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Box Office Democracy: Independence Day: Resurgence

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Independence Day: Resurgence is inexcusably boring, the kind of movie script I would expect if you went to one of those experimental Google A.I. routines and asked them to make a summer blockbuster. None of the ideas feel clever or new but instead a naïve attempt to maximize potential profits.  It’s a disaster movie mixtape with a couple alien cliché deep cuts thrown in to appear hip. Resurgence tries so hard to traffic in the positive memories we have of the original Independence Day and while it’s occasionally evocative enough to stir that up, it so much more often completely fails to not only carry the weight of the first movie but to even be a coherent film.

The original Independence Day was particularly relatable because we were offered so many different slices of life. We saw the goofy scientist and his nebbishy father, we saw the air force pilot and his exotic dancer wife, and, yes, we saw the President of the United States and his family but we also saw the trailer parks and the end of the world parties. We got a world that felt lived in. Every principal character in Resurgence is either a holdover character from the first film, now renowned for their work saving the earth, one of their children who are uniformly top fighter pilots, or a spectacularly important global political figure. There’s no relating to any of these people because so few people actually travel in these circles. The problem seems to come from the world being way more science-fiction-y than the original film and there seems to be no desire to explore how things have changed in any respect besides anti-alien war machines. The world feels so much less lived in and so it’s much harder to care when they start wrecking things.

Along with being unrelatable, none of the characters have narrative arcs at all. With the exception of being sad about loved ones being killed or mad that alien invaders are back, none of the characters have any kind of emotional growth. None of them have to change the way they interact with the world to solve the problem of the alien invasion, they just sort of do the same things over and over again and eventually it works and the day is saved. There’s a certain catharsis to seeing a bunch of alien ships explode and everything but there’s no meaningful character work happening here so there’s nothing but hollow victories.

Independence Day: Resurgence is set in a world where all of humanity has come together in harmony after the monumental alien attacks of 20 years ago. This new one world government is composed mainly of American and Chinese people and I’m sure it’s a complete coincidence that these are the two largest markets for movies these days. No other nations are represented in any significant way at all unless you count the African warlord of a nameless country who seems to exist only to provide a vague sense of menace and have a kind of racist interaction with a minor character toward the end of the film. One of the three big disaster sequences also takes place in China, which is either an attempt to underscore the stakes for all of the main players (including the Chinese fighter pilot) or more transparent pandering to the Chinese market, and I’m betting heavily on the latter.

I could go on and on with things that were boring or lazy about Independence Day: Resurgence. The alien queen looks suspiciously like the one in Alien vs. Predator. Two different plotlines have separate bumbling nerdy guy characters, I assume because they couldn’t figure out a way to combine them, and they both get external validation of their masculinity to close out their stories. Jeff Goldblum is carted around from place to place to react to things in his inimitable way and they rely on his charm being so strong that we don’t notice that he doesn’t ever do anything in the film; he could be replaced by a handsome coat rack. The mysterious object that can save the world is stunningly poorly designed and could quite accurately be described as a mecha-Pac-Man. The third movie basically announced in the closing moments of this one is a hundred times more compelling conceptually but still isn’t a movie I want to go see after this wretched chapter. The original Independence Day was an iconic disaster film that shaped a decade of blockbusters, but Resurgence is an emotionless husk, an exoskeleton with no alien pilot, gracelessly going through the motions.

Joe Corallo: Tragic Chalice

alters-1-5389565 Last week it was announced that Aftershock Comics will be launching a new superhero series in September named Alters. The series will be seasoned comic writer Paul Jenkins’ second title with Aftershock, and it’s drawn by Leila Leiz. Though it will feature a few different kinds super powered humans, referred to as Alters in this world, the central character currently getting all the buzz is Chalice.

The gravity manipulating Chalice will be joining the ranks of characters like Coagula on the incredibly and embarrassingly short list of trans superheroes in comics. The hook for Chalice is that while Chalice presents as female, her civilian alter ego presents as male under the name Charlie Young. At the start of the story, Charlie is a college student who is currently transitioning in secret to Charlie’s family, though some friends may be aware. We just don’t have all the details on that yet.

