfless, who used their powers to help others, were grouped as ‘heroes’, while the people who were predominantly selfish were grouped as villains. This had two immediate and fascinating results, which played out over the rest of the series. By this logic, Doctor Doom was a villain, while Magneto was a hero.

This was a major thematic component to the series, and showed a really deep understanding of the two characters. Shooter realized that for all that Magneto is ruthless and even murderous, he’s not selfish. He does what he does for mutantkind, not for his own personal benefit. Magneto would be perfectly happy with a little house in the country somewhere in a world where mutants were free of persecution; he doesn’t need to rule. While Doom…Victor might delude himself into thinking that he wants to rule the world for all the right reasons. He might pretend that he would simply be the best choice as leader, and that everything he does is for the benefit of humankind. But the Beyonder saw into his heart and knew better. That pretty much formed the underpinning of the entire story.

But of course, we needed fights and betrayals and epic feats of strength and power and big cool battle sequences and heroes distrusting each other and villains distrusting each other and Galactus being apocalyptically bad-ass and all sorts of Cool Shit, too. And ‘Secret Wars’ paid off. You got to see Spider-Man beating the entire X-Men simply by virtue of being too flippy-shit to punch. You got to see Hawkeye putting an arrow into Piledriver’s shoulder. You got to see the Hulk ripping the Absorbing Man’s arm off…and, oh yeah, holding up a freaking mountain with his bare hands. Oh, and you got to see the Molecule Man dropping a freaking mountain on the Hulk. Mark Millar wishes he could come up with an ending as cool as the ending to issue #3 of ‘Secret Wars’. There were so many great, epic Big Moments in this, and yet it never felt like Shooter was trying to shove Big Moments into his story. He didn’t draw attention to them; he just kept going with one after another exciting scene.

And it all culminated in an epically awesome last four issues. After hanging around for most of the series being enigmatic, Galactus finally decided to just eat the planet and everyone on it. (Some people wondered why the Beyonder would include a character who was pretty much guaranteed to win, but that presumes that this was a fair-play competition and not a psychological test. Finding out how people responded to learning that they never had a chance at winning would be worth studying in and of itself.) The heroes debated whether or not to sacrifice themselves and let Galactus win, in order to see his hunger permanently sated and save untold future billions, but ulatimately the whole thing was rendered moot when Doom stole the power of the Beyonder and became basically God.

This has to be one of the all-time great moments of Doctor Doom’s history, by the way. It established Doom as one of the ultimate schemers of the Marvel Universe; while everyone else was trying to figure out how to win the contest, Doom was planning to screw over God. And it worked. That’s bad-ass. And his defeat was also amazing; the heroes didn’t beat Doom with cunning or teamwork or power, Doom beat himself because deep down, he knew he was unworthy of Godhood. He couldn’t consciously accept the truth about his uglier aspects, but his subconscious knew he wasn’t the noble monarch he wanted to think of himself as, and everything fell apart on him through his own doing. (Which, by the way, was another epic Big Moment in the series. The heroes debate whether to take on an omnipotent, seemingly-benevolent Doom, and Cap says, “Is it even possible? If we decide to fight him, he might just annihilate us all with a bolt from the blue.” But ultimately, they decide he has to be stopped…and Doom just annihilates them all with a bolt from the blue. The next issue opens with Cap’s shield in pieces on the ground.)

And ultimately, Doom’s defeat provided the answer to the Beyonder’s question, for the audience if not the characters. Doom’s selfish desires were poisonous, and getting what he wanted–getting everything he ever wanted–worked out very badly for him, because he didn’t really know what he wanted and he wound up getting the wrong things. Self-knowledge matters more than power, and the ultimate “winner” is the Molecule Man, who learns that he’s always been able to do anything he ever wanted to do; he was just too scared to accept responsibility for that. And armed with that ultimate power, and even more importantly with that ultimate self-knowledge, the Molecule Man settles down to a little apartment in the suburbs with a nice girlfriend, content in the knowledge that fulfilling one’s desires doesn’t come from grabbing more, it comes from learning when you have enough. That’s a pretty deep message to come out of a toy tie-in series, but Shooter told it in a way that the average kid could understand.

Then, of course, the Beyonder came to visit the Molecule Man…but since this is “Things I Love About Comics”, we’ll stop there.

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.

Call it the unicorn problem: beautiful, alluring, magical, and totally non-existent. Social commerce, according to the latest Monetate e-commerce report, is almost as elusive.

