When you see two people you know checking each other out...

...and you think 'Oh hell yeah, I want to see THAT titanic team up!'

Well allow me to retort:

The Netflixing of Everything

#drwho #bigfinish #scribd

It kind of amazes me that this is slipping in under the radar, none of the big fan sites or outlets for Doctor Who seem to have noticed that a lot of the Big Finish Audio adventure range is now available on Scribd.  They also seem to have most of the novels and all the new comic lines from Titan, making Scribd one stop shopping for everything Doctor Who except the episodes themselves.

To be fair neither Big Finish Productions nor Scribd seem to have rushed to announce their new partnership either, there seems to be almost a deliberate effort to have this happen on the down low.

In other words Doctor Who fans who have dipped into the full cast radio play style Doctor Who adventures featuring actors from the entire 50 years of the BBC series and those who may have never heard of them can now gorge on many hours of them with an $8.99 a month subscription.  Plus Scribd gives you access to thousands of books, audiobooks, magazines and comic books - all the major comic publishers except DC, Image and Dark Horse in fact.

I have drastically reduced the number of comics I buy while drastically increasing the number I read. I'm saving a hell of a lot of money and storage space and enjoying comics more.

Between my Marvel Unlimited and Scribd subscriptions the comics of virtually every comics publisher except DC, Image and Dark Horse are delivered right to my tablet with a combined cost of under $25 a month for the two subscriptions. Since Scribd also has a large Marvel catalogue you could scrimp and just get the Scribd, but I like the weekly dose of Marvel newish stuff in Marvel Unlimited, even though it is six months behind the comic shops. The Scribd subscription also gives me thousands of books, audio books and magazines.

I still love the medium of paper, I still buy comics and books in physical form and probably always will, but now my slightly OCD completist urge can be satisfied much more cheaply with much less use of storage space.

This is the model I respond to.  Whether its music, movies, tv or books the model that intuitively works best with the existing technology is the subscription streaming service.  DRM is still a concern but for price, ease of access and storage space the Netflix model will conquer all others because its how people want to get their media. 

THIS is the best way to combat illegal downloading.  Give people a simple, economical alternative and they will take it.

New Force Awakens Trailer gives me hope.

I'm starting to get excited. The best of the original six movies was The Empire Strikes Back, which was also the Star Wars film with the least input of George Lucas as others took over both script and direction. I honestly think he's like Gene Roddenberry, stronger in conception than execution and I think Abrams will be more in sync with Lucas's universe than he was with Roddenberry's.

Wonder Woman: Kink Icon

The three big iconic foundational comic book superheros that every other superhero is a variation or refinement of are Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. The ultimate superhuman hero, the ultimate detective/physical elite hero and the ultimate female hero.

Not just the ultimate female hero, Wonder Woman is very specifically the ultimate expression of the feminine principal and ideal. She was created by an ardent male feminist and psychologist, the inventor of the lie detector William Moulton Marston with the pen name Charles Moulton.

Unambiguously Wonder Woman was the first attempt to create a comic book with more ambition than to break into the business or just make some money. Moulton came to the publisher with a fervent desire to use comic books and their awesome hold on the childish imagination to promote his beliefs in not just egalitarian feminism but feminist supremacy. Remember, these days a wildly successful comic might sell a few hundred thousand copies. In the 40s and 50s kids were buying literally MILLIONS of comic books every single month. It was a reasonable thing for an idiosyncratic, imaginative psychologist to view this as a huge opportunity to influence a whole generation of children.

But Wonder Woman didn't just promote feminism, peace and justice.

Among other things Moulton was kinky. He lived in a threesome with his wife and their girlfriend. Some of his ideas about dominance and submission sound like the kind of power exchange language of ethical kinksters today, and not to put to fine a point on it Golden Age Wonder Woman was kinky as hell.

Every single issue people are getting elaborately tied up, spanked, wrestled into loving submission, dressed in fetish deer costumes and hunted - and these were the hero and her friends! The bad guys usually just got a sock to the jaw or tied up in the golden lasso that forces honesty and submission on anyone tied in it. (!)

