Stuff We Like This Week: October 30 Edition
Oct 30
In an effort to combat our occasional…okay, okay, near-constant negativity, we give you a regular feature full of nothing but love — Stuff We Like This Week. Appearing every Friday, SWLTW will recap the things that have set our little nerdly hearts aflame within the past seven days.
Checking It Twice
Oct 29So, here’s the thing about event fatigue.
It’s not that there are annual events. It’s not that they take most of a year to get finished. It’s that – at least for me – they don’t do anything. Nothing has huge consequences anymore. I don’t know if they ever did, but there was a point where it felt like they did. The last two events that I really got behind were Infinite Crisis and Civil War. As literature, they aren’t the best, but shit happpens in them – an embarrassment of shit happening, in fact. For everything that I loved about Final Crisis, all of its toys went right back into the box when they were done with the sole exception of Batman, who DC flat-out told us would be back.  Messiah CompleX, which I actually did like a lot, killed off Caliban and Deathstrike, both of whom have had significant appearances this year, and then shunted its MacGuffin into the future where it could be patly ignored most of the time.
Which is the main reason why I can get behind Marvel’s Dark Reign: The List one-shots. I’ve read all of them except for the Hulk one – which I just haven’t been able to track down yet – and most of them have been important in establishing new status quos for the characters – whether it’s Bullseye finally erasing the last of Matt Murdock’s reluctance about leading The Hand, Namor facing down his wife Marrina, Ronin’s one-man assault on Avengers Tower, or the fight between Daken and the Punisher. They’ve all felt like they’ve meant something big for those characters. That it has consequences for the universe.
And man, that Punisher one-shot. I spent most of the issue saying “They didn’t just do that,” to myself. And, of course, they did just do that. Over and over. And I loved every second of it.
And yet I haven’t heard a lot of chatter online about these books. Mainly because I’m avoiding a lot of comic communities for my sanity’s sake these days, maybe. Have you been reading them, and if so, what do you think?
Stuff We Like This Week: October 23 Edition
Oct 23
In an effort to combat our occasional…okay, okay, near-constant negativity, we give you a regular feature full of nothing but love — Stuff We Like This Week. Appearing every Friday, SWLTW will recap the things that have set our little nerdly hearts aflame within the past seven days.
The Critical Recuperation of Anthony Stark
Oct 22[This post discusses Matt Fraction’s Invincible Iron Man, including the most recent issue #19. It contains spoilers and should be avoided if you wish to read #19 without foreknowledge of that issue’s events. ]
Near the end of the most recent installment of Sober House, Andy Dick confronts his longtime friend and fellow comic Kathleen Madigan to apologize for the myriad ways in which Dick’s rampant alcoholism and natural dickishness (no pun intended) have inadvertantly damaged her life. It may be the only time I have ever or will ever be moved by Andy Dick.
The entirety of Matt Fraction’s 19 issue (to date) run on Invincible Iron Man can perhaps be boiled down to that scene, just with more espionage, violence and explosions. “World’s Most Wanted,” the story that began with the end of Secret Invasion and just this week came to its conclusion with Norman Osborn pummeling a basically brain dead Tony Stark on live news. A pummeling that the reader watches with pity, wanting Tony to fight back but knowing that he won’t (in part because the audience suspects that Stark has a death wish, but chiefly because his brain has forgotten how to perform even basic instinctual reactions). Was it only three years ago that we all cheered when Cap clocked Iron Man in the face after shorting out his armor under a truce? I mean, I was appalled that Steve Rogers did it, but I was really glad at the same time. It was due. After a too-brief run where Warren Ellis gave us a Tony that was a limitless, wide-eyed futurist, Brian Michael Bendis, Mark Millar, Joe Straczynski and Daniel and Charles Knauf tweaked him into a controlling megalomaniac with a savior complex. I won’t take issue with that characterization; Tony is an addict, control is how he copes and the savior complex is intrinsic in his origin. I didn’t like Tony Stark, but I understood him, and that’s far more important than liking.
Post-Civil War, though, Stark had the rug pulled out from under him hard. He hit rock bottom and has been building himself up from that point. Invincible Iron Man has very much been a book about Iron Man rebuilding his relationships, personal and professional, as an externalization of that recuperation, a roadmap to him becoming a real hero again. He is penitent, he has feet of clay, and he is willing to basically place himself in a persistent vegetative state to do one last good act. It’s significant, in terms of absolution, that he’s taking that proverbial bullet to ensure that the Superhuman Registration Act database, the very thing that caused the massive rift among the Marvel Universe’s heroes, is destroyed. Fraction’s work on the title has deftly balanced clever humor, bombastic action and touching human drama in a way that few things can manage, resulting in the best long form superhero epic since Grant Morrison’s Justice League. He’s done the impossible: making us root for Tony Stark again.
Misplaced Princesses
Oct 19My kid is WAY into Disney princesses.
She’s into Disney period. Pixar too. She watches each flick multiple times, of course, but she’s burned through most of the top-tier Disney films and has begun to sample the second- and third-tier product, such as (*chill*) Oliver & Company.
I’m not sure how to feel about it; on one hand, I do believe it’s ultimately harmless and while she doesn’t need Disney movies to fuel her amazing imagination, she sure does seem to enjoy playing Cinderella, Simba, Dumbo, Nemo, and the like. On the other hand, I feel like we’ve totally played into the hands of a cold, uncaring corporate behemoth intent on twisting the minds of the young into lifelong customers, whatever the cost.
It’s a pickle. Somehow, we survive, and wake up each morning, and in a few months, we’ve decided my kid’s first Real Movie in a Movie Theater will be this new Disney princess movie, The Princess and the Frog, which has been touted as featuring the first African-American Disney princess.
I just hope she fares better than other non-white Disney princesses, because if Disney’s past efforts are any indication, Tiana may be doomed to a future of obscurity.
