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Post by paulpogue on Sept 12, 2011 9:48:06 GMT -8
If Amy and Rory turn out to be the Weeping Angel Time Lords, it retroactively forgives EVERYTHING that was wrong about Rusty's run on Who.
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Post by paulpogue on Sept 12, 2011 3:38:35 GMT -8
Moffat's always played around with it a bit, but this week really drove home the whole "Man, the Doctor is a DICK" thing, didn't it?
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Post by paulpogue on Sept 3, 2011 8:49:00 GMT -8
I have to admit a certain amusement of the irony of the entire point of the big reboot getting itself shot in the kneecaps by the very worst of all the 1990s excesses.
Literally on Day One, no less.
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Post by paulpogue on Sept 1, 2011 14:43:06 GMT -8
I think the majority of BSG fans who would have otherwise argued with you have pretty much given up as of "Daybreak."
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Post by paulpogue on Aug 30, 2011 18:23:15 GMT -8
Much to my amusement, the jacket looks a lot like the one Matt was wearing during his public appearances last year, such as Glastonbury, where he seemed to be deliberately playing up "Doctor goes Punk" as his persona.
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Post by paulpogue on Aug 28, 2011 18:08:31 GMT -8
I stand corrected. Good answer .
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Post by paulpogue on Aug 28, 2011 18:07:48 GMT -8
I liked how Rory's really good lines were the understated ones. Especially "Shut up, Hitler!"
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Post by paulpogue on Aug 28, 2011 6:28:24 GMT -8
And yeah, it's always a tough spot handling the line between company and ethics. Although if the stuff Shooter says about the bigwigs stuffing their pockets as they sold the company, it puts them pretty heavily into asshole territory.
The summation though, is that it helps nobody to be in the big editor's chair. Aside from Stan himself, who's ever come out of that job in a good position? Shooter got EPICALLY screwed. DeFalco is largely treated as a joke, and Harras was a pariah for quite a while. And the long line of editors-in-chief between Stan and Jim -- Archie, Marv, Len, Roy -- all have a certain amount of respect in the industry, but even in the 1980s, I could feel a certain amount of "go away, old man, while the youngsters have their day" going on.
(On another note, it probably didn't help Shooter's early career being the tender young age of 13 and having all the responsibility he did, PLUS dealing with the likes of Mort Weisinger and Stan Lee, who were old-school publishing hardasses of the most intense sort. Even Stan, jovial and avuncular though he may be, is pretty free in admitting most of J. Jonah Jameson is based on himself.)
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Post by paulpogue on Aug 28, 2011 6:23:14 GMT -8
I asked the same thing over at the V and they pointed me to the Groth stuff, which is pretty fascinating. It gives a very good counterpoint, largely because Groth was such an in-the-know comics figure in the 1980s as well, and thus isn't entirely talking out his ass. Groth DOES have a pretty high BS factor at times, but a lot of what he says about Shooter is pretty well backed up by facts and/or witnesses, unlike much of what Byrne has to say. His account of the 1985/1986 convention appearances, in which he claims Shooter is crediting other people with saying what Shooter himself said, is pretty damning.
That said, Groth is entirely too proud of himself for hammering home certain points -- most notably, the fact Jack Kirby never sued Marvel. He goes on for ages about how this totally undercuts Jim's credibility because Jim was always talking about "the Kirby lawsuit." Shooter's defense against this on his blog is that it was commonly understood at Marvel that a suit was on the way, they got huge piles of paperwork from Kirby's lawyer, and that everyone around the office referred to it as "The Kirby lawsuit," so even if it wasn't on its way to court, it sure felt like that to them. Fair enough, I suppose.
Part of the problem between Groth and Shooter is that they have deep philosophical divides about settled issues in the comic book industry that informs every aspect of their interaction. One of the things that always hurts Shooter in the public is that he is, unambiguously and admittedly, The Company Man. He speaks for Marvel, and if Marvel does something shitty -- and a company the size of Marvel is ALWAYS doing something shitty -- he takes the hit and he's probably the one who actually executed it. One of Groth's issues, for instance, is the work-for-hire thing, and he extensively quotes Shooter's defense of work-for-hire and the fact that he considers Marvel Comics, not Chris Claremont, to be the author of X-Men, et cetera. Which is, whether anyone likes it or not, THE ENTIRE ACCEPTED DEFINITION THROUGHOUT THE INDUSTRY. Claremont doesn't own X-Men, Miller doesn't own Daredevil, and nothing Gary Groth ever says (or Jim Shooter ever does) is ever going to change that fact. The editors hold all the cards. Any time a creator seems to be getting away with murder (See also: Bendis, Brian M. and Millar, Mark), it's because the editors above them are deliberately giving them that free reign.
Hell, Groth goes on and on about how Shooter invented the crossover and that alone makes him the devil. So in a way I think the feud between them is really Groth's anger at everything wrong with the superhero comics world and Jim Shooter sort of personifies it for him.
Groth is slightly undercut by all the accounts of people he says hate Shooter's guts, whereas Shooter is posting copies of personal correspondence that says otherwise.
I blame Shooter's unpopularity on three things: 1. Company Man. Nobody likes The Man. (Hell, Shooter gives a long account of how he had to untangle the mess created by the production manager who was routinely issuing paychecks for work that wasn't yet done, with the promise of it being done eventually. If I were the one benefitting from that setup, I'd be pissed too.) 2. Shooter's incredibly poor understanding of personal interaction. Priest nails that one perfectly. 3. Torpedoing the writer/editor system. The late 1970s at Marvel were a time of absolute creative chaos because everyone was doing their own thing and blowing deadlines left and right. And Shooter's right when he says the comics were disasters. (Seriously, how many true classics came out of Marvel in the five or six years before Shooter took over? There were a few outliers -- Warlock, Howard the Duck -- but those were created by certified comics geniuses.) But the people actually in those writer/editor positions were in a really, really plumb spot. Shutting it down did wonders for Marvel, but the people who were benefiting from it probably felt so personally screwed that they'd hold a grudge for decades.
