Talk about the art of storytelling here.
Storytelling: the neverending story
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Frank Miller- I can’t quite go against over his DD run and what he did for Bats. Still, all the women (Catwoman) are former hookers etc.
I’ve said this before, but this criticism of Miller seems to have become received wisdom now and I’m not sure it’s completely fair.
I think it probably comes mainly out of Sin City (where one of the main groups of characters in that heightened world of crime was a group of prostitutes) in conjunction with the depiction of Catwoman in Batman Year One.
But in a career that has produced so many other memorable and well-conceived female characters – Elektra, Carrie Kelley, Martha Washington, Maggie Murdock etc. – I think it’s a bit unfair to suggest that all of Miller’s women are hookers.
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I’m not sure they are one and the same really. It seems your argument is ‘dated versus good’.
Great work will always stand the test of time really whether ‘dated’ or not. Monty Python is massively dated, it is very firmly placed in the norms of 1969-73, but it is still very funny.
I don’t really see how the issues with Game of Thrones are anything to with being dated when it’s a fictional facsimile of a medieval society with some magic thrown in. People soured a bit at the end I believe because of poor pacing. The story logically set up every single part of Daenerys turning heel but fluffed the execution.
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True, a definition of the terms dated and classic are in order. I have taken it to mean what no one really cares to revisit vs. what is still liked, rewatched, and appreciated again.
With regards to the “Sopranos”, some say that David Chase had a great idea for a while, but the last few seasons could have been better and that sort of thing. We all know about Game of Thrones as the last few seasons have been analyzed in YouTube videos.
The “Sex and the City” followup had some looking back at the original show and noticing all its flaws and stories that make everyone cringe now. I mean, NYC was mostly whitewashed, Manhattan was this playground for expensive shopping and dating in fancy restaurants, doorman building trysts. Gay men where only there as accessories to give sassy compliments to the women on their fashion, the four women were so shallow, black men were this fetish and fantasy over “well endowment” … you get the picture.
I would say that a “classic” story ages well like the Godfather.
What goes into making a story classic?
Again…Please add more.
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No one really knows what will be good or bad. The studios thought Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Mel Brooks The Producers were terrible movies that would flop. Then they are big hits. Same for Star Wars and Jaws – even the people making the movies thought they would flop.
However, honestly, no one involved in making anything for commercial consumption cares that much if it is good. The people actually making it care that it has professional quality since they need to use their work to get more work. The people paying for it care that it doesn’t cost too much and are usually putting out a lot of different products in the hopes that those few that are successful pay for what the many duds lost them. This is a formula that is actually starting to break down as we are really paying a lot less individually for the entertainment we consume – and some people aren’t paying anything for it.
In the independent film business, it is even more of a hustle, even with all the streaming outlets, there are still a few buyers relative to a lot of films made every year and those buyers will drive down the price as much as they can, so you have a lot of independent filmmakers who pour everything into a movie that they could barely scrape up enough money to make and then they still have to sell it for a distribution deal far less than what they spent just so it will be seen by an audience.
If you look at a lot of filmmakers and actors first low-budget films, they probably personally lost money on it even if it made a hundred million at the box office. So it’s no wonder to see these guys jump at the chance to direct or star in the next Marvel movie or Star Wars television show.
Even George Lucas didn’t make a lot from the first Star Wars, but he learned so much about the business that he changed everything on Empire. He essentially took the risk to provide the money that people depended on the studios to take. However, this meant that he had to change his vision for the material to ensure that it retained its popularity.
Nevertheless, there are very few people like George Lucas in the business. Francis Ford Coppola took the same risk and eventually lost.
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What goes into making a story classic?
If there was a single formula for creating a classic, that any director or screenwriter could follow, every film would be a classic.
Films that have long been considered “classics” might be considered flawed by today’s standards. GONE WITH THE WIND glosses over the horrors of slavery, instead showing the “house servants” like Mammy and Pork and Prissy almost like members of the family or beloved employees rather than property; LAWRENCE OF ARABIA has Alec Guinness portraying Prince Faisal, and Anthony Quinn as Auda Abu Tayi, which today would be considered insensitive casting if not worse. Yet both films are considered classics in spite of these flaws, because the story, direction, performances, cinematography, score, etc etc etc are still of the highest quality and still provide a powerful experience.
