artbyblastweave

[artbyblastweave]

dead lady

[artbyblastweave]

wait did they seriously make a star wars spin off for babies about a bunch of baby jedis. thats so fucking funny they're all going to die so badly.

[artbyblastweave]

Image Comics has just released the first issue of The Power Fantasy on their site, for free. Read the comic people are calling "The Power Fantasy" (normally while showering it with praise).

First trade available now, and you'll find links of how to buy (and a lot more) in our The Power Fantasy primer.

Worth stating the obvious: giving this to friends who you think would dig is the single best way to do word of mouth, which we always appreciate.

[artbyblastweave]

I mentioned this briefly in passing during my last serious Fallout kick, but it's striking to me how much Caesar resembles the median protagonist of an Edgar Rice Burroughs outing, as experienced by everyone in that guy's way. A learned man from "modern" civilization embarks on an expedition to parts unknown (with a couple plucky sidekicks along for the ride.) He gets captured by the natives, wins their respect by applying his knowledge of "modern" science and military strategy to their local conflicts, leads them to decisive victory over all their rivals, kicks ass to the top of the local political totem pole and reshapes society as he sees fit. He's David Innes, he's John Carter, He's Hank Morgan, He's Travis Morgan, He's Alan Quartermaine, he's the successor to any of the slew of stories about an American or European overtaking and surpassing the natives at their own game, in contexts historical, subtropical, subterranean or extraplanetary.

Where it splits off, of course, that it's aware of the fascistic-slash progressive-eugenicist undertones of that entire character archetype and the zeitgeist that produced it. Rather than following the script in lockstep his plucky sidekicks peel off one by one-Bill Calhoun out of moral horror at the overreach of his imperial project, Joshua Graham after flying too close to the sun in embracing a power fantasy that only has room for one true protagonist. A slightly more involved knowledge of military strategy specifically doesn't translate into enlightened philosopher-king status; the "new society" he's trying to create is a sham, informed more by his myopia and personal hangups than it is by anything that made Rome-as-it-actually-existed a successful polity. But this isn't the kind of genre where the Hero receives pushback on the sustainability of his power fantasy. And it isn't sustainable; he built a political machine that reproduces his initial successes at scale, but that's all that it can do. In the referent stories, it's not uncommon for the protagonist's forced departure to cause their grand ambitions to unravel in their absence (gotta make room for a sequel somehow! We're getting paid by the word.) In New Vegas that prospect is presented with a sigh of relief rather than framed as a tragic regression.

All of this feels fairly deliberate; gesturing at a space in pulp fiction even if it isn't dropping names directly. New Vegas, more than any other game in the franchise, is Doing Genre as part of its commentary; in addition to the usual B-movie sci-fi extravaganza it's a spaghetti western, it's a gangster flick, it's a war story. Burroughs and the Burroughs-adjacent are a corner of the pulp lineage that's severely fallen out of the zeitgeist compared to those first three, in no small part due to how they were cannibalized for parts by many of the more immediately recognizable science fiction and adventure subgenres that Fallout is pulling from. But Caesar's brand of power fantasy is still in there- you are what you eat. There's still room for his archetype. It's just that that archetype functions most intuitively as an antagonist once we're a century-removed from a zeitgeist that can spin amoral empire-building as a cracking good time for hot-blooded youths.

[artbyblastweave]

Do you have any opinions on how the Big Two do Atlantis? Do you prefer any of them to the other? Is there another superhero workthat does the job better? Non-superhero work?

I've never been particularly invested in Atlantis at either Marvel or DC. It's there. It's fine. The standout elseworld interpretation of the thing, though, is hands down the version present in Tangent Comics.

To recap, the premise of Tangent Comics was that in the late 90s, DC took a bunch of the golden age characters who'd been reinvented from the ground up during the 1960s (Green Lantern, The Flash, The Atom etc.) and repeated the process for the 1990s in an alt-history shared universe. Some characters continued the one-upsmanship in present in the shift from the golden age to the Silver age- Tangent Flash being an energy-being who could teleport instead of a speedster- and some of the characters invoked the abandoned core of the original golden age concepts, Green Lantern being a mystical vigilante psychopomp whose lantern allowed her to command ghosts. But how they handled Atlantis was extremely compelling.