So in the last few years Superman and Batman have been repeatedly rebooted for a new age. Usually by returning to the character's roots, Superman with less powers and Batman less constraints. When it comes to Wonder Woman the last two major reboots George Perez's awesome take in the late 80's and Brian Azzarello's brilliant but problematic current run return to her mythological roots.
But nobody has ever tried returning her to her fetish roots.

Imagine a rebooted Wonder Woman that embraces Femdom Wonder Woman. Bondage and fetish Wonder Woman. Strongly and unsubtly presented sapphic Wonder Woman.

The problem is that the character is captive to a corporate icon and the political implications of any portrayal of a character adopted by the feminist movement as a political icon. You could do a really stellar, strongly feminist and ideas based Wonder Woman comic - that was also kinky as hell - George Perez, a creator linked with her in the past is also involved in the super heroine costume fetish movement, I'd love to see his editorially unrestrained Wonder Woman.

Grant Morrison has been trying to do a Wonder Woman book true to her kinky roots for years and it is finally coming out but expect it to be restrained when it comes to restraints.  The days of gimp masks, pet play and fetishized submission in Wonder Woman comics are over.

The Night Watchman

Copyright Cliff Hesby 2014

“Do you have any questions?”

“Aye, what is radee-ayshun?”

Stephen flickered slightly. This was the only outward manifestation of billions of calculations, extrapolations and contingency subroutines activating and processing. In a picosecond entire Avatar interaction programs came online as others went dark. The comfortably paternal Professorial persona he had used to explain why the trader couldn't travel through the rocky foothills behind him subtly roughened, hair becoming more leonine, beard more Jovian. The clothing slowly transitioned from Etonion tweed to an intricately folded grey cloak the mind could trick itself into believing it had always been.

Fourth Grade reading level activated.

“This ground is poisoned. Savvy poison?”

The trader reared back scowling. He wore rough homespun clothing and a venomous beard. The creature he led on a piled high with roughly tied bundles looked sort of like a shaggy donkey but their were subtle anatomical distortions Stephen noted and filed under worrisome.

“I dinn't scheme tae stop and sup, let me pass and I will pass through yon pizin'd land without partaking of any taint.”

Stephen almost sighed. His working model of macro-culture retention and enclave led bounce back downgraded significantly and his form transformed as well.

A wind blew up out of nowhere and swirling black clouds began to spin into existence out of nothing directly over the dusty remnants of crossroad that once had been highway interchange they stood in.

Stephen flung wide his arms as his avatar completed its final transformation based largely on Charlton Heston's appearance as Moses. He was taller, inhumanly tall and his eyes seemed to smoulder. His stentorian roar put the howling winds and crashing thunder that had sprung up out of a clear blue sky around them to shame.

“THIS LAND IS CURSED! WOE TO HE THAT DEFIES MY WORD! DEATH AND BLIGHT UNPON THEM, YEA AND UPON THEIR SPAWN EVEN UNTO THE FITH GENERATION! DEATH AND BLIGHT UPON THEIR CROPS AND ANIMALS....”

Stephen kept that stuff up for a while despite the trader and his donkey taking to their heels back down the foothills road as soon as the shock and awe light show began. The black clouds and multiple lightning strikes could be seen across the river valley below for hours. The corridors of computer banks and storage tanks under the mountains behind him went into long term energy savings and self repair triage mode.

Stephen slowly melted away into a flickering cloud of dust in a mesh of sparks. Then even that disappeared swept up in the winds.

It was going to be a long millennium.

DC Comics have become No-Fun Land

So a day later and a dollar short DC honcho Dan DiDio  insists that the editorial stance against Batwoman being able to marry her girlfriend isn't beause DC are homophobic, goodness no, but because superheros just cant have nice things.

Heroes shouldn’t have happy personal lives. They are committed to being that person and committed to defending others at the sacrifice of their own personal interests.

That’s very important and something we reinforced. People in the Bat family their personal lives basically suck. Dick Grayson, rest in peace—oops shouldn’t have said that,—Bruce Wayne, Tim Drake, Barbara Gordon and Kathy Kane. It’s wonderful that they try to establish personal lives, but it’s equally important that they set them aside. That is our mandate, that is our edict and that is our stand.

So mark me down as one male longtime comic geek who isn't going to try to defend this bullshit. Even taking DiDio's argument at face value, its an appalling argument.

