Wednesdaybusiness: 1/30/13

So I've decided to start doing proper comic book reviews on this thing, instead of just ranting about stuff that happened years ago. Keeping shit CURRENT, y'all. So here's what I grabbed to read today.

(I should warn you guys: I don't give one single fuck about spoilers. I'll try not to do it, but if you feel cheated, just deal with it.)

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Superior Spider-Man #2 by Dan Slott and Ryan Stegman

 

(TW)

I went into this book with some expectations, as you can probably tell from my last few Spider-Man Rants. It's a book that I really, really wanted to like, but I found some aspects of the book a little... date-rapey. And then when they previewed the cover for Issue #2 I panicked a little. After my last rant, I received this comment...

...which threw me a little, as either one of my favorite Marvel writers has found my blog after only like four posts, or I've encountered the most polite troll ever. Either way, I was hoping that Issue #2 would indeed resolve things. And... I guess it did?

First, let me focus on some good things. Slott's writing is as sharp as ever; I still feel like he really gets what makes Spider-Man fun and interesting, he has a solid grasp on how to work a large supporting cast without making the main characters seem sidelined, and he can juggle both serious and silly topics in one book... All the things that made me initially fall in love with his She-Hulk run are still there, and I'm very glad for that.

Ryan Stegman is an artist that I'm honestly not very familiar with at all, but he's doing a very competent job on this book so far. His art is just cartoony enough to make me wish Humberto Ramos was still drawing Spider-Man, but Stegman seems like a good fit for this book.

One way in which Slott and Stegman are working very well together is in their depiction of a young hipster Doctor Octopus; whether he's fiddling with his iPad in a coffee shop, or cackling madly while building an army of spider robots, he's just oozing character. A gross, slimy character... but a mostly-fun one as well.

However, the slimier aspects of the character are what got under my skin last time, and I ought to spend some time on that. This entire issue is devoted to Otto/Peter trying everything short of Rohypnol to try and trick Mary Jane into having sex with him. His failure to seal the deal is described as "infuriating," in all caps and with an exclamation point. The above comment from [Dan Slott/Somebody Posing As Dan Slott] is only correct in the loosest of terms: Otto Octavius has not been turned into a rapist, technically, but it's not for a lack of trying. He's wearing his brand-new Spidey suit and trying to repeatedly to get MJ to fuck him through a series of "date experiments", while the real Peter Parker - appearing as a blue Obi-Wanesque spectre - looks on in absolute horror. So basically it comes down to a conflict between intent and action: Do you consider a failed rapist to still be a rapist? Because I do.

HOWEVER. Things do turn around at the end of the book. Just as Otto-Spidey is finally about to get to First Base with Mary Jane, he is hit with a wave of Peter Parker's memories and feelings, and decides to finally back off. A large part of this book is based on the fact that Peter Parker's overwhelming qualities of goodness and responsibility are winning out against Doc Ock's inclinations towards evil and mayhem, so this was actually a really welcome moment for me. Otto's turning against his own rapey ways isn't entirely his own doing; It's sort of like in Groundhog Day, where it took Bill Murray's character literally thousands of years to finally realize that tricking and/or forcing himself on women would never make him actually feel happiness (Jellybean Bonanza still wants me to write a full article about Phil Connors, the repentant date-rapist, which I may just go ahead and do. I wonder how much people are gonna' rage at me for taking a shot at Groundhog Day? Lulz!). But at any rate, it leads to Spidey fully breaking things off with Mary Jane, thus burying this icky consent issue and seemingly leaving the doors open for me to start fully enjoying this comic... so well-played, Mr. Slott. I sort of wish this hadn't even come up at all, and I still feel like Doctor Octopus was distinctly sleazed up in these past two issues, but having Peter Parker inside his head telling him what's right seems to have cleaned up this particular mess in a clear enough way.

So with all that being said, I'm quite looking forward to Issue #3. When this book is fun, it's REALLY fun; and with the queasy-making stuff settled for the moment, I suspect the book will soon be taking a turn for the awesome. Because at the end of the day, this is a really novel take on the old supervillain mind-switch, and there's a lot to be mined there, and Slott's got the talent to pull it off.

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Hawkeye #7 by Matt Fraction, Steve Lieber, and Jesse Hamm

 

I am a really bighuge fan of this book, everybody. If you haven't started reading it, you need to get off your asses.

The whole series so far can be summed up in one sentence: "It ain't easy being Hawkeye."

