|
Phenotype posted:You're gonna have to help me here, because again, I've barely read anything Marvel in the last ten years -- what have Reed, Tony, and Strange hosed up recently? I know Tony is an rear end in a top hat, but what else has he done besides build Ultron? Reed Richards hasn't really hosed up much on his own lately outside of stranding his family in the Negative Zone for a while and deciding it was the best to not tell them that their bodies were beginning to fall apart. That in turn gave us the sickest Human Torch burn ever, but that's another story. Tony Stark did a lot of shady poo poo during Civil War and its aftermath that blew up in his face. Stuff like: - Building a cyborg clone of Thor that ended up killing Goliath. - Forcing Norman Osborn to kill a dude against his will. - Creating a prison in the Negative Zone, which caused Annihilus to go on a big cosmic rampage. - Dropping the ball on helping out the Sentry. - Making it really easy for the Skrull invasion to happen because they were able to mess with his tech, which was EVERYWHERE. - Basically being to blame for Osborn becoming the head of SHIELD (rebranded as HAMMER) Also, building Ultron was just in the movie. Hank Pym did it in the comics. Dr. Strange recently sold his soul (or what was left of it) to demons for extra power. Beast played around with time travel to bring the original teen lineup of the X-Men into the present as a Hail Mary to make current Cyclops a better person because Beast was dying at the time and might as well play Russian roulette with the time-space continuum. As the Illuminati, the team didn't fare much better. Stuff they've done: - Pissed off the Skrulls enough for them to plan a bigger, badder invasion down the line. - Sent Hulk into space to get rid of him, which went very badly. - Decided to take responsibility for the Infinity Gems, which ended up falling into the hands of a supervillain anyway.
|
#
?
Dec 3, 2015 17:47
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 24, 2024 07:12 |
|
|
Cap being pissed at the Illuminati stems farther back than just the incursions. The two posts above mine illustrate that. Claiming the Infinity Gems, pissing off the Hulk, opening doors for invasions, etc. The world-killing bomb making was just the last straw in a long line of "You people are supposed to be the best and brightest and are in fact the exact opposite."
|
|
#
?
Dec 3, 2015 18:01
|
|
|
Monaghan posted:I find it suprising that everyone's calling the illuminati murders, when when push came to shove, only namor actually blew up a planet. The whole point was that most of the group couldn't bring themselves to do it. This is a very important point. Also, the incursions were explicitly happening outside of the timelines of each individual universe, that is to say that Doom's time traveling was necessary for him to gather information and start the incursions but didn't actually buy him any real time towards stopping the Molecule Men from exploding. If the Illuminati hadn't been blowing up worlds, Doom wouldn't have been able to engineer his Black Swans/Battleworld solution and the Beyonders would have destroyed everything, not just most things. We are shown that the Illuminati was willing to lay down and die rather than destroy another world, until the Cabal picked up the world-killing business. If the Cabal hadn't been killing worlds, then the life-raft would never have gotten built and presumably 616 and the rest of the multiverse never gets restarted because no one is there to defeat God Doom.
|
|
#
?
Dec 3, 2015 18:04
|
|
|
So my bugbear here, and it isn't one specific story. Captain Marvel (aka Shazam) is a fairly straightforward concept. Young Billy Batson is gifted with incredible powers and the ability to transform into an adult superhero known as Captain Marvel. The original Whiz Comics version of the character was sort of a split personality. Billy WAS and WASN'T Captain Marvel. They shared personality traits, thoughts and ideas but also viewed each other as different people. It was a very lighthearted sort of thing and it's understandable comics needed to address it. Modern comics danced between two ideas: 1) Billy Batson is the only one. When he transforms into Captain Marvel he gains the Wisdom of Solomon which tempers and alters his ideas and thoughts but that is fundamentally balanced by his childlike optimism and hope. 2) Billy Batson and Captain Marvel are different but Captain Marvel is tempered and aided by Billy and Billy is the fundamentally important part of the character. Regardless of the idea, the core concept here is that Billy Batson's youth and the idealism that comes from that youth is a central part of the character. Billy is defined as having a hard life. Prior to becoming Captain Marvel he was literally a hobo and prior to that he was raised by a cruel uncle who kicked him out onto the street after abusing him. Later versions of the character played with this but only slightly. (Billy's parents were murdered by the evil Black Adam and so-on.) A central core idea of this is that Billy has seen terrible things but retained his optimism and hope. It is a central important part of the character that he is fundamentally a Good Kid. Not a perfect kid, not a flawless kid, but a good kid whose ideals are based around that. He wants to help