Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Huh.

I like it.

The main female character in Invincible, Atom Eve, has put on a lot of weight:



Kirkman has actually gotten letters asking for her not to lose it.

I saw the original art for this in Boston and wanted to pick up since it was the first page I ever pointed out to my wife from Invincible. I said something about Eve getting fat now, I got yelled at and told “She’s not fat!”

http://www.invincifans.com/?p=87

Ya, she's pretty fat. I keep thinking she's going to lose that weight because she was thin before but nope, fat.

Wow, just saw the Man of Steel teaser... normally I'm not a big fan of Superman, but for some reason, the hairs of the back of my neck stood up at the end.

Interesting, with Zod as well.. I'll be off to the cinema next year.

The Dark Knight Rises wasn't the film we needed. It was the film we deserved.

):

What was that talk about the new Tim Drake never been Robin before? I just looked into Teen Titans #1 and he has a picture of him as Robin with Batman.

And the new Amanda Waller looks boring.

I picked up Batman and Robin and Supergirl, typically they are short of her issue 6, so have to wait to read the rest until they get it.

However, really enjoyed the first five issues of Supergirl.

Batman and Robin is a case of what was I thinking not getting them from the off. I love the back and forth between Damian and Bruce, and the Damian challenge to the previous Robins bit is one of my fave bits in DCNU so far.

Morathi's Darkest Sin wrote:Wow, just saw the Man of Steel teaser... normally I'm not a big fan of Superman, but for some reason, the hairs of the back of my neck stood up at the end.

Interesting, with Zod as well.. I'll be off to the cinema next year.

Yeah. Did seem good indeed.

... http://www.bleedingcool.com/2012/07/22/zack-snyder-uses-grant-morrisons-words-for-man-of-steel-trailer/

.. oh, that explains it then

The DKR-packaged teaser for MoS seemed better than the one shown at SDCC alright. (Was that music from Lord of the Rings?) But after seeing DKR, I'm a bit worried for MoS -- which seems to share the same aesthetic and, I fear, ambivalent morals.

Manchu wrote:The DKR-packaged teaser for MoS seemed better than the one shown at SDCC alright. (Was that music from Lord of the Rings?) But after seeing DKR, I'm a bit worried for MoS -- which seems to share the same aesthetic and, I fear, ambivalent morals.

I think you might be on to something there - especially as recent quotes I've read indicate a desire to move away from the "Big Blue Boy Scout" perception that may or may not actually exist.

I think it is a mistake to make a less morally clear version of Superman, but I've got high hopes that eventually they'll get it right, or right enough...

Superman's real super power is moral clarity. This is why Lex Luthor is his nemesis -- Luthor's super power is moral relativism. You can see this symbolized by Superman's relationship to the Sun, a symbol of light and truth and reason. His weakness, kyrptonite, is a radioactive element: it warps and bends and mutates.

Moral clarity, however, is not a good thing if you sponsor bad morals. Snyder's 300 has exceptional moral clarity, for example ... just like those Nuremberg rallies in the 30s were morally clear ... Morrison summed up Superman perfectly when he said that Superman teaches us that it's responsible use of power rather than power itself that we should aspire to. It is the gentleness with which Superman exercises his might that makes his authority irresistible. If it were any other way, Luthor would be right about him.

In DKR, the question comes up several times "why does Batman want to save Gotham?" Nolan never has Batman answer the question explicitly. To me, there are two possible answers: either (1) because Gotham deserves to be saved or (2) because Batman is good no matter how bad Gotham is. This is a powerful ambiguity. In fact, this is the issue at the heart of the Reformation: should we be saved because we are good or because our savior is good? You can see that the question is still not resolved in the popular consciousness 500 years later when you watch movies like DKR. Do we even dare to hope that the answer might be "both"?

Well, that is the answer that Superman offers. To phrase it in Nolan's idiom, he is both the hero we need and the hero we deserve -- meaning we need quite a lot but we also deserve quite a lot. It's a tall order for any creative team. The creative team at hand is ... well, at least they're publicly quoting Morrison!

I do love what Manchu brings to discussion of comics and movies - this place would not be the same without him, or his words!

And let's hope the new Superman movie figures out that "Superman teaches us that it's responsible use of power rather than power itself that we should aspire to"!

Thanks but credit is due to Grant Morrison!

I don't know a lot about Superman. Well, I'm a comic geek like most of us, so I guess I do know a lot of stuff. But I haven't read a lot of Superman stories and didn't really like most of them anyway.

