seriousfic

Call it Shoot ‘Em Up with less brains or The MatriX-TREME!!! More likely, call it Fight Club without the introspection or Office Space with cartoon visuals or just plain wasted potential. Wanted tells the story of that most oppressed of minorities, the middle-class white straight male: Wesley Gibson, whose Mark Millar self-insert status is made clear by the final frames (check the nameplate in the last voiceover). His girlfriend is screwing his best friend, his boss (a “teehee, aren’t I edgy?” black bitch in the comics, a more politically correct fat bitch in the movie) is a bitch, and his father skipped out on him when he was six weeks old. He needs to get away from the dullery of office work to become a man. More to the point, he needs to ditch his respect and courtesy for the common rabble to wrap himself up in the same smugly obnoxious (obnoxiously smug?) white-boy entitlement as Jumper's David Rice, a transformation heralded by the requisite butt rock. Beverly Hills, that's where he wants to be, rolling like a celebrity.

And how does he find out who he is? By reconnecting with the memory of dear old dad, which will help him rediscover his masculinity. No mention is made of his mother, who presumably raised him after his dad skipped out. Indeed, she may even be responsible for his momma’s boy status. Wesley has ninety-nine problems and a bitch is ninety.

( From there on, it becomes The Matrix-by-way-of-the-Matrix-sequels. (minor spoilers) )

Man, this is hard to review. It takes a lot of familiar premises and tries to do something new with them, and in some ways even succeeds, but then there's... a lotta hippie crap. Really, that's the only way to say it. Every time things start to get interesting, it gets doused with some hippie crap. I think it could've used a nice editor, really.

After a bright flash in the sky in a small town, all the children who were in utero at the time are born with superpowers. 113 total. They grow up under government supervision -- although in an inappropriately hilarious way, when dealing with a group of superpowered children who are to be treated as WMDs waiting to happen, apparently the employee screening process doesn't get child molestors -- and some of them become superheroes, some supervillains, and the rest become your average mutant.

Then, much like Watchmen, one of the Specials starts killing the others. As I read this, I was disappointed that the villain didn't get much development, and even after a certain reveal I thought the whole thing could've been dwelled on a bit more. But that only makes up the first two arcs of the story.

The problem is that I never really tracked the characters from children to adults, so all the character development seems stilted. Perhaps this is because of the large cast of characters, with new ones getting called up whenever necessary, but I just didn't care much about everyone's issues and foibles and unresolved sexual tension. The plot moves along so fast, with so little build-up, that there's no time to really get to know anyone beyond a vague "Hi, my name is ____ and I _____." I feel like more leisurely storytelling in the "prologue" would've made everything resonate a lot more.

Another problem is the art. Never have I seen a worse fit for 90s/Image art. The fact is that on the comics page, those corny-looking superhero costumes really do help readers differenciate the characters. Here, only a few Specials wear costumes, so it gets hard to tell one dark-haired man in a trenchcoat from another. Beyond that, the art is often muddled and confusing. ( Spoiler. )

Where the story really lost me is the hippie crap. By the third act, the plot embraces all those cryptofascist subtexts people keep seeing in superhero comics and... it works out great. It's like someone reimagined Watchmen as the feel-good hit of the year. One Special forces nuclear disarmament and it works out pretty good, all told. Another runs for President and forces bipartisan support by blackmail, which is okay because the ends justify the means. There never seem to be any consequences for this, except that the Republicans get angry.

Perhaps I'm cynical, but my version of that story ends/begins with the nigh-omnipotent superhero deciding that humanity, in its present form, is untenable and that the best thing for the world is for it to be reduced to an agrarian state. Cue the whole-sale destruction of every city on Earth... maybe in a couple hundred years, when the ozone layer has repaired itself, he'll let us work our way back up to steam power. Maybe.

Hey, man, what if that ended up with steampunk versus Superman? Sweet.

And oh, lordy lordy, the Republicans. Up to this point Rising Stars has had a typical liberal bias... but by the third act, it goes into overdrive. The Specials can do no wrong, and they get lots of author filibusters to prove it (in addition, all the supervillains that have survived have turned to the Light Side by now), and the Republicans can do no right. People stop talking and start speechifying. It annoyed me in Grant Morrison's Animal Man (although what annoyed me more was the smug, self-satisfied lampshade hanging) and it annoys me here.

It's like a review I read of the Left Behind series that mentioned how, since the Rapture had blipped out all unborn fetuses, abortionists were now despairing that no one would need abortions anymore. It's basically the exact inverse of that. I half-expected it to turn out that the Specials' Kryptonite was puppy tears, so an evil white old guy orders some soldiers outside to kick puppies.

My dirty little secret is that every time I watch the first X-Men movie, I can't help but think that Senator Kelly has a point and the movie cops-out by making him a racist. When he makes an entirely apt comparison between mutant powers and handguns, I think the X-Men's stated goal of having the mutants police themselves is... well, who watches the watchmen?

Here, once more, the Muggles' position gets softpedaled as fearmongering, completely ignoring the fact that there's actually something to be afraid of! I like the "mutants as minorities" metaphor as much as anyone, but it completely falls apart when you realize that people aren't afraid of gay people because John Barrowman can grow fifty feet tall and blow your house apart.

