Heroes Finale

Okay, I finally got to see the entire Heroes season finale (and not just the last 20 minutes that I saw on Monday). All in all quite entertaining. My usual complaints hold, but the episode wrapped up the half-season quite well, closed off almost everyone's story arcs, and setup next season's first arc with a good example of how to do a season finale cliffhanger. Spoilers behind the jump...

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While I didn't care much for the character of Peter Petrelli at the beginning of the season, either the writers have done a lot to make his character more interesting, or Milo Ventimiglia's acting finally won me over. I actually believe the Big Brother/Younger Sister dynamic going on between him and Claire (Hayden Panettiere) over the last few episodes, and even though the drawn out ending sequence was a bit over the top in its shmaltz, their chemistry in the rest of the episode worked well.

What still isn't working as well for me is the character of Nathan Petrelli. I get that he's supposed to be conflicted about the whole "bomb in New York" scenario, that he's getting bad advice from people he trusts (like his mother) and that in his heart he knows its bad, but doesn't think he has a choice -- I get that and I like it in theory, but Adrian Pasdar never really sells it to me. His scenes fall flat -- I don't get the sense that he's conflicted so much as that he's completely empty, too tired to stand up to his mother and to do the right thing. And then in the end we don't get to see his conversion, just the result. This is soap opera, and for closure we really should have had a scene where Nathan puts his mother in her place, where Nathan stands up to her and tells her that he's not going to be a murderer. Instead we get a shmaltzy scene between the brothers that falls a bit short.

The other major character threads to wrap up were, of course, Ando and Hiro. And we got a mostly satisfactory wrap-up of their season-long threads (with a caveat about Hiro's "final battle" scene that I'll get to later). Hiro gets to move to the next stage of his Journey, transitioning from the enthusiastic novice he was at the beginning of the seasons to ... the enthusiastic apprentice. He averts the dark path his future self was forced to follow, and manages to take steps towards becoming the Kensai warrior that he dreamed about in his youth. In the early part of the season, it seemed like Hiro's story was one about growing up. It looked like Hiro was being setup as the enthusiastic teenager who learns that the world won't conform to his fantasy world and that there comes a time when childish things need to be put away and the teenager has to stand up and "be a man".

But they've actually taken Hiro down a slightly different path than that. Future Hiro was that Hiro who was forced to put away his "childish" things and to take the world more seriously. But Hiro has taken a different path from Future Hiro -- instead of putting away his fantasies, Hiro is finding a way to live them out. Hiro clearly is working to become his idealized version of a Kensai warrior -- a Paladin who protects the world from evil. And while Hiro has been forced to confront a world that doesn't conform to his ideas of how the world should work (notably the death of Charlie that he wasn't able to stop even with superpowers, but also his own failure to step up and be the hero he wants to be), he hasn't just "grown up" and given up to go back to Japan and use his powers to make money. Instead, he continues to grasp for the heroic ideal, continuing down a path to become a true superhero -- maybe the only one on the show who can move from being a "person with superpowers" to being a "superhero".

But alongside Hiro is Ando. And in this episode Ando shines. At the beginning of the season, Ando is Hiro's fairly shallow friend who was just along for the ride. By the finale, Ando is a hero in his own right. There have been glimmers of this all season, especially in the "dark future" episode, but by the finale Ando has moved to a new level of heroism. He knows that he will die going up against Sylar but he also knows that someone has to do it and he's convinced that Hiro won't. Even at mid-season Ando would have been hiding in a closet from Sylar, but Ando's journey is also well underway, and even without powers Ando is now ready to do what he knows is right regardless of the threat to himself.

Besides Hiro and Ando, it was the "secondary" characters that made this episode shine for me. The D.L./Nikki/Micah parts have been dragging me in more and more over the last half of this season. Where in the first half of the season I was bored with the D.L./Nikki/Jessica arc, these last few episodes have really drawn me in. Nikki no longer seems like a total victim -- and in this last episode we get some evidence that maybe she's finally integrated Jessica into her personality and is ready to claim her powers for herself. Micah has rapidly become one of my favorite characters -- I'm a sucker for characters who can talk to machines anyway, and Noah Gray-Cabey does a great job of playing the kid as someone who is more worldly than he seems. I really hope that Molly Walker sticks around next season, because having another kid character around may encourage the writers to do more with Micah and his family.

Among the other "secondary" characters, the interaction between Bennett, Parkman and Suresh was well done, even though they didn't get a lot of screen time. I continue to especially like Bennett, though I wish he were still a "villain" in the story. "Heroic" villains have a long history in soap opera, and Bennett was a good candidate at one point to be the sympathetic, near heroic villain. He had strong motivation for what he was doing, but was still willing to be utterly ruthless in carrying it out. He's softened into a more standard "hero" mold at this point, and it would be difficult to see him pulling a "Magneto" and switching to the other side again. Both Nathan Petrelli and Malcolm McDowell's Mr. Linderman characters were also good candidates for the role of sympathetic villain, but Linderman went over the edge too soon, and like I said above, Nathan fell into the "frozen tool" mode until the last five minutes of the final episode, so neither one of them ended up being that character in the end.

What about the villains that we did get? Well, the Conspiracy has at least two living members remaining, though they appear to be on opposite sides from each other. Hiro's father Kaito seems to have solidified as Hiro's mentor figure and a nice counterpoint to Peter and Nathan's mother Angela in these final episodes. Kaito takes Hiro under his wing to teach him what he needs to do to save lives while Angela works hard to convince Nathan that the upcoming cataclysm is inevitable and needs to be exploited. I suspect that Angela Petrelli will continue to be working behind the scenes to manipulate things, since the evil mastermind is a standard device of both superhero comics and soap opera.