In fact, social media referrals represents just 1.55 percent of all traffic to major e-commerce destinations. And when that tiny trickle of traffic arrived, only .71 percent of it actually resulted in any kind of sale. Email marketing, by contrast, generates twice as much traffic as social media, and has four times the conversion rate to sales.

Those are not good numbers for social.

The darling of the omnipresent social media gurus on Twitter, social commerce was supposed to totally disrupt e-commerce. And, because people trust other people’s recommendations and spend a lot of time on Facebook where they meet other people and read what they say, social commerce was supposed to be huge, turning social media influence and shares into sales and revenue.

Unfortunately, there’s a problem:

“The challenge for social media — and for its big brother, word of mouth marketing — is that they are inherently additive pieces of the conversion funnel, rather than causative,” Monetate’s new report states.

But Monetate says that the problem isn’t in the social. It’s in how companies are using it.

Loyalty isn’t about clicking on an offer, report author Mitch Joel says, it’s about building a relationship. And a relationship goes far beyond “do you want to buy this.” Which means that social is not short term, social is not transactional, and social is not the same as direct response.

In other words: shocker, social media is, well, social.

Taken in that context, social can still be very valuable for brands, as marketing firm Syncapse found just a few weeks ago, valuing some Facebook fans at over $1,600. But it’s the relationship that’s valuable, not the episodic communications per se.

And that relationship can be very valuable. When an actual sale is made from a social referral, it’s often valuable, with the average Pinterest-referred sale clocking in at over $80, and the average Facebook and Twitter sales at about $70.

photo credit: zoomar via photopin cc

Filed under: Business, Enterprise, Social

A Michigan baby’s life was saved by the insertion of a 3-D printed trachea at two months old.

The newborn was diagnosed with tracheobronchomalacia, a condition in which the airways collapse, not allowing oxygen to enter the lungs. That, tragically, caused repeated heart attacks. As the doctors said when writing up the case study for the New England Journal of Medicine, “ventilation that was sufficient to prevent recurring cardiopulmonary arrests could not be maintained.”

Doctors then printed a splint that is completely customized to the baby’s tracheal tubes, based on a “computed tomographic image of the patient’s airway.” It’s bioresorbable, made out of a material called polycaprolactone, so it will never need to be withdrawn, and the baby’s body will just naturally absorb and discard the splint within three years.

By that time, doctors say, the baby’s lungs and airways will have developed enough strength to stay open by themselves.

According to LiveScience, prior to 3-D printing, lung splints were carved by hand. 3-D printed splints can be fabricated in a single day, however, and cost about a third as much.

After inserting the device, doctors kept the baby on a ventilator for 21 days, until the child was discharged from hospital. One year after the surgery, no “unforeseen problems related to the splint have arisen.”

Doctors’ conclusions?

“This case shows that high-resolution imaging, computer-aided design, and biomaterial three-dimensional printing together can facilitate the creation of implantable devices for conditions that are anatomically specific for a given patient.”

Filed under: Business, Dev, Gadgets, Health, Science

The story of the scandal is fascinating, not least because it reflects a mindset about the Third Reich that seems somewhat remote in today’s Germany.

Daft Punk have taken the word hype to an entirely new level with the way they’ve gone about unveiling their 4th studio album, Random Access Memories. We got a small glimpse into its inspiration and creation when Guy and Thomas opened up to Rolling Stone, but outside of the now-released lead single “Get Lucky,” we really haven’t had any hints as to what the rest of the album might sound like…until now.

In a new interview with France’s Le Nouvel Observateur, the robots sat down for a track-by-track review of their own album, explaining in detail the thoughts and sounds behind each of the 13 songs, and revealing what we might expect out of the widely anticipated May 20th release. It’s a truly fascinating insight into the minds of Daft Punk, but I will warn you, excitement for the album may reach an all-time high after reading.

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Give Life Back to Music

“One of the goals of this album is to bring something light and elegant to the table. In ‘Give Life Back to Music’ John Robinson Jr plays the drums. He was on ‘Off The Wall’, the master-piece by Michael Jackson. What is fantastic in a performance like his, it’s the infinite possibilities of the nuances, impossible to recreate with an electronic approach. All the Quicy Jones produced hits or albums always fascinated us in the precision of the production only reached by humans. It’s the difference between ‘Thriller’ and ‘Bad’. In the latter, the tracks are brilliant, but performances have less of an aura. Less character.”

