Comic Book Resources

I actually thought Yu was a little off form this issue. And I can’t believe anyone liked The Confession, but then again I didn’t exactly read it very closely.

The Confession is weird. It’s a style and a method I really don’t like. But it is definitely done much better in this instance than most. Maybe that and the nice art combined to work for me? Or I was just overly forgiving at the time. It worked though, at least then. The second scene, the epilogue, not so much. But the main soliloquy seemed to be the first honest attempt to make Stark seem like he wasn’t just an antagonist in this.

I thought the Confession was pretty good…until you read New Avengers, oddly enough. “Gee, Steve, now as I look back, I really feel bad about this whole thing. But not so bad that I won’t use your corpse as bait to trap your best friends (and mine)!”

Really, is there any doubt now that Tony Stark is human garbage?

I dunno, he did what he thought he had to do? I don’t understand the hate.

That sounds like exactly what I expected from 300. Really, really, shiny, polished turd.

The hate is that Tony knows and has fought alongside most of the anti-Reg people for a long time. He knows that Spider-Man’s not about to do something apocalyptically stupid and cause another Stamford. (In point of fact, of the characters shown in the latest issue of New Avengers, Tony Stark has the highest civilian bodycount by a vast margin.)

Any cop will tell you that there’s a degree of personal judgement involved in enforcing the law. Some guys, you let off with a warning, because you think it’ll do more good than jail time. Some offenses, you turn a blind eye to because it’s not hurting anyone and it’d ruin a lot of lives by bringing it all into the legal system. But Tony Stark is spending millions of dollars and countless man-hours of time to bring in people that he could just as easily turn a blind eye to, solely because of his personal obsession with making sure every super-hero either agrees with him or enjoys the view from a Negative Zone prison cell. That’s not “justice”, that’s a dick-measuring competition, and it’s already gotten two super-heroes killed (pending Steve Rogers’ inevitable resurrection.)

Not to mention all the other things horribly, horribly wrong with what he’s doing (violating the Constitutional rights of the prisoners, instituting a peacetime draft, pardoning super-villains, starting wars, manipulating the stock market, bribing super-villains to attack him in front of Congress, creating an insane murderclone of a god, and you could at least make a plausible argument that his incursion of Negative Zone space was responsible for the Annihilation Wave, meaning he’s responsible for the deaths of untold billions of sentient beings.)

I guess I just feel a sense of disconnect with the anger directed at a fake person.

“I guess I just feel a sense of disconnect with the anger directed at a fake person.”
Reminds me of a negative review of Iron Man #15 I read somewhere where the reviewer never once commented on the actual content of the books but instead just ranted about how horrible Stark was in Civil War rather than anything about the book he was supposedly reviewing.

Thunderbolts is a fun book. But the art bugs me as well (though why are you harshing on my man Wilford). I mean the image of Tommy Lee Jones wearing Cornrows is something comics doesn’t need.

I think Iron Man is justfied in what he’s doing because the government is sending the Thunderbolts and Cape Killers after Anti Reg folks. I think Iron Man would rather bring his own friends in rather then the likes of Bullseye, Venom and Tommy Lee Jones in cornrows. He said as much in Mighty Avengers (which was fun read as well).

“I think Iron Man is justfied in what he’s doing because the government is sending the Thunderbolts and Cape Killers after Anti Reg folks.”
- Um, no. After Spider-Man defects to the Anti-Reg side, IM personally dispatches the Thunderbolts to bring him.

“I think Iron Man would rather bring his own friends in rather then the likes of Bullseye, Venom and Tommy Lee Jones in cornrows.”
- Which doesn’t change the fact that he brings his friends in to apprehend his (former) friends and has used guile and treachery on numerous occasions to do so, as to the point where he desecrates the memory of a man he once deemed more important than himself in order to imprison/killanother bunch of friends. At this point, he might as well be called “Irredeemable Iron Man”.

To be fair he sent the lame Thunderbolts after Spider-man. Jack O Lantern and Jester. No Venom or Bullseye. Either way it’s better Tony Stark giving the Thunderbolts orders then Tommy Lee Cornrows.

And Iron Man acknowledges the fake Cap corpse was low but he felt it was the only way necessary.

Either way Iron Man will probably redeem himself next year when his movie comes out. And after the Hulk kicks his ass.

Dick or not I digging Tony’s portrayal in the Avengers.

Wow, Joe, our assessments of 300 are practically identical! I enjoyed it (mostly) while I was watching it — I saw it on an IMAX screen, after all — but the more I thought about it that night in the hours afterward, and then the next day, the less I liked it. Once freed from the immediate spectacle (those ginormous IMAX screens practically pummel the audience into awe), I reconnected with the small part of my brain that was crying out against it, even as it unfolded. With that clearer perspective, my review of the film became a combination of “meh” and active dislike. A very frat-house movie, indeed.

I will point out that unless you’re at least 44 years old, that “fake person” has been around longer than you have.

Seriously, I’m not nearly as bugged by it as I sound (although yes, it does depress and irritate me that bad writing has sucked the enjoyment out of the character and the series); I just always sound like I’m more ticked off than I really am. (Ironically, when I’m actually very very very angry, I tend towards icy politeness. When I describe myself as “a trifle put out”, it usually means I’m ready to kill someone.)

Nah, Mark; the way comics work, you can commit pretty much any atrocities you like and still be redeemable. Look at Hal Jordan. As long as you don’t beat your wife, you’re fine.

“As long as you don’t beat your wife, you’re fine.”

Kinda like politics?

I’m not really angry at any fake people; as I’ve argued at tedious length in other comment sections here, I just think the basic notion of inserting superheroes into political reality in so literal a fashion is faintly absurd.