We also got a foreshadowing of a villain to come next season. Molly Walker tells Parkman that there's someone worse than her Boogeyman out there, someone who can see her when she uses her powers on him. Given that her Boogeyman is a guy who killed both of Molly's parents and ate their brains while she hid under the stairs, this guy better be nasty. I'll be disappointed if we get a so-so villain next season that turns out to be Molly's Nightmare.

And of course the final villain: Sylar. In the end, Sylar was underwhelming as maniacally insane villains tend to be. Just as it's difficult to use the Joker in a lot of stories, it was obviously hard for the writing staff to focus on Sylar as the main villain all season. While he starts as Suresh's snipe to hunt, and took on the role of Hiro's Questing Beast at various points in the season, by the end of the season Sylar has quite obviously become Peter Petrelli's arch-nemesis. And this was clearly no accident -- Sylar is clearly a "dark" version of Peter. Not only does he have a twisted version of Peter's powers, he has the same motivation behind his actions. Both Peter and Sylar are wrapped with their respective insecurities and mother issues, driving both to become the men that they are. While Sylar's insecurities push him to become a psychotic killer, Peter's send him in a heroic direction to prove that he is worthwhile. And their mothers even had opposing influences on them, with Sylar's wrapping all of her hopes and dreams into her son and Peter's writing him off as worthless before he's even had a chance.

So the arch-nemesis setup is there, and the writers teased the ongoing fight between Peter and Sylar a number of times over the season: Peter and Sylar's first confrontation in the High School locker room, Sylar "killing" Peter in Suresh's apartment, the "Days of Future Past" flash-forward that ends in a showdown between Peter and Sylar, all of them teasing the fact that it comes down to Peter versus Sylar, and Sylar seems to be the stronger one. The final battle between Peter and Sylar should have been a phenomenal one.

But it wasn't. Part of this is the inability of anyone on the show to choreograph a decent fight scene. Three punches is not a fight scene, folks, even if you're throwing in some "beat down" sound effects to make the whole thing sound like the actors have super strength. And a guy holding his hand out looking constipated is not that dramatic either, even if it's supposed to be him using telekinesis. Ripping a parking meter out of the ground with telekinesis and using it to beat the other guy is fairly dramatic though, and a nice nod to the source material, so points for that bit.

But more importantly, the Sylar/Peter battle fails to be dramatic because it also has to be the Sylar/Hiro battle and Hiro HAS to strike the killing blow to complete his story arc. Hiro's journey into heroism was set up by the writers from the beginning to have HIM confront Sylar in the end, and without that confrontation Hiro's seasonal story arc does not get closure. So now there's a conundrum that the writers have created for themselves -- both Hiro and Peter have to defeat Sylar to bring their story arcs to a close. And when faced with this maze that they've written themselves into, the writers punt -- Peter beats on Sylar for a while and then Hiro strikes a killing blow, and the final result is not really satisfactory for anyone. They tried to have their cake and eat it too, and instead BOTH characters arcs end up being weaker because of it.

And I suspect that the writers realized this, which is part of the reason why Sylar's body disappears in the end down into the storm sewer. Defeated by Hiro, Sylar gets away so that sometime in the future he and Peter can finally have the confrontation between arch-nemeses that they should have been able to have here. Or at least I hope something like that is what the writers are going for, and that they weren't just having Sylar disappear mysteriously as a genre convention (though I'm sure that was at least part of the reasoning as well).

I will say, the final three episodes have me looking forward to next season already. Hiro's little "Quantum Leap" moment at the end of the episode, as well as the title of the next volume (Generations), suggest that we're going to be getting some "historical perspective" on the world. I suspect that this will tie into the Conspiracy, which is probably somewhat damaged by the actions of our protagonists but definitely not broken. There were still a lot of goons in that building, Angela Petrelli is still alive and well, and Nikki left Candace alive (if beaten). There's plenty of opportunity for the remaining Conspiracy members to make a comeback (and plenty of opportunity for some of them to become sympathetic villains).

I'm sure we'll see Sylar again, despite his limited usefulness as a maniacal supervillain. I'd like to see Sylar partnered with a mastermind. Sylar by himself is only scary to the point that he outpowers the heroes around him. His plot device telekinesis powers are supposed to make him scary, but really just make me feel like the writers are cheating. He's not a planner or a thinker, he's a predator, and as a story element he'd be more useful as a weapon at the end of the leash of a mastermind that could control him instead of as an independent. Plus, now that we seem to have a group of heroes together, having a group of ruthless villains willing to have Sylar as one of their own would be a good counterpoint.

My hope is that the creators will retool some things in the summer break. Most importantly I hope that they ADD MORE ACTION. At this point the show is now clearly a superhero soap opera, drawing on a long tradition of superhero soap opera that stretches back through Claremont's X-men to the Lee/Ditko Spider-man and the Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four. But you need to go all the way with it -- if you're going to do it you need to put in some real fight scenes. Go hire some folks who worked on Buffy or Xena to help you plot these things out. Trust me, it'll be worth it. The next time I see a fight between Peter and Sylar it better be dramatic, damn it.

Secondly, I hope they have more romance on the show. For a soap opera, there's been surprisingly little romance. Since D.L. actually seems to have survived, and Jessica seems to be out of the picture, the Nikki/D.L. relationship can be explored without worrying that its going to turn into a "plot hammer" moment as Jessica tries to kill D.L. and run off. I don't mind tension in a relationship, but I'd like it to be interesting tension and not just "tension to further the plot" tension.

In addition, there are other couples on the show that we need to get back to now that the "exploding man" plot is over. Parkman's wife Janice is still alive, he has a kid on the way, and we don't know if it's his or not. Bennett's family is still alive, and he needs to make amends for turning his wife's brain into swiss cheese (if he can ever do anything to make amends for that). And maybe we can get a love interest for Hiro -- the Hiro/Charlie romance was fun and cute, even if it was tragic in the end. I'd like to see Hiro in a timelost romance. It would be a good fit for the character and would make for some good drama.