Rather than an ancient undersea society, Atlantis and Atlanteans have only existed in the Tangent Comics universe since the 1960s, when a botched attempt by The Atom to resolve the Cuban missile crisis resulted in the American Southeast getting nuked out of existence and World War Three kicking off. In what amounts to the Atlantis/Atlanta joke from Futurama played deadly seriously, the Sea Devils- the setting's collective analog for Aquaman- are B-movie nuclear mutants that evolved from sea life exposed to the sunken radioactive remains of Georgia. They're between a rock and a hard place; the coasts have been recolonized by Utopian eugenicists who've identified them as the new Outgroup recipient of that famed Southern Hospitality, and even worse nuclear horrors are constantly pouring out of the deeper waters to attack them in the shallows in which they're fighting for space with the humans.

On top of the B-movie creature feature throwback, the recency does a ton of lifting for this concept for me; it eliminates the problem of figuring out how an undersea society as old as human civilization would fit into geopolitics or go undetected for as long as it has, and it also neatly eliminates any pro-monarchy sentiment. The Ocean Master isn't the stately head of a noble dynasty with the weight of history behind his every yadda yadda yadda- he's just the guy who emerged who was charismatic enough to do the necessary and thankless work of wrangling a bunch of scared, perpetually on-edge mutant subspecies that've only been sapient for about two decades and viewed each other as potential food sources prior to that. On the whole it really does feel so much like the kind of ground-up Retool Aquaman deserved to get in the 1960s but never got. And it's not at all surprising that it was Kurt Busiek who wrote it.

[artbyblastweave]

What’s some good advice you want to share?

If you're ever in the greater Boston area, the basement of the Harvard Co-op Bookstore in Harvard square has a ridiculous number of discounted comic trade paperbacks in the basement, the stock of which are periodically refreshed when local students need to free up space while moving. Every single time I go in there I find at least one thing I've been looking for since forever, it's fantastic.

More generally but relatedly, never pay more than ten bucks for a comic book trade paperback.

[artbyblastweave]

Little miss gaslight gatekeep girlboss

[artbyblastweave]

If you wanted to ruin one of the Big Superhero Characters as potently and lastingly as humanly possible, how would you do it?

Ruination is relative. The closest you can get to "Ruining" a Big Two character is to do a storyline that permanently overwrites whatever traits they had going for them before, permanently alters their perception. Hank Pym was the recipient of this; he's not ruined, but almost everything involving him is sucked into the orbit of of the wifebeater allegations, either doubling down on or refuting. Ditto for Scarlet Witch and the fallout of Avengers Disassembled; she hasn't had characterization unrelated to the fallout of that since before I could walk. I would similarly argue that Jason Todd is never going to escape the gravitational well of Under the Red Hood; Where do you take him from there that keeps him in Batman's orbit but differentiates him sufficiently from the rest of the Robin Flock?

Of course, whether this sticks is always up in the air. Hank McCoy's character assassination, for example, hasn't caused everyone to turn on Beast; it's caused all of Beast's shooters to go "man, this character assassination sucks, bring back the cool version of this guy!" I can't quite pass judgement on what causes this kind of thing to take or not take. A lot of characters are made of rubber in terms of whether this misconduct is made to count against them in the popular perception; others are glue.

And, of course, there's the nuclear option, mainly applicable to D-list characters in particular; Give them an adaptation directed by James Gunn. The result might still be good, but it'll be differently good, and it stands a good chance of eating the characterization in the source material.

[artbyblastweave]

Draft a proposal to ruin the x-men.

Ultimate X-Men. This isn't a dunk, they semi-deliberately ruined it in-house. A running thread through that comic was that Xavier was, charitably, just shy of a cult leader employing (and selectively manipulating the minds of) child soldiers, and the team's legitimacy was not-so-subtly the result of Nick Fury considering them the version of Magento's movement that they had some ability to exert leverage over. The genre-typical soap-opera love triangles and side switching and double-crossing were used to cast the X-Men not as a found family but as a goddamn circus, and there were a few beats (notably Ultimate Nightmare by Warren Ellis) that framed the entire self-righteous internal narrative of the X-Men about being mutant freedom fighters, the vanguard of the future, as the self-righteous carpet under which they sweep their misconduct and incompetence. Ultimately, mutantkind as a whole is framed not as any kind of future but as a dead-end, the same kind of runoff from the military industrial complex as nearly every other superpowered threat in the setting. All sound and fury, signifying nothing.

None of this was implemented with total consistency or total competence- after all, when the first thing that happens in the book is a sentinel extrajudicially murdering a bunch of people for genetic crimes, some level of violent resistance is pretty clearly justified. but they really were frequently gesturing at the idea that these people need to get over themselves.