Paul Jenkins himself is a straight cis white man, which he will readily admit. His mother who raised him is an out lesbian and he’s stated before that diversity is important to him, though in this case we should be careful not to conflate sexual orientation and gender identity. Mr. Jenkins in particular had in mind to put a trans character in this series from its onset. According to his own account, Chalice didn’t fully come into being until he met Liz Luu at a convention panel who suggested the idea of a trans superhero who had not yet transitioned and who could only present as the gender they identify as when in superhero attire.

With that in mind, I can’t help but be cautious about the idea. Before even delving into the concept behind Chalice, the initial reason I have for being cautious is that this is a character, though created by well-meaning allies, that did not have a trans creator involved. That is not to say that people can’t create characters outside of who they are and what experiences they have personally had over the years. However, we have seen time and again characters that have been created (or retconned in many cases) to represent the LGBTQ community that haven’t had LGBTQ input over the years with mixed results. Examples include most queer characters in 90s TV and movies, as well as Iceman’s coming out last year at Marvel, despite Brian Michael Bendis’ best intentions, which I wrote about here and here.

chalice-4155952Now let’s go into the character of Chalice herself. As I started to explain earlier, Chalice is a super human trans woman that can only be herself when she’s Chalice. Otherwise, she’s Charlie Young and presumably goes by male pronouns. The hook they proudly stress is that she can only be herself when she’s not herself. I have a problem with that.

Look, I understand issue #1 hasn’t even hit the shelves yet. However, Aftershock Comics and Paul Jenkins are certainly making it a point to do the rounds and build buzz for the book, and they’re working to get reactions from people. Positive reactions ideally, but still. The idea of a trans character that can only be herself when she’s in her superhero costume lends itself heavily to the tragic queer trope. It’s been done. It’s been done a lot. It was also done in comics like with Batwoman in 2013.

Being queer is not tragic. Being trans is not tragic. Having a character whose tragedy in life is rooted in their queerness is lazy writing and shouldn’t be acceptable to audiences in 2016. Yes, plenty of characters have tragedy that lead them to being superheroes. Spider-Man losing his Uncle Ben, Batman losing his parents, Superman losing his home planet, and so forth. None of them had something tragic about them based on them being cisgender or heterosexual. And to be clear, I don’t mean to be conflating gender identity with sexual orientation with that previous statement. My intention was to address queerness broadly and to stress how those characters mentioned are cis het.

Even characters in teams like the X-Men or Doom Patrol that don’t like the side effects of their powers aren’t burdened by their sexual orientation or gender identities. Hell, Coagula is an out and proud trans woman in her first pages of Doom Patrol twenty years ago. That’s not to say that Aftershock Comics or Paul Jenkins are consciously supporting the tragic queer trope, but that doesn’t change the fact that when you make the central internal conflict of a character their queerness and promote the comic with that as the hook, that you are feeding into that trope.

Beyond the queer is tragic trope, it’s also made clear that this story will involve the character of Charlie Young transitioning in secret from her family. Popular media is obsessed with transitioning. Whether it be Caitlyn Jenner, TV shows like Transparent, or movies like The Danish Girl, the media can’t seem to get enough of it. That’s not to say that Charlie Young’s transitioning will not be relatable to someone out there in the trans community just coming out or planning on doing so. However, people like Caitlyn Jenner are interviewed and analyzed by cis reporters, and shows like Transparent and movies like The Danish Girl star cis actors in the lead roles, and characters like Chalice are being written and illustrated by a cis creative team (the colorist is trans, but that’s not a position with creative control in a narrative sense) which means we see these more popular glimpses into the trans community and physical transitioning safely through a cis lense.

Trans people and the trans community do not exist to transition for our entertainment. Not to mention that not everyone in the trans community transitions, has the same goals in their transitioning or transitions in the same way. Not everyone is concerned about “passing” as one gender. Some people in the trans community are non-binary as well.

They are more than their transitioning, and we need to stop acting like that’s the only story worth telling with trans characters, or even the most important story to tell. Characters who are often played by or written by cis people in the first place, only adding to how cis people use trans people for entertainment, oscars, and pats on the back for being oh so progressive.