Finally, I want to see better villains. Sylar was, on the whole, mostly boring this season. It's not Zachary Quinto's fault, he was just working with what they gave him for the character and psychos just are hard to keep interesting over the long haul. Villains with more depth, with more reason to be ruthless killers and thieves than just "he's crazy" would not only make the show more interesting, it would be true to the show's roots in both soap opera and superhero comics.

Marvel Trolls Craze Sweeps the Nation

After seeing the success of taking popular Marvel properties and turning them into zombies, Marvel now seems to be ready to take their ever-popular X-Men franchise and turn them into hideous trolls:



I think that the artist here really captured the horror of "trollness" in these figures. Troll-Magneto's wild-eyed stare while baring its fangs is suitably terrifying, while the grimace on Troll-Psylocke's face looks like she's thinking of new horrors to visit upon the world, and Troll-Rogue looks like she's contemplating some tasty-looking baby and wondering how many bites it will take to get the little thing down into her hungry belly. I think Troll-Colossus looks kind of weak in comparison to the others -- he's less "hideous Troll" than he is "kinda-ugly Goblin", but in context I think that other figures draw the "hideous Troll"-ness out of him...

What's that?

Those aren't supposed to be Trolls?

That's actually a statue of the X-babies? Those adorable little knock-offs of the X-men created as a joke by Chris Claremont and Art Adams back in 1986 as a gag that got beat into the ground for a few years after that?



Nope. Sorry. Don't see it at all. I'm fairly certain that those Trolls in the top picture are not supposed to be X-babies. I mean, if they were, they'd kinda look like the X-babies, right?

This Blog, This Monster

Marvel.com has a new blog.

Marvel has a number of blogs. Perhaps the most linked-to on the Internets is the one belonging to editor Tom Brevoort, but they have others. So a new blog on Marvel.com is not really a big news story.

But this blog is special.

This blog belongs to MODOK!



Apparently the programming of the Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing has been altered. Now he appears to be the Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing And Blogging About Killing.

MODOKABAK.

Carry on.

Courtesy of Graeme.

She Blinded Me With Science

So, scientists have determined that a female shark in the Omaha, Nebraska zoo gave birth to a baby shark through parthogenesis. Parthogenesis is where an egg develops into a full animal without any male genetic material being added. As the linked article says, this is the first time that it's been confirmed in cartiliginous fish like sharks, though the article states that it has been observed in amphibians, reptiles and birds, and I have read that it also occurs with some kinds of insects. This is also the process that the dinosaurs in the movie Jurrasic Park supposedly underwent despite the fact that there were no males on the island.

This is pretty darn cool if you ask me. In the end the offspring is like a clone of the mother -- since no additional genetic material is added to the mix, the offspring has to be female and has all of the mother's original genetic material. Just another reminder that the world is always a bit stranger than you give it credit for.

Update: I found another article at the Discovery Channel website with some more detail. Apparently the shark was not a full clone of the mother, inheriting only 1/2 of the genetic material from the mother instead of all of it. Also, the young shark died shortly after birth, apparently from an encounter with a stingray in the tank, so it never got to grow to full size. Still, an interesting story that adds a bit of weirdness to the day.

YouTube, but With Less Stupid

Earlier this month Kevin Church posted a link to a Greasemonkey script that removes comments from YouTube pages.

I finally installed it.

YouTube without comments is very, very nice.

If you have Greasemonkey installed and aren't using this script, try it out.

If you're using Firefox and don't have Greasemonkey installed, try it out.

If you're not using Firefox, well, I guess there's not much that can be done for you.

Thoughts on Superhero Television

As I noted in the comments on slugboy's post below, I didn't get to see all of the Heroes finale last night due to a personal conflict (The Lovely Wife and I were attending our final childbirth class -- apparently we've passed and we'll be allowed to have the kid. Hooray!). I'm going to catch the re-run on Sci-Fi Friday night and I'll post something about it after that. Suffice to say, though, that slugboy and I have fairly different views on whether Heroes is a good series or not and, maybe, what makes good superhero television. Personally, I'm looking for a good soap opera with some decent fight scenes in my superhero TV. For me, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was my Platonic Ideal of superhero TV -- overwrought drama, witty banter, and well-choreographed fight scenes. A close second are the Xena/Hercules franchises, which don't have quite the level of overwrought drama, but make up for it by being campily weird, highly mythic, and having some awesome fight-scene choreography. Heroes comes in at a tier down from these two for me -- very enjoyable overall, and a great way to spend an hour of TV-time with The Lovely Wife (who I think sometimes enjoys it even more than I do) but the episodes always leave me picking at ways that they could have been better. In that way it's a lot more like X-Files or Star Trek: Deep Space Nine for me than anything else -- always so close to the target, but not quite there.

The main way that Heroes lets me down week after week is that the fight scenes are so damn bland and they rely to much on the "cut-away/cut-back" method of not showing the fight scene. Sure, it saves on the special effects budget, and used sparingly it can be really dramatic, but not if you use it for every single damn fight. And next season I want to see some more romance, dammit. You can't do good soap opera if you don't have love triangles and families in tension over their son/daughter dating someone they don't like. So in short -- more soap opera and better fight scenes would go a long way to improving the show overall.

However, thinking about the half hour of Heroes that I did get to see last night: I really think that as much as I like the movies, the Spider-man franchise would work much better as a serialized TV show than it does as a movie franchise. All of the annoyances that I talked about earlier are due to the restricted format of the big-budget action movie. Move the series to a 24 episode season and all of those soap opera elements can fall out naturally instead of feeling like they were forced in with the plot-shoehorn. You'd have to work at it to make sure it didn't turn out like Smallville, but Spider-man starts with a natural advantage over Superman in the soap opera department -- he was a soap opera character at his inception. Forcing Superman into a soap opera role feels wrong because his world is not a soap opera world. Spider-man's is, and a show that understands that and plays to that strength while throwing in crazy villains for him to fight week after week could be awesome.

