A few weeks ago She-Hulk made headlines for all of the wrong reasons. David Goyer, writer of the upcoming movie Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, made some truly indefensible and ignorant comments about her on the Scriptnotes podcast. He glibly insulted her by reducing her entire character down to a sex object for the Hulk in much less polite language than I’ll use here (for more details you can read this article on IGN). ...
We are used to comics containing metaphorical representations of puberty. With the X-Men it is no coincidence that the mutant powers kick in when the characters reach puberty. There’s no better metaphor for the inexplicable changes the body partakes during puberty than to suddenly start shooting lasers out of your eyes. Let’s not forget Rogue’s power. Her near killing of a boy when acting on the urges that come from puberty is the perfect metaphor for promiscuity. Elsewhere in the Marvel Universe, we have Spider-Man. He is doing stuff in his room that he doesn’t want his Aunt May to discover. And, I think it’s pretty obvious what Spidey’s webbing is a metaphor for. With Matt Fraction’s Sex Criminals the puberty metaphor is completely stripped away although new metaphors about sex come to the fore.
I couldn’t attend Baltimore Comic-Con last year because of family commitments, but I did attend in 2012 and had a blast. If you’re in the region, I highly recommend attending. As you’ll see below, you get the same top talent as you would at New York or California Comic-Con, but it’s WAY less crowded. Also, the focus at Baltimore Comic-Con is on comics. I still would like to attend both California and NY Comic-Con one day, but it’s pretty awesome not to have to battle for space with people who don’t care for comics. This year Baltimore Comic-Con has expanded to three days and takes place over the weekend of September 5-7, 2014! Who will be there?
If you’re into digital comics and you’re on a budget, I’ve got two great pieces of news for you. The first is that comixology is doing a Summer Reading List giveaway. Each day, they’re giving away a different comic, completely free. Each free deal is only good for a day, so you do have to log in each day to get your freebie, but they have an email list that’s free to join for daily reminders. So far, they’ve given away Detective Comics #871, which is the first issue in The Black Mirror, my very favorite Batman story of all time; Magnus: Robot Fighter #1: Digital Exclusive Edition, which is the first issue of the relaunch of Magnus: Robot Fighter from earlier this year; My Little Pony: Pony Tales Vol. 1, which collects the first six issues of the My Little Pony comics for over 150 pages of Ponies; and Lumberjanes #1, which I’ve already spoken about at length and highly recommend to everyone who hasn’t yet picked it up.
Time once again for a roundup of upcoming Images series so we can find out how Image Comics will get all our money. Wayward The subject-line for the press release for Wayward claimed, “The perfect new series for wayward Buffy fans.” I’m currently working my way through Buffy Season 9 (article forthcoming), but after the insanity of Season 8 (which did have lots of high points), there are many Buffy fans that have become disillusioned. My wife is one of these - she loved the TV show and gave Season 8 a chance, but refuses to read Season 9 after what happened last time. The fact that Buffy was on UPN/WB/The CW kept me from watching it at the time. However, I did really enjoy it on DVD, so I’m excited to see another story in the same vein. I’m not really familiar with the output of the creatives, but I definitely want to give it a chance, especially since it mentions Japanese mythological monsters. My time with manga as well as some recent Japanese sci-fi short stories has left me wanting to explore that part of Japanese culture a bit more.
X-Men: Days of Future Past opened in theaters across America this weekend. The movie is a strong installment in the X-Men franchise and manages to fix some of the continuity errors and poor decisions from past movies that have frustrated fans of the series. There are a lot of good things about the movie and it is very entertaining; however the decision to retell the comic story Days of Future Past in the movieverse that FOX has established led to some questionable changes.
Saga resumes today and, combined with the Humble Bundle sale which included Volumes 1 and 2, I think it’s as good a point as any to examine what Brian K Vaughan is saying with Saga as it moves into its next phase in which our narrator is a toddler. After all, Y: The Last Man, Vaughan’s previous original story, is no more about a world in which one man is left alive than The Walking Dead is about zombies. In fact, I’m behind on The Walking Dead, but at the point at which I’ve stopped, no one knows why it happened and Kirkman seems in no rush to tell us, if at all. Similarly, Y: The Last Man left the reason behind the deaths up to the reader.
It’s the middle of May, which means that the TV schedules for fall have been released. There are seven – count them, SEVEN – live action comics-inspired television shows set to air on cable networks this fall, and I, for one, couldn’t be more excited. It’s no surprise to anyone at this point that ABC’s hit Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was renewed; its numbers have been solid, even if the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier did leave a lot of people wondering what, exactly, that show was going to be about. As it turns out, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. dealt with the fallout in a way that will make for an action-packed second season – and, by the end of the season, had redeemed itself somewhat in my eyes from some of the mistakes it made earlier on.
A groundswell for Nikola Tesla has been building over the last couple of decades. I’d been hugely into science and technology, but other than seeing the Tesla Coil in Command and Conquer: Red Alert, I hadn’t heard much about the scientist. I didn’t know his lab was the basic for the Universal horror films Frankenstein laboratory which has come to be the default lab for any mad scientist. The first time he was brought to my attention was when I was doing my undergrad degree and one of my TAs went on a nearly hour-long rant on how Tesla was a genius who was robbed by Edison. Then he had a small, but key role in the film The Prestige. A year or so ago, The Oatmeal raised money to fund a Tesla museum. It was kicked off by this comic. Why all the fascination with Tesla? The stuff he was doing and trying to do includes both what was science fiction at the time (radio, RADAR, etc) and is still science fiction today (teleportation, free energy, etc). It is the the combination of the two that makes him ripe for use in science fiction dramas and thrillers.
Spider-Man is without a doubt the most popular and enduring character at Marvel Comics. Each month his title whether it is Amazing or Superior is the top selling title from the publisher. The creation of Peter Parker in 1962 by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko was a revolutionary moment in comic history ushering in the era of everyman heroes and opening the superhero genre up to teenagers who were more than just sidekicks. In 2012 Spider-Man celebrated his fiftieth anniversary and that year also saw the 700th issue of Amazing Spider-Man. Both were major mile stones and Marvel celebrated them by having Otto Octavius (Doctor Octupus or Doc Ock for short), one of Spider-Man’s greatest foes, switch minds with him and then promptly killed off the body that Peter Parker was in. They ended the publication of Amazing Spider-Man and started a new title as a part of the Marvel Now initiative called Superior Spider-Man which followed Otto’s attempts to prove himself a better hero and a superior version of Spider-Man than Peter had been. Fans were understandably upset.