Secret Invasion #2

May 9th, 2008 by Brack

Oh god, it’s House of M all over again. A whole lot of nothing happening.

Issue 1 of Marvels latest cash grabbing crossover had a lot of vim and vigor to it, with a fairly cohesive narrative and nippy pace. With this issue all that ground to a halt, the story mired in its dialogue and turgid action scenes.

Conversely the issue of accompanying issue of Mighty Avengers zipped nicely, with the actual Avengers story taking place in Secret Invasion we get more flashbacks to what Nick Fury’s been up to.

Marvel are yet to find a happy balance in storytelling in these crossovers. The central Civil War mini series didn’t work as single story as it was acting more as the background to events in the ongoing comics. House of M and Secret Invasion do have the main stories in the mini series, but the stories are stretched out beyond their natural length to the detriment of monthly pacing and the ongoing titles that they span out of are left treading water - Claremont’s Rachel Grey/Psylocke gubbins in Uncanny X-Men during House Of M, Mighty Avengers current transformation into a Nick Fury comic and New Avengers recent Skrull history lesson.

If Secret Invasion had kept the pacing of that first issue this would be a whole lot of fun. Instead with a pacing more suited to a weekly schedule it looks like the reader is in for another underwhelming event comic from Bendis.

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Superhero Colour Theory

January 15th, 2008 by Brack

There was something mentioned on Comics Should Be Good a couple of years back regarding Superhero comics and the colours used in the sixties.

It was pointed out how many of Spidey’s foes are dressed in Purple and Green. Now, from my rusty colour theory knowledege, these are two of the secondary colours. Spidey himself is Red and Blue, primary colours. Which makes me postulate is there a relationship between superhero characters and primary colours, and conversely supervillain characters and secondary colours?

If we look at the main characters in Marvel’s sixties comics we see the following:

Spiderman - Red/Blue
Fantastic Four - Blue, Torch is Red on occasion, and Thing is a mix of Orange and Blue. It’s note worthy that the most monstrous character breaks from the primary colours.
Iron Man - Yellow, then Red/Yellow
Captain America - Blue/Red
Thor - Blue/Yellow/Red
Ant-Man/Wasp - Red
Nick Fury - Blue
X-Men - Blue/Yellow
Daredevil - Red/Yellow, then Red.
Doctor Strange - Blue/Red/Yellow/Orange - if there is a connection between colours chosen and the popularity of  a character, could it be argued that the use of too many colours relates to lesser impact Strange had as a character?

As you can see mostly primary colours, however there are 2 notable exceptions:

Hulk - Green (and purple trousers).
Namor - Green.

However both characters could frequently be found behaving in less than heroic manners in the sixties. Indeed, literally painting the Hulk with the colours of villainy adds to his outcast nature. Would a Blue, Yellow or Red Hulk have worked as well?

Now let’s look at Spidey’s villains:















A few notable exceptions - Sandman (green top, but blue trousers - sand often coloured yellow), Electro (green and yellow. Yellow is the colour of electricity of course), and Rhino - plain ol’ grey. Chameleon - (assorted disguises, note he had a purple costume in the 94 cartoon).

Other Marvel Secondary Coloured Villains:






Notable exceptions: Red Skull (Red, obviously), Loki (Green and Yellow), Magneto (Red and Purple)

But as you can see, a lot of purple and green was used for villains. (and a smattering of orange). Whether this was intentional, coincidence or printing related, I’m not sure it matters, because I think it works. And possibly if more colour theory was used in designing new characters we’d have ones that catch on with readers.

Some later date I’ll take a look at DC characters, because this theory holds out over there a lot too (especially Batman and Superman).

Scans from http://comics.org/

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Bland New Day

January 12th, 2008 by Brack

OK, that subject title may be a little harsh. It came from a google.jp search that got someone to this website. Amazing Spider-Man #546 is a perfectly fine comic. It just has a few problems that kind of grate.

First off, there is a lot of infodump here. Slott seems to be setting up a large number of future plot threads all at once, as well as establishing the new status quo for the character. And it’s a bit overwhelming. Particularly when combined with McNiven’s art.