Aftershock Comics, Paul Jenkins, Leila Leiz, Liz Luu, and other people who are working on Alters in some capacity all seem to be creating characters like Chalice with the best of intentions. They all appear to have a vested interest in increasing diversity in comics, and it’s certainly nice to see how many women are working on a book like this when the mainstream comics industry still sorely lacks hired female talent, which is something important to Paul Jenkins. Mr. Jenkins also have a history of writing quality comics.

That being said, if you want to tell more diverse stories with rich characters of different backgrounds, then you need to hire people with those backgrounds. We need more diversity behind the pages just as badly as we need them on the pages.

I’m hoping that Alters will be a deeper, richer story for Chalice than the press hits lead on. I’m hoping a character like Chalice may be around long enough to develop and grow into something more than a tragic queer trope and a way to continue feeding these obsessions with physical transitions and people “passing.” Mostly, I’m looking forward to the potential that a character like Chalice could bring to getting more comics publishers to green light more projects with trans characters.

And hey, maybe they’ll even get a trans writer or illustrator on it too.

Is fandom “entitled”? A history of fan-made material

  • News
  • June 27, 2016

tumblr_li3k3nuaj31qhyhwto1_500-6464920For those who came in late, a bunch of fans crowdsourced the funds to make a Star Trek fan film, Axanar. The funding campaign was outrageously successful, earning over 1.1 million dollars. That large an amount of money set off Paramount’s sensor array, and they quickly filed suit against said fans for unauthorized use of trademarked items. The folks behind Axanar counter-sued, claiming Paramount didn’t have hold of all the items they claimed.  It was going to get testy (and potentially untenable for Paramount if any of the points made in the counter-suit were deemed valid) until J.J. Abrams stepped in and convinced Paramount to calm down.

In response to said events, this week Paramount released a series of guidelines that fan films must follow in order to stay on the right side of the law, or at least on the right side of Paramount’s battery of white-lipped attorneys. Some of those rules are quite reasonable – the producers of the films can’t make merchandise of their property, and Paramount wrote up a paragraph of verbiage the producers must include in the film’s credits.  Some of the rules are a bit more stringent – the films can’t be more than 15 minutes long, and nobody in the production can have any “professional credits”.  That second one is drawing a number of eyes – some are arguing that it could mean you’re not allowed to use union workers for the production crew, something the unions will likely have something to say about.

Now, the real problem here is that for years there was an unspoken “line” to determine what was considered acceptable by fans’ creations. The exact details were never set in stone, but centered around basic ideas like “don’t make too much money, don’t do anything particularly untoward with the property,” and so on.  While the exact location and cartography of the line may not be known, it’s pretty obvious that Axanar crossed it miles back.  This was no simple pack of fan on cardboard sets and an eight-millimeter camera – the film (and its short prequel) had professional actors, some who had not only appeared on Trek before, but ones like Gary Graham who were actually portraying characters they had played on the actual shows.  The producers of Axanar had stated that in addition to making this film, they were effectively setting up a movie studio, dedicated to making more features in the same vein. So basically, they broke the “don’t make too much money” rule before they even stepped on the set.

These new “guidelines” are far stricter than what was allowed before, and are clearly in response (Retaliation? Perhaps…) to the liberties taken by the Axanar team.  To make an example, an apartment house has a tacit agreement that nobody can play their stereos above six, and even though people were playing them at seven or eight, nobody was complaining. But one guy threw a party and turned his stereo to ten, and the landlord had to step in and put his foot down, so now everyone has to keep their stereo at four.

There have been many conversations about the new rules online – many saw it as a potential death-blow to the staggeringly popular Star Trek Continues series, an acclaimed web series which was likewise inspired by another fan production, Starship Farragut. Another fan production, Renegades, simply announced they planned to excise all Trek references in its new production and become a completely new franchise.

But it was a conversation with an online friend that I found the most interesting.  He described fans who wanted to make amateur films as “entitled”.  That they somehow thought they had the right to make their own versions of other people’s IP and share them with the world. To say that I disagreed with him is an understatement.

First off, let’s look at the history of fandom… starting with the Epic of Gilgamesh.

You heard me.