Watchmen got by because, despite what we’d like to think, it winds up being fairly irreal in its plotting and quite abstracted from a realistic political world in terms of most of its main characters’ attitudes. And despite the misguided claims of a few, Frank Miller’s never been a realist, but an expressionist. (He seems to have gotten confused about that in recent years, of course.

But Bendis and Millar actually seem to think that you can make superheroes “realistic” by demanding that the characters are suddenly placed in a quasi-realistic — albeit reductive and rather adolescent — version of the “real world” of regulations and brutal violence.

And honestly, as a project, it doesn’t work all that well, because whatever analogies or direct comments are supposed to be getting through get derailed by the inherent difference from reality inherent in the very idea of people in costumes with superpowers and (basically) archetypal personalities.

That said, I’m curious as to whether Bendis’s usual dialogue style has been noticeably changed up in the newer work he’s doing at Marvel; I’d grown pretty weary of his dialogue tics in the past (i.e., sentence fragments and repetition to convey banter, pauses and “hiccuping” word balloons to convey professional or “serious” conversation, and an excess of expletive construction — that is, it is, you are, he is, we are — even in otherwise informal sentences).

I’ve never understood the need for “realism” in superhero stories. I thought the whole point of the exercise, the FUN involved, was that it’s NOT realistic.

I think a lot of people are mistaking ‘realism’ for plausibility. The best stories set in a fantastic milieu aren’t especially realistic — but they are PLAUSIBLE. They have internal logic. They set up rigorous standards of what will and won’t be allowed and stick to them.

The trouble with this new fixation on ‘realism’ and inserting real-world politics into superheroics is that the story instantly stops being plausible. My gut reaction to Civil War was that A) the government wouldn’t sanction ANY costumed superpeople, ever, and B) No masked superhero would go for the registration idea in the first place. When you try to insert realism into a superhero story you instantly trip over the problem of your audience CONTINUING to extrapolate even after you need them to stop. You don’t get to say, “Come with me this far, but then please stop thinking about it.” It’s a very binary sort of thing. Either you are going to ruthlessly extrapolate the concept out to the end, or you mustn’t open the door at all.

Superhero stories have always depended on the audience NOT extrapolating its concepts into a real-world context. When you do that, it collapses almost instantly — remember Larry Niven’s “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex.” The writers that invite us to imagine superheroes operating in a real-world setting are really kind of asking for trouble, and they have to be near-geniuses to work themselves out of it. There aren’t very many genius writers working in comics these days and I don’t think any of them had anything to do with Civil War.

“I will point out that unless you’re at least 44 years old, that “fake person” has been around longer than you have.”

Technically? Sure. Practically? No.

The character of Tony Stark has gone through enough total revamps over the years that you can’t really count them all as the continual existence of the character. I mean, is the current incarnation of Tony Stark anything like he was in his first, say, five issues?

I guess I’ve also always found Iron Man to be the boringest of the early Marvel characters. I don’t feel violated when he’s in a dumb story.

Omar - I read an issue of Peter David’s ‘Spider-Man’ shortly before “Civil War” where he and Iron Man have a conversation about evolution vs. creationism. It was a decently written convo, maybe a bit simplistic for two high-level geniuses who should understand evolution better … but then I realized that, as I understand the Marvel Universe, creationism is actually true. There is evolution of a sort, but it is — or at least for a long time was — specifically guided by more powerful entities. Hell, the universe itself is an entity. So, essentially, two of the smartest guys in the Marvel U, guys who have seen the creatures who shaped our evolution, are apparently in denial and believe creationism is crazy and unscientific within their world.

That was when I realized something more or less along the lines of what you just wrote. Real world issues simply don’t translate to comic books directly, they can really only work in less direct ways.

Good reviews. I applaud your willingness to sacrifice bogus “indie points” for honesty. I’ve been hot and cold on the whole Civil War business, sometimes completely hating it and sometimes finding myself really into it. For the record, you should check out Mighty Avengers if you haven’t yet. It features the legal, pro-reg superheroes forming a brand-new Avengers team and I think it’s the type of comic you’d like.

Also, very honest and frank (no pun intended) appraisal of 300. Most critics agree it’s interesting visually, but at it’s core, is completely bone-headed. Directors should be as concerned with the script as they are with propping actors in front of lime-green backdrops and animating digital bloodshed.

Good job this week.

“As for the advancing of film technology, I suppose one day a real artist will make a movie with this method and create and unbelievable spectacle that will be a defining point of a generation.”

I thought that when I saw ‘Sky Captain’ but, unfortunately, it seems as if we’re going in the wrong direction.

I randomly caught a piece of a making-of Sin City, and Alba is there saying “Yeah, it’s really freeing, because you can just worry about acting and not have to worry about all the stuff around you.” Yeah, I’m sure being surrounded by green walls with nobody in the room really gets you in-the-moment and ready to play a stripper.

Apodaca said:

“The character of Tony Stark has gone through enough total revamps over the years that you can’t really count them all as the continual existence of the character. I mean, is the current incarnation of Tony Stark anything like he was in his first, say, five issues?”

Oh, sure, and you haven’t changed since you were five months old?

“I randomly caught a piece of a making-of Sin City, and Alba is there saying “Yeah, it’s really freeing, because you can just worry about acting and not have to worry about all the stuff around you.” Yeah, I’m sure being surrounded by green walls with nobody in the room really gets you in-the-moment and ready to play a stripper. ”

I used to totally think this, too, but a good actor doesn’t need a lot of props or realistic backgrounds. Good actors can act on the stage. The preparation should be internal. It might be harder for some, yeah, but it IS their craft.