McNiven is my biggest problem with this comic. His art just doesn’t work for me here, the detail is actually distracting from the amount of information Slott is trying to convey. On a panel by panel basis he has some great layouts, but it all looks a little too busy for the story. His art worked wonders on the vacuous framework that was Civil War, but things move faster here, and in the end it feels rather tiring to look at his art AND read all the dialogue Slott’s providing (often a lot in a tiny panel - are they doing this comic “Marvel Style”? If so I’m more inclined to blame Slott for not working his dialogue to McNiven’s panels.).

Also: the “nerdy” new love interest for Peter is really too attractively drawn for her character. For all the complaints about Spider-Man being married to a super-model (MJ being a super-model seemed something born out of general pop-culture trends of the time), replacing her with someone with model looks WHO JUST HAPPENS TO WEAR GLASSES seems stupid and shallow. It gives the comic the aesthetic of a dumb Hollywood teen movie. John Romita Sr. style comic book sexiness please, rather than this aseptic glossy magazine prettiness.

Phil Winslade’s art in Bob Gale’s Aunt May back up strip is much more in line with what I want to see on a Spidey comic. Winslade’s art increasingly reminds me of Gene Colan. I’m sure it was there before, but I’m only noticing it now since I’ve seen uncoloured Colan art in various Essentials. What it boils down to is that I’d like to see Winslade do a main story on the book.

Script-wise, a little too much is given to running through Spidey tropes that seem a little old to longtime Spidey fans. The Aunt May and job hunting stuff seemed out of place 40+ years down the line from his first appearance, particularly now when the material that did that originally is so freely available. The Osborn entourage stuff seemed a little bit like a clumsy stab at modernity at first, but at least it felt a little new. The villain, Negative Man, was interesting and the stuff with Jonah at the end was the high point of the book. Overall there was a little too much housekeeping and pipe laying, and note enough story.

Of course the advantage of the new format is we don’t have so long to wait for the next issue and so what flaws there are, aren’t left to stew. McNiven’s art on it’s own looks great, so I’m hoping when the script moves towards following the flow of a story, rather than acting as an establishing issue, it will run at a pace that suits McNiven’s style.

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Rambling Pre-Emptive Thoughts About Spider-Man: Brand New Day

January 8th, 2008 by Brack

I saw this splash page that recaps the status quo of Spider-Man in the post-One More Day Marvel Universe and it got me thinking.

Now, the whole One More Day malarky doesn’t bother me too much as I’ve not read Spider-Man regularly since the Micheline/McFarlane era. So it’d be churlish to complain about changes to a comic I’ve not been a reader of. However, I am intending to read Brand New Day. I like Spider-Man (read the Spectacular Spider-Man Essentials last year, which is just getting to where I came in on the character via 80’s Spidey UK reprints), I like a lot of the writers involved and I like the format they are planning. I’m not too fussed about the supposed “retcons” implied by the ending of the OMD story, as I can see an easy way they can get round that (Mephisto has only altered the present not the past. This particularly makes sense as in Marvel, Time Travel Doesn’t Work Like That. The line about people remembering Spider-Man unmasking, but not who it was, suggests memories have been altered rather than the timeline).

Plus, and here’s the main thrust of post, the Bob Gale’s script on that splash feels very forward looking. The best way to deal with the OMD ending is to say, these are the changes, this is how everything is now, let’s move forward. The big mistake would be to do a series of surprise reveals of Things Aren’t What You Expect like the Harry reveal. It’s a rare chance for a superhero comic to sever itself from the approach of writing stories tied to past events. However, I don’t expect it to last…

In one of the Flaming Carrot collections it’s discussed how superhero stores are invariably tied heavily to the character’s origin. All of their actions are coloured by what made the hero a hero in the first place. To avoid this, Bob Burden made Flaming Carrot a hero without an origin (well… he read 5000 comics in one sitting), giving us a diverse range superhero stories that you wouldn’t find anywhere else. The best way to use a character’s origin in subsequent stories is to use it thematically, which various Spider-Man comics have used to great effect over the years. For instance, the villains that really resonate in Spider-Man are the ones that in someway reflect Spider-Man/Peter Parker himself. Venom, I think was the last Spider-Man villain that was successful - the suit and echoes of Peter in Eddie Brock resonated with Spider-Man. The attempt at recreating the success of Venom in Carnage fails, the character having resonance with Venom rather than Spider-Man. A psychotic serial killer with an alien suit isn’t a Spidey villain, a depressed, disgruntled, jealous journalist with Spider-Man’s OWN alien suit, that has resonance with the character, regardless how poorly the character might have been (over)used down the years.