The classic epic poems could arguably be described as the first fan fiction.  The stories were created by persons (largely) unknown, re-told and embellished by countless other creators.  The versions we know were assembled from various bits and bobs by people who usually ended up getting credit for “writing” them, though you could make a case that “editor” was a better description.

Jumping ahead centuries, Sherlock Holmes had its share of fan fiction. When Arthur Conan Doyle decided to stop writing about Holmes (because apparently he got tired of money) the fans rose to the cause. Doctor Who fans kept the flame alive during The Dark Years with fan productions like PROBE and the audio plays of BBV, which eventually became the official audio plays by Big Finish.  Indeed, many of the people who worked on those fan productions went on to create for the new series.

Entitled?  Hardly.  Dedicated, committed, even? Absolutely.

The big change between the fan films of past decades and those of today is technology.  Thirty years ago, such films were only seen at conventions, often in people’s hotel rooms.  Save for a copy of a copy of a VHS tape, there was no way to obtain one for yourself.  So too for fanzines – stories and art got a hundred or so copies made, which were hawked at conventions, eventually selling through their single print run, never to be heard of again.  Now, literally anyone can film an adventure in 4K quality, with cinema-quality effects, and make it available globally with the click of a button. This makes these fans no more “entitled” than the fans of yore, it just makes them a lot easier to get recognition. Indeed, many times these fan productions catch the eyes of the official producers in a positive way. A fan-made opening for Doctor Who was considered such a good idea, they got a hold of him and used the idea for the series’ new opening titles.

But at the core is that Line. It was virtually impossible to make money on fan material back in the day – it’s almost difficult NOT to now.  But still, for the most part, the desire of the fan is not to make money, but to share their love for the property, and show off their own ideas and jokes.  We’ve seen entire video games created by fans based on their favorite shows and movies.  The sheer breadth of creativity by the fans of the world’s various popular properties likely outstrips the original works by an order of magnitude.

But I don’t know of many fans who think they have a “right” to do so.

When a company steps up and points out a fan project that crosses the line, there is usually a hue and/or cry to some degree.  People will claim the company has “gotten greedy”, and there will be some muted mumblings of boycotts, but in almost all cases, the item in question has simply stepped past that Line, and pretty much deserved to get hit with the ban-hammer.  And in the cases where they weren’t, so far, cooler heads have prevailed.  I’ve talked in the past about the Harry Potter Website scare.  When the HP books (and especially the films) became popular, fan websites proliferated, with various names that used terms and phrases from the series.  And someone in the Warner Brothers legal department thought these sites would cause the downfall of the franchise, and the Cease and Desist orders went out like the exact opposite of Hogwarts acceptance letters. And the news articles began to appear about ten-year-olds getting threatening legal letters, and there was much clicking of tongues, and Warner Brothers quietly waved their hand and the complaints were cancelled.

It’s always been a dance between creator and fandom.  The creators know they owe their fans for the money they’ve paid into the property, and respect their desire to want to play in their garden. The challenge has been in making sure nobody goes too far with their work, and have it potentially become a challenge to the original.  In the age of the electric-type internet, that’s becoming more possible.

We’re starting to see amazing new ways that fans and originators can co-operate.  Cartoon Network just announced a program where they’d work with fan artists to turn their creations into limited run officially licensed items. The fans get both major recognition for their work, and a few dollars to boot, and the creators get to wet their beak, and maintain control of the property.

In a very real way, these rules set forth by Paramount are a GOOD thing.  Strict tho they may be, they set up an actual set of rules that fan creations can follow. The Line is now LITERALLY drawn, which means there’s less chance of stepping over it in error.

REVIEW: Eye in the Sky

eits_bd_3d_o-card-e1466729750311-6947365If it takes a village to raise a child, it seems to require an international village to kill a terrorist.  In the contemporary military thriller Eye in the Sky, the moral and legal issues resulting from the decision to launch a drone strike against three of the most wanted causes discussion,  consternation, and a lot of hand wringing. Out Tuesday from Universal Home Entertainment, the movie is available as a blu-ray combo with Digital HD.

Helen Mirren is the woman in the center of the action, orchestrating the American done opeeators, consulting with Alan Rickman, safe at headquarters,  and desperate to take these enemy combatants out. The problem: they are readying suicide bombers in a residential neighborhood so collateral damage is a given so limiting it becomes the challenge as they race against the clock.

