Being an internet refuge for Graeme McMillan
Late 80s/Early 90s Superhero Fashion
What were the actual roots of this – eg that Wolverine link I just reblogged? Spikes, chains, pouches, studs, “low cut muscle shirts” etc. As a reader I “was there” so I saw the very rapid effect on how superhero comics looked, but I was also British (which I suspect matters) and maybe four or…
Tom asks a question I have often wondered.
Greg Pak was saying McK and I should do a Dazzler comic on twitter earlier.
It reminded me of something.
When we were doing PHONOGRAM, we were often asked in interviews about what superhero work we wanted to do. Our standard answer was Dazzler, not as we really wanted to specifically, but because we wanted to talk about our creator owned books in interviews. It was a standard answer that got a laugh, and to get back to trying to make people interested in our desperately uninteresting indie book.
However, the problem with writers is that if you even say things enough near them, they’ll find themselves thinking about it on some level. And one day I realised I had an idea for a Dazzler story.
And then you find yourself just writing them down, to get them out of your head. I did it for this story, and put it in a folder alongside such masterworks as ROBIN HOOD VERSUS PREDATOR, and expected to never touch it again. I’m not working for Marvel, and I wasn’t trying to court them. I had uninteresting indie books to try and sell.
Then Fraction mentions to me that Marvel may be looking for a Dazzler mini. I smile, polish it up a bit and lob it at Axel and Nick.
It didn’t go anywhere for reasons that will become immediately obvious – in part that Attilan had just moved off the moon, in part that it was patently apeshit – but I’m still fond of it in many ways. There’s at least two jokes I like in it a lot – the implicit one that it’s a PROG vs DISCO story set on the Dark Side of the Moon and the other which you’ll probably guess, as I mention it twice.
And on a more practical level, people do ask me what one of my synopsis/pitches look like. This is a very early version, obviously, but may be interesting for that too.
Anyway – here’s what 2007 era Gillen was thinking about the Disco Dazzler…
This is the greatest.
Kaskie insists that for all the technological bells and whistles, simplicity and readability remain key to Cover Stories. And yet features of such intricacy inevitably run the risk of alienating both readers and advertisers, who may not be in tune with these grandiose concepts. “It’s great for people with expensive tablets and modern computers but a lot of people visiting sites like ours are not rich and many of them are using computers at work with versions of Windows that are a decade old,” says Drowned in Sound founder Sean Adams. “All people want is to read the words and if the writing isn’t incredible, no amount of stylish design can cover that up.”
Email exchanges between National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander and Google executives Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt suggest a far cozier working relationship between some tech firms and the U.S. government than was implied by Silicon Valley brass after last year’s revelations about NSA spying.
Disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about the agency’s vast capability for spying on Americans’ electronic communications prompted a number of tech executives whose firms cooperated with the government to insist they had done so only when compelled by a court of law.
But Al Jazeera has obtained two sets of email communications dating from a year before Snowden became a household name that suggest not all cooperation was under pressure.
WAIT WHATNAUTS, you are not ready for the world that’s coming in this episode.
The more recent relaunches at Marvel are coming in at lower sales levels both because of how recently some of the previous volumes of those titles launched and because of the number of new first issues at Marvel these days. A new first issue a month might be viable, but one or more a week clearly isn’t. “Wolverine and the X-Men” launched with 99,611 estimated units in 2011 and with only around 54,675 units when it relaunched in 2014. “Fantastic Four” launched around 114,531 units in 2012, relaunching at a far lower level in 2014 with only 65,775 units. “Secret Avengers” launched at 85,267 units in 2013 and at just 34,035 estimated units in 2014. Launching with lower numbers on the more recent volume doesn’t happen universally, but it has become the norm, not the exception.
Marvel has gone to the well too often and too frequently. The lower launches are setting lower high water marks for the relaunched titles. With the number of new titles they are launching, the launch numbering most likely will continue to weaken on most title. Marvel is systematically draining the sales power out of first issues much like it drained it from retailer incentive covers.
The question is, what happens after relaunches are exhausted?
If the Doctor’s name means anything, it is that in a story about a woman who is raped he will be the figure who helps her to heal. If there is to be a Doctor Who story about rape then that story has to be one that is about the victim. It has to be one about her agency and her identity. One in which she is not an object, and more to the point one that rejects the entire ideology that would treat her as one. A Doctor Who story about rape isn’t about vengeance, but reparation. And that, of course, is what River offers. Amy is not all right, but she will be. The horrible things that have happened to her cannot be undone. Not with a magic wand, and not with an army. But she can heal. She can have her daughter, and love her.
The wonderful, must-read Philip Sandifer writes about “A Good Man Goes to War,” and the whole Doctor Who reveal that River Song is actually Amy and Rory’s daughter.
It’s an interesting take, if one that I don’t really agree with or embrace; I think Steven Moffat really dropped the ball with the resolution of this storyline – for all that he clearly wants to explain away/fix the violation of Amy’s pregnancy happening without her knowledge and the subsequent kidnapping of her child (and he definitely does, hence the whole, awkward insert of “Mels,” the pre-regeneration River), the show not only utterly fails at doing so, it also fails at dealing with the inevitable emotional aftermath that said events should have had on the characters; sure, it happens off-camera, to some extent, but still. It’s a terrible fumble at best.
(It’s also a surprising fumble, in many ways; Moffat’s first season as showrunner was so well done in terms of emotion, but the second – and definitely his third – are far too focused on the intellectual sleight of hand instead of the emotional truth of the characters. He didn’t really returned to the heights of his first season in charge until “The Day of the Doctor,” for me, and even that was followed by “The Time of the Doctor.”)
In the Marvel movie universe, a straight white guy has played some part in saving the world 20 times in the past nine years. With The Amazing Spiderman 2 opening today, we’re up to 21. On the pages of Marvel’s comic books though, a different story is unfolding.
The company has, in the last few months, been aggressive in giving women and minority superheroes starring roles. That means solo books for heroes like Captain Marvel, She-Hulk, and Black Widow; the launch and re-imagining of the Ms. Marvel as a teenage Muslim-American girl; an all-female X-Men title; a new solo series for Storm; and perhaps most excitingly, the formation of The Ultimates, a superhero team comprised of women and minorities.
Reason Number 23 Why DC’s PR Sucks*: The publisher has been leagues ahead of Marvel in terms of female-led books (and, arguably, books with non-white-straight-leads…? I’m less sure about that one, to be honest, although it feels right) for years, and yet Marvel’s canny PR team is able to score headlines and stories like this one in Vox when it finally gets around to parity, making it seem like the leader in the area.
(* Reasons Number 1 Through 22 are pretty much the ones you think they are.)