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Depends on what you think of whatever happened to The Russian I guess
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May 29, 2019 18:28
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to my knowledge, the answer is emphatically no
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May 29, 2019 18:34
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The sequence in The Boys I thought was semi-humane, which is atypical for The Boys. The trans people are prostitutes patronised by one of the depraved superheroes, but they are portrayed as like, vulnerable individuals doing a crummy job, and Butcher's bigotry towards them is called out by Hughie, the actual good person in the story. One of them gets murdered, but the rest of them are normal people with names and faces who come to the protagonists for help. To me it felt like Ennis clumsily trying to engage with trans people as human beings rather than as an exploitative joke, but of course, like you say, he was still putting them in the "tragic sex worker" niche, which is only a small step up from the "disgusting sex worker" cliche. To my knowledge, that's the extent of his development on trans representation from the much worse stuff in Punisher. A Walk Through Hell is his attempt to take a humane, serious look at modern social justice issues, I think, but trans people have been absent from that, for certain. It's a really fantastic book, though. I've enjoyed it so much that my estimation of Ennis has jumped tremendously. It's terrifying and dramatically interesting, but it also feels grounded and empathetic in a way that much of his other work tends to self-consciously skid away from whenever it gets too close.
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May 30, 2019 14:21
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Like, I believe in Shaw, McGregor and Driscoll as people pretty empathetically. They never feel like Ennis sells them out for a cheap joke or a moment of bathetic, violent catharsis, like he does with his characters in other books. The art helps. I'm absolutely in love with how Goran Sudzuka draws Shaw looking perennially angry at things.
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May 30, 2019 14:25
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Ennis is a boil on the rear end of comics.
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May 30, 2019 14:42
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Lurdiak posted:Ennis is a boil on the rear end of comics. Hitman is still good.
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May 30, 2019 16:38
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Android Blues posted:Like, I believe in Shaw, McGregor and Driscoll as people pretty empathetically. They never feel like Ennis sells them out for a cheap joke or a moment of bathetic, violent catharsis, like he does with his characters in other books. I agree, his work on the leads has been really great and their dynamic has been pretty atypical for him. It still has its moments of gratuitous excess but I think for the genre he's working in it's fine, this week's was the first time I was really like, ah, hmmm, this is Ennis.
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May 30, 2019 17:31
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Rhyno posted:Hitman is still good. Although even that had its rocky patches with stuff like Bueno Excellente. That said 'Who Dares Wins' and 'Tommy's Heroes' are amazing pieces of comic literature.
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May 30, 2019 17:42
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Archyduchess posted:I agree, his work on the leads has been really great and their dynamic has been pretty atypical for him. It still has its moments of gratuitous excess but I think for the genre he's working in it's fine, this week's was the first time I was really like, ah, hmmm, this is Ennis. i'm still of the mind that this started happening back in issue 7 or 8 or whatever where he dropped in a rant about identity politics and how awful it is that minority groups would dare criticize faux woke liberals
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May 30, 2019 17:47
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Dawgstar posted:Although even that had its rocky patches with stuff like Bueno Excellente. Yeah I gotta concede that Bueno is bad. But otherwise it's a fantastic cast and it's strong from beginning to end. It's my dream DCU animated series.
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May 30, 2019 17:50
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Rhyno posted:Yeah I gotta concede that Bueno is bad. But otherwise it's a fantastic cast and it's strong from beginning to end. It's my dream DCU animated series. And to say another nice thing about it, I tear up like clockwork at two points in it - that being the end of 'Old Dog' and 'Closing Time' respectively. (Admittedly when I re-read the series I gloss over 'Local Heroes' because Ennis and I have very different opinions of Green Lantern.)
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May 30, 2019 18:17
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Dawgstar posted:And to say another nice thing about it, I tear up like clockwork at two points in it - that being the end of 'Old Dog' and 'Closing Time' respectively. I find it very realistic that a bunch of drunk goons from the slums of a crime ridden city would have no time for super heroes. Plus the numerous callbacks are worth it. Wanna talk about a gutpunch? That last page of JLA/Hitman is rough as hell for me.
