f13.net

Apparently Peter Parker got killed off in some storyline a couple months ago by the Green Goblin.  So we need a new one (http://www.comicsbeat.com/2011/08/02/marvel-announces-new-ultimate-spider-man-of-a-different-color-miles-morales/)!


At least they're sticking with the alliteration of Peter Parker...  But then the Daily Mail chimed in with this tidbit (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2021563/Marvel-Comics-reveal-new-Spider-Man-black-gay-future.html)...


In Soviet Russia, YOU will make Spiderman gay!   :oh_i_see:

The /. comments on this have been hilarious

http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/11/08/03/1858250/Spidermans-Politically-Correct-Replacement

Comedy GOLD, Jerry!

I'm going to have to stop reading Spider-Man in protest!

Wait, what's that?  Ultimate Spider-Man?  Oh.  Someone was still reading that?  Why?

Plus, geejus fuck, this is not a new thing. Tony Stark was replaced in the comics many years ago for a very LONG time by James Rhodes. Hal Jordan was replaced for a long time by John Stewart. This is a common comic-book trope: refresh a book by sidelining the 'normal' alter-ego, and make the new guy/gal represent some kind of diversity. Then later on you can get a nostalgic continuity-fetishist like Geoff Johns to come along and bring the old (always white) guy back, and if it's Johns, he'll almost certainly want to go ahead and kill/dismember the new black/Asian/gay/woman replacement. Frankly if you're a racist this is a storytelling trend that ought to please rather than anger you: the "normal" version is the standard white guy, the "variant" is non-white, and the variant always gives way to the white norm sooner or later.

The Ultimate line was doomed as a storytelling platform once it began to acquire its own continuity and history. Sooner or later they'll find a way to bring Peter Parker back through cloning/magic/dimensional travel because now even the Ultimate line has its own "nostalgia" effects taking hold despite its supposed "realism".

and while we all wanted to probably forget, what about Ben -- clone of Peter?  That was canon wasn't it?   Jeebus that lost me.

I like how the Daily Mail article there makes this seem like big news until it gets to the very last couple of lines and explains that this is part of the Ultimate line which is complete separate from the normal Marvel Universe.

How many super heroes haven't quit / died / been sent to the negative zone / future / past and been replaced by their friend / enemy / son etc?

Anyone who claims that this puts them off of comics isn't terribly familiar with comics in the first place.

I'm impressed about how hard Marvel is working to skull fuck the Ultimate universe into the ground.  I use to enjoy the line of comics.  They were a lot better to read anything coming out of the main universe.  And it allowed them to skip over and strain out the worst parts of Marvel coninutiy.  Then they started bringing those worst parts in for the fuck of it (clone saga..).  Then things started getting stupid across all the lines.  

And then they had Ultimatum.  Ye gods.

And now I see them getting even more retarded with killing Spiderman and some other main characters in his universe.  Fuck marvel up its stupid ass.

I think using the Ultimate line to genuinely kill characters is fine. It has to fit with the overall storytelling and have a point beyond Jeph Loeb-asshole-shockvalue of being all 'mature' and shit.

Eh, sort of.  The original point of the Ultimate universe was to create a place where they could sort of freeze frame in time the characters we know and love, have them go through adventures, and not have to deal with the decades of bullshit built up behind them.  They didn't want the characters to age or anything from the time they started them in the Ultimate universe.  I thought it was a nice idea, and it worked well for the first few years.  Then they started just fucking things over.

Having said that, your right, I wouldn't mind them killing off a character or two as long as it worked in context of a great story.  But all we got was the aforementioned Jeph Loeb-asshole-shockvalue.

Yep, whats going to get me to spend money on comics again is a black gay spiderman.

Marvel you have to one up DC yar!

What?  I can't say I've read everything Johns has written, but he's pretty much never struck me as somebody who kills off replacement characters for no reason.  All of Hal Jordan's replacements (Guy, John, and Kyle) are all alive and well and play prominent roles in the Green Lantern books.  JSA, especially towards the end of his run was all about celebrating Legacy heroes.  He was also co-writer on 52, where the Question was killed off and replaced by Rene Montoya, and Jason Rusch (Firestorn) had a decent sized part in both the Blackest Night and Brightest Day storylines.

