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Post by jessebaker on Feb 27, 2009 21:01:02 GMT -8
pacioccosmind.blogspot.com/2009/02/obey-your-master.htmlLook, it's as simple as this: If you supported the Superhuman Registration Act and the Initiative when Tony Stark was running things, you should be supporting Norman Osborn without hesitation. In point of fact, you should be CHEERING HIM ON. Why, you may ask? Well, has the Registration Act itself changed? No. Has the need for superhumans to be registered and overseen by the law changed? No. So, for those of you who supported the Registration, well, nothing's changed. Except the guy on top. Well, let's compare, shall we? "Norman Osborn is brining unrepentant criminals into the Initiative! He's going to be in charge of an army of supervillains!" As opposed to Tony Stark, who was the one who actually brought unrepentant criminals such as Bullseye, Taskmaster, Venom, and Norman Osborn into the mix to begin with. Please try again. Norman Osborn made a secret pact with a group of powerful criminals! Right. And Tony and his group of super-secret friends who killed a bunch of Skrulls and kidnapped and shot the Hulk into space are not at all the same kind of thing. Except it is. Norman Osborn has an agenda and bends and distorts the rules for his own ends! And so did Tony every time he didn't go after the New Avengers. Or Spider-Man. Or Daredevil. If Tony can make exceptions, so can Norman. The Initiative is corrupt and will fail because of Norman Osborn! It'd be pretty damn hard for the Initiative to fail any more than it already has. OK, well, fine, you say. But it doesn't change the fact that Tony is a decent man, and Norman a corrupt one. Well, as far as that is concerned, I'll let Nighthawk speak for me. (POST NOTE: You need to go to the link to see the speech in question) Do you understand now? If all it took was one man to turn the Initiative from a "good idea" to a "bad idea", then IT WAS ALWAYS A BAD IDEA. This was the reason commonly brought against Doom and Magneto: sure they could make Earth a paradise; as long as they were alive. After them, it would all fall apart. So making the Initiative and the SHRA dependent on any one man, no matter how noble, meant that it was fatally flawed from its very inception. And Bonus for Kirk: Kirk, come and watch BittercupoJoe squirm  The funny thing about the whole Norman vs Tony thing is that Norman hasn't even DONE anything majorly bad yet with the Initiative resources. Granted this is partly because Tony stole the registration master list, but also because it seems Norman, in his infinite wisdom of wanting to create his own power base (hence HAMMER and Dark Avengers) loyal to him, seems dead set on destroying the "already horribly crippled by the Secret Invasion" Inititative. It makes me wonder, in a way, how much longer the "Avengers: Initiative" book will last without a renaming/relaunch, seeing as the 50 State Initiative has been gutted to it's core. |
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Post by jessebaker on Feb 27, 2009 21:39:18 GMT -8
Hell, this point was made -- unintentionally, I think -- by the very brain trust who came up with the Initiative. Millar, Bendis and Jenkins, at various points, indicated that the crux of Tony's Super Seekrit Plan was that all the Big Future Thinker types felt this was absolutely inevitable, and the only way to control the monster to come was to actually push it through themselves and make sure one of their own -- Tony -- was at the top. And with Tony in charge, nothing could go wrong! And like Doom and Magneto, none of them really thought through the consequences of "What happens when and if Tony is inevitably cut out of the loop?" And this my friend, is why I think Fantastic Four, should be featuring Reed utterly suicidal and trying to kill himself with such seriousness, that Sue has to put Reed in a stasis tube to stop her husband's groutesquely macabre attempts to take his own life, brought about by Reed realized that he fucked up and fucked up BIG TIME with his fancy pants "I can predict the future" shit, as far as not realizing what would happen if justice ever caught up with Tony and kicked him out of power/put someone WORSE in charge of the Initiative. |
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Post by jensaltmann on Feb 28, 2009 0:07:23 GMT -8
Hell, this point was made -- unintentionally, I think -- by the very brain trust who came up with the Initiative. Millar, Bendis and Jenkins, at various points, indicated that the crux of Tony's Super Seekrit Plan was that all the Big Future Thinker types felt this was absolutely inevitable, and the only way to control the monster to come was to actually push it through themselves and make sure one of their own -- Tony -- was at the top. And with Tony in charge, nothing could go wrong! And like Doom and Magneto, none of them really thought through the consequences of "What happens when and if Tony is inevitably cut out of the loop?" And this my friend, is why I think Fantastic Four, should be featuring Reed utterly suicidal and trying to kill himself with such seriousness, that Sue has to put Reed in a stasis tube to stop her husband's groutesquely macabre attempts to take his own life, brought about by Reed realized that he fucked up and fucked up BIG TIME with his fancy pants "I can predict the future" shit, as far as not realizing what would happen if justice ever caught up with Tony and kicked him out of power/put someone WORSE in charge of the Initiative. From the solicitations, that is almost exactly the plot of Dark Reign: Fantastic Four. |
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Post by michaelpaciocco on Dec 14, 2009 10:10:01 GMT -8
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Post by michaelpaciocco on Dec 31, 2009 6:25:56 GMT -8
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Post by Mario Di Giacomo on Dec 31, 2009 10:16:53 GMT -8
You missed the obvious reason:  |
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Post by michaelpaciocco on Dec 31, 2009 10:22:23 GMT -8
might make sense in the larger scale, but in the comics themselves? With like, 3 regular series and one-shots and minis? Yeah, I don't buy that as the reason.