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May 30, 2019 18:33
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Archyduchess posted:I agree, his work on the leads has been really great and their dynamic has been pretty atypical for him. It still has its moments of gratuitous excess but I think for the genre he's working in it's fine, this week's was the first time I was really like, ah, hmmm, this is Ennis. Yeah. I think it's less pronounced than normal - like you say, the guy saying that is supposed to be a complete scumbag, it's not like The Boys where Butcher is ostensibly an amoral monster but the book still seems fond of how edgy and anti-heroic he is - but definitely a trace of it in how gratuitously horrible McGregor's past is. It's delivered with far more subtlety and grace than pretty much anything else I've ever read from him, though, and McGregor isn't a figure of fun but the reader's point of identification with the story. Makes a huge difference.
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May 30, 2019 18:57
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site posted:i'm still of the mind that this started happening back in issue 7 or 8 or whatever where he dropped in a rant about identity politics and how awful it is that minority groups would dare criticize faux woke liberals I could argue that the character delivering that monologue is supposed to be extremely damaged but tbh I wouldn't buy that excuse necessarily from someone else, he wrote it and he put it in the mouth of one of the book's primary viewpoint characters. So-- point taken, honestly I'd just forgotten about that scene when I was putting my thoughts together about the most recent issue. Android Blues posted:Yeah. I think it's less pronounced than normal - like you say, the guy saying that is supposed to be a complete scumbag, it's not like The Boys where Butcher is ostensibly an amoral monster but the book still seems fond of how edgy and anti-heroic he is - but definitely a trace of it in how gratuitously horrible McGregor's past is. I agree with your point about Butcher and I think it's endemic to a lot of his writing-- this romantic mystique of the "necessary monster" which is present in stuff as relatively nuanced as his Punisher to disposable schlock like Just a Pilgrim to the aforementioned The Boys which I guess I'd put somewhere in the middle. I think this recurring motif or obsession with these grotesque figures of masculine violence who still act as the narratively and almost eroticized center of gravity for a book is separate, I think, from his other big problem of very broad, very strident humor about ghoulish poo poo that isn't funny (Bueno, as mentioned, or the gratuitous and rather shockingly out of place rape gags in Hitman/JLA) but both are fundamentally issues about where he draws the perimeters of masculinity and, in a pretty blunt sense, what he thinks Men Should Do and what they shouldn't do. To be clear this is also the root of much of his best writing-- a lot of his war stuff, or, to go back to Hitman, his consistently excellent and moving portrayal of Superman. I think it's clear that he's thought very deeply about masculinity, maybe more than anyone else currently working in comics. It's just that his conclusions differ wildly from mine, and, increasingly, from any sort of sane mainstream consensus. I mean this is to say nothing of his often outrageously lovely handling of race, but still, I think where he's the most embarrassing or appalling in that regard is where race and masculinity intersect.
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May 30, 2019 19:35
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site posted:i'm still of the mind that this started happening back in issue 7 or 8 or whatever where he dropped in a rant about identity politics and how awful it is that minority groups would dare criticize faux woke liberals I feel like given that's coming from Shaw and aimed at McGregor (from what I remember?), it's not really the book taking a position so much as the two lead characters having political friction. McGregor is empathetic, smart and sweet, while Shaw is bitter, smart and jaded. She isn't necessarily in the right, and her position maybe comes from a relatable place of having been a woman coming up in the FBI in an era when talking about institutional sexism got you silently blacklisted. We see many times that McGregor's sensitivity is a strength - and in fact Shaw's hard-tack grittiness, while it makes her unflappable, also leads to her playing right into Carnahan's hands after the investigation hits a wall. Like, I don't feel that the book encourages you to cheer for Shaw when she complains about identity politics, or feel like McGregor got dunked on. I do feel that a lot of Ennis' modern work, even his more ridiculous stuff, is trying to mediate this sort of struggle between wanting to be a good person vs. his conflicted idealisation of tough, no-nonsense, straight-talking masculine hyperviolence. Definitely seems to be something he's talking his way through in his comics. Archyduchess posted:I agree with your point about Butcher and I think it's endemic to a lot of his writing-- this romantic mystique of the "necessary monster" which is present in stuff as relatively nuanced as his Punisher to disposable schlock like Just a Pilgrim to the aforementioned The Boys which I guess I'd put somewhere in the middle. Funnily enough, I feel like he avoids this most often when he replaces that (astutely noted) "masculine centre of gravity" figure with a woman. He manages the whole gritty no-nonsense shtick, but doesn't seem as enthralled with making his tough female leads egregiously horrible people and/or narratively magnetic presences. You can see this in Crossed, Code Pru, and most successfully in A Walk Through Hell - where Shaw has many hallmarks of the "tough, jaded Ennis protagonist", but isn't spectacularised or idealised in the same way. Instead, she's given texture, flaws and uncertainties. What this indicates about the gender politics of Ennis' work is dubious - maybe just a gut feeling on his part that it isn't as funny or interesting to have a female lead who's a cocksure, amoral murderer, which raises several questions as to why and what that means about gender in his writing - but I do think the results tend to be better.