Superheros are wish fulfillment power fantasy - what does it say that DC's brain trust believe that what their readers are really looking for in their wish fulfillment fantasy is endless lives of misery and loneliness. I'm not suggesting that realistic narrative, challenge and conflict aren't good things to strive for even in a corporate owned costumed wish fulfillment fantasy character but Didio's clarification crystallizes for me why I've been drifting away from DC for my heroic fantasy needs.

Ironically, in the main Batman book, writer Grant Morrison had recently been going in a completely different direction, a Batman happier, more functional and connected to a larger world than the character had been in years. Now that he's disengaged from the Batman universe over the last year new writers have quickly returned the character to the devastated emotional cripple with rage issues putting on tights and going out at night to beat people up.

The DC universe has become a bleak landscape littered with desperate attempts to slow a meteoric sales collapse marked by hologram covers, creative teams leaving in disgust and art contests where young new artists looking for their first break are asked to draw a major female character committing suicide - 'but make it funny!  And naked.'

Superhero comics are supposed to be fun, does any of this sound fun?

Yes they do, yes they do....

test

Awwwwwkward

Reiterations in Red and Green

In my last post as the New DC Universe was just launching (Its been a busy couple of months) I suggested that the new Swamp Thing and Animal Man books were calling back to their Alan Moore and Grant Morrison glory days.

In fact after reading the first four issues of both it seems they are instead calling back to just after both of those writers left.

After Grant Morrison left Animal Man the book was given to writer Jaimie Delano who introduced the Red, gave Animal Man a more animalistic appearance and made Buddy and his daughter the avatar/elemental champions of the animal kingdom the way Swamp Thing is for the plant kingdom.  This is of course the currently running storyline in the new Animal Man series as well.

After Alan Moore left Swamp Thing Rick Veitch continued with much the same thematic approach as Moore until his Swamp Thing meets Jesus storyline was censored by DC (after originally approving the script.) and Doug Wheeler took over.  In a storyline that combined with fan backlash over how Veitch had been treated dropped sales to record lows Wheeler created an archetypal foe for the Green that Swamp Thing served, the Grey - the separate fungal world.  The resonance with the Rot of current Swamp Thing and Animal Man stories is obvious.

I have serious doubts about both of these books now.  Making an anthropomorphised villain out of the concept of decay seems to fly in the face of the themes of Moore's run that explicitly recognized death and decay as a natural part of both nature and the Green.  When the book suggested a conflict between parts of the natural world, the seemingly never ending 'vegetable wars' story was a conceptual, and sales disaster that the book foundered on.

Over in Animal Man, Jaimie Delano left behind the meta fictional conceits of Morrison's later run on the book and used the animal avatar concept to address radical political animal rights and environmental concerns.  Echoing an almost despairingly apocalyptic viewpoint from his Hellblazer run Delano's was a challenging read, feverish angry extremes with stretches of bleakness that were almost unreadable.  His run was fascinating but ultimately exhausting and disheartening.

The current Animal Man storyline and that of the new Swamp Thing haven't even mentioned environmental or political concerns except in almost purely comic book monster terms.

I wanted to like these books, I really did, but they seem like pale shadows of the characters glory days calling back to old narrative dead ends.  

New Comics Sept 2011

The first wave of DC's rebooted 52 event are out and we begin to see the outlines of the new universe. Everybody's a little younger, costumes are more Hollywood friendly and reassurances are being given that much of the past continuity is intact if slightly different.

Essentially the creators of the 52 books hitting the stands over this month appear to have been given permission to keep the bits they like and ignore the ones they don't. I'm unconvinced but I will be spending more in the short term as I plan to give almost all of them a shot. The exception is Hawk and Dove by Rob Liefeld. I flipped through it in the store and confirmed my confident suspicion that yep, Liefeld still sucks balls so I can save some money at least.

The only new 52 title I could really have been said to be enthusiastic about is Action Comics by Grant Morrison and Rags Morales.  Morrison of course, the writer who gave us such mind expanding freak outs as Doom Patrol, The Invisibles and the fourth wall breaking meta-fiction of Animal Man before moving on to bringing his mind expanding 'wide-screen' approach to more traditional super-heroics with JLA and then spent the last few years on Batman with his fascinating approach of embracing all of the characters decades of bizarrely convoluted often contradictory continuity.