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Post by Mario Di Giacomo on Dec 31, 2009 10:31:35 GMT -8
I'm not saying that's why folks are buying all these DP books. But I'm betting that's why Marvel greenlighted them.
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Post by michaelpaciocco on Dec 31, 2009 10:33:49 GMT -8
hmm...ok, that's a fair point.
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Post by michaelpaciocco on Feb 5, 2010 15:32:55 GMT -8
pacioccosmind.blogspot.com/2010/02/warning-commentary.htmlQUESTION: Do I really think things are really going to change with the newly announced more "optimistic and bright" directions from Marvel and DC given all the creators are still the same? ANSWER: No, but it doesn't matter because it's going to change anyway, for reasons I'm about to explain. Now, on the simply practical matter I don't think some of the writers currently employed by the Big Two Corporate Comic franchises have any other setting than grim and gritty. I'm hard pressed to imagine Brian Bendis' new Avengers title is going to be any different from any of his other efforts. He's not going to turn into Kurt Busiek or anything. But that really does not make a lick of difference at this point because he, and most of the current Marvel regime, are hanging on to their jobs by a thread. Every morning Joe Quesada steps into the office is another day in the longest Marvel EIC run ever recorded. Remember when Kurt Busiek left the Avengers book because with Mark Millar's Ultimates coming out, he didn't want to be considered "the old guard"? Well, Bendis has now been with the Avengers franchise almost twice as long as Busiek. The current regime? THEY ARE THE OLD GUARD THAT THEY CAME IN TO REPLACE. It is inevitable. If you think differently, ask Tom DeFalco or John Byrne or...you get the idea. Now, how are they going to be replaced? A few possibilities exist. In a more traditional time, what would likely happen is new blood coming up through the ranks. You can almost see this happening right now with the Avengers relaunch coming right on the heels of the Marvel Adventures relaunches. Now, while there's likely no way that Marvel Adventures is going to outsell Avengers, not all things are equal. All Paul Tobin has to do is exceed the very low expectations of the MA sales base, and he can claim a big win, whereas Bendis has to maintain his high sales on the Avengers books to keep his reputation intact. Bendis has already had some serious sales troubles with big shake-ups and restarts with Ultimate Spider-Man, and there's every reason to believe that things might no go well for him. That's an example you can apply line-wide at both companies where a small increase at a book with no expectations can yield some high results. Another traditional alternative is that the higher end management of the corporate giants that control these companies simply start rotating in teams to manage their properties from other arms of their respective media empires. A sausage factory approach where the suits move the talent to whatever part of the company they think merits the attention. A method guaranteed to bring in a level of mediocrity and result in the adaptation of the old school "House Style" of comic creation, but not an impossible result. The final method is that of outside recruitment from independent outlets, comics and otherwise. In the last decade, this took the form of a lot of TV and movie writer talent migrating to comics for a quick stint before going back. However, given that the corporate demands will be higher in this new world, I suspect that another realm might be poached for its talent; the internet. Yes, I know this sounds like a bad joke, but hear me out. What a media outlet wants more than anything is new content generated for them to profit from, and that's something that can be found in spades in on the internet. Whether it is the webcomics which create new content and possesses a natural talent pool of creators who know not only some of the storytelling fundamentals, but are familiar with the challenges of getting an audience in a post-internet universe, to talented amateurs (paging Mr. Chris Bird, of course). I think we're going to see the internet open up as a new talent hunting ground in this decade, because it's necessary. See, here's the bigger thing: comic companies don't know what the hell kind of trouble their industry is really in. Go to a bookstore, and compare the manga shelves with the "graphic novels" section that has Marvel, DC, Dark Horse Image and etc etc. The Manga shelves are clean, uniform and easy to find things with. The Graphic novel sections is chaos incarnate where a non-fan would get lost without a roadmap. And let's not forget things like online shopping and marketing, where the comic companies are silent. It's an unexplored (and mature) frontier that comics are nearly entirely absent from, and if that doesn't change, it doesn't matter what stories are being produced because no one will be reading them.