This issue is based around Hurricane Sandy, and the pretty intense toll it took on New York and New Jersey. Fraction did a really fantastic job of avoiding the sort of heavy-handedness that could have accompanied a story like this, and he instead opted to follow his two Hawkeyes as they attempt to go about their goofy lives during the disaster. Clint Barton is trying to help one of his neighbors - who calls him "Hawkguy", which I don't think I'll ever stop finding hilarious - secure the house of his elderly father. Kate Bishop is off attending a high-society gala in New Jersey (an idea that Fraction succeeds in making fun of in just the right amounts), but of course she quickly ends up having to steal an usher's shoes so she can go fight off looters and retrieve a vague life-saving medicine for somebody's mom.


With this issue being a sort of one-off, it may be a good place to hop on the train if you haven't been keeping up. It maintains the status quo of Clint being a lovable schlub of an ex-carnie who never seems totally comfortable telling people he's one of Earth's Mightiest Heroes™, and his plucky young ward being actually quite a bit smarter and savvier than he is. I liked Kate Bishop alright in Young Avengers, but I absolutely LOVE her in this comic. Her constant mocking of Clint's trick-arrows, and the way he occasionally gets to teach her their value ("BOOMERANG. ARROW."), is one of my favorite things in the series. It's a great book, both in writing and visuals, and I definitely recommend it... if you think you can handle a superhero comic where there are occasionally no superheroics.

And I damn near choked up when Clint's car got washed away. Dude loved that car. Poor, poor Hawkeye. At least he still has Lucky the Dog, who is legit one of my favorite characters of Marvel NOW!

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Avengers #4 by Jonathan Hickman and Adam Kubert

 

Hickman is treating the Avengers the same way he treated the Fantastic Four: as a good place to explore all sorts of Big Ideas. His writing always gives the impression that he's got everything planned out for the next ten years, and given how well that played out in FF, I hope Marvel actually lets him stretch his legs and run with the Avengers.

The first three issues revolved around massive cosmic craziness, along with a team-recruitment montage. I'm sure other people have written more extensive reviews, but essentially some cosmic bigwigs started creating life on Mars, the Avengers bulked their ranks up to a few dozen heroes (including Cannonball and Sunspot, which I think is great, because it furthers the newfound blending of Avengers and X-Men while shedding light on a couple characters I've always had a soft spot for), and then Thor and Captain Universe clunked everybody's heads together and things were okay again.

Issue #4 is working with the premise that a few godly super-science MacGuffins landed on the Earth, and the Avengers are trying to gather them up before they inevitably fall into the wrong hands. However, one them landed on A.I.M. Island (which I feel like they created just for me), and a bunch of mad scientists in beekeeper costumes (with a slick new design!) are already splicing and injecting things to see what'll cook up the best M.O.D.O.K.

The issue also took some time to focus on one of the new Avengers recruits, Hyperion. I think Hyperion is a very interesting choice for a mainstream Avengers book, as he is basically Tortured Superman. But not in a crappy and annoying way like The Sentry was, because he really ought to have just stuck to miniseries and flashback stories. Throwing characters like Hyperion onto the team definitely implies that there is going to be some BIG stuff happening... Hickman's not the kind of writer who'd waste a character like that on bank robberies.

I feel like this series hasn't built up to full speed yet, but once it does, it very well may be amazing.

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Journey Into Mystery #648 by Kathryn Immonen and Valerio Schiti

 

I actually don't have a whole lot to say about this comic, except that I fucking love the shit out of it.

Kathryn Immonen. Sif learning the way of the Berserker. Oldschool Marvel Monsters. SHANK!

OMG

You guys, I'm going to be posting a lot of reviews and stuff really soon, but I just quickly want to let you know something:

 

I am extremely disappointed that none of my friends let me know this was happening. And written by Kathryn Immonen, no less. I know a lot of y'all don't approve of my tastes in comics but... I am practically vibrating with excitement over this thing, you guys.

I just felt I needed to post this image (lovingly stolen from Stuart Immonen's Tumblr) so that we could all bask in the glory of Kung-Fu Doop.

GET BASKING!

Why "Brand New Day" Was Great, Part Two: Things Were Great For A Few Years...

Check out Part One HERE.