people, he wants to make things better, he wants to learn and he prefers to find solutions rather than just punch villains. Obviously there are stories that ignore this but these are not the ones I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is the New 52 Shazam. The New 52 Shazam is Captain Marvel as written by bitter adults. He is effectively the opposite of the usual Marvel. He's got the power but is written as a little poo poo. Not even a believable little poo poo but the kind of little poo poo you get when 40 year old people start talking about how kids these days only care about their X-Boxes and their Facebooks. Rather than trying to update how childlike optimism might play in the 2000s they just decided that modern kids are all self-absorbed shits. There's faint wavings at giving him a character arc where he learns but even this misses a fundamental part of what makes Captain Marvel work. He is Optimism. He is literally a child granted the powers of a superhero and wanting to do good with them. Even back in the 1940s this was a central conflict where he would be given godlike power and have to learn the proper way to use that power. There would be a conflict between what seems right and what is right. Captain Marvel would argue that they should fix downtrodden neighborhoods rather than punching villains, Billy Batson would learn that looking evil doesn't mean you ARE evil, and so-on. Sometimes it could be simplistic in the way that comics are but often times the mix of a kid in a godlike body meant the focus was on problems that couldn't just be resolved by hitting them because they know Marvel can do that. Captain Marvel shouldn't be about how kids these days need to grow the gently caress up and stop caring about their X-Boxes so much, it should be about the childlike optimism to change the world for the better and how that can balance with real-world challenges.
|
|
#
?
Dec 3, 2015 22:48
|
|
|
I think it's less malicious than you're implying, and more that they want to show a bit of nuance where he's not just Superman In A White Cape, but actually reads like a kid in a grown man's body. Basically the Tom Hanks in Big/Jennifer Garner in that other movie thing. Now that may come off annoying or selfish or undercut the heroic part of the character, but I don't think it's meant to shake a fist at "those drat kids" anymore than Kamala Khan being into Tumblr, fanfic and MMOs is. If you're writing young people, you, weirdly, have to write them as interested in stuff young people like and acting like young people do, which includes making dumb decisions because they think they know best (and maybe sometimes, you can have them be right about this)
|
|
#
?
Dec 3, 2015 23:31
|
|
|
Gaz-L posted:I don't think it's meant to shake a fist at "those drat kids" anymore than Kamala Khan being into Tumblr, fanfic and MMOs is. It absolutely is. The major difference is that Kamala is celebratory. She is dorky and cheerful and her interests are shown as positive or neutral. Modern Shazam is shown abusing his powers for money or caring more about his X-Box than anything. Billy isn't shown as being interested in kid things. (Which is what other versions of Marvel are.) He is shown as being That drat Kid. And 'making dumb decisions because that is what kids do" is again, not the same thing. Billy has always done that. That is a central part of the character and why Wisdom of Solomon is an important part of his powers because it can temper him being a dumb kid. The new stuff is in a very different tone from the older Marvel stuff I enjoyed or stuff like Ms. Marvel. Edit: Like, Billy doesn't have to be "Holy Moley, I need to get to the sock hop and do my homework" and that would ring pretty hollow too unless you were doing an intentional throwback. Shazam and the Monster Society of Evil or even the recent Shazam Convergence issues show how to do versions of the character that are more modern without being full Nu52. ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 23:57 on Dec 3, 2015 |
|
#
?
Dec 3, 2015 23:53
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 24, 2024 07:12 |
|
|
Gaz-L posted:I think it's less malicious than you're implying, and more that they want to show a bit of nuance where he's not just Superman In A White Cape, but actually reads like a kid in a grown man's body. Basically the Tom Hanks in Big/Jennifer Garner in that other movie thing. Now that may come off annoying or selfish or undercut the heroic part of the character, but I don't think it's meant to shake a fist at "those drat kids" anymore than Kamala Khan being into Tumblr, fanfic and MMOs is. If you're writing young people, you, weirdly, have to write them as interested in stuff young people like and acting like young people do, which includes making dumb decisions because they think they know best (and maybe sometimes, you can have them be right about this) It's not impossible to write a modern kid as not an rear end in a top hat though, and Billy shouldn't be one. He can be a genuinely hopeful and optimistic kid and still be thoroughly modern and not "golly gee wilikers". All I know is that replace Geoff "Arms Are Best Not In Their Sockets" Johns' vision sucks. Has there been like a DC You Captain Marvel or something? ImpAtom posted:It absolutely is. Yeah.
|
|
#
?
Dec 3, 2015 23:54
|
|