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Post by jarddavis on Feb 16, 2010 17:52:33 GMT -8
Okay, so you asked how I felt about District 9. I've finally seen it.
a.) Yes. This is what I am talking about with Science Fiction. A genre that asks the hard questions and forces us to look at ourselves. The fact that this took place in Joburg and is based on Apartheid happenings in Cape Town is not lost in me as far as the Irony goes. The fact that I wound up completely unsympathetic to the plight of Winkus was good film making. I wanted him to atone and suffer, and felt that the movie accomplished that.
b.) Much better than a lot of movies in the last few years, it's still a depressing movie. However, the Twilight Zone and Alien Nation influences are waaay too strong sometimes.
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Post by michaelpaciocco on Feb 17, 2010 17:17:28 GMT -8
One could do much worse than those two franchises for inspiration - but then again you could just accuse me of having set the bar low.
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Post by michaelpaciocco on Feb 20, 2010 14:29:16 GMT -8
in "The Boys", Garth Ennis portrayed the X-Men Analogues as a pedo ring. Which is par for the course for Garth Ennis because everything comes down to fucking with him. He's like a 15 year old boy who just found his dad's porno stash. However, there's a much more disturbing analogue for the X-Men IRL that would apply: pacioccosmind.blogspot.com/2010/02/x-men-child-soldiers.htmlThat is the question I put before you all today in this later than usual post. Now, yes, it is true that a lot of these critiques can be applied to any underage superhero (e.g. Robin) and yes, of course it's not an intentional thing on the part of the writers. It's also true that the teen/young sidekick hero has lasted since the Golden Age as a staple of the genre. Fine, so be it. I'm still taking a look at it and I'm curious what you think. First, how do we define a child soldier? It's a controversial subject with a fair degree of leeway, but to use a general description; -Under 18 -Organized into a military structure and heirarchy such that they are NEVER viewed as a superior to any adult. -Radicalized into a specific doctrine. Now, let's apply this to Xavier's original class, pictured below. While continuity nuts may haggle on this one, I'm going to discount Hank McCoy (Beast) from this list as while his age varies depending on the depiction, he's generally been portrayed as the eldest of the first class by some years, so saying he was likely 18 years of age is not much of a stretch. For the rest of the team, and particularly Cyclops, the definition applies. From other iterations, I would also include Kitty Pryde, Rogue, Jubilee and every single New Mutants/New X-Men/X-teens/Generation X member. Now, what makes the "child soldier" label stick to the X-Men in my mind is that of a specific ideological bent - that of mutant co-habitation, enforced by a group of militants (The X-Men). No matter the (real or imagined) nobility of Charles Xavier and his cause, he made a very dubious moral compromise when he recruits these teens - he is bringing them into a conflict that they are (from a legal standpoint) not capable of making an informed decision on. Consider this: in many of the recruitment stories of these individual young X-Men, from Cyclops and Iceman, to Rogue, to many of the individual New Mutants, they are recruited after an incident of anti-mutant paranoia or some other factional conflict. In effect, they are recruited at a moment of weakness and in a state of fear, trauma or shock. Rarely if ever is there an intelligent arguement made by another adult advocate for rejecting the option offered by Xavier or to act in any other way. If this were a government military doing this recruitment, there would be no question that a immoral act of coersion was being applied to a minor. While there is the minor caveat that many of the X-Men have the option of returning to normal lives, in reality after they have been identified with that faction they remain with it out of fear of reprisal from the group's many foes. What does this mean? Well, for one, it means that "The Ends Justify the Means" is a label that should rightfully be applied to Xavier as well as Magneto, and it makes the moral grounding of the X-Universe and the mutant struggle that much more murky. It also means that most of the X-Men, recruited when they were younger, could be considered the subject of brainwashing and would need to be subjected to intense therapy. I would think this would be the case with Scott Summers, after being recruited at age fifteen after a traumatic encounter with anti-mutant hysteria. He even took on Xavier as a surrogate father and completely adopted the ideology at the expense of any semblance of any other life, but that's completely understandable; he was never given another choice. |
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Post by Anders on Feb 20, 2010 14:34:17 GMT -8
You could also add that their parents are often misled into thinking they're just sending their kids to a special school.
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Post by michaelpaciocco on Feb 20, 2010 14:37:06 GMT -8
The ones that even have parents or guardians of any moral fibre - Marvel Universe.
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