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What does the creator of it all owe to the following?
Fuck all.
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That is what I was getting at. I mean what does everyone think now about the two showrunners of GoT? If you don’t deliver and end up disappointing the following you amassed, it will cost you your reputation and money.
Oh, I think a badly received ending is a very different thing to just not providing an ending at all. With that you’re really just debating the creative choices made rather than being left with nothing at all.
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In comics it’s quite common, and it’s why (say) I generally won’t buy a Warren Ellis book until it’s done because I’ve been burned too many times by him starting a series and then giving up on it.
This is true – or Grant Morrison.
Still, there are lots of stories where they aren’t aiming for a conclusion at all. Television series, comics, most serial fiction – the stories will end eventually due to physical limitations (though we are still getting new Sherlock Holmes stories all the time in some form), the eventual conclusion is not important.
In relation to GAME OF THRONES, the problem of the ending was that there was an ending. With all the rich material and dramatic arcs still in play, it felt like there could have been three more seasons.
These days, as soon as anything ends, the people that own the IP are like “great… now how do we bring it back?”
I mean, if Kevin Feige had told Disney that Avengers: Endgame was going to be the last Marvel movie ever because it was such a great ending, they would have simply said “you’re fired” and gotten someone else to run it.
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I mean, if Kevin Feige had told Disney that Avengers: Endgame was going to be the last Marvel movie ever because it was such a great ending, they would have simply said “you’re fired” and gotten someone else to run it.
The Feige/MCU situation is a good example of how to bring a story (the Tony Stark arc?) to a satisfactory conclusion, and then use that story as a springboard to develop new storylines with fresh characters/situations and different subgenres instead of immediately trying to do another giant Avengers epic. So far they’ve had mixed success with the concept, but I applaud them for trying to branch out.
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It just ended randomly in mid-arc because he died.
That’s a valid conclusion, he cleaned up his act for the 12th time and died before he could do a dumb thing again.
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It just ended randomly in mid-arc because he died.
That’s a valid conclusion, he cleaned up his act for the 12th time and died before he could do a dumb thing again.
Really Thanos is the true hero for helping him die so he couldn’t fuck up again.
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So… was Eternals really about making abortion look like a good idea?
Interesting…
On another note… What are the Avengers etc. going to do with that unsightly “Emergence”. I know that capitalists would make the area a tourist site but…
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It just ended randomly in mid-arc because he died.
That’s a valid conclusion, he cleaned up his act for the 12th time and died before he could do a dumb thing again.
Really Thanos is the true hero for helping him die so he couldn’t fuck up again.
Tony did leave Peter Parker the EDITH glasses which led him to being outed as Spider-Man by Mysterio. That in turn led to the shitshow in No Way Home with consequences yet to be seen.
Even dead, Tony is still doing dumb things.
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Oh, I think a badly received ending is a very different thing to just not providing an ending at all. With that you’re really just debating the creative choices made rather than being left with nothing at all.
True. But the showrunner/author/whatever has to realize that today’s audience is more observant than in the past. I mean, YouTube has all these videos that dissected all the inconsistencies, plot errors, of the last few seasons of GoT as well as other series. A smart audience can tell that the storytelling is waning. We even do that here in the forum with comics and shows! We all know about the major criticisms on the Matrix movies and where the story fell short. The same about Star Wars prequels and #7-9. I just finished the HBO series Euphoria and there are videos now on where the season fell short in storylines, character development, etc. With an audience invested like that, the style goes only so far, the substance has to be there as well.
I was saying that if the creator doesn’t deliver, he will lose his reputation, money and will be “cancelled” to a certain extent. Case in point: The two GoT showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were slated to do a Star Wars trilogy once, but then came the last season of GoT and afterwards their Star Wars project was nixed.
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This is the Tony Stark character development arc:
Hahaha. But….
Tony Stark started out as an egotistical genius who could not help but promote himself (IM1: “I am Iron Man”), then suddenly became a basket case unsure of himself (IM3), then became a stooge for the government he previously flouted (Captain America; Civil War), then eventually became a self-sacrificing goddamned hero (Avengers: Endgame). I’d call that a pretty good character arc.