I never get tired of using this panel:

[artbyblastweave]

Hey I've sent you a few asks in the past and I really appreciate your takes on the superhero genre, and I'm hoping you can share your input on this.

I'm obsessed with categorizing things, not always in a healthy way, but in my thinking about literary conventions I've come up with a Cartesian grid, where if fantasy and sci fi are on either end of the x axis, then the y axis runs from horror to superheroes. It's far from universal, but it serves my purposes.

For the x axis Dune and The Lord of the Rings can serve as a sort of representative ur-text, in that they aren't progenitors of the genre, but if you spend enough time in SFF you will eventually have to reckon with them, and they are vast and dense enough to warrant serious study.

I'm currently on a horror binge trying to decide if anything fills that same type of niche for the y axis. The Cthulhu Mythos comes close. For all their faults Lovecraft and Derleth cast long shadows.

With superhero fiction it'd be easy to point to something like Watchmen and call it a day. It makes sense if I don't think too much about it, but that feels like such a cop out. I'm also not really well read enough to have any confidence in that pick.

Maybe my framework just doesn't function, but I'm curious if you have any thoughts on it.

Thanks for your time

You're right that it's a bit of an awkward fit to use Watchmen for what you're talking about because even if it's the wellspring of basically every superhero story told since, it's good specifically on the grounds of how it engaged with the forty years of codified genre tropes that existed up to that point. That makes it a significantly different beast from LOTR and Dune. I'd argue that with the axis you've presented, Horror and Superheroes actually mirror each other pretty well as two genres that have a massive corpus without necessarily having a standout platonic version of the thing. It's telling that instead of a specific Lovecraft story, you picked the mythos- I.E. the whole written corpus of two different authors. I think you can similarly point to the sprawling perpetual publication of silver-age Marvel or 1950s Schwartz-and-Binder Superman as something loosely analogous to the mythos, in your analogy- collectively emblematic but with no one piece being standout.

Now feels like a good time to bring up Avengers #88, a piece of work-for-hire writing done by the esteemed Harlan Ellison.

This issue was has always been remarkable to me because it's very, very clearly a loose adaptation of the plot of Call of Cthulhu. It only dodges plagiarism status by virtue of the first page opening with a cheeky little quote from the story proper. It follows the same loose story beats, except instead of the cops breaking up a cult in Louisiana it's Cap helping the Falcon track down a brainwashed friend of his, and instead of Cthulhu acting as an intermediary for the higher pantheon of dark gods it's an alien named Psyklop, and instead of Norwegian sailors stumbling on R'lyeh It's the Avengers, who kick down the door and kick Psyklop's ass and save the day. A cosmic horror story except Superheroes show up at the last second.

Given their respective publication timelines- superheroes following on the heels of lovecraft by about a decade- and given the perpetual escalation of the threats that they punch out for our viewing pleasure (e.g. "The FF fight God)" for a while now I've conceptualized superheroes as an antibody against cosmic horror. This comic is basically the epitome of that comparison.

[artbyblastweave]

Draft a proposal to fix the x-men.

To the extent that the X-Men need to be fixed, the problem, more than probably any other superhero, is that they never fucking end; they can't end. Every civil rights movement they've ever been pegged as a metaphor for has made some kind of forward progress over the decades, but the people who can fly are somehow stuck on a treadmill. We're on the sixth or seventh "mutants on the brink of extinction" scenario; McKay just did, what, the fourth instance of Xavier Fucking Off Forever, For Real This Time, Pinkie Promise? Even if it was objectively incredibly well written it can't claw its way out from under the weight of the fact that it's all been done. And it'll be done again. Making it a single, finite story that fucking ends, or at least advances the fucking setting, is all that actually needs to happen. X-Men: Evolution but it runs for five seasons and gets to tie everything up. Claremont took a stab at this with X-Men: The End, although I haven't read it and can't attest to its quality one way or another. And, of course, Ultimate Marvel made them a finite property in its own roundabout, widely despised way.

