The 2010 KBox "12 Ideas" Revivalfest!

[Mario Di Giacomo]

That's fair, I guess. But Elizabeth is going to be pissed off at her father again.

[michaelpaciocco]

Sad to say, but if you look at it, very few of the Alphans are nice people when you get right down to it.

[michaelpaciocco]

How the fucking fuck did this happen?

Someone explain it to me: we live in the age of Enron, of Haliburton, KBR and every other energy company being a suit of armor away from becoming Lex Luthor, but Marvel, the oh-so "We have our fingers on the pulse of the people" company hasn't used Roxxon as an obvious surrogate for this sort of thing in YEARS? How is it that only Ed "Englehart remixed" Brubaker is going to deal with Roxxon in his Secret Avengers?

(Of course the answer is obvious: For all their swagger about being rebels, they aren't - they are a corporate entity that does not fight it's own kind, appearances to the contrary).

I mean, ok, Haliburton does it's share of skullduggery, but they aren't responsible for empowering half the fucking Serpent Society or creating the original Omega Flight or 1/100th of the things Roxxon has done. (Complete sidebar: Apparently the Asp was a stripper and Black Mamba was a call girl before a Roxxon exec gave them their powers - make of that what you will).

Now, here we stand: Roxxon is making their play, and of course, they want the Alberta Tar Sands. Well, at least that's the cover.

Remember what I said about the Master's technology? Yeah, that too. And they don't care if they have to hire an army of superhumans and mercenaries to get what they want. They've even got a plan in place to get Alberta to succeed from Canada using a couple shapeshifters who've replaced major political figures.

And of course, a little revenge against James Hudson for all the trouble he's caused them is just icing on the cake.

[jessebaker]

IIRC the only person to use Roxxon in the last 15-20 years is Warren Ellis. He had them in his first Thunderbolts arc, showing up and revealing that they were recruiting unregistered/fugitive super-heroes to work as high-paid bodyguards for rich people overseas. It was never followed up, so who knows if they were on the up and up or planning something nasty.

As for why they aren't being used, I blame the fact that Roxxon was WAY over-exposed in the 1970s and 80s, that you had an entire generation of writers essentially not touching the concept because they had been done to death as a go-to big bad.

(Also, Black Mamba was Sidewinder's lover and not just a hooker; though this was never followed up on by anyone).

[jessebaker]

Regarding Alpha Flight and Bendis killing them off, all you need to bring back are Puck and Heather Hudson, especially since Sasquatch was already upgraded to living (which IMHO would be the no-fuss way to do it, via the notion that they are simply in a hospital, waiting to wake up from their comas).

Shaman sucks and Talisman is way more interesting; ditto Heather over James, who's return circa #87-90 is pretty much the moment the franchise jumped the shark.

Just reunite the Mantlo era team (Heather, Madison, Puck, Northstar, Aurora, Purple Girl, and Sasquatch), since that was the era that Alpha Flight actually was GOOD to read. Byrne's run has it's moments but the writing was crap for the most part and hell, the book didn't find it's niche until he offed Guardian in the Omega Flight two-parter.

[K-Box]

Unfortunately, Jesse is absolutely right on ROXXON - during the Reagan '80s, Marvel and everyone else in the mainstream edia turned The Sinister Corporation into a fucking hackneyed cliche, and in the process, completely defanged any future political commentary on the subject, because while Reagan '80s corporations were very bad, the media portrayals of them made them so cartoonishly evil that even liberals were crying foul at the strawmen, and now that evil corporations really ARE even more one-dimensional than goddamn Captain Planet villains, the only way you could do an effective takedown of them in fiction would be to do a "South Park versus Scientology" parody, in which you exactly describe everything that various corporations have done, with a constant caption saying, "THIS IS WHAT EVIL CORPORATIONS IN REAL LIFE HAVE ACTUALLY DONE."

[michaelpaciocco]

1) On Black Mamba - yes I know she was Sidewinder's girlfriend. I was just observing something I just found out and finding it amusing.
2) On the Ressurrection - fuck it, I want all the toys in the toybox to play with, not just the ones "Bendis" will permit me. Fuck that in the face with a rusty chainsaw. And I even have an angle for Jimmy Hudson himself, or at least I like to think so....
3) On Roxxon - Kirk, Jesse, you are both missing the picture - Roxxon? They are the ultimate evil company - next to them, OCP and Weyland-Yutani? Fucking Amateurs. And let's not even get started on RDA, the villains of the super-hugest movie in history right now. Yeah, there's an audience for huge corporate takedowns, and adding supervillains to the mix won't hurt. AT ALL.

[paulpogue]

"Fucking amateurs."

[jessebaker]

And I even have an angle for Jimmy Hudson himself, or at least I like to think so....

The only angle worthwhile for James Hudson is to be ashes in an urn on the shelf above the fireplace, that Heather occassionally talks to when she has doubts about being a leader of Alpha Flight.

He's a horribly craptastic character and one of the few SMART things that Byrne ever did as a writer, was to kill him off and replace him with his much more interesting wife. Heather is a way better and more interesting leader and it's mind-boggling that everyone keeps trying to bring him back to life, since he adds NOTHING to the franchise and derails a character who IS interesting (his widow) whenever he is brought back.

[michaelpaciocco]

Agreed that Heather is more interesting than Jimmy. But wait until next month and you'll see what I've got planned for him - it's something that the groundwork was laid for way just before the axes fell.