But, yeah, there was a lot of backsliding throughout his personal growth….
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I’ve always found the climax and the falling action to be a bit vague or hard to understand. Look at the simplest stories that we culturally share. In Star Wars, what is the climax?
i, and I think most people would say, the battle for the Death Star, but in that case where is the falling action? the movie ends with the goofy awards ceremony right after. Or is the rescue of the princess the climax?
Which moment has higher tension? The Death of Ben Kenobi or Luke’s final run on the exhaust shaft?
I think fulcrum is probably better than climax. The protagonist is struggling uphill but at a particular point the momentum shifts and it is clear that the next step forward means no turning back. Rather than the audience does not know what happens next, I think it is more important that the audience knows that whatever happens, the protagonist has no way out. They have to see the struggle through to the end, victory or defeat.
For me, I’ve never really seen a story where the “resolution” does not have at least as much tension as the climax did. Clint Eastwood’s UNFORGIVEN for example, where is the climax? Is it when they shoot the kid? When Ned is killed? When Will finds out Ned is dead and drinks the whiskey?
More importantly though, how much does it matter where it is? The tension still rises until the end.
The way you understand it is actually the way the structure was originally explained by Gustav Freytag in the 19th century.
The climax is also the turning point (peripeteia) (or leads directly into it), and it’s the climax not because the tension is at its highest but because from the top of the pyramid now, you can see the ending of the story. It’s the great big turning point in the middle of the story when one plot strand ends with the climax (with Star Wars, probably “Will they rescue the princess?”, with Kenobi’s death being the climax) and another thread starts that’ll lead straight to the ending (the rebels fighting the Death Star now).And falling action means that you’re falling towards that inevitable ending now, not that the tension is falling or anything – quite the opposite, most of the time. The Battle for the Death Star is the final conflict before the resolution, with the “moment of last suspense” being the last moment where you think things may go wrong (when Vader is about to shoot Luke, before the Falcon hits him).
Apart from that moment of last suspense, all of the suspense nonsense is just How-to-write-for-the-screen authors not properly understanding what a 19th century German drama theorist explained. Weird how that happens.
Uh, it’s been too long since I saw Unforgiven, but I’d guess that if you think about it like this, it’ll also work for that movie. It does for most of them.
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Genre is an interesting concept. There are some “genres” like detective fiction and romance that clearly have a family resemblance but it would be difficult to point to any original works that every story in that genre would have in common. Then, there are stories that are “Kafkaesque” or “Lovecraftian” where they obviously emerge from or resemble the style of a particular author’s entire body of work.
However, I have to say that there are some genres or sub-genres that really are better characterized as a long legacy of rip-offs. Shark movies, for example – they are almost all either rip-offs of Jaws or a spoof of Jaws. They’re Jaws rip-offs more than an actual genre.
Same for demonic possession horror movies – they are really just The Exorcist rip-offs.
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Ok… I felt bad for Carol Danvers because of Rogue, and then I was reminded of this previous arc in Avengers 197 -200 making it worse:
I remember this story back in the early 80s. It was an Avengers story where Ms. Marvel found out she was mysteriously pregnant and had an accelerated pregnancy. She gave birth to a baby boy that matured rapidly. It turned out that the baby boy “kidnapped” her in his limbo dimension, used tech to have her be in love with him, “impregnated” her, and she gave birth to him. It was his plan to be able to exist outside of limbo. After saying all this to the team, he was returning to his dimension and Danvers “volunteered” to go with him. The team approved and no one objected.
Well, Chris Claremont was so furious at this story that he wrote Avengers Annual 10 which had as you know had Rogue absorbing all her powers. In the end, the Avengers visited Carol at the X mansion and she chewed them out. Basically, she was raped, gave birth to the rapist, and was still influenced by the tech he used on her to go with him and none of the Avengers objected to her going with him after all she went through.
https://www.cbr.com/meta-messages-chris-claremont-sticks-up-for-ms-marvel/
http://www.carolastrickland.com/comics/msmarvel/index.html
Looking back, that pregnancy story of Danvers was so bad… How this got past Marvel…
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Looking back, that pregnancy story of Danvers was so bad… How this got past Marvel…
It was a weird time. This is from Teen Titans back then and the girl is Terra – a 15-year-old.