Director Gavin Hood wrings as much tension out of the situation for 92 minutes, but he is hampered by the reality that the key players are never together.  Instead, we watch reaction shots and debates occur and really, editor Megan Gill gets all the credit for sustaining the tension.

Mirren’s desperation grows as every time she is ready to give the kill order, everyone wants to run the risk assessment again and higher up the chain of command.  Aaron Paul and Phoebe Fox are in the bunker, controlling the drone and he actually refuses an order to fire at one point, seeking verification about a little girl selling bread next to the target. According to a consultant who watched with me, he was in the wrong especially in front of a junior officer.

The reliance on technology and law protects hut hampers the efforts and brings up interesting themes for post-viewing discussion, the film itself, though, has lots of the right elements and several solid performances but is less than the sum of its parts. It just doesn’t hold together and sustain interest.

The high definition tansfer is crisp as is the audio.  The film comes with a mere two electronic press kit packages about the themes and totally underwhelms. Considering this is Rickman’s final film, I just wish it was overall a better experience.

 

Mindy Newell: Post-Denver Blues

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Hey, guys, I’m home.

I was going to tell y’all about my absolutely fabulous weekend at the Denver Comic Con, but besides bringing home great memories, super inspiration, and renewed zest to write a children’s book and some comics, I also brought home…

Something not so pleasant.

It started with a sore throat on Wednesday morning—my tonsils were swollen and it hurt to swallow, but I felt all right otherwise, so figured it was from the air conditioning and popped an Advil along with my tea and usual dosages of Vitamin C and D3 and all those anti-oxidant supplements. And I felt better by the afternoon.

But it didn’t go away. Not really. I felt okay enough to visit with Alix and Jeff and my little Meyer on Thursday night (and really ate too much of absolutely delicious home-made pizza), but I awoke on Friday morning with a sledgehammer working out a beat on my head and absolutely no desire to get up. And the rest of the weekend has been just as joyful

I don’t think it’s the flu, even though I’m totally knocked out and can barely drag my ass to the kitchen to make a cup of tea and every joint and muscle is aching and I’m coughing like poor, tubercular Alex Randall in last night’s penultimate episode of Outlander, Season Two, except that I’m not bringing up blood, thank God, and not even very much phlegm, which I actually wish I could because I can feel it in there weighing down my chest like an anvil and I want to get it out of my system. But I still don’t think it’s the flu because I don’t have a fever, and that’s pretty much the single symptom that rules in flu as a diagnosis and delineates it from “just a cold.”

At least I don’t think I do—I haven’t taken my temperature because my thermometer is somewhere in my laundry closet, and I’ve been too tired to get up from the couch to dig it out.

So I’ve just been taking Advil and drinking lots of water and grapefruit juice—‘cause I don’t like o.j.—and limeade and sucking on ice cubes. And yes, chicken soup and lentil soup and tomato soup.

The consensus is that I got sick from the plane because “everybody gets sick from the plane.” Only then why didn’t I actually get sick in Denver? (Yeah, yeah, I know, incubation periods and all that—it was cooking, in other words.)

Anyway, whatever it is, whether a summer cold or a mild flu or the dread “Airplane Adenovirus,” I feel like shit.

Plus, I can’t stop worrying that I’ve infected my almost 3 years-old grandson.

So next week I’ll tell you about my adventure in the Mile High City and all the great people, pros and fans, I met and about how it was so damn hot and humid I felt like I was still in New York City. Okay?

I’m going back to bed.

Ed Catto: A Guy and His Lion – Tarzan’s New Logo

erb-logo-lo-rez-2063293mosaic-logo-2455880Hollywood embraces certain heroic brands time and time again. I think Dumas’ Three Musketeers (spoiler alert: there’s really four of them!) holds the record for movies most frequently adapted from a story. But another property has been capturing fans’ imaginations for over 100 years, and he’ll be swinging into theatres again this summer.