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May 30, 2019 20:15
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no i didnt mean that as in the book has a position, but that monologue was ennis directly speaking to his critics who call him out on the digusting poo poo he puts in pretty much all his books, when he considers himself to be of the "correct politics". "how can all these minority groups criticize my work, can't you see im on your side??"
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May 30, 2019 20:26
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Rhyno posted:I find it very realistic that a bunch of drunk goons from the slums of a crime ridden city would have no time for super heroes. Plus the numerous callbacks are worth it. The problem is Ennis didn't write Kyle anything close to his actual personality and is on record as saying the Green Lantern in general is a stupid idea so it read entirely as 'lol dumb' and took away from the story.
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May 30, 2019 21:57
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Archyduchess posted:
Not exactly the same but when the Doom Patrol TV series did Danny the Street they dropped the whole transvestite thing and instead say Danny is genderqueer and prefers the use of "They/Them" as pronouns.
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May 30, 2019 22:48
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I'm reading Uncanny X-Force. During the Captain Britain Corps arc Psylocke says "Once upon a time Brian caved in a man's skull for attacking me. He's in no position to judge you." Is that reference to a specific story?
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Jun 5, 2019 06:27
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Fritzler posted:I'm reading Uncanny X-Force. During the Captain Britain Corps arc Psylocke says "Once upon a time Brian caved in a man's skull for attacking me. He's in no position to judge you." Is that reference to a specific story? Yeah, that’s Slaymaster. It’s a story from pre-Excalibur Marvel UK Captain Britain stuff. Brian has left behind being Captain Britain and Betsy took it up in his absence. She encountered Slaymaster, who gouged out her eyes. Brian comes back in a rage and smashes Slaymaster’s head with a big rock.
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Jun 5, 2019 06:41
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Benito Cereno posted:Yeah, that’s Slaymaster. It’s a story from pre-Excalibur Marvel UK Captain Britain stuff. Brian has left behind being Captain Britain and Betsy took it up in his absence. She encountered Slaymaster, who gouged out her eyes. Brian comes back in a rage and smashes Slaymaster’s head with a big rock.
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Jun 5, 2019 07:21
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I would loving hate to have any major aspect of my backstory tied to a guy named Slaymaster
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Jun 5, 2019 08:23
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Lunatic Sledge posted:I would loving hate to have any major aspect of my backstory tied to a guy named Slaymaster What about a Santa-based character named Sleighmaster?
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Jun 5, 2019 11:16
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Gavok posted:What about a Santa-based character named Sleighmaster? I dunno if he wants to gently caress with Goldberg, man
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Jun 5, 2019 13:48
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Android Blues posted:The sequence in The Boys I thought was semi-humane, which is atypical for The Boys. The trans people are prostitutes patronised by one of the depraved superheroes, but they are portrayed as like, vulnerable individuals doing a crummy job, and Butcher's bigotry towards them is called out by Hughie, the actual good person in the story. One of them gets murdered, but the rest of them are normal people with names and faces who come to the protagonists for help. To me it felt like Ennis clumsily trying to engage with trans people as human beings rather than as an exploitative joke, but of course, like you say, he was still putting them in the "tragic sex worker" niche, which is only a small step up from the "disgusting sex worker" cliche. To my knowledge, that's the extent of his development on trans representation from the much worse stuff in Punisher. One of Hughies friends when he visited home was a trans woman that, as far as I recall, wasn’t a sex worker
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Jun 6, 2019 17:09
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Sir DonkeyPunch posted:One of Hughies friends when he visited home was a trans woman that, as far as I recall, wasn’t a sex worker Do you have an issue number or rough spread for that, I'd like to have a look at it. I disliked a lot of The Boys but I thought a lot of the writing for Hughie was great, and seemed to evince a weariness and almost, like, a pity for the Ennis formula that wasn't as apparent in the rest of the book, which was often a pretty heightened execution of that formula.