Of course, the SFX could never be as good as the big budget action film FX, and to a large extent Spider-man needs those SFX more than, say, Superman does. You can fake super-strength pretty easily, and flying is apparently easy to do nowadays even on TV. But the webslingning that Spidey does in the movies is some fairly complicated CGI, and I'm not sure you could do Spider-man justice without having those large setpiece battles over Manhattan -- he can only fight in so many old warehouses and alleyways. But if that problem could be overcome, Spidey would be a great candidate to move to the TV.

Smeh

Well, Heroes is over.

Maybe next season, something will happen.

I read Runaways for the first time tonight. I would like to see something that moves at a pace more like that. I would like to see something thought through, rather than just have things happen because it's that point in the season, and for people to do things because it's in their character to do things, not because the plot suddenly needs something to happen. I'd like somebody other than Ando and Hiro to be funny, fer cryin' out loud.

Not that anybody's reading this blog yet, but I suppose I shouldn't get into specifics until the west coast has seen the thing.

Does Whatever A Spider Can ...

The Lovely Wife and I finally went to see Spider-man 3 this afternoon. We had intended to see it opening weekend, but illness intervened. Then last weekend was, of course, Mother's Day -- not a Spider-man movie weekend. All in all, it was a fun movie, and better than I had expected given the level of 'meh' towards the movie that has been floating around the Internets since its release. Discussion and spoilers below the fold...

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The movie is really plot-heavy -- three villains, two "love interests" (and two "love triangles" to go along with them), three fairly massive setpiece battles -- there's a lot of stuff going on in this movie and it pretty much doesn't slow down from the beginning of the movie to the end. There are a few quiet moments such as Peter and Mary Jane in the trees watching a meteor shower, or Mary Jane and Harry Osborne cooking, but even the quiet moments are plot-advancement moments -- the movie doesn't really slow down enough to do many pure character building moments.

This is probably the movie's biggest flaw -- it's pretty clear that there's an underlying soap opera story that Raimi wants to tell about Peter and Mary Jane set against the backdrop of Peter's larger responsibilities as Spider-man -- a classic setup right from the source material. But because of the scale of the movie, the soap opera moments get rushed along a bit too quickly. We get the big moments of their relationship struggles, but not the subtle ones. The relationship has to be drawn large and broad to quickly telegraph the problems to the audience to get onto the action, which makes the relationship seem more shallow than it should - almost a caricature of a relationship. It feels like if it had been given some more depth, the relationship failure could have been more natural, rather than the sudden shift that Raimi had to give it to make the movie flow.

Additionally, Raimi clearly wanted to wrap up the Spider-man/Green Goblin story that he's been working on since the first movie. This part felt rushed too -- Harry moving from angry man on a vengeance kick to subtle manipulator wanting to undermine Peter's happiness to ally all felt too chaotic. I can tell that Raimi wanted a big setpiece battle between the new Goblin and Spider-man, and I suspect that he wanted to get Harry and Peter back to being "friends" so that Harry could betray him. And, I suppose that Raimi also wanted a big battle at the front of the movie to get the action rolling. But it still felt off to me -- like Harry should have gone for the subtle manipulator angle first, then moved onto the angry vengeance kick afterward.

Speaking of Harry, there is one element of the movie that I just didn't understand -- why did Mary Jane go along with Harry's plan to torment Peter? This is never addressed in the movie. Harry threatened her, but why not tell Peter that Harry threatened her? Even if she felt that she had to put on a show to keep Harry off her back, why not let Peter in on it after the fact?

Okay, so if I have so many complaints why did I like it? The above complaints are fairly minor actually. I mean, we're not talking about an indie film or a romantic comedy, we're talking about a summer big-budget popcorn movie. Expecting a big-budget popcorn movie to spend time on building relationships is a big thing to ask, so while I would have liked to have seen more of it, I'm not surprised that it isn't there.

So what did I like about the movie? First of all, I was surprised by how much I liked the Eddie Brock plotline, and I mean all of it. I have to provide the caveat that I. Can't. Stand. Venom. I like the concept well enough, and I think that the character has a lot of potential, but it is rarely realized in the comics, and Venom is a character that is incredibly easy to write lazily. And so he's been written INCREDIBLY lazily over the years.

But Raimi really makes me like his version of Venom. First of all, the decision to cast Topher Grace as Brock was outstanding -- Grace played the character with the right mix of obnoxious slime and blind obsession to make Brock both understandable and unlikable -- a tough mix to pull off. You don't really sympathize with Brock at all, but you can understand why he blames Parker for his own failings.

And that's another part that Raimi hit note perfect -- Brock blames PARKER for his own failings. Brock isn't out for revenge on Spider-man -- he hates Parker. The fact that Parker is Spider-man just makes it harder for Brock to get his revenge. What's more, Brock hates Parker not for something Parker did, but for something that Brock did to himself.

On top of that, Brock is not only slimy but obsessive. And not just about his revenge on Peter. He talks about he and Gwen "dating" and acts like she's his girlfriend even though Gwen clearly says that they only had coffee once. He obsesses about getting the staff photographer job enough to fake a picture. And, since Dr. Connors points out that the symbiote enhances the personality of the host, once Brock becomes Venom his obsession with Parker and revenge is equally enhanced. (Leaving one to wonder why his obsession with Gwen didn't also get enhanced -- probably because two damsels in distress would have been too much, even for this movie).

The design for Venom was probably as good as one could do with the character, I guess. I liked the vampire fangs on Brock more than the CGI Venom, but that may be a gut reaction owing more to my visceral dislike of Venom than anything else. Venom as monster works for me -- as long as no one wants to make a movie where Venom is the hero, I'll probably be okay with it.