The bad way to use an origin is to tamper with the origin, to generate cheap shocks by creating reveals that were never there in the original material. Such is the problem of inherent in corporate superhero comics. Eiichiro Oda can pull a reveal regarding the origin of an One Piece side character from 7 years ago and it will make sense, doesn’t feel cheap and gives the reader a genuine surprise. Mid-nineties Spider-Clones and 21st century spider totems feel tacky and disconnected from the original character.

In the case of long running characters I think it’s possible to amass a number of origin stories, namely those stories that made such an impact they noticeably changed the tone/types of stories you could tell with the character. I’d argue that as well as the radioactive spider/Uncle Ben origin story, the death of Gwen Stacy and the marriage to MJ are origins of a sort too. I can see arguments for the reveal of Norman Osborn as the Green Goblin as an origin too.

And so, the problem I can see them having with Brand New Day, is that One More Day is essentially yet another new origin story for someone to be tempted to use it as a theme for future stories (and I can see two potential ways they can already), and then, eventually, tamper with the events of the story. The fact that the story was so reviled gives it a sense of inevitability that we will see that Everything Was Not As It Seemed.

But for now, I can ignore that.

Slott, Gale and Guggenheim tend to write superhero stories I like to read.

And it’s Spider-Man, Spider-Man is cool.

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CIOASIISAG Part 9 - Marvel Super Heroes

November 3rd, 2007 by Brack

These are probably the RPGs I’ve run the most, and written the most material for a campaign for. Which is astounding considering how poor the actual rules are.

Obviously the pull of these games to me was the Marvel license. I’d liked Marvel comics as kid, starting with a Spidey/Ghost Rider UK reprint as a treat as a kid after having to go to London for various tests (the other treat being a Battle Of The Planets transfer kit). Then various second comics picked up in school fairs/jumble sales and the occasional present from my grandmother. Finally there was the UK printing of Secret Wars, Secret Wars II and Spider-Man and ZOIDS.

I kind of forgot about them when I went to secondary school, until WH Smith’s started getting US Marvel comics in. Which coincided with when I got into RPGs. So TSR’s licensed Marvel RPG was a natural draw.

Now the rules were based around this colour coded chart. You rolled percentile dice, the cross referenced the roll on the chart against the value of the statistic you were using. They used this system on various other non-D&D games that TSR released at the time. One of the Gamma World editions used it as did their Conan RPG and Star Frontiers. Possibly the Indiana Jones RPG too. I don’t think Top Secret/SI did, but I could be wrong. I’ll look it up when I get to that one.

Some people liked this system, but I found it a pain. I dislike games with unnecessary work, and cross referencing two numbers on a chart definitely count as too much work. But I still kept hacking away, trying to get a decent campaign going, because I had such Marvel love. And this really was a game for Marvel lovers.

It was essentially OHOTMU the RPG, particularly the Advanced version and it’s supplements. Most of it’s supplements were vast depositories of statistics for Marvel characters both prominent and obscure. And on top of that there were the Gamers Guide To The Marvel Universe books that at the time were arguably better than the information provided by Marvel at the time. At one point I had all but 5 products published in this line (I’ve since disposed of a lot of that material via eBay) and here’s the products I’d recommend if you were interested in playing:

Marvel Advanced Set - The core rule book. The rules aren’t particularly clear and you’ll end up winging a lot of it. Plus there’s not that much scope for character variety.
Ultimate Powers Book - An expanded character creation book. You’ll end up rewriting the character type table, as frankly it’s barking mad, but the range of powers and the rules to use them are expansive.
Realms Of Magic - This was for the Basic set, but the magic rules in the Advanced are, if anything, even worse than the Basic’s. This supplement completely replaces the magic rules and makes them workable.
The MT Modules - This was a 3 part time travel themed campaign by Ray Winninger. A great adventure with a superb meta-gaming climax.
The MX Modules - This was a 4 part campaign based on The Nightmares Of Futures Past story from the X-Men. It’s clever trick is to set the adventure in your hometown. Of course this trick works better when you are in America. I had to pretend Spalding was in Massachusetts when I ran it.
Deluxe City Campaign - This is the only supplement that actually gets around to telling you how to run your own campaign. I think TSR must have thought you were only going to play their published supplements.