The Legend of Tarzan debuts July 1st. This movie stars Samuel L. Jackson, Margot Robbie and Alexander Skarsgard. Fans are hopeful. Of note, this movie opens with a “civilized” Tarzan in the city London. But the hardcore Tarzan and Edgar Rice Burroughs fans know there’s always something rumbling in the jungle.

In fact, I recently wrote about Tarzan: The Beckoning. Dark Horse is re-issuing the 80s miniseries by master artist Thomas Yeates. You can read my column here. But right now, I’d like to put on my metaphorical jungle pith helmet and explore a fascinating little story about iconography and corporate branding.

Edgar Rice Burroughs (ERB) created many memorable characters, but Tarzan is the most well-known. In fact, when ERB purchased land in the San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles from a former LA Times publisher, he named it Tarzana. I’m sure you will agree it’s a much cooler name than Sherman Oaks.

margot-robbie-as-jane-legend-tarzan-movie-2016-1991938Way back when, the famous illustrator J. Allen St. John created an iconic image of Tarzan and the Golden Lion (ERB fans know the feline better as Jad-bal-ja) that became an icon, essentially offering up a visual shorthand to the sprawling adventure stories.

Years later, in the 60s, ERB commissioned Roy Krenkel to re-create the image as a corporate logo. It was used as a logo for years and years.

But there was one problem. In many instances, especially when used on letterhead and the like, it looked like Tarzan was riding the lion!

This just wouldn’t do for Jim Sullos, the President of ERB, Inc. During Tarzan’s centennial celebration in 2013, he enlisted longtime Tarzan artist Thomas Yeates to create another version of this classic pose. But this time, Tarzan would be standing in front of the Golden Lion – as he did in the original St. John version – so there would be no confusion.

And beyond letterhead, email signatures and corporate reports, it’s only fitting that this logo will live on in Tarzana. ERB, Inc., working very closely with the Tarzana Community and Cultural Center, has announced the creation of a mosaic logo based on Thomas Yeates’ illustration.

The new logo is from a California based company called Vita Luxury Mosaics, and the mosaic artist is Gail Rotstein.
It’s nice to see comics artist like Thomas Yeates have his work honored with such an enduring corporate image. And the updated logo is a beauty.

“It’s wonderful to see my art turned into a mosaic,” said Yeates. “Hats off to Roy Krenkel and J.P. Monahan for their earlier versions of this image. Now I wonder how else Burroughs Inc. will use the new logo?”

And you thought the Nike or Apple logos were iconic.

Oh, one more thing – Roy Thomas and Tom Grindberg are doing great work on the online Tarzan strip at the official Edgar Rice Burroughs site. Stop by and check ‘em out!

John Ostrander: Pop Culture Politics

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“Chicago is not the most corrupt American city, it’s the most theatrically corrupt.” Studs Terkel.

seducation-of-the-gun-1986604With due respect (and a lot of it) for the late, great Studs Terkel, I think the Chicago city council has been supplanted by the Congress of the United States for political theater and corruption. As an old Chicago boy and fan of political theater, I was fascinated this week as the Democrats in the House of Representatives staged a sit-in in the well of the House, led by the venerable civil rights leader (and graphic novel author) John Lewis, to protest the refusal of the Republican leadership to even permit a vote on two very small and very specific gun control issues.

House Speaker Paul Ryan dismissed the sit-in as a “publicity stunt.” Well, duh. That’s what a sit-in is, a publicity stunt to draw attention to a specific problem. Ryan himself has done a fair share of publicity stunts so I don’t know what his problem is. It’s all part of political theater.

I think there was more to the Democrats’ ploy that a mere desire to shine C-Span’s cameras on themselves. It was triggered by the shooting in Orlando at the gay nightclub that left 49 dead and 52 wounded. The House had its moment of silence to honor the dead for the 16th time of these type of events and that was going to be it. No gun control legislation was going to be even brought up for a vote, let alone passed, and the Dems snapped. They protested, they staged a sit-in to dramatize the situation and they got attention.

Why didn’t the GOP leadership simply allow a vote? I have my own theories. I doubt that the Dems would have allowed a simple voice vote; it would be a roll call and each representative would have to be tagged as they voted. For the GOP, atsa no good. Estimates say that 90% of the electorate are in favor of simple gun control measures so the representatives who voted against it would have to justify that vote to displeased voters.