H'okay. So I really was planning on writing a very long follow-up article here. I'd already broken down why I felt that Spider-Man had been completely whizzed as a character and was in major need of the full reboot he received. I'd established exactly where Spidey and I had been standing, and it was NOT the solid ground he and I had enjoyed for most of my life. I'd even made a header image for this that I thought looked pretty cool. And then... I got distracted. Marvel Comics launched its Marvel NOW! initiative and suddenly I had a ton of things I wanted to read, a ton of things to catch up on, and... Spider-Man wasn't on that list, because REASONS. Which I'll get to in a bit.

So anyway, the story of Spider-Man: One More Day, in brief: Aunt May is dying, and Spider-Man wants to stop it. He goes to everyone he knows for help - from the superscience of Reed Richards and Iron Man to the supersorcery of Doctor Strange and Doctor Doom. Everyone basically tells him to go fuck himself. So finally he runs into Mephisto (Marvel's sort-of Satan. The actual Satan shows up in some comics nowadays too, which makes the whole thing a bit more confusing.). Mephisto is all like "Yeah, bro, I can heal a gunshot wound. This is COMICS, my man!" But deals with devils have their price, and Mephisto demands that Peter give up his marriage. Then there's a lot of talking because J. Michael Straczynski is kind of a boring writer, and Peter & MJ decide that Aunt May's important enough for them to make the sacrifice.

Now, I'm not going to front like this was a good comic. I can't stand the shit JMS writes, and Joe Quesada's art is like getting smacked in the forehead with the entire concept of the 1990s. But the key objection a lot of critics had to this whole thing seemed to be that they should have handled divorce in a mature fashion... and this shit was never about divorce. This was about magically making Spider-Man act like Spider-Man again. So Mephisto lays down his demonic whammy and hey presto, we're on to Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

Here's where I need to get really real for a second: I am SO SICK of fighting about this comic with people who are totally misinformed about this comic. I wrote this in my last article...

This argument, and literally dozens of previous arguments, was with somebody who claimed to have stopped reading Marvel Comics altogether because of the release of Spider-Man: Brand New Day in 2008, despite never having actually READ Spider-Man: Brand New Day and having many of the details wrong; whether that's by ignorance, misinformation, or stubbornness is hard to say.

 ...and it remains totally true. This is based on purely anecdotal evidence; but from where I'm standing there are literally thousands of comic fans who have spent the last five years incessantly hating on Marvel Comics for reasons that aren't even accurate. They think Spider-Man got de-aged, or that Mephisto owns his soul now, or that MJ got killed off, or all sorts of other weird things.

So here's the extent of Mephisto's meddling in the life of Peter Parker, in order of importance:

1. Spider-Man's powers are back to normal. Does whatever a spider can... Is he strong? Listen bub, he's got radioactive blood! Et cetera. He's also back on his wrist-mounted web-shooters instead of just excreting goo on folks.
2. Peter Parker's secret identity is secret again. There's some fiddly magic stuff in that deal, but to the general populace, Peter Parker is just a regular dude.
3. Aunt May's fine (as well she should be; that was the whole thing after all). She's actually a bit more active than in the past, as she's volunteering at a local homeless shelter instead of just sitting around in her little house in Queens cooking dinners that nobody eats.
4. Peter and Mary Jane dated seriously for years and lived together for a while, but ended up splitting. The comics weren't totally clear on the when or the why, but it seemed recent enough to still hurt.
5. Harry Osborn is alive again; he'd just been in Europe for a while going to rehab.

That's it. That's all. The only other key difference is that the story starts with Peter jobless, but considering that he'd been a fugitive for like a year, that wasn't really a change to the status quo. Pete quickly is able to get his job back at The Daily Bugle, and restores his supporting cast. And that leads into a major pet peeve of mine:

I've had multiple people say to me that it is a step backward for the character to return to the Daily Bugle. That as a highschool teacher he had achieved a Real Job™ and it was indicative of some kind of character growth. Now, as I said in Part One of this thing, I didn't think it was any sort of character growth: The teacher thing was just an excuse for one of the heavy-handed school shooting stories that were popular in all forms of media at the time. But I've legit heard people claim that being a freelance photographer for a major New York City newspaper is a "kid job"... and I fucking call bullshit. That is some seriously difficult, grown-up business. If anything, it was unrealistic to have him doing that for work when he was still a teenager.