Option two, (really option 1.5 since these aren't mutually exclusive) is to make the story an explicit period piece, ideally either in the 1960s or the 1980s. The 1980s would allow you to tap into and play with the zeitgeist that produced the version of the team that people actually give a shit about (which, come to think of it, is what X-Men 97 is already doing;) it's also the point at which the Marvel timeline really started to terminally arrest into comic-book time; the ANAD lineup have been around for fifty years but they're still the New Guys, to me. Positioning the X-Men as the comparative New Kids on the Block compared to the old guard of the Avengers, Fantastic Four and so on lets you pin the disparity in their public treatment of mutant and non-mutant heroes as the result of the increased saliency of mutants from the mid-70s onward. Claremont's run was already deliberately plugged into the politics of the back half of the cold war in a lot of different ways; Magneto as an aging concentration-camp survivor turned mutant Zionist, Storm having been orphaned by French Bombers during the Suez crisis, evil televangelists as antagonists, a whole mess of stuff with a lot of historical specificity.

If not the 1980s, my other pick would be to set the thing in the 60s. Mutants are fundamentally a product of the atomic age, fleetingly and hand-wavingly identified as the delayed byproduct of the testing and use of nuclear weaponry, but 60s X-Men really weren't engaging with the politics of any of that; or really any kind of complicated politics at all; it wasn't a civil rights metaphor except retroactively. But in this pitch it could be more directly plugged into that political moment, ideally in tactful and non-stupid ways. There's tons of ways in which the non-metaphorical minorities at the heart of the civil rights movement bore the brunt of American nuclear testing and similar scientific misadventures; the idea that mutants were created by the same government now frantically trying to oppress the cat back into the bag is a pitch with a lot of legs. Ultimate Marvel understood this, although the idiom was filtered through the lens of genetic engineering is the new nuke, and nobody liked the punchline because Jeff Loeb delivered it in the trainwreck that was Ultimatum. Deniz Camp has implemented similar ideas to what I'm talking about here on the Hulk side of things, with the New Ultimate She-Hulk being the byproduct of illicit gamma bomb testing on Pacific Islanders. To cap this all off I've mentioned before that a 1960s retrofuturistic nuclear age X-Men would act as a great foil to a 1930s-situated first wave of heroes- Teenaged Rebels and Heartthrobs on the heels of the Greatest Generation. It could be made to rhyme.

[artbyblastweave]

Later this year, I'm planning to port my blog's scrambled timeline posts to AO3, with some extra content. At the moment that's a ways off - other plans in between here and there, scrambled timeline and otherwise - but as a little preview, I'm going to post Appendix C. It's actually quite old, but I haven't published it on Tumblr before. Decent chance I've already sent it to you if we've been in contact about it, though.

General content warning on this one; that kind of applies to all of my posts, but I think it's worth highlighting with Appendix C because the content warnable stuff is all there really is to it. It's one of the shortest posts in the series, and it sort of exists to bluntly clarify the thesis of the project overall in a more serious way. I wouldn't really recommend it if you aren't already really into the whole scrambled timeline thing.

APPENDIX C: THE POINT OF ALL THIS

I feel like one major elephant in the room in the second post, which goes unspoken but kind of highlights the nature of the entire project, is this: why did Zack Snyder suddenly leave production of The Avengers, handing the project over to Joss Whedon? Well, same reason he did it with Justice League in our timeline; his daughter committed suicide. I said at the start that everything went basically the same except for who told what stories, and I meant it; the tragedies of the artists played out in pretty much the same way, it was just the art that was different. That's the whole premise. The thesis of this universe's connection with ours is essentially this famous Vonnegut quote:

Every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turned out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.

It's a world that's existentially dreadful because all of the art has been chaotically jumbled around like the Tazmanian Devil ran through it and it didn't matter. Everything basically turned out the same. It might matter some on an individual level to people who were touched by some piece of art or another, but there's a lot more seeming there than being; the world is full of muses, and there's always another fish (story) in the sea. There's just a whole lot more In Spite Of A Nail going on here than For Want Of A Nail. Everything's getting warped towards the same place eventually; it's Sisyphean.

Walt Disney drew Bugs Bunny and still started a media empire that would drag his name through the mud after he smoked himself to an early grave. Henry Darger still remained unrecognized in his lifetime for writing The Story of Rose, and the Other Girls of the Forest, and their Ordained Child Slave Rebellion against the Tyrant Kings of Gerkopolis, and access to the full sixteen thousand page manuscript remains tightly guarded away from the general public; the internet still gangstalked Christine Chandler to the severe detriment of her wellbeing and mental health for creating The Vivian Girls. Howard Ashman still succumbed to HIV without ever getting to complete his magnum opus The Snow Queen; Judith Barsi's abusive father still murdered her and her mother after she finished voice work on Don Bluth's The Rescuers. Woody Allen doing The Day The Clown Cried instead of Jerry Lewis doesn't undo the Holocaust and it doesn't unabuse those women. Yeah, Matt Groening did The Jetsons instead of Futurama; he's still on the Epstein list. Dan Schneider's Kim Possible, filmed for Nickelodeon and sweetened with a laugh track. Joss Whedon's Xena The Warrior Princess.