I bet this person has "tons of black friends"

Still less stupid than One More Day/Brand New Day.

Spiderman fans, the nonwankers, already had a reason to boycott marvel with one more day/brand new day garbage. Now we have this. This is a FU from marvel, its cyborg jedi buggs bunny type rape of the franchise. I grew up with the 90s you want ME into comic books you better have the Batman TAS Bruce Wayne as batman, JLU John Stewart as Green Latern, and 90s Peter Parker as Spiderman. Anything else can go bugger itself in the asshole where it came from.

I wonder when they are coming out with the Ultimate Ultimate books. It seems like thay have become just as convoluted as 616 now.

oh no DL Riley wants his Peter Parker in his asshole so he feels properly good.

Seriously, if you give a shit about comics, here's the only thing that matters:

GOOD STORIES.

If Spider-Man's mantle is taken up by a disabled Inuit pipe-welder lesbian who has lived most of her life in Saudi Arabia, who the FUCK CARES if it turns out that the people doing it are able to tell great stories with great art?

Shitty, boring, conventional comics-books are not ennobled because some white shitfucker nerd who is still in high school is Spider-Man. The odds are that if they stick with the basic Peter Parker storyline, a hack is going to be able to tell a good story because the basic Peter Parker storyline is GOOD. It's smart. It's semi-idiot-proof. Which has not prevented idiots from breaking into the box and shitting on it. A good premise can be spoiled by average or sub-average creators. A shitty premise can be turned into gold by geniuses. Anybody who wants to categorically rule out either is a shithead who should give me all his/her money that might be used to buy comic books or books or movies or anything else because their cluelessness about culture and life and politics means they would be better off sitting in a box without sharp objects eating gruel for the rest of their lives.

If this change was done in the interest of good stories than yeah, go gay spiderman. But this isn't case. You know it, I know it, everyone with a brain knows it. Im no fan of ths than i am a fan of the new grim darker spiderman set in highschool who looks like that dutch from twilight. I'm not a fan of the old reboot of of spiderman that had insisted that carnage was some clone of peter parker/uncle ben, wasn't a fan of spiderman undoing years of progress so he can be a 20 something living with his aunt again because thats new and exciting. No i'm not a fan of 60% of what they do with spiderman in the comics, and probably won't be a fan of this, because i find it insulting that to attract minorities you slap black face on a character and say he is from the inner city and there you nonwhite comic book readers here is a character you can relate to. And being a nonwhite prone-to-visit-a-comic-book-store-every-once-in-a-while comic book reader I would find this comedy gold if this wasn't fucking spiderman. Even sadder this shit will probably be on TV/Theater if given half a year to run its course.

Besides if any A list hero needs to be rebooted as a black man its Superman.

All they did was change his race. Spazz out much?

It seems like that according to you changing a super hero from white to non-white is always an insult and we know why they are doing it etc etc our only option is no minorities in comics!

White Spiderman still exists and has decades of stories about him. Obviously this does open up new story territory. They've basically run out of stories to tell with mopey white Spidey, hence him getting married, getting unmarried, aunt may dying, coming back to life, etc. Do we really need the same Spiderman fighting with J Jonah Jameson the same way in two different universes for a combined total of 80 years or some shit?

Johns on JSA is one good example of this pattern a while back: he opened his run by brutally killing several old characters and having some Nazi bad guys dismember a bunch of people at a picnic. He was also behind the editorial dictate to kill the new Asian Atom so Ray Palmer could be the Atom again, and behind bringing Barry Allen back to life, which has apparently made Wally West be non-existent. A very Johns "like" elimination was bringing back Superboy's old frenemy the Yellow Peri so she could have her legs eaten by demons while she watched. (That was Keith Giffen as writer, though.) This is Johns' whole schtick: nostalgia plus 'adult' violence = what today's comics fans really want!!!