Besides the surprise of Eddie Brock, I quite liked the Sandman as a character too, though there wasn't as much there as I would have liked. Thomas Hayden Church did a good job with what he had, and he looked remarkably like the character from the comic books. The CGI for the Sandman was really impressive as well, not just in detail but in choreography. The image of Sandman pulling himself up out of the particle accelerator and the giant sand creature at the construction site -- both were very well done and fun to watch. Much better than the Venom CGI, which was mostly 'meh', though the scene at the end with the symbiote in the cage was nicely done.

My one plot complaint is related to Sandman and an old one -- the obsessive need to tie villains to the hero's origin. Was it really necessary to make Flint Marko the "real killer" of Uncle Ben? I know that Raimi was looking for something to push Peter into wearing the symbiote despite the dangers, and wanted a baser emotion to latch onto, but couldn't he have gone for something other than revenge? Maybe jealousy? Peter deciding to wear the black costume because of Harry's mind games with MJ maybe? I mean, it worked in the movie, but it's a trope that really gets tiresome in superhero movies.

And finally, I liked the intro of Gwen Stacey into the movie world even if she was hardly in the movie except as an object of jealousy for Mary Jane. Bryce Dallas Howard does a decent job with what she was given, though unfortunately she wasn't really given all that much in this movie. I'm sure that since there is apparently going to be a Spider-man 4, Gwen will show up again. Interestingly, Mary Jane and Gwen seem to have reversed roles in the movies from their roles in the comics -- in the films, Mary Jane is the girl-next-door and Gwen is apparently a successful model, while in the comics Gwen was the girl-next-door and Mary Jane is the model. I'm not sure that it means anything, but it's interesting.

Overall I liked the movie quite a lot. It's not the best of the series (number 2 gets that honor from me), but it was definitely worth my six bucks. Plus, the previews in front of the movie were awesome -- the new Harry Potter movie looks like it will be intense.

Logo!

Totally created this logo while sitting in a coffee shop. And now I'm blogging about it!

I'm officially a cliche! Huzzah!

Lloyd Alexander, Rest in Peace

Lunchtime blogging can be depressing. The Beat is reporting that Lloyd Alexander has died (newspaper link here). He was 83 years old.

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Alexander wrote two series that I still adore to this day - the Prydain Chronicles (starting with "The Black Cauldron") and the Westmark series (starting with "Westmark"). He wrote many, many other books, but I'll always remember both of these series. The Prydain Chronicles in particular colored my early fantasy expectations as much as Tolkein, LeGuin and Howard all did.

He still has one book that will be released in August, one inspired by Middle Eastern folk tales according to the story at the Gainesville Sun linked to above -- "The Golden Dream of Carlo Chuchio". I will have to look for it this summer.

Humor in Comics

There's a new installment of Comic Book Urban Legends Revealed over at Comics Should Be Good. I love this feature, even when the things that Cronin posts aren't really urban legends but more "industry trivia". This one has a real urban legend though -- despite what I've heard around the Internets, Orson Welles was never making a Batman movie.

Anyway, go read them for yourselves. I want to blather specifically about a quote from Beau Smith in the second article:

I got a letter from DC telling me that Dan [Didio] figured that without the show being on TV and such that there wasn’t in their best interest to do the book now. I was disappointed and disagreed. Marketing and business 101 in the comic book direct market will tell you that there IS an audience for Wonder Woman and Xena going toe to toe. TV show or not. I was also told by one of the editors that Dan [Didio] wasn’t a fan of humor with their icon heroes. Wonder Woman being one of em’.

(Emphasis mine). First the caveats -- this is a quote from a second hand source (Smith) who heard it from "one of the editors" at DC. It's possible that either the editor or Smith didn't understand Didio's actual objection, or that Didio didn't actually have such an objection at all and the editor was misreading a situation.

With those caveats in mind, I'm going to make the assumption that this statement is basically true based on the evidence. Discounting All*Star Batman And Robin (which I contend is unintentionally funny and that Miller is trying to write it straight), there really isn't that much humor in the DC universe these days, at least in the core titles. Everything gets taken so seriously, or at least as seriously as you can take a bunch of people running around with their underwear on the outside of their bodies.


There's also the fact that the characters who have been abused the most by the current editorial regime are the ones from the 80's Justice League series by Keith Giffen and J.M. Demattias, whose primary characteristics were a lack of the "big guns" of the DC universe (due to editorial constraints) and TV comedy-style scripting that mixed intentional humor in with the typical superhero drama. In the minds of at least some fans, that era of Justice League is remembered as the "silly League", even though objectively it's much less silly than, say, Gardner Fox's Justice League of the 60's.

If Didio does have a dislike of superhero humor, one could see why he might want to use those characters as a way of drawing a line in the sand and saying "no more funny stuff". For the fans who have been around long enough (DC's target demographic these days), those actions were a very clear indicator of what was to come.


Apparently fun books suffer a sales hit. I'm actually not surprised by this in the least -- I've been around enough comic book stores to know where the general tastes of the comic buying public lie. Of course, looking at the sales of DC comics in the year after the end of Infinite Crisis shows they aren't doing all that well saleswise, even catering to the "I don't like fun in my comics" crowd.

This is not, by the way, an argument that catering to that crowd has hurt their sales. I think that is true for the long term, but the short-term horserace numbers between Marvel and DC don't support that at all, given that Marvel also seems to be attempting to get the "I don't like fun in my comics" readership. DC's problems seem to be more scheduling related -- while 52 consistently placed in the charts last year, other books that should be cornerstone books like Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman slipped off the radar due to creative team juggling and the inability of the assigned creative teams to stick to a monthly schedule. Marvel doesn't do too much better with this scheduling stuff either -- look at the publishing schedule of Iron Man, for example, but they at least had a mega-crossover pushing things along through last year. DC had 52 which explicitly DID NOT crossover with any of the other books in their line, and so none of their "core" could get a boost from folks following their big event.