James Mangold was filming what would become Remember Me with Hugh Jackman and Meg Ryan when 9/11 happened and he decided to rework it into a war propaganda film. But wars don't really need any specific propaganda film. The same ugly shit happens either way. The deck chairs just got rearranged at Pearl Harbor.

[artbyblastweave]

re:ward i literally read it just to know how the shard science worked on the backend. it was just okay, but it was memable and I quite like the alternations to the power system.

Perfectly fair assessment

[artbyblastweave]

If you don't mind, what was the discourse on Ward about?

For a latecomer to the fandom

I compiled a bunch of it in a big post several years ago the last time this question came up- I wouldn't read it unless you've finished Ward (or don't intend to finish it) so that it doesn't impact your experience of the contentious story beats under discussion. That might be out of date by now but I'm not burning any more braincells on it

[artbyblastweave]

one thing about iron man i always found interesting was how, if you go back to that very first Tales of Suspense story, it strongly implies that Stark is just trapped in the Iron Man suit forever, and then walks that back from the next issue onward with him just having to wear the chestpiece and letting him continue the millionaire playboy lifestyle. i wonder sometimes how his character might have shaken out if they hadnt gone back on that initial concept

Was working on a longer post about this but yeah, one of the most compelling early concepts of Iron-Man is that even if he slims it down to just the chest plate, he might have all the money in the world but he's fundamentally dependent on a Bulky Apparatus to survive- one that he can't let anyone find out about in order to maintain his secret identity, and at the start that did matter to him.. Some of the early comics show this actively interfering with his playboy lifestyle because he can't take off his shirt in front of casual flings without blowing his cover. A modern comic that was interested in digging into this more could do some really interesting things with the social limitations that this imposes.

Of course the core issue is that with Iron Man of all characters it genuinely constitutes a characterization misstep if he doesn't eventually eliminate or marginalize this problem through iteration. A piece of shrapnel being the one goddamn problem in the entire universe that Mr. I've-got-Reed-Richards-On-Speed-Dial can't figure out how to fix eventually starts to smack of the writers Arbitrarily Preserving The Premise At All Costs, which is one of the biggest original sins of the superhero genre, so it makes sense that they've eventually moved away from that aspect of it- I'm in fact 90 percent sure he's on his second or third cloned body by now. Thematically, though, the idea that he's terminally and fundamentally medically dependent on his own engineering prowess in some way would be a great thing to bring back or raise the saliency of. Something esoteric and pervasive enough that it can't be trivialized by the sci-fi engineering of the setting, but still visibly chronic-illness coded so the metaphor gets across.

[artbyblastweave]

Taylor when she went out in that dress to do skitter business

[artbyblastweave]

I was told to do something really funny here. I was told to say all seven gorillion-word serials had to be read in release order, or some similar thing. I did not do this. I have a sliver of integrity and I can't get the tweezers in at the right angle to deal with that sucker. I'm just driving it in further every time. It hurts. It hurts

So what are the sequels to Worm, like? Are they also superhero stories, are they good etc?

The only sequel to Worm is Ward, which, in the most spoiler-free manner possible, follows a hero team attempting to navigate the evolving post-gold-morning status quo. The question of whether this story was "good" ignited a war that claimed the lives of approximately twelve billion commentariat between roughly 2018 and 2021. Personally, I liked it despite its many shortcomings but I'm typing that subjective stance from within a bespoke Discourse-proof bunker I constructed with my bare hands in an abandoned coal mine in Appalachia. At the end of the day It's online for free. If you don't like it you can at least in theory stop reading, and I've heard rumors of some individuals who actually managed to do so.

The other stories are Pact (Urban fantasy universe, good but breakneck) Pale (same universe as Pact, good but bloated beyond measure) Twig (biopunk alternate history, good) Claw (Alternate history technothriller crime drama, liked what I read of it) and Seek (The current serial- cyberpunk dystopian space opera survival horror affair.) People who are less sleepy than me can act as better pitch persons for any given series than I can at the moment. Really the important thing to hammer in here is that Worm only has one sequel. All the rest of that is some other unrelated bullshit