So okay, everything got all fixed up for Spidey. A team of writers set about crafting new stories for him, introducing new supporting cast, new villains, and new situations. The writing was light and fun, the art was colorful, and there was a pervasive sense of experimentation throughout BND. After the initial push, the writing staff was whittled down to just Dan Slott, and he continued apace, writing years worth of really fun Spidey comics. They were nostalgic yet original, palatable to kids and adults, brought back old characters in new interesting ways, and they were able to be funny without becoming a joke. They slowly brought MJ back due to fan demand, but in an organic way, over time. Years of really fun stories, folks. Spider Island? Everyone in Manhattan getting superpowers because of genetically-engineered bedbugs? That shit is fucking golden, and if you don't think so you are both wrong and an idiot.

However, I'm actually having a hard time singing all these praises now that Dan Slott has fallen off the truck. In the past few months, Peter Parker died, Doctor Octopus transferred his mind into Spider-Man's body, and is currently trying his damnedest to fuck Mary Jane in the pages of his new book, The Superior Spider-Man.

I don't really care that they killed Peter Parker's brain off. That's comic-book shit, and Slott's already dropping hints that OMG PETER'S STILL IN THERE FIGHTING! And I don't give a shit that they're changing the status quo, because that's the sort of thing that sells comics. I am fine with almost everything about the comic.

But turning Doctor Octopus into a rapist is Not Okay.

I hate the trend of the last decade to have supervillains committing rape (and I am repulsed when the creators and fans come out with all the fucking "No, see, it wasn't RAPE-rape!" bullshit, too). I am a dude who happens to like supervillains, and I really don't like seeing them taken to that level.

Because you know what? Not every criminal is willing to commit rape. You know what else? Plenty of "good" people TOTALLY ARE willing to commit rape.

It just sucks all the fun out of what could be a potentially entertaining story. The idea of Doctor Octopus in Spider-Man's body is great. Seeing him square off against a new Sinister Six and getting to be the hero for once could be a really fun angle for me... but it's colored by the fact that every five pages or so there's a shot of Peter/Ock staring down Mary Jane's shirt, or referring to her as one of the "perks" of his "new life", or just straight-up trying to force himself on her.

I doubt Dan Slott will ever read this, but because he's a writer I have/had a lot of respect for, I'm going to address this directly to him anyway: Homie, I don't want to have to throw down a Trigger Warning on my blog before I talk about Spider-Man comics.

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So now I guess I'll just have to get by on Stan Lee's newspaper Spider-Man comics... And Newspaper Spider-Man is the absolute worst superhero of all time.

Gail Simone Got Fired from DC via E-Mail.

So Gail Simone got fired from writing Batgirl, via an email. DC Comics is just such a clusterfuck right now. All of the other writers - the Bat-writers especially - seem pretty pissed. I wonder when the entire company will just be Dan DiDio, Geoff Johns, and Jim Lee jerking eachother off.

I know I've groused about the silly costumes and whatnot in the Nü52, but shit like this is the REAL reason you're not gonna' see me talking about too many DC books on this blog. 

EDIT:

She totally got hired back as soon as her fans complained. So there was like one issue that didn't have Simone writing it. But seriously, fuck DC and their editorial staff anyhow. I know Ms. Simone was treated pretty poorly by Marvel, but I still think she needs to get the heck away from DC at this point too. The fact that they have no idea how to treat artists is a major part of DC Comics as an institution.

Why "Brand New Day" Was Great, Part One: Because FUCK YOU, That's Why!

So yesterday I got into even yet still another argument about this, and I figured I should simply put all of my opinions about this particular thing in their proper place, because what the fuck else did I lock down this URL for?

This argument, and literally dozens of previous arguments, was with somebody who claimed to have stopped reading Marvel Comics altogether because of the release of Spider-Man: Brand New Day in 2008, despite never having actually READ Spider-Man: Brand New Day and having many of the details wrong; whether that's by ignorance, misinformation, or stubbornness is hard to say.

Now, I'm a dude who's loved Spider-Man for as long as I can remember. I've suffered some moderately big losses in my life, and yet - and I know this is ridiculous but whatever - the time I lost my Secret Wars Spidey action figure ranks pretty high on the emotional list. Spider-Man holds a pretty important place in my nerdly little heart.

I'm also a dude that usually hates any kind of retcon most of the time, which leads me to constantly make the grumpface when my friends talk about anything related to DC's Nü52 experiment... and that has made for some awkward moments.

However, I think BND is the best thing that could have happened to Spider-Man comics. So I'm gonna' make my case here, and direct anybody else who ever wants to fight about this shit here.

