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.

“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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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).

Kinda like politics?

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.)

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.

“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”.

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).

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.)