Jan 16
House To Astonish Episode 53
Posted on Sunday, January 16, 2011 by Al in Podcast
The first House to Astonish of 2011 is upon us, and we’ve got discussion of the Marvel editorial shake-up, the Flex Mentallo collection and the new Spider-Man and Captain America movie costumes, as well as reviews of Who Is Jake Ellis?, Deadpool Team-Up and Weird Worlds, while the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe keeps it all in the family. All this plus Joe Quesada’s left-hand man, the Gerry Adams of Marvel and food stamp fraud.
The podcast is here, or on Mixcloud here – let us know what you think, either in the comments below, via Twitter, by email or on our Facebook fan page.
I’m not sure Flex Mentallo is worth the hype. After all these years, I hope people aren’t disappointed.
The new Spider-Man costume doesn’t look all that different to the Raimi one, although the logo looks a bit funky, but I’m not sure if it’s supposed to look like that, or if it’s battle damage.
Regarding Deadpool and Iron Fist, I’m reminded of that bit in, I think, Civil War in which Deadpool figures out that Iron Fist is posing as Daredevil because DD is using Iron Fist’s martial arts style. They conveyed that through using the same page layout for the Deadpool/Daredevil fight as they did for an earlier fight between Deadpool and Iron Fist. I’ve always thought that was a clever idea.
Re: webshooters: Al is just plain wrong here, and Paul is just obviously right. There’s no reason to have Spider-man invent his own web-shooters; by making Peter Parker a genius, you take away his everyman status, which just fouls up the character.
Mechanical webshooters: Peter is a really brainy kid who can conceive amazing things when he’s fired up.
Organic webshooters: Spidey fights his enemies by flicking gigantic sticky bogies at them.
And now that I’ve actually finished the podcast, congratulations, Al!
I see Paul’s point about the webshooters. I think the main advantage of mechanical webshooters are you can do the “Oh no! I’m out of web-fluid and I forgot my spare cartridges!” thing if you want to inject some extra drama. You can also do fun stuff with variant web-fluids – How does an organic-webshooter Spidey create special webbing to defeat the Molten Man? Drink flame-retardant chemicals and hope his body processes them into his spinerets?
On the other hand, when you say that without the mechanical webshooters, Peter is no longer a science-whiz, what you’re basically saying is that there’s nothing else about the character that suggests he’s a budding Reed Richards. So why is it so important?
I approved of Ultimate Spidey splitting the difference – Peter is bright enough to complete the formula with access to his Dad’s notes and laboratory, but he’s not an ubergenius who can create the stuff from scratch out of ordinary household chemicals in a couple of days.
And supervillains don’t try and market their gadgets because they’re crazy and have poorly thought-out life goals. That’s why they’re supervillains.
Regarding Weird Worlds, the “flashback panels contradict what the guy is saying happened” aspect of the Lobo story was mildly amusing, even if it is an overdone concept. And this being DC, I suspect Garbage Man is supposed to remind us of pre-Moore Swamp-Thing rather than Man-Thing.
Congrats, Al! My reading suggests weddings are frequently attacked by supervillains. But in your case, they’ll all be total loser supervillains, complaining about The Official Handbook of The Official Handbook…
Odd possibly-a-coincidence: After listening to the episode, Scott Ian from Anthrax is now in my “Who to Follow” on Twitter.
ConAltulations Grad
I always figured that they went with organic webbing in the movies because after you do the scene where he experiments with his wall crawling etc, he then has to say “hey, I should have some webs, too”. Then you have to do the labratory scene where he fails to get the formula a few times (which would have been another montage, after the designing the costume montage we already had) and would then need another learning to use his powers scene, this time with only webs.
In the interest of streamlining the movie so we can just get on with the movie, organic webs are the way to go.
This could be combatted, of course, by having the movie start with him already being spiderman. The origin/powers scenes would then all be in flashback.
Why do the origin at all? Considering that every how-to-write-movies book/article/etc says you should start as close to media res as possible, it’s very strange that every comic book film has to begin at the absolute beginning.
Congratulations, Al! Have fun.