Most of these can be downloaded in PDF form for free at MarvelRPG.net

It should be said a lot of my criticisms of the game are in hindsight, back when I started playing I was a lot less critical of game mechanics and more interested in settings. But I do think those flaws held me back in every getting a campaign really off the ground in my first gaming group. I’ll talk about my long-term Marvel campaign when I get around to talking about the SAGA rules Marvel RPG, but here’s some teenage brain spill about the characters we created at secondary school.

AXE-MAN - This was the first character I created using the Basic set. His power was that his hand turned into an Axe. I was 13, this seemed cool to me then. I believe he was a mutant and that his background was that he had been asked to join the X-Men but was thrown out for being too cool.
TWISTED SOULS - This was the superhero team that my players in my first group came up with they were:

MR MYSTERY - a robotic Rorschach clone, with Hank Pym powers
ACE OF SPADES - a mystic swordsman
TWISTER - a mutant with wind based powers
and there was a Captain Marvel-type whose name I forget. The twist was that he was a cat who turned into a human superhero.

THE WRESTLER - a teleporting wrestler
MEK-A-NEK - a blatent copy of the He-Man character
ALIEN SKATER - The HR Giger creation. BUT ON A SKATEBOARD!

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Five Awesome Links

February 10th, 2007 by Brack

Great Pop Things - Great Pop Things was a comic strip that ran in the NME around the time I started reading it regularly. 1992 I think as Father Ted writer chap, Arthur Matthews’s  “Doctor Crawshaft’s World of Pop” cartoon was running at the same time. GPT was the creation of Colin B Morton and Chuck Death. Chuck Death being a psuedonym of the Mekons’ Jon Langford. It was great. My brother and I still refer to Steve Albini as “Steve Albundy” to this day because this strip.

Ghost In The Shell Lego - It’s the crab tank thingy from the end of the Ghost In The Shell film. In Lego.

Moriyama Miki and The Honkytonk Devils - Another Japanese country band. I’m kind of fascinated by the Japanese country scene as the best I can tell, it seems to work exactly like the British country scene.

The Usuta World - A fansite for the works of humour manga author, Kyosuke Usuta. The most well known work of Usuta’s in the west is “Sexy Commando Side Story, That’s Amazing Masaru-san” through the fansubs of the late 90s anime. And when I say well known, I’m guessing it’s known by a couple of thousand people at most. Currently running in Japan is the strip “He Blows Like PYU! Jaguar” which hasn’t made it to anime yet, but has a number of video games and CDs out. Usuta’s humour is along the lines of something like Cromartie, but is more surreal and fractured, with a less of a reliance on hammering a joke into the ground.

Marvel Super Heroes - Scans of the old TSR Marvel RPG, known fondly as the FASERIP system after the seven stats it used. I ran this on and off from the late 80s in secondary school, until the much better SAGA system came out in, I think 1998 or 97. The books produced were more bad than good. I know this, as until recently I owned all but 3 of the products produced for it. The Advanced Rules, the Ultimate City Campaign Set, the Ultimate Powers book, the MX modules, and the MT modules are probably the only essentials. The Gamers handbooks are nice if you want to play specific Marvel characters. Those MT modules by Ray Winninger are awesome adventures, with the best meta-payoff I’ve ever seen.

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Stuff That Rules 3000

September 25th, 2006 by Brack

The long-delayed return of stuff that rules!

Black Lagoon

12 episodes of immaculately animated action. It felt a lot like some of the arcs in Ennis' Hitman comic in terms of the level of violence and ridiculousness it delivers with a deadpan face. Treasure hunting neo-nazis, war criminal maids, crazy boat vs. helicopter gunship fights, nuns with guns, scarred ex-Spetznatz Russian Mafia-types (actually that's more like Ellis - there was period in the nineties where he seemed obsessed with Spetznatz…). Anyway, there's a lot to love here in terms of slightly OTT action thrillers. And it's nice to have a show that is an office worker's fantasy rather than the adolescent fantasies most anime shows serve.

Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso UFO - Mantra Of Love

Acid Mothers Temple have always been a band lurking on the outskirts of my radar, taunting me to listen to them. And really considering I have album of 60s and 70s Japanese psychedelia, I really should give the modern equivalent a try. So why not start with one that only has 2 tracks. One of which is a thirty minute version of a traditional tune that only contains 3 syllables. It is, needless to say, awesome.

Kemonozume

I've written enough here already about how great this show is. The first 3 episodes have been fansubbed now, so go watch it already.

That Mitchell And Webb Look

OK, I'm putting the fact that there was a totally unnecessary second Numberwang sketch down to the first episode seemingly being a pilot episode. The second episode seemed to be mainly new material, whereas the first was culled almost entirely from the radio show. That minor quibble aside, this is looking to be first great UK sketch show since Jam. Hopefully it will be a great success and we can see the death of catchphrases and rewriting the same sketch again and again as a way of producing sketch comedy.

The Office

After the pilot episode that was too reverent to the original BBC show, I dismissed the US version of The Office. But on hearing good things about the second series, I thought I'd give it a try again this season. And it is great. Now it's deviated enough from the source material and found it's own voice it is wonderful. It's played broader than the original, but it works well. And the introduction of Ed Helms' character Andy is great idea, both as the character itself, as a contrast to Dwight character and the jokes it got out of acknowledging the presence of the camera (a gag which also was played out elsewhere in the episode).  I really do suggest giving it a second try if you were put off by the first series. It's certainly better than Extras.

Can we stop pretending that it was a better idea than making more Office episodes? Getting “stars” to portray exageratted versions of themselves is an one-note gag, and getting Ketih Chegwin to say bigotted things isn't deep or edgy, it's the equivalent of Dick and Dom In Da Bungalow's “Bogies” game. A snickering childish “look how shocking we are!” type move that has no deeper meaning. It's not like Borat tricking real people into joining in with racism, it's a script Gervais has written that is entirely reliant on who he could find to say it in order to make it funny. Because without the shock value of who is saying it, it is just racism and homophobia.

ALSO: THE RETURN OF THINGS THAT A WANT A PUNCH IN THE FACE

CIVIL WAR #4

Firstly a defence of Millar's poor characterisation. The people he is writing the worst are Reed Richards and Tony Stark, two characters of that a lot of writers have struggled to find the voice of. Stark is particularly hard and it's arguable no one has found a voice that works since the Micheline/Layton run. In fact it probably would have been wiser to permanently put someone else in the suit after they left as it's unlikely that they can be matched. So I'm willing to let their general jerkiness and poor characterisation slide.

And the cloned Thor, as bad an idea as that is and as contradictory to past Iron Man stories as it is (Starks hate magic, remember?), is not the problem either.

Nor is the mini series contradicting stuff going on in ongoing titles, that's a more a criticism of Marvel editorial than the comic itself.

HOWEVER what is godawful about this comic is the actual internal logic of this issue. Tony is feeling bad about Goliath biting it when Cloned Thor gets out of control. So what's his next plan of action to handle the rogue heroes? Send supervilains after them! And not just any supervillains, ones who are known murderers.  Honestly, what sort of idiot sends Bullseye on a mission to capture people?

The reveal only serves to be a reveal, it doesn't actually fit in with what has been said by people on the previous pages. Millar's tricks work in The Ultimates because he's the stories less condensed and there isn't 40+ years of continuity to contradict him and hold him back. Here it just feels like he's working to story beats, with little in the way of characterisation or plot to link them together.

I wouldn't say it's an out and out bad comic, as McNiven has some great art here, but it's not working as the spine of a massive crossover company event, and it also isn't working as a stand alone mini series either, both due to poor plot and characterisation issues raised here and due to some plot elements being resolved in other comics. Where inevitably contradications start to arise. It's a shame as the core idea is good, just poorly executed.

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