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Jun 6, 2019 17:41
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I think that was in the Highland Laddie miniseries, around the third act of the overall series.
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Jun 6, 2019 17:58
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Archyduchess posted:Do you have an issue number or rough spread for that, I'd like to have a look at it. Its funny, i remember feeling like ennis himself hardly liked hughie at all throughout much of the book This does remind me though, of how i felt that even though a few members were definitely being exploited for cheap laughs as usual, the only people ennis seemed to treat with any amount of respect were the group of disabled heroes and their caretaker, which was something i had not expected from him
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Jun 6, 2019 18:05
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Sir DonkeyPunch posted:One of Hughies friends when he visited home was a trans woman that, as far as I recall, wasn’t a sex worker Oh, I forgot about that. Pretty sure she was in the tasteless gag vein, though. Like, the joke was that she was super blokey and macho and has facial hair, right? For my money that's way worse than the trans sex workers in the main book, who are pretty much depicted as normal people that the entire cast except for Hughie is bigoted towards.
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Jun 6, 2019 18:05
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Archyduchess posted:Do you have an issue number or rough spread for that, I'd like to have a look at it. lifg posted:I think that was in the Highland Laddie miniseries, around the third act of the overall series. Yeah, Highland Laddie miniseries I would not describe this individual as sensitively written, so please don’t take my reference as a endorsement
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Jun 6, 2019 18:05
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Android Blues posted:Oh, I forgot about that. Pretty sure she was in the tasteless gag vein, though. Like, the joke was that she was super blokey and macho and has facial hair, right? For my money that's way worse than the trans sex workers in the main book, who are pretty much depicted as normal people that the entire cast except for Hughie is bigoted towards. Yeah, I dug Highland Laddie out and it's a mixed bag, largely typical and disappointing. Bobby refers to herself as a woman, describes herself as a lesbian, wears wigs and dresses, but is consistently referred to by other characters with male pronouns, male terms of description, and one use of "trannie" from Hughie. You get the usual jokes centered on a hyper-fixation on trans genitals, including a bit in the climax where she gets her penis cut off with hedge trimmers but doesn't mind (also a scene that drastically misunderstands the mechanics of bottom surgery, but surely I couldn't expect Ennis to do his homework here). A lot of the onus here, I think, is on John McCrea. I don't know Ennis' scripting process and for sure little in the scripting leads me to believe Bobby is meant to "pass," but McCrea really leans into the broad, farcical stereotypes. Bobby is huge and muscular, with tons of chest hair, hirsute arms, and thick stubble. Her dresses are loud and drawn as much too small for her frame, underlining the sense of her cramming herself into a farcically unsuitable role. Her makeup is colored in as bold, clumsy splotches, in stark contrast with the other female characters in the story, such as Annie, whose makeup as it were is comic book typical, that is to say, not even on the artists' mind. As a rule of thumb I've found that if a male artist takes the trouble to depict makeup its to point it up as ostentatious, clumsy, or "whorish." It's not, in a sense, all bad. Bobby is loyal, insightful, and kind, one of the characters definitively on Hughies' side throughout the story. Her transition could in fact be read as an early marker of the realization that Hughie eventually comes to in the last few scenes-- that even though his hometown seems to be frozen in time, people change, people move on and grow, with or without him. This is cold comfort though, because it still leaves Bobby as a prop, subject to the common trick of making "sympathetic" characters supernaturally sanguine and chill, so that as readers we're spared their indignation and anger at being made into punchlines. Bobby never corrects characters who misgender her, even blithely waves away being viciously beaten and attacked with giant hedge clippers. She's a sailboat on still waters because if she wouldn't we would recognize Ennis' treatment of her as monstrous. The activist Julie Serrano talks about two types of trans femininity that show up most often in mass media-- trans women that are predatory deceivers, who pass as cis and then spring the unwelcome secret on unsuspecting straight men, and clownish, harmless failures, eccentric and sad men parading around in kitschy dresses. Bobby is a classic example of the latter. Ennis permits her to be positioned as likeable, that is to say, harmless, because we are never invited to take her femininity seriously. He expects us to take her as Hughie and the rest of his friends take her-- as an oddball man in a dress, a joke who the protagonists are