Concerning the webshooters, it is kind of laughable today, but I like this element of Spider-Man. It is this charming kind of wish-fulfilment, where the loser can build the space-ship in the garage. It reminds one of simpler times, so why change it?
When I think of Axel Alonso, I think of books like Preacher. Since he is at Marvel, has he done any books with that kind of impact? The only book which comes to mind is Ennis´run on Punisher Max, which was as far removed from the Marvel mainstream as is possible. Which of course was why it worked so well.
One of the problems with concepts like Decimation is that the editors are seemingly unable or unwilling to think things through. It was a terrible idea from the start – in this way at least – which was obious even then. Of course you could argue that Lee or Kirby made it up as they went along. I bet Lee never wasted a thought on what a character like Galactus really means if you think it through – he is the biggest mass-murder of the galaxy – while even a few years later an editor like Shooter thought the idea of Phoenix killing a whole planet so distasteful that he changed the story-line – and the books dynamic – in the last minute. Different sensibilities, sure, but if seems to me that the wish to make things “more relevant or realistic” did take a lot of fun out of comics.
I’ve always thought that, with superhero sequels, you could just recap the origin in the title sequence and then get on with the story.
The organic webbing was a relic from James Cameron’s script; as I recall there was a rather unsubtle sequence in which Peter dreamed of Mary Jane, then woke to find he’d webbed himself to his bed.
I’m looking forward to reading Flex Mentallo, so far I’ve only found one issue in an Oxfam.
The “Peter Parker as kid genius” thing is an anachronistic holdover from the early sixties, when the overwhelming majority of Marvel’s publishing output involved characters and storylines that revolved around mad scientists and scientist heroes. In the context of Stan Lee cranking out script after script where crazy bald men build giant killer robots in their tool sheds, yeah, it’s not so surprising to see this random nerdy teenager cooking up webshooters out of stuff from his doddering aunt’s garage. Several decades removed from the Silver Age, though, that entire episode reads as pretty bizarre, and not in a science-fictiony, “got my powers from the bite of a radioactive spider” way, but in a “this character is suddenly a super-genius instead of a nerd the reader can identify with” way. It’s a bad aspect of the character to focus on (as Dan Slott is bizarrely choosing to do now), and it’s a perfectly good aspect of the character to wipe away in any film adaptation or other modern updating. The most salient characteristic of Spider-man isn’t that he’s a kid genius, it’s that he’s an everyman, and these two things are actually in conflict.
Stag night podcast! No? Ok then.
I’m with Al on the web shooters. The organic web shooters are just…gross. It takes Spidey from a relatable (if smart) guy who happens to be really fast and strong, into a creepy horror-type guy that runs around shooting some sort of biological materal at everything and everybody.
Congrats on the wedding, Al – I’m very jealous of the honeymoon trip. I’ve spent 3 weeks in Australia on a couple of occasions, and New Zealand is also really high on the list of places I want to go as soon as my girlfriend’s job situation solidifies enough that she has vacation time again…
The webshooters don’t matter. At all. No casual moviegoer cares whether or not they’re organic. Making them organic means that the casual moviegoer doesn’t have to think about them – and they’re not important enough to require time being spent in the movie explaining them. They’re just a tiny detail. That’s not what Spider-man is about.
As Paul said, you can show that Peter is smart in a variety of other ways that help advance the story. Building webshooters only further delays the main story from moving forward.
In a comic book, fine, you can waste an issue on them. Not the same in a movie.
@AndyD:
The problem with events such as Decimation goes beyond editors not being willing to think them through. It isn’t just that Decimation was a bad idea or “heroic” Spidey makes a deal with the devil. It is that no one appears to actually be in charge, or the people in charge just don’t care beyond getting the “big idea” implemented. Nothing, beyond the concept itself, is established.
Yes, Decimation was a bad idea that came from nonsensical logic. No, it isn’t impossible to write stories about a minority that has a population measured in millions. (Indeed, such a population should make it easier to write relevant stories about the mutant minority.) No, cutting the population to 198 didn’t increase the number of “minority” stories. It actually killed them. Writers were writing such stories before Decimation, and stopped afterward.