MARV WOLFMAN: The funniest part — when we got to the end of the storyline and we’re at the diner and we’re plotting the death. At the end of it, four or five hours later, we walk out and I suddenly turn to George and I say, “Do you realize we’ve been plotting the death of a 15-year-old girl and not one single person there said boo. Can you just kill people in New York and no one even cares?”
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Moon Knight is not a Z-list character. The Z-list would be reserved for characters like Snowflame and Skip Westcott.
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D-Man!
I was actually thinking of him!
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Not to forget all that hologram tech used by Stark…
Yeah, in movies, during a heist or assassination or other “impossible mission” scenes, the “techie” is always behind the scenes in real time pulling off instant hacks at the last second without ever having to worry about rebooting, crashing or just hitting the wrong key.
U.S. Drones Suffer From Human Error, Computer Glitches In Afghanistan | HuffPost The World Post
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The Monkees was a spoof of the Beatles and Beach Boys and similar bands of the time, but then they went on to be as popular and sometimes more popular than the real bands they were spoofing (and maybe even inspiring the manufactured boy band craze from Back Street to BTS).
in comics, you see this a lot as well. Spoof characters like Dredd, Lobo, Deadpool and Ambush Bug often end up more popular and last longer than the characters that inspired them.
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in comics, you see this a lot as well. Spoof characters like Dredd, Lobo, Deadpool and Ambush Bug often end up more popular and last longer than the characters that inspired them.
Very True: GROO and CEREBUS THE AARDVARK are two books that started as an homage to/spoof of the then-popular CONAN THE BARBARIAN comics, and both of them received popular and critical acclaim and earned their creators (Sergio Aragones and Dave Sim, respectively) a lot of money.
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Or TMNT, the title itself being a joke about including all the best selling trends from early 80s comics in one one book (Teen Titans, X-Men, Miller’s Ninjas from Daredevil and funny animal indie books).
Then came the imitations/parodies it inspired:
Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters
Pre-Teen Dirty Gene Kung Fu Kangaroos
Geriatric Gangrene Jujitsu Gerbils
Cold-Blooded Chameleon CommandosEven Marvel tried to get in on the act with Power Pachyderms:
The original title was going to be Adult Thermonuclear Samurai Elephants.
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Guy Gardner is another good example of a top publisher spoofing its own characters and then ending up with one more popular than the main character. Like Deadpool.
If I did a Green Lantern character, I’d prefer a completely extraterrestrial character assigned to this sector as a kind of punishment for going rogue all the time. At first, he sees Earth as a primitive backwater where nothing serious happens but then discovers it is a focus point for all sorts of Galaxy threatening activities and he’s way out of his league dealing with it.
kinda like HOT FUZZ meets STAR TREK. Like what if Abin Sur was actually a bad cop and it really was his ring taking the initiative that got him out of trouble and made him look good?
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HOT FUZZ meets STAR TREK
Sounds cool. I’ll draw some alternate covers for you when you’re ready to publish.
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Guy Gardner is another good example of a top publisher spoofing its own characters and then ending up with one more popular than the main character. Like Deadpool.
If I did a Green Lantern character, I’d prefer a completely extraterrestrial character assigned to this sector as a kind of punishment for going rogue all the time. At first, he sees Earth as a primitive backwater where nothing serious happens but then discovers it is a focus point for all sorts of Galaxy threatening activities and he’s way out of his league dealing with it.
kinda like HOT FUZZ meets STAR TREK. Like what if Abin Sur was actually a bad cop and it really was his ring taking the initiative that got him out of trouble and made him look good?
You need to open Word and get started ASAP.
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HOT FUZZ meets STAR TREK
Sounds cool. I’ll draw some alternate covers for you when you’re ready to publish.
Thanks
That could be fun. Maybe this would be more HOT FUZZ meets INVADER ZIM actually
😉
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HOT FUZZ meets STAR TREK
Sounds cool. I’ll draw some alternate covers for you when you’re ready to publish.
Thanks
That could be fun. Maybe this would be more HOT FUZZ meets INVADER ZIM actually
😉
I’m still down.