polite enough to not laugh at (at least, until she's out of earshot). Is there worse stuff in Ennis' ouevre? Of course. There's much worse stuff in The Boys even, to the extent that the rather quotidian offenses of his writing here seem, at first blush, almost progressive. She didn't rape anybody! There were barely any cheap jokes about her dick! But I think that accepting that as "good enough" is a disservice, and it is worth dwelling on how Ennis' writing of Bobby is at once a failure to humanize what could have been one of the most vividly human characters in the story, as well as a failure of his imagination in falling into well-worn and pernicious narrative traps. Which is disappointing because in other ways Highland Laddie plays up the very best qualities of The Boys, namely, Hughie and his ambivalence towards the typical Ennis protagonist. The scene where he apologizes for holding Annie's previous sex-life against her, but is unable to get over it entirely, is sort of impressive for acknowledging the deeply caustic masculinity that Hughie has been immersed in, as well as his inability to shirk it off at will. And Annie's monologue towards the end, about how wishing to emulate guys like Butcher is dangerous and pointless, is one of the book's best points, one which unfortunately is undercut numerous times throughout the series. It is, at the very least, Ennis grappling with the limits of the hard-man masculinity he made his trademark for so long, and finding blindspots in that could and should be filled with tenderness, empathy, and love. If only he'd extended that empathy a bit further to his trans characters.
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Jun 6, 2019 19:03
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When did Star Boy of the Legion start being pictured with mental illness?
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Jun 17, 2019 03:52
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Beerdeer posted:When did Star Boy of the Legion start being pictured with mental illness? I think that was when Geoff Johns pulled him into the present day to show up in his JSA run.
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Jun 17, 2019 04:34
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:I think that was when Geoff Johns pulled him into the present day to show up in his JSA run. He might have popped up a few times before the book launched. There were a bunch of Legionnaires on a mission in the past at the time and I think Thom was one of them.
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Jun 17, 2019 04:38
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Rhyno posted:He might have popped up a few times before the book launched. There were a bunch of Legionnaires on a mission in the past at the time and I think Thom was one of them. Yeah, but I think that was the first time we'd seen Thom ill, as it had been handwaved that the rest of the Legionaires had returned to the future (I think? I could be wrong about that) and Thom had spent a few years institutionalized, which is how Johns got away with calling him Starman and putting him in the Kingdom Come Starman costume.
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Jun 17, 2019 05:11
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I was reading old Legion comics last night and he'd had the costume since the 70s. I didn't know if the schizophrenia was a new thing though. I should read more Legion. With 50 years of story, what do I need to read to understand it?
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Jun 17, 2019 14:38
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Beerdeer posted:I should read more Legion. With 50 years of story, what do I need to read to understand it? Just start with Mark Waid's run. It was designed explicitly as a way to get people onto Legion without having to worry about the decades of cruft. If you like that, then you can start poking around Legion history.
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Jun 17, 2019 16:15
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Random Stranger posted:Just start with Mark Waid's run. It was designed explicitly as a way to get people onto Legion without having to worry about the decades of cruft. If you like that, then you can start poking around Legion history. Post Zero Hour boot is better.
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Jun 17, 2019 16:48
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This will probably be based on taste but which of the big two put out the better stuff in the 90s?
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Jun 17, 2019 18:39
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bessantj posted:This will probably be based on taste but which of the big two put out the better stuff in the 90s? The 90's are a long time and the pendulum swung a few times. I think I'd go DC overall, mostly due to being a bit better off during the dire years, but if someone said they felt Marvel did better over the course of the decade I wouldn't argue too hard. Basically, DC kept chugging along albeit with the same chasing the speculators trap everyone fell into while Marvel started strong, went full corporate train wreck, and then was rebuilding at the end of the decade.
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Jun 17, 2019 19:08
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