What does this mean for the long run? I suspect more of the same. If in the current market "fun" doesn't sell, and if there's no push to expand the market beyond the current fanbase, then the publishers will continue to "give the market what it wants". Those who like these types of things will keep buying them; those who don't like them will either stop buying them or (more likely) keep buying them and bitch about it. But there will be a stream of folks who just stop buying -- not in an ostentatious "I'm never buying a DC comic again" sort of way, but just drift away and find somewhere else to spend their time and money. Which is the best thing you can do, really, if you don't find what the "market" is giving you to be entertaining anymore.

Players Always Surprise You

Sigh.

No matter how well you think you know your group, they always manage to surprise you.

Last night, in only the second session of what I thought would be a four-session adventure, my players short-circuited the entire plot and brought the adventure to its conclusion about two sessions earlier than I expected.

Maybe they're just too suspicious -- no matter how much I tried to make the wizard living in the tower at the center of the village seem like an innocuous, absent-minded, "Dumbledore"-type, they still (correctly) suspected that he was the actual bad guy. They picked up the clues about the threat to the village much quicker that I thought, solving that mystery in only one encounter.

Kudos to my players, though, they did it fair and square. I underestimated their cynicism a bit, I think. Additionally, I think I haven't had enough genuinely "helpful" NPCs around -- they were looking for the kindly wizard to stab them in the back I think partly because there just haven't been that many "kindly" folks around in the campaign. On top of that, I think I tipped my hand a bit early with the NPC spy that was tagging along with the group, but given how their proposed actions I'm not sure I could have done it any other way.

We're going to be doing a short dungeon crawl next, followed (hopefully) by a larger running campaign adventure. I need to meditate about the lessons of last night's game to make sure that the upcoming campaign adventure is as entertaining as it can be.

New Writer on Titans

Newsarama has an interview posted with the new writer for Teen Titans, taking over with issue #50:

Sean McKeever

McKeever was already announced as the new writer on Birds of Prey when Gail Simone moves over to Wonder Woman.

Now, I'm not currently reading Titans in its monthly issue form. I HAD been picking up the trade paperbacks, but after the "Infinite Crisis" crossover paperback, I've been leery about picking up any of the new ones. I've read some of the individual issues sporadically at Borders in the post-"One Year Later" jump and, while there are some things that I like about them (Miss Martian in particular, though also Kid Devil), it hasn't been enough for me to think about jumping back onto Titans. The whole "death of Superboy" thing just sits like a pall over the whole book for me.

But McKeever -- he does do the teenage drama well from what I've seen. On the good side, he expressly likes the characters of Miss Martian and Kid Devil and wants to explore them more (wanting to explore more about Ravager is more neutral than good to me -- I just haven't been that interested in Rose since the arc where she became a psychotic nut under her father's tutelage). On the bad side, McKeever says he "really likes" the Titans Tomorrow story, a story that I thought was fairly derivative overall and just not that compelling. Revisiting that particular story arc doesn't thrill me in the least.

There are only some indications of what the "full roster" of the Titans will look like in the interview -- McKeever commits to Kid Devil, Miss Martian, Ravager, Wonder Girl, and Supergirl explicitly. There's an implicit assumption that Robin will also be on the team, and McKeever's careful choice of words indicates that Blue Beetle will not be on the team. I like this -- it's good to see the focus move off of the Wolfman/Perez roster of Titans and onto a new generation of teen heroes. I'm also already pre-disposed to like almost all of those characters (but can Robin please get a decent costume back? That red-and-black number just screams "target practice" to me).

Overall, I think I'll take a wait-and-see approach to the book. I could see it getting onto my monthly pull list. I could also see myself continuing to mostly ignore the book. I've been impressed by McKeever's work in the past, and I'm already planning on getting McKeever's Birds of Prey. Despite not really having the money to expand my pull list right now, I actually hope that the book is so good that I can't help but put it on my list.

Site Update

I've finally added some links over in the blogroll to various blogs that I find interesting (I'm sure that slugboy will come along and add some of his own eventually). The folks over there always have insightful comments on comics and pop culture in general. While I don't always agree with everything you might find posted on those sites they all always give you something to think or laugh about.

Magic 8 Ball

Apropos of nothing in particular...

Did you know that there's an online magic eight ball?

I wasn't so sure that I should devote a whole post to this, but I asked the magic eight ball and it said "Absolutely!", so I felt compelled to follow through with it.

Quote of the Day

From office-mate Tim:

Let me go cheer myself up by reading some Funky Winkerbean.

Tim has been having a bad week, to say the least.

Thoughts on a D&D Fourth Edition

Regarding the posts for the last few days, Paul commented via e-mail:

Any talk at all of new edition of D&D is bad, considering I just bought 3.5 sourcebooks after four years.

Ah, fourth edition D&D -- that elusive beast that has been both desired and dreaded by D&D fans since, well, since the release of third edition, actually. I think the first messageboard thread about fourth edition that I noticed came up around a year after third edition came out. The release of the revised (or 3.5) edition quieted down the edition upgrade conversation -- for about a year. It's now reached the point where EVERYTHING is a possible indication of an impending 4th edition.

For the record, I don't think a 4th edition is coming any time soon. And by soon I mean "before 2009". At this year's D&D Experience there was no announcement of a fourth edition, and indeed people were outright told that there was no 4th edition coming in the forseeable future (which I take as corporate-speak for "not this year"). If a 4th edition is coming down the pike, I imagine the earliest it would get announced is at the next D&D Experience -- next January or February. And they'll want to have a year to hype it up, because that year of hype worked amazingly well for the third edition release. So the earliest I think 4th edition gets released is 2009.

But I'm going to go out on a limb and say that even 2009 is too soon. Wizards has a lot invested in this edition -- the miniatures aspects especially seem to turn a tidy profit for them. And Wizards is just now figuring out new ways to exploit some areas that both they have shied away from in the past. Wizards got into the minis business hard, they've branched into things like the Dungeon Tiles sets to support those minis, and they've once again started releasing adventures. All of these are indications to me that Wizards is trying to keep the game profitable and push the release of a new edition off for a few years. I suspect that we might even actually end up with another "revised" edition (v 3.75?) instead of a full-blown 4th edition, but that might not be economically feasible.