This doesnt sound like they are taking spiderman from a new angle, it sounds like there peddling a character people wouldnt read if he wasnt wearing the spidey custom. They want to wright awarked confused spiderman again but they cant use time bullets to turn ultimate spiderman into dweepy peter parker beimg bullied on an hourly basis. why couldnt they fast forward that one book and have spiderman superseeded by his daughter oh wait... no reusing good ideas might as well redo the clone saga again. I wonder what will happen if they kill wolverine and replace him with some asian guy with 2 admantiam katanas.

The Flash seems totally fucked up even by comics standards. Like there are 10 of them and instead of just being a dude who can run fast he's a guy who taps into the "speed force" which is like a fundamental primary force in the universe or some shit...lol. And from what I gather Flash fans are now divided into distinct pro and anti camps based around who the real Flash should be...?

Man, talk about being up your own ass. How do you take "dude who can run real fast" and fuck it up so badly?


Not many people complained when they turned Psylocke into a hot asian whore!

Not many people complained when they gave power girl a boob job. And lolz psycholocks went from a 4th grade league of shadows esque villian to some sex symbol.with an asian ghetto booty and her super power is showing off her cleavage and her ass with superhuman back twisting.

Someone had some iidea that flash should be as strong or stronger than superman and they stuck by that ever since.

The JSA run you're talking about is when they restarted the series with a new #1 issue (following his 75 or so issue run on the previous vol.).  The only hero I recall being killed off was a minor character known as Mr. America, and in fact it wasn't even the original Mr. America that got killed off, it was someone who was related to the original, and his first appearance is the same issue he died in.  Ryan Choi is supposed to be back as the Atom in the Geoff Johns written JLA DCnU book.  And really, you're upset that a minor character who has been gone since the first Crisis got was brought back and maimed (and subsequently had her legs again the next time she was seen, which funny enough was in Brightest Day)?

So when you said that Johns loves to brutally kill off newer versions of heroes in order to bring the old versions back, what you were really complaining about is him killing one-off characters, temporarily maiming characters that hadn't been used in decades, his current treatment of Wally West (despite the fact that he had a fairly acclaimed run writing Wally West in the Flash), and killing off another character only to bring him back a little over a year later in what essentially is being marketed as DC's flagship book.

What's the drama mama?  Marvel has been diverse for decades; remember the old Luke Cage and Iron Fist comic?  Luke was a jive-talkin' streetwise man of the people.  And Iron Fist helped him clean up the mean streets from pushers, pimps and of course THE MAN.

Marvel has always been culturally sensitive.  Black Panther, Black Lightning ring any bells?  Sheooot.

I be trollin' 

Just saying that one of Johns' schticks is to inject some pretty gruesome violence into otherwise vanilla superheroics; another is to revive old minor characters so that he can kill or maim them to give the more well-known characters motivations; and yet another is to argue that wherever a Silver Age character has been replaced, bring back the old guy and get rid of the new. It all adds up to an unlikeable pattern, at least for me, and it's at its worst when all three of those things collide.

I did!  Still do, but don't bother voicing it since it's so old.

But to be fair that's pretty much the most awesome power ever.


Velorath is John's sock puppet. I'm calling it!  :awesome_for_real:

Hey, I think Geoff Johns' writing is one of the things that reinvigorated DC Comics years back. Yes, he's been charged with resurrecting a lot of "originals." Yes, you can tell he loves him some continuity. But for fuck's sake, the guy made Mr. FUCKING Mind into a threatening villain. A goddamn caterpillar with nerd spectacles. The guy has some writing chops.

Of course, I also like Judd Winick's writing so you'll probably be calling me a sock puppet too.

