Yep Still Alive; Part 1

Wow, been a while hasn't it? Well between by several aborted attempts to create an entry entitled "In Defense Of Buffy Season 4" (which I will eventually finish and post one day) and being out of town for Christmas week with my girlfriend's family (and not internet, save for on my phone), updates got to be pretty slim pickins for a while. But now I'm back and ready to spill my thoughts about several geek topics onto the page. Ready to go?

Final Crisis (here there be spoilers)


Yikes, what a mess.

Ok. I'll admit that before this year, I was never a huge DC fan. I was and always will be a Marvel guy. It's just the way I was raised. My dad was a big Marvel guy, my uncles were Marvel guys, so it all just stuck. However, 2008 saw me making serious inroads at rectifying this.

It started at Wizard World Philly where I finally got to meet Ethan Van Sciver (DC exclusive artist extraordinaire) after spending years chatting with him on message boards. Amazing artist and awesome guy, I don't care what anyone says. I wanted him to sign something for me, and I picked up Green Lantern Rebirth and Sinistro Corps War vol 1. He did a cool Sinestro sketch in one of the books and got me really excited to read them.




In a span of just a few months, my Green Lantern Library jumped from two trades to six, and Hal Jordan is one of my favorite superheroes. Over the summer I also picked up both collections of Justice League Unlimited on dvd. I highly recommend it for anyone even tangentially entertained by comics and superheroes, it's great stuff. I even picked up the Identity Crisis and Green Arrow: Quiver trades. So, as you can see, I was slowly starting to get into the DCU.

Then I started reading Final Crisis.

The biggest problem with Final Crisis is the writer. I know Grant Morrison has ardent defenders all over the world. And I'm not trying to say that the man is untalented. In fact it's almost the opposite. His ideas are so big, and so unwieldy many times, he cannot convert his mental vision into a cohesive story that can be widely enjoyed. It also doesn't help that this huge event for the DCU is a love letter to Jack "King" Kirby and some of his lesser known work.

To put this in terms Marvel fans would understand; imagine if Secret Invasion focused, not on the shape shifting alien race of Skrulls (who show-up all over the place in the Marvel U) but instead on the Eternals, Deviants, and Celestials. The Deviants decided to take over the world and only the Eternals could stop them. Cap, Iron Man, Spidey, Wolverine, Luke Cage, etc are all either M.I.A., killed or, captured for 5/7th of the story. But instead it focused on Kirby's lesser known characters and treated them as though they were Cap, Iron Man, etc. and assumed that everyone knew the characters. It would be kinda weird, no?

Well that's essentially what's happening in Final Crisis. The Evil Gods of Apokalips and the New Gods of the 4th world had a battle and the Evil Gods defeated the New Gods. The Evil Gods come to Earth (inhabiting the bodies of established, but minor DCU characters) and bring with them the Anti-Life Equation. They set it loose over the globe and turn Earth into New Apokalips. Some are immune, but most turn into willing slaves of Darkseid (reincarnated in the body of 60 year-old cop Danny Turpin).

Sounds pretty cool so far right?

Until you realize that Superman is M.I.A., Martian Manhunter is killed in issue #1, Batman is captured (don't even get me started on what this means for Batman R.I.P.) and Wonder Woman is converted into a Darkseid slave and you hardly see her. 4 of the most recognizable of their superheroes are relegated to the sidelines while we spend most of our time with The Tatooed Man, Danny Turpin, A Monitor who's forgotten his true role, and the suddenly resurrected Wally West *EDIT* It's actually Barry Allen who has been brought back to life.

The whole thing is Motherboxes, "Kirby Dots" around dialog balloons and characters, the 4th World, and the Bleed. It's all over my head, and not made any easier to understand by Morrison's standard scene jumping with a lack of dialogue or captions explaining where we are and what we're seeing.

The Curious Case of Stephen Strange, M.D.