More Star Wars Saga Edition Thoughts

Following up on my post from yesterday, while I don't think everything in the Saga Edition previews would be suitable for use in D&D, there are some mechanics that look really, really good and, with some adaptation, could be very suitable for a D&D game.

The biggest change is the removal of saving throws and replacing them with defenses. At base, I like this a lot. This is a great idea. Saving throws are a throwback to the wargames that D&D grew from, and given the current incarnation of the game they no longer make as much sense as a mechanic as they did back in the day.

At their core, saving throws are a kind of "skill check". In older editions of the game they were very specialized and they represented how well your character could resist particular types of magic, or could jump out of the way of particular types of magical effects. They were divided by magic types (and which saving throws were in the game depended on whether you were playing D&D or AD&D), representing the ability to dodge "Dragon Breath" or resist magic from "Rods, Staffs and Wands" or resist Poison attacks.

When 3rd edition came along, these were simplified down to their core, abstract principles -- how well you could dodge out of the way (Reflex), how well you could physically withstand the effect (Fortitude) and how well you could mentally resist an effect (Willpower). While this simplification seemed like a radical shift, it actually just abstracted the old system down to something similar, but that scaled more easily to more situations.

The 3rd edition system introduced a new problem (or, conversely, made apparent a problem that was already there) -- if your Reflex save represents your ability to get out of the way of a damaging effect before it hits you, how is it any different from your Armor Class, which represents your ability to dodge an attack to keep it from hitting you? Plus, 3rd edition also has true skill checks -- the question of when to use a Balance check versus a Reflex save is a real issue that, while discussed in some depth in the 3.5 edition Player's Handbook, is kind of obnoxious. If you have a high Balance or Tumble skill and you're actively trying to duck out of the way of something, why can't you make the skill check instead of the Reflex save, and why would you need some kind of feat to make it work? There's a game balance issue involved, of course, but the real problem comes from the fact that there are two different stats in the game that are attempting to describe the same thing.

Likewise, having a blurred distinction between Reflex Saves and Armor Class defense makes the action in combat stranger than it needs to be. Specifically, one-on-one effects are usually performed with a "to hit" roll -- the fighter taking a swing at an opponent, the wizard firing a ray at an enemy, etc. -- the attacker makes the roll against a set defense. Area effects, however, are performed with a "Reflex save" roll -- the defender makes a roll to avoid getting whacked by the effect. Though the actions being simulated are symmetric, the mechanics are completely opposite. Why not just have the wizard making the area attack make a "to hit" roll against the defenses of the folks within the area being targeted?

And that seems to be exactly what the folks writing the Star Wars Saga Edition asked themselves. By turning the three saving throws into Defenses and merging Armor Class (or in the case of Star Wars "Defense") and Reflex together into a Reflex Defense, they seem to have taken a big step to fixing this problem, and to making every combatant an active participant in combat whether they are making one-on-one attacks or throwing around fireballs.

This setup isn't perfect for D&D, though. Firstly, this method de-emphasizes armor immensely -- after a certain level your Reflex bonus from your class levels is going to dwarf any armor bonus you might get from equipment. For Star Wars this is fine -- almost no one in the setting wears armor and the Talents provided for wearing armor give enough of a reason for continuing to wear armor while not giving the armor wearers too much of an advantage. In "standard" D&D, armor needs to be much more important. Fighters should be the best class for combat, and that means having the best physical Defense (be that Armor Class or Reflex Defense) as well as the most hit points and best combat abilities. This needs to be taken into account if a system like this is put into D&D (though this would make a great variant for a Conan-style D&D game).

A second consideration is that the Star Wars method of improving defenses isn't a D&D-ish way of improving defenses. The Star Wars game proposes a simple +1 per character level bonus to all defenses across the board, with an additional +2 bonus based on which character class you have. This is a great, simple idea that works for Star Wars, but it dilutes the differences among classes. Additionally, this makes defense scale INCREDIBLY quickly -- a 10th level character would have over 20 for all of his defenses. This just doesn't feel right for D&D -- classes in D&D should have different feels. A more granular approach to defense improvement seems to me like it would be needed to keep D&D feeling like D&D instead of like an action movie. A fix might be to use +1/2 level for a primary defense and a +1/3 level for the secondary defenses of the class. This would keep defenses lower in general, which given a good mechanic for armor would keep the feel of D&D while simplifying the defense mechanics, though of course I haven't tried anything like this in play yet, so I'm not sure how well it would actually work in practice.

Star Wars Saga Edition

There's a new preview for the upcoming Star Wars Saga Edition RPG up at Wizards of the Coast's website. This one's all about the rules changes to make droids viable player characters in this edition.

I think this is a good approach -- making droid a "race" in the game rather than coming up with a bunch of exceptions to the standard rules to make droids usable as PCs. The description given at the website seems to be a combination of the warforged character traits (from the D&D Eberron setting) mixed with some new rules specifically for the Star Wars setting (such as Ion weapons, the ability to reallocate their skill training, their "rest" requirements). I especially like that droids get to use Force Points. Since Force Points are an abstract "Drama Point" mechanic in the game, not allowing droids access to these points limits their capabilities as a PC. Plus, it makes little sense -- R2 was one of the luckiest characters in the whole movie series. Without having access to the Force Points mechanic, someone playing an R2-like droid character couldn't hope to even come close to replicating the little guy's performance.

I wish that droids could be Jedi, though. I know that's a limitation of the Star Wars universe (after all, they're not alive, so they can't have any "midichlorians" running through their system), but still. The image of a golden protocol droid in Jedi robes completely amuses me for some reason.