Has DC gone a little stupid in the last year? Well, yes. Actually, I think they lost a good bit of their momentum after the Infinite Crisis "reboot" which really should have been a lot more of a reboot. What really hurt that thing was the "One Year Later" stuff. 52 was a great series, IMO, but it forced writers to have to backfill their new status quos without really being able to tell those stories properly, and it really fell flat. Nightwing in particular was terrible, partly because they wanted Jason Todd involved so they made Jason Todd try to be like 3 different things in the span of 6 months - first he's an evil Nightwing, then he's Red Hood again or some shit. It was really terrible. After 52, they really fucked the pooch with that execrable Countdown and the even more idiotic War with the Amazons which made no sense from the get go and got worse as the story went along. By the time Final Crisis came along, the whole fucking thing was just a goddamn mess, and putting Grant Morrison in charge of Batman's Omega Ray bullets and Superman's "let's put the entire universe into a capsule to keep it from Darkseid" or some shit killed the whole line.

You want to hang DC's idiocy on one guy, give it to Didio. He's the one who's been dictating these stories. Johns has just had the misfortune to be in charge of writing some really confused editorial edicts.

My only issue with this is I don't see a reason to make fundamental changes to characters like this. Sure, the writers are probably bored of the same character but you don't exactly find comics readers bitching about "gee I wish they'd kill off my beloved character and replace him with someone else in his costume."

It's just to me there is no Spiderman without Peter Parker, no Batman without Bruce Wayne, no Superman without Kal-el/Clark Kent and no Wonder Woman without Diana Prince. It's not about the powers and costume so much as the person in the costume that I want to read about it. Oddly enough I'd probably have less trouble with it if this was something where Peter Parker's mind somehow got put into this Miles Morales's body. I'd think it was kind of a silly storyline potentially but at least it would still be Peter Parker.

Heh, I just found it to be an odd complaint that Johns has a habit of killing characters off in order to bring back the original version when the entirety of his JSA run was all about celebrating the legacy carried from the old generation to the new.  Hell, Wildcat even blatantly spells it out at the end of the same JSA story Khaldun cited.

I agree completely.

The only two swaps/changes I've seen in comics that I've truly enjoyed were Barry Allen to Wally West, and Hal Jordan to Kyle Rayner.  That said, the Flash became and Green Lantern always was a position within a corps rather than singular entities who control said powers, so it kind of works.  For the majority of other characters, though, it comes down to the ending of "What Ever Happened to the Caped Crusader?"

You also see the best selling comics barely cracking 100k and most of the "popular" ones hovering at 60k or so. So "keep on doing what we're doing" doesn't look so appealing.

I don't know how to put this...overpriced books sold to a generation that remembers vanilla ice...hmmm. I mean comic books are what the gaming industry would be without any motivation to think about what customers outside of there 30+ crowd may enjoy. So everyone's stuck remaking UO, and then someone comes along and says "UO in 3D" and they start frothing at the mouths.

If this guy had any relationship (not a sex related one god) to Peter Parker than I'd give it a chance to mature. I mean I love Peter, no way they going to treat Spiderman like some green latern or josh wedens slayers (got to have a new pimple face girl fight evil when the last pimply faced girl dies brutally). He is a Peter Parker invention and Peter Parker should pass the mantel.

As a former Marvel comics reader, I think the main fuckup here is that they really need to preserve either the regular or the Ultimate universe in a somewhat "classic" state. Since the "regular" Marvel universe is already a mess with all of the spider-crap you've just mentioned, Frankenpunisher, Civil War, et al, (isn't Tony Stark's Iron Man suit now essentially a biotech nanotech symbiote now?) then they should make the gay biracial spiderman the "regular" one since that's the one that has already been fucked with for the past decade+ in the universe that jumps the shark in new ways every other month.

You know, I can't find the report post button/link, if there even is one.  And I so wanted to let others know about the New York tours. :(

The report post button was removed long ago due to Signe annoying the mods.

Hm. Any chance of putting it back now as she and Righ left long ago?

It would only serve to summon her back...

...

I vote we return it!

Wait, what? Isn't she Captain Britain's sister or cousin or something? And, you know, very much anglo-saxon?



This also makes sense to me, I have to say. The character isn't the costume. It's the person inside it. We're not talking about Joel Schumaker Batman films here...