::adding a rantage tag because this has become less a review and more a reviewer filibuster::

It's depressingly true, but as much as we may wonder "hey, why haven't Reed Richards and Captain America and all the rest created utopia yet?", the reason is very simple... it's boring as hell, man. It's as deeply boring as listening to a stoned out college student tell you about how, man, if, like, the government would only, dude, only stop funding the military for one year, like you see?, and then put that money in legalizing hemp, dude, are you with me, and then stop the gas companies from keeping down that water that runs on cars, I mean...

Shit.

I’m writing a rather… epic? (30,000 words and counting)… Dick/Babs story with amnesia as the plot element du jour. I think I’ve told you guys about that before. My beta’s telling me that Barbara comes off like a sulky child, which serves me right for trying to make this consistent with canon. Dick/Babs is one of those couples that have had so much shit heaped on them that it takes a long time to clean it off in a way that seems organic, at least if you’re me and don’t want to betray the integrity of the story. Because there’s a lot of drama to mine in Dick basically forgetting all the bad shit that’s happened to him and in Barbara trying to protect him from what amounts to his own life. Also, there’s a supervillain plot, because at a certain point you just need a break from the will-they-or-won’t-they? Trust me, you’ll thank me (if you read it, please please please…).

Because the reason Barbara doesn’t just hop into bed with people isn’t cause of the wheelchair… although she could probably rig up a ramp or something and oh God that’s gonna get me in hot water. I hope someone laughed.

And the bad part is that Dick/Babs canon is apparently what the Big Two would like for most comic book romances. Two people like each other, but a series of contrived events prevent them from ever celebrating their love in any meaningful way (no, I don't care how many naughty-bits-concealing sex scenes you throw them into, that's just cheap eroticism. Still, do more of it). Thus the dude gets to keep being a “swinging bachelor” (and don’t tell me that’s not what the Nightwing book was going for, when the issue after he proposed marriage to Barbara he went and screwed some nameless bimbo. Get thee to an editor, Bruce Jones) and the woman doesn’t get her cooties on him. Comic book publishers are really fond of certain kinds of change, the death part. They’re practically in love with that, because it presents the illusion of growth and then you can throw the costume on someone else and it's All Better. But the idea of characters developing on their own is anathema to them. They want characters to fit into the same, tired, stale dynamic for-literally-ever. Because of the kids, you see, though I doubt these writers ever were kids from the way they write, trying to suck all the awesomeness and grandeur out of the stories they've inherited. I mean, there are people who still think Lois Lane should be trying to trick Superman into marrying her! Look at Smallville’s Lana-go-round. Look at Lois & Clark, after it started to suck. At a certain point, same old same old gets… old.

I swear to God, if Fifth World reinvents Barda and Scott as one of those fourth-season John/Aeryn couples who can’t get together because the editor says so, I may have to not pet my dog. Do you want to be responsible for that, DC? That dog loves being petted, I’ll have you know!

See, this is why I like Babs/Dinah. That was organic. So organic the writer didn’t even intend it. Dinah falling in love with a voice on the radio and Barbara coming to reciprocate it just plays right into their characters. It basically cures their issues, which is what a good relationship should do. Dick/Babs is organic to a much lesser extent because at a certain point Chuck Dixon said “these two characters love each other, partly because he used to be Robin and she used to be Batgirl.” But at least he laid the groundwork. Nowadays you’ve got a lot of editorial fiat behind the epic love (gag me) of Dick/Babs, because they have Always Loved Each Other. I’ll pick up on that in my review of Nightwing Annual 2, but basically it does a disservice to both characters and to poor Starfire. And even then, there’s no snogging. We get the worst of both worlds. At this point, DC might as well marry them, because the fans won’t accept anything less and at a certain point Dick leaving a trail of ex-girlfriends behind him starts to look… well, fandom is way ahead of DC on that point.

I was going somewhere with this, I swear.

I’m not even disagreeing on the dissolution of the Dick/Babs marriage, because they hadn’t even been dating when he proposed and the only reason DC went through with it is because they were gonna kill Dick off anyway. Like, what kind of cheap irony is that? What next, Tim gets shot dead one week before he was set to retire and travel the world in his yacht, the U.S.S. Live Forever, with a resurrected Sue Dibny as first mate and Stephanie Brown as sexy cabin girl? Come up with something more inventive. Like Dick and Kory get teleported to a jungle world for a year and when they come back they’re both married and fetchingly attired in leopard-skin loincloths. And Barbara never got a chance to give him her answer! And Dick still wonders what her answer might’ve been! And Kory kinda preferred things on the jungle world, because life was simple there and no one hurt anyone else! You don’t have to be TNT to know that’s drama!

Last word: characters can change in ways that don’t involve deathey deathey DEATH and those ways can also involve committed relationships. Reading this is more satisfying than repeating the same thing over and over and over again. Let’s be honest, if I gave you a choice between a series that will not change appreciably over the course of ten years and one that will be totally different, which would you choose?

Just for the sake of argument, we’ll say that this change doesn’t involve several members of the supporting cast dying for the sake of sales, the hero’s girlfriend being tortured to death by a bad guy, and/or the entire universe being reset back to the status quo of the author’s childhood.

I think that’s as good an evidence as any that there’s a difference between change and growth. Superman Blue? Change. Peter marrying MJ? Growth. See the diff?