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This link I found interesting about how the storytelling in the
disaster movies of the 70s were a reflection of the political
and social upheavals from that decade:https://movieweb.com/best-disaster-movies-70s/
Then it has been said that 9/11 brought forth storytelling with superhero movies
and the great recession brought forth (for some reason) zombie moviesWho knows what the pandemic will make Hollywood conceptualize and make into movie?
Like Marvel comics in the 60s. All the origins of the Hulk, Spiderman, FF, were all radiation
given the threat of the era. -
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Maybe the pandemic MIGHT bring about some stories about time travel to the past to avert a pandemic or some other huge disaster.
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@toddClones are creepy to me.
Like those huge lifelike statues I said before. Scares the Sh*t out of me.
Phobias…
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DC vs. Vampires has gone to this well, and I’ve seen the biggest flaw in such a plan. No sun means humans either freeze or starve to death. And if humans starve to death, then by extension, vampires starve to death.
DAYBREAKERS used the lack of human supply pretty well. 30 DAYS OF NIGHT was maybe the best use of the endless night idea/
However, the idea of a dominant vampire overclass is pretty interesting. D THE VAMPIRE HUNTER takes place after a Vampire aristocracy essentially stepped in to provide a post-apocalyptic human race with order and that period was never seriously explored.
I did have an idea for a BLADE sequel along the lines of LOGAN but it was years before OLD MAN LOGAN when it first hit me.
Blade is an old man – remember that Blade’s advantages as a day-walking vampire came at the cost that he continued to age – and in the end, his crusade was futile. The vampires were already dominating the world and in the future, they had come out of secrecy to simply rule the world.
However, a mutation arose that threatened their dominance. A breed of humans that could emit sunlight from their very cells. In this new world, a kind of futuristic or steampunk world that was more Medieval and Gothic, the Vampirica overlords had these “Shining Ones” hunted down, captured and killed like supposed witches under the reign of King James.
Blade, though, still lives in this new world, and he is roped into protecting the last “shining one,” a little girl in Siberia that he has to guide across the continents to the last region free of vampire control in the Sahara Desert, a place that is now so vast, the vampires dare not travel there for fear of being caught in daylight.
The interesting idea of the story is basically taken from Vampire Hunter D in that the rightness of Blade’s cause – to plant the seeds for the end of the Vampire Empire – is called into question as it was human civilization that brought the world to ruin and the Vampires only came out of the dark so they could prevent the entire collapse of their food supply. The Vampires essentially saved the human race, so really the question is whether they are really the bad guys or if the humans would be any better if they were free.
I’d call it BLADE: THE SUN CHILD.
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With regards to the pandemic bringing forth time travel stuff about changing the past to avert it…
That was done in the original “Outer Limits”. This horribly deformed human (that show became famous for its hideous creatures)
managed to time travel to the past and got this woman to help him change some point in time to avert this plague that wiped almost
everyone in the future. When they succeeded, he started to fade away and he explained that he erased his own timeline and therefore “he was
never born”.
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I got to check out the episode Harlan Ellison wrote that he said the Terminator franchise “lifted” from…
Unfortunately, he set just up a Grandfather Paradox.
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Unfortunately, The Terminator was not based in any way on Outer Limits. Over James Cameron’s strong objections, the studio settled with Ellison because he was such a litigious loudmouth. However, Ellison claimed it was based on both Demon With A Glass Hand and The Soldier.
However, the 60’s B movie CYBORG 2087 has pretty much the same story as TERMINATOR 2.
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DC vs. Vampires has gone to this well, and I’ve seen the biggest flaw in such a plan. No sun means humans either freeze or starve to death. And if humans starve to death, then by extension, vampires starve to death.
The idea of “no humans = no food” was addressed in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. At the end of season 2, Angelus (an evil vampire) has a plan to have the whole world sucked into hell, which would mean the end of humanity. Spike (also an evil vampire) joins with Buffy to thwart the plan, his rational being stated something like this:
“I like the world. It’s full of people, like happy meals on legs. Why would I want to see it end?”
Plenty of villains have master plans to destroy the world, very few of them have enough common sense to realise that’s not actually a desirable outcome for them.