A little bit earlier, over on Jinxworld, I was reading a thread asking why Dr. Strange "doesn't work" as a character. Meaning why do writers complain that he's difficult to write and avoid him at all because they think he is only good as a deus ex machina. Here are my thoughts from that same thread:

He "doesn't work" because they keep him on Earth too much. Dude's supposed to be the high-muckety muck of defending our entire plane of existence from Cthullu-type threats and he's slumming it with "the cool kids" working as their personal taxi service. He (or whomever ends up being sorcerer supreme) needs to tell the heroes to fuck off with their "I need a spell to make me invisible" and "I need to talk to my dead mother" shit. He's a little busy as the only man on the interdimensional rifle wall between us and the mystical threats that would eat our souls from the inside out, and would melt our brains if we even tried to comprehend them.

Keep him in the other dimensions where the threats can be bigger and badder than what he can face on Earth, and where he's in legit danger.

Can you imagine what a Dr. Strange comic would be like, if instead of fighting fucking ninjas, he was in a parallel dimension, far from friends and allies, and was fighting eldrich elder gods on a regular basis?

Well, can you? Lovecraftian elder gods > Ninjas.

The Knights of Wakanda and Writer's High

If you don't recognize at least half of the characters above or aren't the creative type, you should probably just skip this entry.



Still here? God, you people are fucking geeks.




Over on the Jinxworld boards, a group of us participate in a very different type of "Fantasy League". Instead of drafting football or baseball players, we draft fictional (mostly comic book) characters and build teams. We then pit our teams against each other either in head-to-head brawls or in missions to obtain a particular goal. Each player posts his strategy for other board members to read and they then vote on which strategy they felt was more likely to succeed.

This is my second year playing in the league and I love it. I haven't had as much time to dedicate to it this year due to moving, working more, and traveling. But somehow I made it to the finals (last year I was eliminated in the semis).

The motley crew at the top of this entry represents this year's team, The Knights of Wakanda. I feel they're pretty well-balanced. Got an inventor and tech user (Black Panther), world-class psychic (Emma Frost), a couple of tanks (Juggernaut, Husk) magic users (Willow, Etrigan), a Green Lantern (Green Man), a Jedi (Obi-Wan), a ninja (Daredevil) and a bunch of wild cards.

Later today I am writing my final strategy for the year. My mission is as follows:

A new Sinestro Corps is attacking Manhattan! Sinestro is leading an elite task force of the world's greatest villains, newly armed with Lantern rings to fit them. Their goal is to attack the Baxter Building and gain access to the Negative Zone. The team you are going up against is as follows:

Sinestro (Yellow)
Dr. Doom (Red)
Norman Osborn (Yellow)
The Joker (Yellow)
Lex Luthor (Orange)
Doomsday (Red)
Zoom (Green)

Pick a team of seven characters to defend the Gate to the Negative Zone and defeat the new Sinestro Corps!

BONUS: You may pick one ring from the seven Corps and assign it to a member of your squad for this mission. Choose carefully.

I wish I could find the words to explain to the uninitiated why I love this so much. I don't do drugs, but I would imagine combining the love I have for all things comic book and the rush I get from writing period, not to mention in this particular genre is equivalent to a high of some sort. Hell, I don't have to "imagine" it, there's an actual term for it. Flow.

From the Wiki article:

1. Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one's skill set and abilities).
2. Concentrating and focusing, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).
3. A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
4. Distorted sense of time, one's subjective experience of time is altered.
5. Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
6. Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).
7. A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
8. The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.
9. People become absorbed in their activity, and focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself, action awareness merging.

I've experienced writer's flow multiple times in my life. It's very difficult to describe to people that haven't experienced it before; but it's almost as if I can see how everything in the world (I am writing) is connected. Natural links between characters and situations appear. Nuances of dialogue unintentionally foreshadow future events I haven't even planned yet. It's like being a chess grandmaster and seeing 15-20 steps ahead of where you are. The only word for it is exhilarating.

For all of my creative brothers and sisters out there, be you writers (of any kind), musicians, artists, whatever; I hope you all get to experience this at least a couple of times in your life. It is like diving deep into the collective unconscious.