[K-Box]

Michael - the problem is that there have been SO GODDAMNED MANY evil corporations in fiction by now that, even speaking as someone who hates evil corporations IN REAL LIFE and wishes there was more pop culture mainstream media criticism of them, even *I* roll my eyes at the thought of YET ANOTHER evil corporation in my stories, and the fact of the matter is, for those folks who neither know nor care anything about the Marvel Universe prior to 1990, Roxxon might as well be a BRAND-NEW evil corporation to them. Again, the ONLY way this is going to work is if you SELL the audience on it, and given the patently ludicrous extremes to which evil corporations have ALREADY been taken in popular entertainment, you really do need to make every single one of Roxxon's deeds EXPLICITLY REFERENCE an equally evil deed done by evil corporations in the real world, or else your audience, who has no sense of history, is going to dismiss Roxxon - one of the earlier entries in the evil corporation category - as merely being a LATECOMER IMITATOR. That's not fair, but that's how it is.

[jessebaker]

But wait until next month and you'll see what I've got planned for him - it's something that the groundwork was laid for way just before the axes fell.

You mean, putting Hudson in jail for stealing corporate secrets regarding his costume (something Byrne glossed over), with the added humiliation of Heather filing for divorce, because Madison Jeffries is now a bachelor again and she's way more into him than she is for her on-again, off-again husband?

Because again, Alpha Flight has and always WILL suck so long as James Hudson is alive and well. He's an albatross around the franchise's neck and NOTHING can make him interesting. NOTHING.

As for Roxxon, maybe the best thing to do with it is to DECONSTRUCT the evil corporation. The CEO and Board of Directors are killed and it's various buildings are destroyed (killing innocents) as all of the various evil secrets with regards to it's super-villain community start coming out into the light.

Given that the public doesn't know much about Roxxon being evil, you can make a story about how someone is trying to destroy the company and use it to do a mystery story about the company's past as the good guys try and figure out who's trying to wipe Roxxon off the map and why.

[Anders]

I think Jesse's on the right track, kind of - except I think you should deconstruct Roxxon (which is something I haven't heard of before now, but then I'm not broadly read on Marvel) in the literary sense, not the practical.

Realize that corporations in themselves aren't evil, but that a corporation can be a machinery for evil in that it makes otherwise decent people do horrible things. Yes, there will be bad people in it, but much more bad as in not wanting to risk their paycheck to protest the minor transgressions they have knowledge of rather than bad as in "Muahahahaha! I'm so eeevil!", which is what corporate people are often reduced to in fiction. Yes, there will be a callous bastard who okays dumping toxic waste in a river, but he doesn't do it because he's evil. He does it because he wants to keep his job and his boss is on him about costs for that new factory and he wants to get a bonus so he can make the mortgage on his new, expensive house because otherwise his trophy wife whom he actually cares deeply for might leave him (and god knows his kids aren't talking to him after the divorce) and making tough decisions is what he was hired for goddammit and that Johnson fellow is after his job, he just knows it, he can't lose his nerve now... and so on.

Even hiring supervillains or making experiments on humans shouldn't come up as some kind of evil scheme to rule ze vorld but a gradual introduction of something that's "one step ahead of our competitors" or just "letting the market do it's work". Sure, medical experiments in an effort to create superhumans that have a 50% mortality rate and which leaves most of the surviving test subjects crippled for life would be unethical if the subjects aren't willing, but when you're doing it in a country where you'll have people lining up around the block to take the chance that they (or a child they can't afford to feed) could become a superhero if you offer them $10,000? Even if you skew the numbers a little to make the odds seem better than they really are, and are secretly implanting small radio-controlled bombs in the backs of their heads ("We have to take reasonable precautions against the combination of an in essence successful procedure and a loss of stability on part of the test subject"), and so on and so forth, is that really evil? They signed the contract, didn't they?

Also, nobody in a corporation has the full picture. The CEO or board of directors don't know everything that's going on, and they certainly don't know the details of every little project. Do they know about the experiments to create superhumans? Certainly. Do they know what it costs? Probably, assuming the people further down in the organization aren't trying to obfuscate. Do they know the details on mortality rates? Probably not, because they're probably not asking for those figures and the information they get is filtered through layers and layers of corporate bureaucracy where everyone is trying to keep their job and the best way to fail at that is to make your own department look bad by reporting failures or making waves about something that everyone else just goes along with. Sure, you run the risk of whistle-blowers, which is why you go after anyone exposing sensitive information hard - not out of vindictiveness, but as sound practice. It's important that your employees act loyally towards the company, and the fear of being sued into oblivion is a powerful motivation to not be disloyal.

And remember that this is a company acting in a world where other corporations (Stark Industries, the Fantastic Four) are already associated with superhumans. Any large corporation that isn't trying to match that are just inviting disaster, and since the heroes aren't willing to take a paycheck...

Anyway, that's what I'd do: focus on the mechanics of corporate evil rather than putting evil people in a corporation.

[K-Box]

I think Anders is really on the right track here.

The MUNDANITY of corporate evil should be its most terrifying aspect.

[jessebaker]

Expanding on what Anders said, it would be interesting to see SOMEONE do a story where you have a corporation going after the Fantastic Four as the bad guy, under the established plot point that Reed is hording technology like an Ayn Rand-type "hero" from Atlas Shrugged, technology that could help mankind if Reed would get off his high horse and put it on the marketplace.

(One of the major dropped balls in the first Fantastic Four film was the notion of making Doctor Doom a populist-type scientist who's output was dismissively called "fast food" science as far as stuff that could be used in everyday life. It was an interesting way to juxtaposition Doom and Reed as far as Doom using his brain for the common man while Reed was obsessed with big picture science that had no everyday application)

Or even the notion of "let's give everyone super-powers!" as far as the notion that there was a market to make people into mutants or giving them super-powers. Or making super-soldiers since, you would think, that in the Marvel Universe that people would be obsessed with the notion of making super-powered Marines or Army guys to fight wars.