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Storytelling plot devices:
In Star Trek TOS, those aliens that took over the ship and turned the crew into those cubes actually upgraded the ship to make the Andromeda galaxy. Somehow those engine upgrades were never preserved (even on file) nor copied onto future ships like Voyager…Same with Nomad’s upgrades to the engines.
That time gateway where Kirk and Spock met Edith Keeler isn’t used all that much as it really should.
As for Avengers: Endgame, Steve could be de-aged by going back to those quantum tests that de aged the Antman… But they most likely won’t do that even though it can be very handy. Practical Immortality… fountain of youth… but never used
again.There are other examples on many shows. So many plot devices in stories that are great but never revisited much at all afterwards despite the potential.
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“I like the world. It’s full of people, like happy meals on legs. Why would I want to see it end?”
Spike: The truth is I like this world. You’ve got… dog racing, Manchester United. And you’ve got people. Billions of people walking around like Happy Meals with legs. It’s all right here. But then someone comes along with a vision. With a real passion for destruction. Angel could pull it off. Goodbye, Piccadilly. Farewell, Leicester Bloody Square, y’know what I’m saying?
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I like the kind of villain that actually wants to end the world. Clive Barker had some like that. Nix in Lord of Illusions was a complete nihilist, and in one of the novels – Sacrament, maybe? – I remember the villain talking about how he just wants to quiet all the loudness of the world and wants pure nothing to be all that remains.
Again, that was a missed opportunity of the Dark Elves in Thor 2. They were played like evil, sadistic “movie matinee” villains, but it would have been much more interesting if they were much more compassionate and saw the affliction of existence as a disease.
“If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?” – SCHOPENHAUER
It’s not that different from Buddhist or even monastic and gnostic Christian philosophy in that existence is suffering. The Dark Elves could recall the peace and contentment of not existing so whenever they looked at a sentient being continuously caught up in the struggle of life, it would appear to be the same as a sick man fighting an inevitably terminal fever.
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I got an apron. The kind suburban dads wear for their backyard barbecues. It has a this printed on the front.
”I hate livin’. But I love grillin’.”
I got the apron, but here’s the thing… I don’t got a grill.
Hell, I ain’t even got a back yard.
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Masturbation is necrophilia if you’re dead inside.
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Well, just metaphorical necrophilia. And who hasn’t done that?
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Why The Room Would Have Made a Better Supernatural Drama
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CBR has an archive section called I Love Ya but You’re Strange. It is a collection of all the weird storylines:
https://www.cbr.com/i-love-ya-but-youre-strange-archive/
One of the stories has Wally West in Cuba meeting with Fidel Castro:
Here is the CBR link with some pages and the whole synopsis.
Never came across a story like that tbh…
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It’s a historical crime that William Messner-Loebs was followed by Mark Waid on Flash, because Waid’s run was so stellar that Messner-Loebs’ is now almost completely forgotten. But he gave us not only that awesome Cuba story but also introduced a gay Pied Piper, a strong Asian-American love interest for Wally, fantastic development of all the Rogues (all developments that it sometimes feels that Waid gets the credit for these days), and just a string of great stories in general. Messner-Loebs deserves much more recognition than he gets.
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It is an interesting idea. Violent Messiahs did somewhat present its vigilantes as closer to serial killers, but it did not have a gallery of villains like Batman’s.
The difficult part is audience identification in this. It can’t be significantly like Batman because a standard Batman story is villain-driven. A villain is performing some plot that the Batman has to figure out and foil.
However, there are a couple comic book movies that are similar in that they have colorful villains that find their plots being foiled by some dark, deadly vigilante. The first is ICHI THE KILLER and more recently the Finnish movie (I believe it is Finnish) RENDEL.
A more darkly comic version of the idea is the Swedish film IN ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE (remade as COLD PURSUIT).
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Thought that crossed my mind: has anyone considered pitching a sort of horror movie version of Batman, from the criminal’s viewpoint? Just have a bunch of criminals being stalked by a dark vigilante, like teens in a slasher flick.
As a kid, I loved that Batman issue in which there are people sitting around a fire telling scary tales about the Batman.
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The WandaVision show and the Dr. Strange movie next week had me reading some old issues on Wanda.
Byrne was briefly on West Coast Avengers and he did so much. He had Wanda lose it when she saw
the remains of a disassembled Vision, found out the truth about her two kids among other trauma.
