Top 5 Marvel UK things (because I know very little about it!)
I never read much! The original stuff I mean – Deaths Head, Knights of Pendragon, etc. I had access to US imports, and I had 2000AD, and the Marvel UK stuff just seemed… obviously lame, in that instant-judgement teenage sense. They were on different paper, they LOOKED wrong, they were the Cliff to Marvel US’ Elvis. And then I was a smidgen too young for the earlier wave of Marvel UK stuff with Night Raven and Captain Britain.
So my Marvel UK was primarily a reprint house. So this top 5 is a mix of things that originated there and things that I first read through the reprints there.
1. Secret Wars: stretched out over 30 or so fortnightly issues. Introduced me to every Marvel character basically. Amazing. Terrible. Amazing.
2. “THE BLACK ZOID” early super derivative Wagnerian toy fight epic by Grant Morrison. The only original material here.
3. John Byrne FF vs Psycho Man and Hate Monger: after Secret Wars they reprinted Secret Wars II, which necessitated reprinting not only the mini but the crossovers and EVERY surrounding issue that resolved subplots raised in said crossovers. Ridiculous. But it meant we got all of John Byrne’s fevered, kinda queasy with hindsight but uh ‘resonant’ bondage epic ft dominatrix Sue Storm. (It’s the enslaved She Hulk sequences I think would read unpleasantly now tho)
4. Strikeforce: Morituri – Peter Gillis’ fantastic doomed kid super-soldiers series, no idea why they reprinted it.
5. Iceman – JM DeMatteis’ weirdo Iceman mini in which he confronts (this being JM deM) questions of death and reincarnation. Absurd but memorable clash of hero and storyline, has surely never been mentioned since.
It’s scary how much this mirrors my own Marvel UK experience.
The Iceman mini was reprinted (in a hardcover, because Marvel) a few years back, and it has to be said: half-remembered nostalgia was far kinder to that than revisiting the actual thing.
Which do you prefer: Boxers or briefs? Lemon or lime? Peaches or nectarines? Mac or PC? Sweet or savory? Sunny or raining? Walking or driving? Eating too much, or not enough?
You have to make a new Justice League but can only use Legion members tossed back in time. Pick your 7 and WHY.
I attempted to answer this earlier but got interrupted by the first of my couple of interviews I’m doing today – watch the Internet for more details, fact fans! – and completely lost my train of thought. So! Second time around, then:
- Cosmic Boy – maybe my favorite Legionnaire, if I’m honest? I blame my love for the Paul Levitz run, really. But he seems integral to making the team dynamic work, somehow? I’m bringing him in for his social powers more than his magnetic powers, because, I mean, magnetism.
- Chameleon Boy – because every team needs (a) a japester and (b) a shape-shifter.
- Brainiac 5 – similarly, every team needs a super-genius, and he can also fill the Batman occasional sociopath role.
- Dream Girl – another character I love thanks to Levitz, and another character I’d bring on for social impact as much as power-set. Although I’ve always been fond of the “I can see the future, but I need to be asleep” gimmick.
- Triplicate Girl – but probably in her Duplicate Girl guise, so she could create limitless dupes and help out with crowd control when necessary.
- Phantom Girl – in large part, I confess, because I love the Cockrum-designed outfit for the character, but I also like the Legion Espionage Squad mini-team she and Cham could bring to the 21st century.
- Ultra Boy – all the powers of Superman, but he has to choose between them one at a time? Sold.
It could be like Legion Lost, but… better?
We’ve already seen, at somewhat considerable length, the way in which Moffat is very focused on changing and improving the stories we tell about women. He is an ideologically feminist writer, a point that can trivially be demonstrated by trawling interview quotes. His feminism may be imperfect (in fact it is imperfect, in ways that are not entirely different from the ways that William Moulton Marston’s feminism is imperfect, but as anyone who has read the book where I talk about that will know, feminism is an ongoing process of making new mistakes, and Moffat accomplishes that with aplomb), but anyone who attempts to argue that Moffat is not consciously attempting to write feminist television is simply and factually incorrect.
Philip Sandifer’s always-worth-reading Doctor Who writing hits “Closing Time” from season six of the new series and throws some elbows with that above statement, I suspect.
This might literally be the best GIF of all time! Yet it’s still stunningly inadequate to fully encapsulate the endless vicissitudes of mourning. Just as we all experienced Robin Williams’ life differently, so we all are experiencing his loss differently. Yet we all retweet the same image ad infinitum, a one-size-fits-all sentiment that ultimately communicates nothing. From the endless nuances of our personal sadness, we all send up the same meaningless image as a token of our despair. The internet is a monster. It homogenizes grief. This GIF just doesn’t cut it.
But the comment sections on most highly-trafficked sites, the ones automatically included to drum up interaction, do nothing to collapse the distance between the journalist and her audience. Instead, they have only served to cement that vast chasm, lead to the strengthening of the ramparts. Ask any Internet writer, and they can recite you our creed and code: Don’t read the comments. The language widely used to discuss commenters is the same as for an invading barbarian army, because it’s easier to imagine a vast sea of abstracted piranhas than actual people behind their computer screens clamoring for blood… The comment section is the most vivid example of the failure to see other humans on the Internet as living, breathing people, ones with ambitions and failures and favorite snack foods and jobs to do, not avatars or figments of our imagination.