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First of all, let's talk about what Peter Parker was up to BEFORE BND happened. I don't know the actual sales figures, but I suspect that many of the people who raged out about this "change to the status quo" hadn't actually read any comics with Spidey in them for at least a few years, because damned near every Spidey story up until BND has been about shaking up the character's status quo, sometimes in ways that were both ridiculous and downright stupid. I'll just throw down some bullet-points here to catch y'all up:

• In 2001, Spider-Man met an older dude named Ezekiel, who had the exact same set of powers yet had somehow never been seen before in the Marvel Universe. Ezekiel explained to Spidey that they were both mystically-powered animal totems, and that the spider that gave Peter Parker his powers didn't need to be radioactive at all; it simply WANTED to give him spider-powers.  
• It should be noted that Peter and Mary-Jane were separated at the time this all started.
• Ezekiel also explained to Spidey that the reason so many of his enemies were animal-themed was that they were jealous of him; somehow able to sense that he was a true animal totem and not a totally wack totem poseur.
• Spider-Man and Ezekiel then spent like a year (or at least it seemed that long) fighting a dude named Morlun, who was some sort of vague vampire-type-guy who fed on these animal totem people. When Spidey managed to get a DNA sample from Morlun, he found that Morlun had the DNA of every species of animal on Earth! Spider-Man ended up not so much defeating Morlun as letting Morlun attempt to drain his life-force, whereupon Morlun was killed by Spidey's radioactive blood ("Is he strong? Listen, bub...").
• During all of this bizarreness, Peter Parker also had the time to get a job as a public school science teacher, despite having no background in teaching, so he could get into some heavy-handed Columbine-inspired school shooting hijinks. FUN!
• Later, after Spidey's defeat of Morlun, some crazy lady went on Fox News (lol) and claimed that she was Spider-Man's lover. This drove an even deeper wedge between Peter and Mary-Jane, though it was all repaired when it turned out the woman was actually Shathra, a mystical wasp totem who wanted to feed Spider-Man to her babies, no doy. Spider-Man failed to defeat Shathra, but then she was eaten by a swarm of spiders, just because. So Peter and MJ were totes happy again, yay!
• Spider-Man joined The Avengers around this point, revealed his identity to all of them, and he, Mary Jane, and Aunt May all moved into Tony Stark's mansion. Aunt May started fucking Jarvis in weirdly public places so Peter could awkwardly stumble upon them doing old-people sex stuff. Because older people having sex is the height of comedy.
• So then a story called Spider-Man: The Other began. Spider-Man: The Other was SO MOTHERFUCKING STUPID OH MY GOD YOU GUYS. 

•  In Spider-Man: The Other, Spidey got diagnosed with Spider-Cancer. He went all over the world visiting all his Super Friends but nobody could cure this cancer because it was Spider-Cancer. Spidey started having blackouts and getting all sickly-like, and also started trying to kill supervillains for no real reason. Eventually Morlun showed back up - with no explanation as to how he got un-deaded - and beat the holy hell out of Spidey for an entire issue, and then ate his eyeball for some reason? And then ran away from a group of police before properly killing and eating him for an even less clear reason? 
• Spidey ended up in the hospital, where Morlun showed up and knocked Mary Jane around a little. Feeling the slight twinge of WiR Syndrome, Peter Parker woke up and hulked out... Like, his eyes started glowing red, he got fangs, and he grew these big poison barbs out of his forearms; all things I always associate with spiders. He then bit Morlun, which... re-killed him, I guess. Then Spidey dropped dead. THE DEATH OF SPIDER-MAN, YOU GUYS.
• Spidey's dead body was then taken to Avengers Mansion and sealed in some kind of tube for some reason, and while Wolverine started hitting on MJ, there was a crash, and they all ran in to find a broken window and Spider-Man's shed skin. Yup.
• Spider-Man then formed a cocoon under the Brooklyn Bridge, where he chilled for a few days. Yup.
• I'm just gonna' quote this part from Wikipedia: 'Under the Brooklyn Bridge, Peter sleeps inside his cocoon and has a strange dream. A voice tells him he never understood what he was, accusing him of being too scared to truly be a "Spider-Man", only focusing on the human part and neglecting the spider part. Morlun managed to kill the human part of Peter, but the spider in him survived and killed Morlun, saving them both. The voice tells him that he will only be reborn if he accepts both parts, and warns him that Peter could be reborn very differently. Peter's soul agrees and is reborn, outwardly human. He goes to the Avengers Tower and swears to Mary Jane and Aunt May that he will never leave them again. Later in the night, Peter goes to the lab where his husk is and recalls the final warning of the voice: "Are you the man who dreamed of being a spider? Or the spider who dreamed of being a man? Are you the one...or are you the other?" Shaking off the warning, Peter removes the wedding ring from the husk and heads back to bed.'
• Then a bunch of spiders stole Spidey's old skin and started walking around in it, and he had to fight them, like you do.