In the long term I think maybe that's true, but in the short term I think there are a lot of good stories to be told by replacing the main character.  Thor, Captain America, Iron Man, Green Lantern, Flash, etc..., all have had some pretty good runs focused around this concept.  There are things you can examine about Bruce Wayne or Peter Parker by the effect their absence has, and sometimes it's just fun to see a guy like Eric Masterson step into the role of Thor for a bit.

http://www.google.com/search?q=psylocke&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi&biw=1418&bih=707

Yeah.  It's pretty stupid. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psylocke#Transformed)

I guess my question is, if all the classic heroes have their defaults already, and those defaults were made where White Male was the only accepted norm... how do we go about making 'new classics' that fit a broader spectrum.


Has there been a 'new' superhero in the past 20 years? One that wasn't a 2 issue wonder that everyone instantly forgot about?

Spawn was big for a time.

A few here and there, but even some of the more successful ones have a hard time lasting because there's such a strong connection between these characters and their creators.  Runways as an example, is a book that consisted of entirely new/diverse characters, and eventually built a solid fanbase, but once Brian K Vaughan left the book, it was a jumping off point for a lot of fans (I stuck around for Whedon's arc, but I had little desire to read Terry Moore's, or Kathryn Immonen's take on the characters).  I think writers are reluctant to touch newer characters as well.  Older characters are sort of like community property at this point,  but if a writer wants to mess around with a newer character, they probably feel obligated to be in contact with the creators of the character to make sure they're stating true to the character.  Just look at Young Avengers.  Things got off to a good start when the book launched, then completely stalled out because Allan Heinberg doesn't have a lot of time to write comics, and aside from a few throw-away minis by other writiers, Marvel seems reluctant do another ongoing book without Heinberg.

DC
Static Shock. The tv show is a billion times better than the comics. So they mothballed the book and told his stories as part of the new teen titans. Apparently making most of the villains white surpremist/nazis or gangsters is in fact lazy story writing.

I forgot spawn.


Marvel
Marvel wrote a book called the runaways (or something like that) that had a black version of batman when he was a teenager (kinda like a badass robin without the cape) type character who leads a group of kids who ran away from there parents when they discovered that their parents are Cthulhu cultist. He was the best part of the book, than the plot twist was that he was evil and working with his parents the entire time, than they killed in 2 pages later. The book became unreadable a 2 books later...fuck you marvel.

The problem with the runaways is that the other characters weren't notable enough, except for the tiny mutant/alien girl (no i'm serious she is a 10 year old mutant alien) who is fucking awesome, everyone else was a throw away teenager.

Not from either DC or Marvel. You need to look at either the indies or the imprints. But even those don't go 'mainstream' so much as build a vocal fan base within the dwindling number of comic readers.

But it isn't about the comics these days; it is about the movie deal.

She's in the Alan Moore Captain Britain stories, which are well worth reading if you haven't already. There's a trade paperback (http://www.amazon.com/Captain-Britain-Alan-Moore/dp/184653433X/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1313416115&sr=8-4). This is before she was known as Psylocke. She was a blonde (although she dyed her hair purple), English fashion model with fairly weak psychic powers.

When she first appeared in the X-Men, as written by Chris Claremont, she was kind of bland and boring. I'm guessing they turned her into a hot Asian ninja babe because they couldn't think of a better way to make her interesting.

Fixed that for you. I firmly blame Psylocke on Jim Lee, though yeah, she was never that interesting a character.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvel_Adventures
Aimed at kids, but all that means is it avoids the tedious teenaged angst and cod-philosophy of the 'mainstream' and Ultimate Marvel universes and concentrates on, you know, fun stories.

Static Shock yea, they had the show and it worked it into the DCAU. I guess that's a decent example, still he's no superman/batman but it's certainly something to build off of.



I forgot about Spawn too, which is kinda the point  :why_so_serious:

No one gives a shit about Spawn anymore.

Spawn had the first relatively decent comic book movie next to Blade.

There we go.

RE:spawn

At first I liked it until they ran the merch into the ground.  The story/origin was actually fairly solid and there's probably a lot they could have done with it if they hadn't gone full retard with all the grimdark and elseworlds bs that seemed to go on.

The only thing I have to say about Spawn is that the HBO series was, and still is, the tits.