But what really made Decimation a mistake was that there was no plan for it. There was no organization. Nothing was established. Instead it was every writer set loose to fend for themselves, with apparently only the same PR blurb given to readers to write from. (Perhaps even less than the PR blurb, considering some of the contradictions that resulted.) The same was true for Civil War and House of M, where different writers had different interpretations because no one in charge established anything beyond the event’s PR description. As for Secret Invasion, it had one guy masterminding it, but he didn’t even know what he was doing from moment to moment.
Planning and order could have made these events much better even if the core concepts weren’t really thought through.
And the big difference between now and the early days of Stan Lee is that there are many more books and more minds involved.
Having Alonso as EIC doesn’t exactly offer much confidence. I imagine he’ll probably stay the course, which means that ‘event’ type stories will continue to be a regular occurrence. Though part of my negativism is that Alonso & Brevoort often come across as irritating and show disdain during their T&A columns at CBR.
Question for Paul: You have any thoughts one way or the other about Nick Lowe becoming new X-Men Group Editor?
(By the way, you should check out Deadpool Team-Up #888, as it’s a wrestling based issue)
And all the best Al, hope everything passes off well.
I’m not convinced that the “Spider-Man is an everyman” thing is anything but a buzz-phrase bandied about by Marvel and adopted by fandom.
Yes, part of his charm is that he faces the same problems we do, in that he gets colds, has to pay the rent, and so on, but that doesn’t make him an “everyman”, not when he can walk up buildings and throw cars.
However, I understand that this is a minority opinion.
Dont think I buy into the idea that you cant have spiderman be a genius and an everyman at the same time. Its a balancing act the character has been pulling off for a long while now.
Congrates to Al!
Be warned however – talking about marriage in a Marvel Heavy podcast is liable to have them retconned away…
Yes, part of his charm is that he faces the same problems we do, in that he gets colds, has to pay the rent, and so on, but that doesn’t make him an “everyman”, not when he can walk up buildings and throw cars.
He can walk up buildings and throw cars because he’s a character in a superhero comic, not an Arthur Miller play. But within that context he has financial problems and relationship problems, he gets yelled at by his boss, gets dumped, kicked out of his apartment, etc. – universal experiences which most of his readership can identify with on some level, and which superheroes cut from a more traditional mold – Captain America, say, or Thor or Superman – can’t really deliver. Characters like Batman and Iron Man may have their strong suits, but “I can see myself as that guy” isn’t exactly one of them. And every time Spider-man is pushed into a narrative space that’s farther from everyday experience – living in Avengers tower, for example, or getting mystical totem powers, or getting a high-paying job as a sort of kid Reed Richards making super-gadgets – he gets pushed farther away from the source of his appeal.
If i recall correctly, Spiderman tried to sell his web fluid to a lab or soemthing sometime in the 1960’s or 1970’s. I can’t place the issue, or even the time period, unfortunately.
They turned him down because it dissolved after a few hours, and they wanted something that would last longer. So rather than try to modify it to last a while, they just rejected it entirely.
Didn’t Anarky have his base in the top of the Washington Monument for awhile?
Put me in the mechanical web-shooter camp. I don’t think making Peter a super-genius somehow makes him unrelatable. It gives him another aspect of his life to be bullied over and made unpopular because of, another responsibility he can’t live up to (because in his actions as Spider-Man he can’t put the time and effort in needed to actually capitalise on his talents) and thus more grief. You can talk about Spider-Man being an ‘everyman’ all you like, but he’s always just been a cosmic punching-bag with incredibly bad luck. That’s why people relate to him, because everybody loves an underdog. And for all his varied powers and intelligence, his is an underdog.
Congrats to Al
And another great podcast!
Have to say, I’m also in the camp of not thinking that Decimation was a definitively bad idea in itself, but – as usual – suffers due to Marvel not really thinking things through or planning these things properly. The basic concept – putting mutants back on the fringes numerically was IMO overdue. And generally, while “Uncanny” still seems to trundle along without ever really doing anything that interesting, I find the shift in underlying set-up for the X-titles more intriguing and the sort of change I like the X-books to keep doing.