• Basically, Spider-Man: The Other was an excuse to give Spidey some new super-powers. He could communicate with spiders and insects telepathically, he could see in the dark, he could shoot poison stingers from his wrists, his webs came out of his hands naturally - OMG, just like in the movies! - and he could occasionally hulk out into a spider-monster if he got really mad.
• The Civil War series started soon afterwards, Spidey got an ugly new "Iron Spider" costume, and he publicly came out of the secret identity closet at a press-conference in support of Superhuman Registration.
• The Kingpin almost immediately had Aunt May shot in the stomach, Peter decided that registering everyone's secret identities was maybe not so smart, and he and MJ went on the run from the government while Aunt May was being shunted from shitty hospital to shitty hospital under a falsified name.

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So... That's where Spider-Man was. He was a fugitive from Iron Man's weirdly fascist government regime, he was a mystically-powered totem animal who could talk to ants and shit, he had died, come back to life, and regrown an eyeball, and Aunt May was dying from a gunshot to the gut. THIS is the precious continuity that the people who hate BND with such vitriol were so attached to. Our stage is set.

Tune in next time for deals with the kind-of devil, relationships sort-of not working out, and Spider-Man's return to making jokes!

Part Two: Things Were Great For A Few Years...

Steve Ditko and THE HORNS

So apparently Steve Ditko is launching another campaign against Stan Lee, and this time he seems to be hinting that he wants to smear Jack Kirby a little bit too.

Now, I'm all for a little inter-creator kvetching, and I love getting insights into the history of superhero comics, but... C'mon, Steve. We all know you're a kooky, reclusive, bootstrappy Objectivist curmudgeon; and we all know Stan's a self-promoting glory-hound nutbag. YOU DON'T HAVE TO KEEP REMINDING US.

I mean, Steve Ditko is very obviously a genius of the comics industry, and has created and/or co-created some of the most intriguing characters in superhero comics. I could probably write an entire essay on The Question and his weird ties to Ayn Rand's philosophy (and Alan Moore's fairly excellent parody of that philosophy in Watchmen), and of course somebody like Spider-Man couldn't be ignored even if you wanted to.

But the real secret scoop I want on Ditko's days at Marvel in the 1960's is... What's up with the "ILY" hands and/or "Devil Horn" hands (he varied on the thumb-placement)??? The fucker has always remained really quiet about that question. The only answer I could find in my MINUTES of research was a quote saying “Because it looks more interesting that way,” and I think that's just BULLSHIT.

His two most recognizable characters at Marvel are both constantly either telling speakers of ASL that they love them, or hailing Lucifer, and I suspect some sort of hidden narrative.

Or, at least, I want to pretend that there's some sort of hidden narrative. In fact, since Ditko remains so staunchly silent about things in general, I'm going to just go ahead and create my own narrative.

I think that whenever Ditko and Lee were having slappy-fights around the office, he'd go and throw a bunch of Satanic imagery into a Spidey comic. Then, later, when he was working on Dr. Strange and feeling more relaxed, he'd have the good Doctor secretly spreading messages of love. And unless Steve Ditko writes to me personally to correct this, I am considering it historically-accurate. Also, fuck Objectvism and bootstraps and all that other stupid right-wing garbage. Fuck it all to hell!

(This blog-post brought to you by boredom and the Fuck Objectivism to Hell Foundation.)

A Surprising Lack of Opinions...

The title of this post is specific to this post, but also sort of reflects the fact that I created a blog and then never used it. See how I did that? I am one clever motherfucker, y'all had better get used to that.