The Game of Love

“We sing with vocoders. In an era where human voices are treated to become robotic. We find exciting the fact that you can go the opposite and and give a robotic voice the most human voice possible. The idea of an artificial intelligence that would ressemble the human one. An emotion of something that is not human, but tries hard to be.”

Giorgio by Moroder

“We met him a few years back, he was always an mythical legend for us, a bit mysterious. His personal life path follows the music. The idea behind the track was to make a sort of documentary based on an interview we did with him. Giorgio Moroder’s voice was recorded with different microphones from different periods. We finally ended with over three hours worth of interview material in which he recalls his life as a musician. This track is a great metaphore on musical freedom. We always push ourselves to break boundaries between musical genres, between good and bad taste, hype and non-hype. Giorgio is a model in that field. It’s fascinating hearing him say at the tender age of 72 “Oh, I was doing electronic music over forty years ago,”

Within

“Gonzales plays piano on this track. It’s a friend of ours, and a great musician, one of the best of his generation actually. ‘Within’ is one of the very tracks we recorded. It’s very minimal, a little rhytmic section, a bass and a piano. Create the essential track with a little instruments as possible, that’s the idea behind the this track.”

Instant Crush

“Julian Casablancas from the Strokes is on the vocals. We’re both super fans of the band, and we go to hear he wanted to meet us. We had a demo lying, he came, he got to hear it and was enthusiastic about it. He’s got a gift. We, at first, we love rock and the whole concept of a rock band. However so many powerful stuff in the past that a new voice would have been hard to cut through. Recently the Strokes and MGMT – with a different approach – achieved that. Julian has this punk rock attitude, an emotional side to his melodies. It was important for us to have him on this album, to be pushed by our contemporaries.”

Lose Yourself to Dance

“This track is the simplest definition of our desire. A very detailed album in the production, but very simple at the same time. Focused on bass, drums and guitar, and of course robots. It’s the opposite of an over-produced album. Our fantasy, was to comeback to dance music with a drumkit. To record it this way was very satisfying. We’re so proud it’s a real drummer behind a drumkit and not some beat box. There’s two drummers on the album, John Robinson Jr, who holds the record for most recorded drummer in the world and Omar Hakim, who started drumming at the age of 16 with no other than Stevie Wonder…”

Touch

“This track is the crux of the album. It’s the starting point for the whole album. It’s us meeting Paul Williams [composer of film music, including "Phantom of the Paradise" and actor]. A sound engineer that we know presented him to us. He visited us in the studio. From there, something very cinamatographic, very narrative came out. ‘Touch’ would best define the psychedelic side of ‘Random Access Memories’. This song has 250 different tracks. It’s the most complex, the craziest of the album.”

Get Lucky

“Pharrell Williams sings on this tune, it was only natural to invite him on the album. It’s a born entertainer, complete, who transpires elegance. He didn’t always have the chance to show off his singing skills, and boy he can sing. We wanted to give the impression of being trapped in a glass bubble, completely isolated from the outside world. We could of been in 1978, but the idea was to get the music to travel the present time and also the future. See what happens and observe how this enthusiasm communicates with people.”

Beyond

“Another track made with Paul Williams who wrote the lyrics. It’s an hyper-cosmic song with some of the purest, poetic lyrics. We chatted a lot with Paul Williams of the direction we should take for the album, it was interesting to hear that he could pen our ideas for real.”

Motherboard

“A very futuristic track, it could have been from year 4000…”

Fragments of Time

“Our comeback track with house producer Todd Edwards since ‘Discovery’.”

Doin ‘it Right

“The angelic voice is by Panda Bear (from the Animal Collective group). We absolutely love the solo work he’s done, as well as the band approach to their music. This track – the only fully electronic one of the album – was the last one recorded. It feels so relaxed. Maybe our most futuristic effort and our most contemporary track.”

Contact

“A track produced with DJ Falcon, and a voice recorded on the last Apollo mission – number 17 – from Nasa. The voice from Captain Eugene Cernan, the last man to have walked the moon. It’s a voice that literally comes from space. And what it says, needs no comment…”

(Le Nouvel Observateur, additional translation via Sodwee)

There once were two planets, new to the galaxy and inexperienced in life. Like fraternal twins, they were born at the same time, about four and a half billion years ago, and took roughly the same shape. Both were blistered with volcanoes and etched with watercourses; both circled the same . . .