Marvel Comics General

Well The Boys has the benefit of being handled by multiple hopefully good writers.

Plus unlike anime adaptations which are kind of a 1:1 straight adaptation comic book made TV shows are generally reworked into what fits for a show and then added stuff to make up for any possible errors.

Well that's my optimistic belief about it. It could just be high-budgeted shit in the end.

"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."

Well I’ve only read welcome back Frank and Punisher Max from Ennis (I refuse to read Punisher Kills the MU) I did like Punisher Max a lot as a crime drama, even then it still had some issues regarding race and sexuality

Edited by Bec66 on Jul 1st 2019 at 8:29:29 AM

I basically ignore the Marvel Knights stuff after "Welcome Back, Frank" and skip right to the Marvel MAX stuff, which is so much better. For one thing, Ennis basically ignores the rest of the Marvel universe aside from Nick Fury and just does his own thing with Castle. Second, he explores a lot of the soldier side of Castle, which is way more interesting than the vigilante side.

If you haven't read it, I would highly recommend reading Punisher: The Platoon. It's about Castle's squadmates from the Vietnam War telling the story of his first tour and what happened during it. And it's also highly respectful of the Vietnamese, too.

Edited by alliterator on Jul 1st 2019 at 8:22:14 AM

A lot of people have pointed out that Ennis likely has... issues with LGBT folk. In Preacher every non-straight character, and even kinkier straight characters, is evil, and it actually has a character turn gay after being raped by a man without a hint of irony.

It comes up in The Boys. He plays every stereotype for all its worth (mocking the idea of straight “allies”) and just ends going “everyone is homophobic, just don’t be too homophobic.”

Not sure that’s gonna get into the show.

I don’t think I like Ennis very much

Forever liveblogging the Avengers

So this came up...

Who knows if anything will come off it, but it’s definitely interesting.

Edited by megaeliz on Jul 1st 2019 at 11:43:39 AM

Honestly I think the overall theme of Ennis’s work is “everyone is horrible, stupid, or both.” Seriously “Punisher: The End” is probably the most nihilistic thing I’ve ever read. Although, I do appreciate it for playing a nuclear apocalypse realistically and giving Frank a fitting ending.

Edited by Bec66 on Jul 1st 2019 at 11:50:07 AM

To be entirely fair, he did grow up amidst the Irish religious wars, so it's not exactly difficult to see why his worldview would be like that.

The thing about Ennis that nobody talks about is that he has this weird apologia for the British Empire. You see this in Kev (where Kipling is quote unironically) and also in Crossed where apparently the British Empire is preferable to the Catholic Church or something. I mean the leap in logic and bizarre comparison is really something. Ennis strikes me as someone who's left-wing out of a sense of shame and not out of preference. He kind of regrets/laments/believes that right-wing are cooler, and come off as more assured and sorted and so on. The Punisher series that Ennis wrote, the MAX ones especially, are very popular among right-wing people and The Punisher is the Marvel character most popular and embraced by the right, and the secret is that Marvel baits that crowd to buy this comic because they're money is the same as anyone else's. It's not so far from Southpark where they like gay-bashing jokes and slurs and try to make that work by divorcing it from actually attacking real LGBT people and so on. By doing that, they kind of sanitize and provide this postmodern gaslighting trick for abusers to cover up their stuff with dog-whistles.

As far as superhero satires go, Marshal Law (published by Marvel's Epic Imprint by the way, and really the only real adults-only classic Marvel put out in the 80s that is as good as what Moore and Gaiman were doing) is great and convincing. While The Boys is just mean and ugly, and also confused. Like the satire about the X-Men in the boys devolves into a ridiculous parody of East Coast and West Coast rap battles done tin-eared by a guy who knows nothing about it.

x4What fits Kamala better, a TV show or a movie?

x3 I suppose I should be happy Ennis said he was done with heroes and hero parodies after The Boys. You just know if he was writing more material, we would probably getting half a season shitting on My Hero Academia since it wasn’t a thing during the initial run. (Then again, Ennis IIRC is one of those people who subscribes to the idea that Superior Western Comics are always superior despite hardly ever having an example outside his own work).

Edited by Beatman1 on Jul 1st 2019 at 11:57:44 AM

I think Kamala Khan should be a movie. If it's a TV show, she will never be mainstream. If it's a movie, she will be.