That's a sad fucking statement.

Sure, if you ignore the Tim Burton Batman movies.  And the first couple Superman movies.  And The Crow.  And the fact that the Spawn movie was crap.

This is exactly why Spawn is dead as a franchise.  McFarlane cared much more about the merch money than the actual franchise. So much so that you now see McFarlane toys everywhere when I think Spawn really could have grown as iconic as the top-tier DC and Marvel heroes. That softball to the head must've knocked something loose.

Hellboy is fairly recent too, and got a couple of fairly decent movies out of it. Haven't read it in ages though.

We will always have superman and batman movies, they will probably never be in the same vein as ironman, spiderman, xmen or captain america. No executive will say "oh that guy in a bat suit will never work no one will pay to see him in action. I mean who the fuck drives a batmobile?" Up until 4 months ago people were thinking a movie about a thunder god wouldnt work. And dont even get me started on the debate around captain america being to cheesy for film going audiences.

I didnt know the crow was a comic book first.

I think that's being a bit optimistic about Spawn's chances. The story really wasn't all that well written. Granted, it was better than all the other shit that Image put out in their first block of titles, but it's very telling that less than a year into its run, McFarlane was already hiring in guest writers for the flagship title.

Yep, though the film was better IMO.

IMO, it was a great concept that could have done with more over-arching direction and Vision than it had.  McFarlane had already checked out at the time, though, so whoever was actually in charge didn't have a real vision beyond, "well that seems cool.."

Yes, spawn the knight/ gunslinger/ whateverthefuck seems cool.  However if it's not blended into an actual narrative about either rogue Hellspawn or Al Simmons himself then it's just a spastic collection of fanboy wankage.   

McFarlane Toys started in 1994 after, if I remember right, McFarlane announced he was disappointed nobody was willing to produce the Spawn toys or those who were willing would produce really cheap Walgreens-imitation-toy-level objects.  That means he'd been shopping the idea around prior to that already.  Considering Spawn had only appeared 18months earlier, I think we know where his focus was at.

That said I can't really blame him.  He's a millionaire toy maker for man-children.  No way he was going to make that money as a comic guy alone, and it's a good part of the reason he and the other guys founded Image in the first place.  To be able to exploit their IP for their own gains rather than letting DC/ Marvel do so.

Yeah, though his big beef with Marvel was that he thought they ripped off his concept for their short lived character Nightwatch. And to be fair they kinda did, even though Nightwatch had none of the hellspawn nonsense.

(http://media.comicvine.com/uploads/0/4/62450-5314-95445-1-nightwatch_super.jpg)

Disclaimer, I liked the Nightwatch comic.

Very true.

Spawn benefitted from having other writers come in, including guys like Alan Moore. And MacFarlane generally recognised this.

McFarlane's a dick, but I have to admire his push to make money off of HIS creations.  Always loved his artwork, always hated his writing.  I have the first twenty issues of Spawn and his plots and mythos were decent, just hated his rambling.  I thought the idea of angels who inflict lots of pain pretty interesting and saying that the 'good guys' were pretty nasty too.

Image almost pulled it off.  Kudos to those guys but I never bought any of the toys.  Just not my thing.

His artwork is great, when someone else is driving.

For example : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YV4oYkIeGJc&ob=av2n

I picked this up (off a shelf, didn't but it) at the store this morning and read it.

It's fucking awful.

I don't really care about making him black, or killing 'real' spidey or even if they make him gay.  What bothered me was that during the two trades that I read cover to cover, in growing horror in the store, Bendis appears to have forgotten how to actually write.  The whole thing was godawful from start to finish.  (I stopped when his Uncle offered to train him.)

Truly, truly retarded.

Bendis lost the ability to write 2 pages into his Avengers Disassembled storyline. I can't fucking stand him now and I used to love him. His dialogue fits very particular types of stories but he uses it whenever he writes whether it fits the characters or not.

Fair enough;  To be honest, I haven't read his stuff for a very long time and even then I didn't bother with any of the other 'Ultimate' stuff.

It was truly terribad.