Now he takes on Superman again - his Silver age worshiping All Star Superman run can be considered a continuity all its own - and he goes back to the characters earliest roots.

The earliest Superman stories in the 30's by Seigel and Shuster were the adventures of an almost crazy grinning radical with super powers who would break down the Governor's door to stop an execution, kidnap arms dealers and force them to fight on the front lines of the wars they were supplying, force mine owners to work in their own unsafe mines and smack wife beaters through walls.  When the earliest strips Seigel and Shuster had completed before selling the character to DC (then National comics) ran out, the publisher firmly mandated bringing the character in line and making him a bland and nonthreatening protector of the status quo.

Morrison presents a Superman at the beginning of his career in a DIY costume abducting corrupt executives, getting shot at by the police and bleeding when he gets hit by cannon shells.  For anyone complaining this isn't the Superman they know Morrison has the unassailable defense that he's actually returning the character to his earliest roots.

I'm in for the duration on this one not least because of Morales' lovely art.

Animal Man by Jeff Lemire and Travel Foreman and Swamp Thing by Scott Snyder and Yanick Paquette are more problematic but still are on my buy list on a probationary basis.  They bring in the concepts that Alan Moore and Grant Morrison explored in innovative runs in the 80's while grounding the characters in DC's mainstream superhero continuity.

Basically the plan seems to be to make Animal Man the avatar/elemental of the animal kingdom while Swamp Thing is the same for the plant world.  The art is beautiful and the writing is certainly competent, but ultimately for a long time reader of the characters this seems to be re-warmed versions of narratives I've read before with the added complication of more firmly grounding them in the world of long underwear types.

The real innovations of the Moore and Morrison runs were narrative, dialogue and character pyrotechnics that blew the lid off what readers could expect from the medium.  So far these books seem to be trying to adopt some of the story ideas of those classic runs, but in the context of more traditional comic book writing.  They have me for a few more issues at least and possibly more, but ultimately my recommendation for these characters is to pick up the trade paperback collections of the classic Moore and Morrison runs they are harking back to instead.

Also worth checking out from the new DC books this week are Batgirl by Gail Simone and Ardian Syaf.  Problematic decision to write out Barbara Gordon's paralysis notwithstanding the art and writing are beautiful.  I'll be giving a Static Shock, Batwing and Men at War a shot too .

Wow this is a tough one.  I'm a big Rick Veitch fan, his dream diary book Rare Bit Fiends is as innovative and fascinating a comic ever produced and his take on Superheroes in books like Maximortal and Brat Pack is darkly fascinating.  The Big Lie  is well written, beautifully drawn and Gary Erskine a tasty artist on his own provides a lovely gloss to Rick Veitch's pencils with his assured inking job.

But my overwhelming reaction to this book is... disappointment.

Disappointment that a creator I respect has falling down the rat hole of a conspiracy theory I most emphatically do not respect.

The book uses the framing device of a scientist from today going back in time 10 years to September 11th to try to convince her husband to get out of the Twin Towers as a framing device for all the various Truther 'facts' and 'theories'.  Lots of niggling little cavils about the inconsistencies and contradictions in the official story culminating in an unabashed statement of belief in the conspiracy theory that the Bush administration killed thousands of Americans to get the excuse they needed to attack Iraq.

I'm not going to get into the many reasons why this is nonsense, this Salon article eviscerates most of the theories in this book quite nicely and this Rushkoff piece expresses how I feel about what a waste of time and energy the Truther movement is.

For a peace loving Timelord...

...the Doctor sure has busted a lot of caps in a lot of punk ass bitches.

Nymphos!

From Shock Corridor, 1963

Nightwing Red

In general I'm running pretty cold on the pending DC comics universe reboot, particularly as it applies to the Batman family of titles.  But the release of the cover for Nightwing #1 almost allays my fears.

The cool blue highlights of his old costume have been replaced with blood red explicitely tying the costume to the red vest of Dick Grayson's original Robin costume and even more so to the design esthetic of the cartoon Batman Beyond costume.

It's a much better costume than any of the previous Nightwing designs and creates a nice visual continuity between Bat family characters past and future.