Byrne brought back the original Human Torch, had the Tigra character conveniently out of the
picture by making her go a little crazy and more feline, and had to be sidelined.Byrne had Immortus manipulating everything from limbo, kind of like Mastermind with Jean Grey. Anyway, Byrne
left the title abruptly over some of the usual behind the scenes bovine excrement. But the successors Roy and Ann
Thomas did an INCREDIBLE job writing the conclusion with the material he left behind. The West Coast team found out it was Immortus, his plan to use her hex powers, the team got transferred to limbo, Agatha Harkness helped astrally etc.
The ending was a little Deus ex Machina as other entities above Immortus came in to cast judgement, sort of like Trelane’s “parents” came at the end in that Star Trek episode.All this is to say that Wanda could use years of therapy with a Doc Samson and/or a Dr. Phil.
When you look at old runs from past decades, you notice the differences in the storytelling between then and now.
Some tricks are still around like sidelining (or killing off) a character who really doesn’t fit into the story being told. -
All this is to say that Wanda could use years of therapy with a Doc Samson and/or a Dr. Phil.
You do know that “Doctor” Phil McGraw is not a doctor, right? He has a PhD in clinical psychology, but is not licensed to practice psychology (he stopped renewing his license more than 15 years ago).
As for Doc Samson….
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Why don’t Daredevil and She Hulk come out and do most of the talking? They are professional lawyers after all…
That’s a good point.
MURDOCK: Okay, guys, Jennifer will present the case and I’ll do the cross.
JENNIFER: As far as the rest of you, we’re going to give you the same advice we give all our clients.
MURDOCK AND JENNIFER: KEEP YOUR MOUTHS SHUT!
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MURDOCK AND JENNIFER: KEEP YOUR MOUTHS SHUT!
😂 In those stories, it is always a Reed Richards or some other big guy from the Illuminati opening up their big mouth speaking for the other heroes and humanity. Leave it to the lawyers who make a living posturing and negotiating deals.
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Reading old Byrne runs of FF and his Supes reboot…
We spoke about Marvel and DC characters and most vs. threads have to do with a character facing off against their counterpart or knockoff. I read Doom and I read Luthor. Doom is a sorcerer (almost on par with Strange) and he knows his science and tech, even building his own time machine. A lot of his personality I find overlaps Luthor’s, the arrogance (I need no one), obsession to defeat his enemies, conquer, etc. Almost like twins facing each other.
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Last words on Dr. Phil: The one thing he said that stuck with me is rather obvious: You wouldn’t do something over and over again unless there was a payoff. Something that you get out of it. What is the payoff? With some, they turn to videos and pics to watch or save, go on forums to post all the time for interchange on something common, or to express themselves more. Then there is the matter of guilty pleasure, etc…
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So Wanda needs therapy. So does Bruce Wayne and the GL Kyle Rayner from his trauma of finding his girlfriend mutilated in the fridge.
There isn’t a single superhero who doesn’t desperately need therapy.
But then, most of us could do with some, honestly.
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There isn’t a single superhero who doesn’t desperately need therapy.
Except Superman when written correctly. Like in All-Star Superman.
Superman’s deepest superpower is his perfectly healthy personality. If he lost his powers and remained Clark Kent for the rest of his life, he would still be happy. If Superman went to a shrink, the shrink would end up working out his own problems and Superman would leave with nothing changed.
Not the Man of Steel Superman, of course, who is a fucking nut.
Honestly, though, it is pretty much why I don’t read Superman anymore or watch the movies in that the big appeal of the hero is that he can work out anything so there is nothing preventing the writers from throwing anything at the character as he will find a way to work it out.
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Except Superman when written correctly. Like in All-Star Superman.
Superman’s deepest superpower is his perfectly healthy personality. If he lost his powers and remained Clark Kent for the rest of his life, he would still be happy. If Superman went to a shrink, the shrink would end up working out his own problems and Superman would leave with nothing changed.
I kinda agree as far as Supes is concerned, but on the other hand… you can’t tell me someone who has made his experiences as a child wouldn’t profit from therapy. Honestly, these days he should be written as somebody who of course has been to therapy and it’s helped him become who he is now.
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