So some decent, non-Quesada images of Cyclops in his Marvel NOW! costume have hit the interwebs, and the costume is causing people to feel feelings. Rage feelings. The kind of feelings that spawn Epic Nerd Hyperbole like "Marvel is destroying my childhood!" And, well... I'm kind of surprised that I'm just rolling with it. I actually think it's kind of a dope outfit for Cyclops to wear. I'm surprised by this because usually I am the first one to get ultra-grumpy when they put kneepads on Superman (WUT) or take the little wings off the sides of Captain America's head (NO). I'm a guy who gets slightly distracted when Spider-Man has his armpit-webs in one series but doesn't in another (for the record, I am pro-armpit-webs), so - and this may be sad but fuck you for judging me - I actually found myself lying in bed this morning wondering why I'm so okay with a superhero getting such a radical makeover. And I figured that means I'd better blog about it.

Now, I know a lot of my friends will just jump to the "because Cyclops is boring and stupid" conclusion, but I can't accept that one. The truth is, I've always actually liked the dude, despite years of movies, cartoons, comics, and basically nerd-culture-at-large telling me that I'm supposed to be rooting for Wolverine and viewing Cyclops as the stuffy jerk. And I mean, he IS a stuffy jerk... But he's also a dude with extraordinarily low self-esteem, who leads a team full of people with extraordinarily low self-esteem, and constantly has HIS boss - a dude who ALSO has extraordinarily low self-esteem - barking orders inside his brain while he's trying to lead on the ground... and that shit right there is interesting to me. During Matt Fraction's painfully short stint on Uncanny X-Men, there was a scene where Madelyne Pryor, Cyclops' thought-to-be-dead ex-wife, launches a major psychic assault against him; When his current-girlfriend Emma Frost rescues him from psychic torture, his only response is "Please. I have bigger nervous breakdowns for breakfast." And he makes you believe that, and I think it's GREAT. So no, it's not because I write Cyclops off as boring and stupid.

No, I realized as I was lying around dorkily pondering shit that clearly has no practical impact on my life, the actual reason is a little deeper. I'm sure this has been pointed out and pondered by many of the fine folks who draw superheroes for a living, but it's genuinely a thought that's never occurred to me before: The X-Men don't actually have any sort of consistent costumes. I don't know why I never realized this in the past. The reason I will get so pissy about changes to Superman or Captain America or Spider-Man is that I always feel like they're messing around with something iconic... whereas The X-Men are arguably more popular than any of those guys and they aren't iconic at all. They change their super-suits at least every couple of years. In fact, if you count the Phoenixed-Out costume he was sporting for a few months, Cyclops has had three different costumes in 2012 alone! There's usually - but not always - some sort of vague blue and yellow motif going on, but for the most part The X-Men all just change outfits all the time while their friends and peers in the Marvel Universe are wearing the same things they did 50 years ago. I mean sure, Cyclops has had his little visor thinger, but even that changes shape depending on who's drawing it... and now even that has changed to a big old X on his face, yet he remains recognizable.

So now I'm left wondering: What is it that makes these characters recognizable when their looks are constantly changing? I mean, there are certain visual cues, like Wolverine's perpetual hat-hair, or the fact that Beast is covered in blue fur... But why is it enough for me that Storm is just the lady with the prematurely white hair who wears whatever she damned well pleases, while I find myself pitching a fit about Green Lantern having his costume become a mock-turtleneck? I mean, I'm probably being unreasonably hard on the Nü52 for erasing the entire history of events that made me care about DC Comics in the first place (where probably = absolutely), but still. The idea that these characters have achieved a place in my heart even when they're wearing exceedingly silly or dated costumes doesn't bother me, and I have no idea WHY. Like, I think Cyclops is kind of intriguing on a conceptual level, but Captain America has been one of my favorite superheroes for as long as I can remember, and I'm still a little salty about that goofy armor he wore in the 1990s, so it's not that I'm more forgiving of Cyclops and his fellow X-Men by virtue of their being somehow more compelling, or more emotionally resonant on a personal level, as characters. They're just superheroes to me.

Could it be because they've just always been inconsistent? Is it really that simple? Am I really that simple? Could the reason I get so bent out of shape over Superman's kneepads be that I'm just comfortable with Superman dressing a certain way, while The X-Men have never given me that sense of steadiness? It's a weird thing to process, because it means that I'm internalizing this shit even more than I thought (and I was already pretty sure I was internalizing it too much). I am a grown adult who makes the gas-face at the idea of a superhero wearing a slightly different costume in a comic book; and while I'm okay with that part of myself, it's apparently taken The X-Men to point out the why and how of the matter so starkly... and I've just now decided that that's part of what makes the X-Men fucking rad.

So yeah. Cyclops has a new costume, and I feel vaguely positive about it... and that has me questioning the very core of my being. Welcome to my blog, lol.