Everbody always says how All Star Superman is the best Supes story ever written. I thought it was boring and ridicolously siver age-y. And this comes from someone who loved the Brave and the Bold cartoon.
My favourite Superman story is Red Son, because here we see that it doesn't have anything to do with his upbrining that he is the way he is. Superman is a genuenly good guy who tries to better everyone's life.
I don't think I ever read a Superman story where he was unsure about himself and his powers and didn't know what do to with them. That at least, always seemed perfectly clear.

It's actually Red Son I was thinking of as I wrote about Luthor's super power being moral relativism. Remember how Brainiac advises Superman not to speak to Luthor under any circumstances?

As for a great, non-All Star Supes story from recent times:

http://www.amazon.com/Superman-Secret-Origin-Geoff-Johns/dp/140123299X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1343060881&sr=8-1&keywords=superman+secret+origin

My favorite Superman story is also Red Son but obviously it's not a normal Superman story. Superman makes a more interesting Villian than hero I guess.

KamikazeCanuck wrote:My favorite Superman story is also Red Son but obviously it's not a normal Superman story. Superman makes a more interesting Villian than hero I guess.

Not really, but that seems to be the popular, conventional wisdom these days.

Kinda sad, actually.

Alpharius wrote:

KamikazeCanuck wrote:My favorite Superman story is also Red Son but obviously it's not a normal Superman story. Superman makes a more interesting Villian than hero I guess.

Not really, but that seems to be the popular, conventional wisdom these days.

Kinda sad, actually.

Well, I think for people like me and Anung Superman is kind of damned if he does and damned if he doesn't. I also don't want to be morally ambiguos Superman. He should be a paragon, but that kind of makes him boring for long serialized fiction (good in contained stories). He should be a symbol but symbols make poor characters.

Manchu wrote:The DKR-packaged teaser for MoS seemed better than the one shown at SDCC alright. (Was that music from Lord of the Rings?) But after seeing DKR, I'm a bit worried for MoS -- which seems to share the same aesthetic and, I fear, ambivalent morals.

Man of Steel was completely off my radar until I had the two trailers pop up in my email today. Because really, who gets excited over Superman movies? They traditionally have been "Meh" since the first Superman movie appeared.

But really. The character's essence was beautifully distilled into those two teasers.
Jonathan Kent:
"One day, you're gonna have to make a choice. You have decide what kind of man you want to grow up to be. ... Whoever that man is, good character or bad, is gonna change the world."

Jor'El:
"You will give the people an ideal to strive towards. They'll race behind you, they will stumble. They will fall. ... But in time, they will join you in the sun. In time, you will help them accomplish wonders."

Suffice to say...
I'm excited now.

So....did anyone like Superman Returns? Just throwing it out there. Speak up, don't be shy.

Anung Un Rama wrote:I don't know a lot about Superman. Well, I'm a comic geek like most of us, so I guess I do know a lot of stuff. But I haven't read a lot of Superman stories and didn't really like most of them anyway.

Everbody always says how All Star Superman is the best Supes story ever written. I thought it was boring and ridicolously siver age-y. And this comes from someone who loved the Brave and the Bold cartoon.
My favourite Superman story is Red Son, because here we see that it doesn't have anything to do with his upbrining that he is the way he is. Superman is a genuenly good guy who tries to better everyone's life.
I don't think I ever read a Superman story where he was unsure about himself and his powers and didn't know what do to with them. That at least, always seemed perfectly clear.

FWIW, Henry Cavill said he looked to Red Son in particular for inspiration.

I don't get the impression that they're going to portray Superman as a moral relativist. I get the sense (from the trailer and past rumors about the movie) that his primary dilemma is whether he wants to assume the role. And really, who would want to take that on? Wouldn't it just be easier and happier to enjoy your powers privately and just fit into society? Although I'm guessing that with Zod on board, Kal-El will have some decisions to make. Hopefully it's a more nuanced Zod that we're accustomed to seeing.

One of the things I like most about the current reimagining in the comics under Morrison is the notion that he's a crusader of sorts for positive change and the moral center for the Justice League. The scene where he disappointedly tells the JL to give him a call if they encounter a space monster was subtle but really powerful, I thought. With him apparently walking the earth, maybe we'll see a little of that guy in the movie.