Usually I come down on the "misunderstood hero" side of the Shooter debate. Because when all is said and done, just look at the output. The Shooter years are among the greatest era of any comics company, ever, and probably the greatest creative output Marvel did outside of Stan/Jack/Steve/Wally's first few years. Somebody did SOMETHING right.
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Post by paulpogue on Aug 27, 2011 15:41:05 GMT -8
Looking for a devil's advocate, folks:
Can anyone point me to a reasonably coherent and reasonably current statement, essay or interview from someone who was actually there at the time that out-and-out paints Jim Shooter as a villain? Because I've noticed something interesting: nearly everything I've read in the last few years about Shooter talks about how unpopular he is, but rarely, anymore, does anyone ever say why. The interviews usually say something about "once the most hated man in comics," but it's been a long time since I've seen an interview with a professional from that era who actually gives solid, hard evidence of Jim Shooter's alleged dickishness.
Which, to me, points to the conclusion that Shooter's accounts of events in his blog is usually reasonably close to the facts -- that he can't really be held responsible for a lot of bad shit that was going on before he was boss, like the Kirby thing or the royalties. Shooter frequently owns up to the fact that "I was the face of the corporation and had to be the good company man, so I willingly took the hit for whatever was coming down from above." Which is as close to an admission of assholedom as you'll get, but also explains a lot. Christopher Priest once theorized that Shooter was an extremely intelligent, borderline autistic who was almost incapable of explaining what he was doing to the people who worked for him, which also makes a lot of sense.
The few people who still outwardly criticize him are pretty flawed sources. Tom Brevoort makes a snarky comment every so often about how Shooter isn't always telling the truth, but Brevoort A: wasn't there, B: has a full-of-shit content higher than Russell T. Davies talking about the next season of Doctor Who and C: isn't exactly forthcoming in his own right, just infers that he knows more. John Byrne, who WAS there, often has Shooter Asshole stories, but they're usually pretty petty things, like the time Shooter griped about how nobody could draw the Hulk punching right and Byrne threw one of his own covers in his face or something like that. Or how Byrne feels Shooter takes way too much credit for convincing the higher-ups to allow royalties, and how the higher-ups in question are apparently hurt that they don't get the credit. Not exactly damning stuff.
About the only thing I've ever seen where Shooter legitimately comes off looking poorly is his testimony against Grant Morrison in the Flex Mentallo/Atlas lawsuit, and to be honest, while I disagree with Shooter's viewpoint, he takes a legitimate position and mounts a reasonable defense of it (i.e., even I would have a hard time claiming Flex Mentallo was parody, simply based on how absolutely seriously Grant takes the whole thing in the book.) So I don't really put that one in the "Jim Shooter Asshole" column.
Thoughts?
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Post by paulpogue on Aug 27, 2011 6:32:46 GMT -8
At least that has continuity basis! Makes more sense than packaging a Howard toy with the Silver Surfer .
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Post by paulpogue on Aug 25, 2011 20:22:12 GMT -8
And yet Jim Shooter is still out in the wasteland. No fucking justice in the world sometimes.
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Post by paulpogue on Aug 24, 2011 18:21:11 GMT -8
The biggest difference here is that while there's a lot to criticize about Rusty's reign on Who, the opening season was a fucking masterclass in how to revive an old property and ease in all the old stuff. Hell, for most of the first series I almost believed Rusty's line about how he was putting even the Daleks out to pasture and starting fresh.
The Time War itself -- which put longtime fans and newcomers on an equal footing as far as having no idea what had just happened -- was a stroke of brilliance. Everyone watching Who assumed there was a bunch of backstory they wouldn't understand, and the hilarious thing was, only the longtime nerds were the ones annoyed by it because they weren't in on it.
Another big difference: The new team on Who was, in fact, a new team. DC has next to no creative changeover from the old to the new crews, just some shuffling, and doing it in such a way that the continuity is even MORE of a mess. Seriously, I have a Ph.D in nerdology and I can't tell you what the hell is going on with this or why Blackest Night still counts but Doomsday doesn't.
DC's reboot is basically the Doctor Who equivalent of giving John Nathan Turner the keys to the 2005 series, and him only taking on the condition that he's totally allowed to keep "Dimensions in Time" in continuity. And also some episodes would follow the Cartmel continuity and others would not.
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Post by paulpogue on Aug 23, 2011 17:50:16 GMT -8
In the recent Jenn and the Holograms crossover, the Doctor was 6. I just wanted to repeat this for posterity, as it is one of the five or ten greatest sentences in the history of K-Box, if not the entire WEF Diaspora.
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Post by paulpogue on Aug 17, 2011 14:06:14 GMT -8
Peter David did a really good take on this in his run on "Dreadstar," when Vanth Dreadstar and company help an ousted ruler retake his throne and promptly learn that the original ruler is a gigantic dickhead. Because said ruler is quite genre savvy, his first act is to order Dreadstar executed, under the logic "You are a revolutionary, Dreadstar, and your lot is always to be dissatisfied with the status quo and desire change. Thus you must die."
Of course, Vanth eventually trashes the guy and wipes out his regime, but it's the thought that counts.
Christopher Priest edged into this territory in "Black Panther," when Killmonger correctly accused T'Challa of slaughtering countless innocent children just to keep his throne when he crashed the world's economy.
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