The frustration for Ennis and his superhero parodies and so on, is that they still get more attention than his other work. I happen to think his war comics are pretty interesting. The other stuff he does is ultraviolent Crossed which makes Walking Dead look like a church. I mean ultimately superheroes are here to stay, they haven't died as a genre despite numerous attempts. They haven't lost any appeal or favor among the public. The only thing that has become dated is the "superheroes are uncool" movement that Ennis grew up thinking was the latest cool thing and the last word, only to find himself repeating those last words ad nauseam.

Personally, what I really want is a solo animated show, Spider-Man Style, but if I had to choose between a live action movie or television show, I’m not sure.

Street level heroes like Kamala (and even Spider-Man honestly, at least to an extent) tend to work really well in a more serialized format, and having a TV show would allow more time to develop her supporting cast and world, but her shape shifting powers could be an issue on a television budget.

Edited by megaeliz on Jul 1st 2019 at 12:22:08 PM

I don't like this weird attitude about street-level heroes being good for TV and not the big screen because there's this weird attitude conveyed there about epic/cosmic heroes being bigger than street heroes that's...I mean that kind of attitude is not unknown in Marvel...but if you extend that to who's on TV and who's on movies, what you have is a heirarchical idea that goes back to Ancient Greece. I.E. comedy is fit for lower-classes because their suffering literally doesn't matter to the world whereas the slightest issues of the ruling classes and aristocrats are matters of importance. One of my issues with Daredevil being on Netflix is that Daredevil has consistently been one of Marvel's most prestigious titles since The '80s, but now he's relegated to this forgotten ghetto. There are more great Daredevil stories than Iron Man you know. And of course one of Captain America's most defining moments comes in Daredevil: Born Again. Born Again should have been a MCU movie but now it will never be made thanks to the Disney obsession with the kid market and merchandising, and Born Again is essentially a street-level story.

As it is the MCU suffers because civilians are hardly a presence in their movies, so most of the time we don't get a sense of how big events and cosmic events matter to the regular people. The MCU Spider-Man movies rest on Peter being denigrated implicitly or tacitly for not being as big as the Avengers, and Spider-Man seeing that as basically down-time between big events. Which is one reason why IMHO the MCU Spider-Man will never be as good as the Raimi movies and ITSV, the stuff that defined Spider-Man in the comics is gone forever in these movies. I mean Christopher Nolan's Batman movies, especially The Dark Knight is a street-level crime movie but it's a great superhero movie and part of that is the sense of this city as a living space and Gotham and its people. You don't get that in the MCU.

"Forgotten ghetto"? Netflix's Daredevil was a popular, critically acclaimed series that also helped rescue the character from the scrappy heap in the mainstream's eyes.

Also, t.v. is mainstream.

And this attitude towards street level heroes doesn't exist in Marvel. Spider-Man and Luke Cage have been Avengers and Daredevil once beat Ultron.

Damn straight.

One Strip! One Strip!

I think street level heroes are good for televisual medium because you can do them acceptably good on the tv budget.

Forever liveblogging the Avengers

Details on the Marvel schedule for San Diego Comic Con

Weirdly, I think it got him a GLAAD Award.

It was nominees for The Boys and Midnighter back in 2008, but he didn't win.

Edited by lalalei2001 on Jul 1st 2019 at 11:44:02 AM

The Protomen enhanced my life.

What if there were super-advanced countries like Wakanda and Latveria in real life?

Then we'd have people whining about how Wakanda isn't sharing its vibranium or people rioting on how a jerk like Doctor Doom shouldn't be dictating any form of land.

So I've been reading Hickman's New Avengers.

I hate it.

Part of me wants to like it The other part of me can't help but see a number of flaws and questionable storytelling decisions that add up, nevermind the very premise being an affront to what the franchise stands for. It keeps trying to paint Reed and the rest as these well intentioned but self righteous 'great men' who are forced into committing unspeakable acts by a situation beyond their control, but ultimately deciding to blow up populated planets even to save their own is still their choice. (Nevemind that the narrative keeps giving them easy outs.) As was mindwiping Cap. Who ironically is the only person to bring that up before being removed for that very reason.

It's nihilistic manpain nonsense.

Edited by kkhohoho on Jul 2nd 2019 at 7:56:39 AM

Hickman will agree with you. New Avengers is more or less a deconstruction of the Civil War era characterizations, and ultimately they revert to type in Secret Wars (2015). The Illuminati are a bunch of superheroes trying to act like supervillains and are terrible at the job, so actual supervillains eventually come in and do it better than them, led by a supervillain who thinks he's a superhero and on the right day and against the right bad guy actually is one.

It should be noted that ultimately they can't blow up the planets — their own consciences get the better of them and they can't press the button...except for Namor, who does it because he's, well, Namor.