A number of folks have been looking at these previews as indications of what may be coming up for a new "Fourth Edition" of Dungeons and Dragons. I'm not so convinced. I think some of these rules changes may make it in, but a lot of these changes are just to make the d20 system feel more like Star Wars. It seems like now, 5 years after this whole "d20 Star Wars" experiment got started, Wizards is finally making the system fit the setting. That's a good thing in my mind, but there's no indication that what works to make d20 more "Star Wars"-like would also work to make d20 more "Dungeons and Dragons"-like. Time will tell, I suppose.

What would I do if other folks didn't read Previews for me?

Marvel has a new book coming out.

It is being written by Fred Van Lente, writer of Action Philosophers and Marvel Adventures Spider-man.

Now, a book by Fred Van Lente automatically gets my ears perked up. It's like hearing that there's a new book coming out by Jeff Parker, or Gail Simone, or Sean McKeever. I start to wonder if I have room on my monthly docket to pick up the book, or if it has a high likelihood of getting collected so that I can just wait for the trade.

But for this book there will be no waiting for the trade.

For this book contains MODOK:



A supervillian heist book starring MODOK? SOLD! This could be as much fun as Simone's "Villain's United" and "Secret Six" books. Possibly moreso, because while she did have Catman and Deadshot to play around with, she didn't have MODOK!

Now I just need to find someone who will buy my plasma to get the extra money...

(via Chris's look at the Previews catalog.)

Things that cheese me off (part the first)

Final Edit: (Hopefully) Mark Waid confirms "foot-in-mouth" on his part. He says it was a "botched joke", so there you go.

Another Edit: Graeme McMillan confirms that the original CBR story was edited to fix some misquotes and that the blog entry was likewise altered. The commenter "Matter Eater-Blog" also confirms that the quote was as I have it below, so this post stands. Again, I don't know if the interviewer misquoted Waid or if Waid asked for his comment to be taken off the record -- and I don't care. Regardless of why a posted story is changed there should at a minimum be an indication that the story has been edited if it is altered after publication.

Edit: Okay, now the quote is gone from the blog and from the linked interview. I cut and pasted this directly from the Blog@Newsarama post after confirming that it was in the original interview, and now it's gone. There's no indication that either post has been edited after the fact, but the quote is gone. I know that I cut and pasted it directly from the interview here, but apparently it's fallen into the Internet black hole. This is another thing that cheeses me off - folks who edit stories after they're posted without indicating that they've changed it.

The new quote reads:

Ralph's resolution was my favorite thing in "52." The scene with the "ghost detectives" was what we were always building to with Ralph. Based on his history, his personality and his character, there were only two possible payoffs for Ralph: he could have lived, but been miserable without Sue for the rest of his life, or we could have killed him. But simply killing him to be gratuitous didn't feel right. Killing a character that's been around since before you were born is, generally, a thoughtless and convenient path to take as a writer, and I've learned that the hard way.

via ComicBookResources

I'm cheesed off here because if you need to print a retraction, print a retraction. If you need to edit the post and drop a quote because someone realized they had "foot-in-mouth" disease, or because you misquoted them, at least put in a note to say that the story had been changed.

I'm leaving the rest of this post up for posterity, though whether the quote is legit or not, or conveys an accurate view of reality or not, is left as an exercise to the reader.

From a recent interview with Mark Waid (regarding the now finished 52 miniseries):

Ralph was my favorite thing in it. The scene with the ghost was what we were always building to with Ralph. There is only one resolution for Ralph: he could be miserable without Sue for the rest of his life, or we could have killed him. And Dan was pushing very hard to kill the character because Dan hates him.

But it didn’t feel right. It just felt gratuitous on top of everything else.

The "Dan" in this case is Dan Didio, high-mucky-muck of DC Comics. He's like Joe Quesada's evil twin (or would be, if Quesada himself weren't someone's evil twin - why do we get the universe with all of the evil twins in it, anyway?). The "Ralph" in this case is Ralph Dibny, the DC Comics character known as the Elongated Man, who recently had a happy ending to his story in the last issue of 52.

Kill Ralph "because Dan hates him." WTF? What kind of a whiny fanboy is Dan Didio? This isn't about killing the character for story reasons, or dramatic reasons, or just to shake things up. Sometimes those are excusable under the right circumstances. Instead, kill him because "I don't like him". Why? Because he's goofy? Because he's a fun character who hearkens back to a day when comics weren't so oppresively dark all of the time? Because Didio hates detectives? Because Ralph Dibny once kicked Didio's dog? Why would anyone "hate" a character like the Elongated Man anyway? Who has that kind of energy? It's not like he's Lobo or Wolverine or something. Didio was probably the kind of kid who broke his action figures in the sandbox too, just because he didn't want any other kids to play with them.

This has been the first in what is likely to be a long-running series of "Things That Cheese Me Off". Or, alternatively, "Rantings From An Old Man That Are Not About Kids Playing On His Lawn"...

Hasbro keeps us informed!

Apparently, Spider-man 3 is here. Hasbro has sent me an e-mail to this effect, so it must be true.

Did you know that there are Spider-man versions of MONOPOLY, OPERATION, and MEMORY? And apparently also Spider-man SORRY and Spider-man YAHTZEE?

Wait - Yahtzee?!?

The dice have pictures of different Marvel Heroes on them -- they look like they're the Marvel Jr. versions. That is so weird - a Yahtzee variant. I must find out how this game works...



There's also what may be the single most awesome movie tie-in ever created -- the Mr. Potato Head Spider Spud. Complete with stretchy spider-man costume that you slip around the spud. According to the ad copy, a radioactive spider bit Peter Parker Potato to turn him into Spider Spud. I don't think their ad copy folks are trying too hard these days. But really, who needs ad copy? This thing sells itself.



(I mean, look at it! It's beautiful! And it has a little plastic web that you can attach to its wrist!)