I really liked the concept of the two trailers, each featuring a father that helped mold him into the person he is. It's always been interesting to me that he would have been a prince of sorts under his father on Krypton, while his upbringing under Jonathan and Martha was obviously very humble. But take either father out of the equation, and you wouldn't get Superman.

Okay so everybody realizes that Superman is a story about Jesus right?

As told by two Jewish men.

KamikazeCanuck wrote:He should be a paragon, but that kind of makes him boring for long serialized fiction (good in contained stories).

It'd be presumptuous to simply point to 80+ years continuously in print, I suppose. The current dominant form in modern American storytelling holds up the arc as the summum bonum. The rise of arc-as-all runs parallel to the rise of libertarianism -- the narrative of the individual's effort to overcome his community. In popular culture terms, we're talking about the transformation of Survivor into Lost and the mode of Lost proliferating across the other networks and into film. The destruction of the planet Vulcan by J. J. Abrams is its ultimate expression for us geeky types.

The whole process is about cycling dramatic energy up and up and up with twists and turns until the protagonist is raptured away into self-actualization. Events cannot be repeatable in this form because everything is directed toward the protagonist's contingent but imminent destiny: the whole world of the story exists only for his transcendence. The endless soap opera with its interminably retiring and arriving cast suddenly becomes deadly finite. In other words, the story takes history (or at least the phantasmagoria of history) as seriously as gravity (again, more specifically, the phantasmagoria of gravity). And all these arc-is-all stories have a heavy emphasis on the "realistic" (e.g., the Nolan Batman films).

There are some problems. First, we don't tell stories for the same reason that we study history. There's a lot of confusion about that (the whole "those who don't learn from their mistakes are doomed to repeat them" deal) and most people are deeply devoted to the idea of history just being a series of stories that we tell in order to make sense of reality. We do that, too. We do that in novels and films and even comic books and video games. And our most persistent form of storytelling is myth. It seems to me that DC is always trying -- and failing -- to be slick and with-it which is funny when their characters are thousands of years old. Marvel is the opposite -- Marvel is eternally contemporary rather than being eternal in contemporary times. Marvel is always on the cutting edge of the current culture, which is one of the reasons they do so much better at the box office than DC (and, to be fair, why they usually sell more comics). But to say that "symbols aren't good characters" is a little too glib, a little too naive. Arc-as-all is the style of now, not of forever and ever amen.

And the age of the libertarian is ultimately morally and practically unsustainable. When this latest Tower of Babel topples, the pantheon of DC will still be there. Superman will be waiting, as always, to save the day. I think that that safety net is why we can take so many liberties with super heroes, from Watchmen to Kick Ass. On the page, they cannot die. Bullets bounce right off of Superman's chest. They never seem to find Batman at all. And in the real world, we can't kill them, either. All the fads come and go, and Superman still stands for truth and justice. And somehow, darkly, so does Batman.

gorgon wrote:As told by two Jewish men.

You mean like all the guys who wrote the gospels? Who else but a Jewish man (or rather two of them) could tell the story of the Messiah coming at last?

KamikazeCanuck wrote:So....did anyone like Superman Returns? Just throwing it out there. Speak up, don't be shy.

It had some beautiful moments but bad casting and the cuckold twist ruined it.

Superman Returns was, as a parody of Batman once very eloquently put it, "two hours of him lifting stuff". I understand that there is more to a superhero movie than fighting stuff, but Returns could've really used some of that.
The casting was good though.

Anung Un Rama wrote:The casting was good though.

Wha? I mean, I think Kevin Spacey and Parker Posey were 100% perfect. But Brandon Routh and Kate Bosworth? No way those were good choices.

Yeah, Bosworth as Lane...I have no idea what they were thinking.

I personally found SR vaguely creepy, as only a sequel-of-sorts-to-a-film-25-years-old-using-a-guy-who-looks-a-lot-like-the-dead-actor-from-the-original type film can be.

Manchu wrote:

Anung Un Rama wrote:The casting was good though.

Wha? I mean, I think Kevin Spacey and Parker Posey were 100% perfect. But Brandon Routh and Kate Bosworth? No way those were good choices.

To be honest, I don't remember Lois that much. But I thought Brandon Routh was a great Superman and Clark Kent and I liked Spacey.

But it has been years, since I've seen that film the last time. I actually only saw it once. In the movie theatre back when it came out.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I just read Morrison's Action Comics #2. Why is Superman's cape indestructible when he's not wearing it?

Isn't it his swaddling cloth from Krypton?