They also don’t want to vote for any gun control measures. The National Rifle Association gives good money to Congresspersons to keep that from happening and they have issued stern warnings of what they would do to any Congressperson who did vote for gun control legislation – any gun control legislation. Translation: we’ll pour money into the campaign of someone to unseat you. We will make sure you lose your job. This is more important to them than doing their job. More than ever, Mel Brooks’ line in Blazing Saddles as the governor of the state resonates: “Gentlemen, we must protect our phony baloney jobs.”

Not to say that the Dems were completely in the right. One of the simple measures was “no fly, no buy” – meaning that if you are or were on a no-fly list (and thus, presumably, suspected of terrorist ties) at any time, you should not be allowed to buy a gun. However, I watched Larry Wilmore on The Nightly Show voice his problems with that. He has some of the same problems that the ACLU has – it’s too easy to get on the list, too little evidence has to be shown, it’s too hard to clear yourself and get off the list, it appears to unfairly target people of color, and it violates Constitutional freedoms including the right to due process.

It’s too bad because “No fly, no buy” is the sort of simplistic jingoistic catch phrase that works so well with the American public. We don’t do well with more nuanced declarations. Easy to say, easy to remember, and you don’t have to think. That’s ‘Murrica right there, that’s what that is.

To my mind, however, the real issue is not the specific legislation but the larger issue of how no meaningful gun regulation is possible because the NRA won’t hear of it. That’s the underlying frustration that led to the sit-in. Even though 90% of Americans want some kind of laws passed (according to many polls), they can’t even get discussed in the House and they sure won’t get passed in the Senate.

Just keep in mind that this Congressional version of Big Brother has one thing in common with the TV show – in the fall, they can get voted out.

Marc Alan Fishman: Legends(ish) of Tomorrow(sorta)

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DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, upon being announced, caught me dumbfounded. Hot on the heels of The Flash, which spun out from Arrow, this new time-hopping romp through the unknown left me in between diametric emotional states. The first was joyful confusion. Where all current DCU-TV joints were clearly single-hero driven vehicles (The Flash, Arrow, Supergirl… and Gotham, sorta), here was something decidedly team-based… and a large team to boot.

This lead straight to the antithetical emotion: crippling fear. With nine “leads” – all of whom were D-Listers or complete canonical lies – and a show built around time periods only the most pernicious perusers of prose would recognize, I was afraid it was all too much too soon.

I was both right and wrong about it. Natch.

When I last talked about the show there were far too many variables being hammered into submission to draw final conclusions. But I was certainly a snarky so-and-so over the very odd choices the writers applied to the character of Firestorm. But as is often the case, TV shows are malleable in their freshest forms.

Over time, the chemistry of the cast coagulates. The writers create serialization. Layers build on top of layers and, soon enough, you have a sandbox where creatives create and the audience visits every so often. Some shows feel well-worn from the get go (The West Wing). Others take a season or more to find their footing (Parks and Recreation, Agents of SHIELD…). I’m happy to report that Legends found its footing for me somewhere around mid-season.

The show pushed itself harder into characterization. Rather than be forced to drag on and on with psuedo-science and timeline refraction and Rao-knows-what, Legends adopted a quicker pace that refocused the show on just being a silly romp. We were transported to the wild west for a team-up with Jonah Hex. The following week, we went to the 1950s for a horror-twinged episode about the night of the living Hawkmen. And then, off to the far flung future to learn that (SPOILER ALERT) Heatwave was Chronos all along. You might even postulate though all of this that the show started to feel more like a comic book. And with it came the good vibes I was hoping all along.

The strongest points have been specifically with the ne’er-do-well duo of Mick and Leonard – Heatwave and Captain Cold. Tossed in at the get go as the villains with the hearts of gold, Dominic Purcell and Wentworth Miller stole every scene they were in. Whether it was quick comebacks, threats of imminent violence or casual admittance to love of baked goods, there simply wasn’t a time they didn’t command attention. With the fleshing out of the season, Mick’s Chronos gained pathos as the friend with the knife in his back. And Leonard got his moment to shine in self-sacrifice to boot.

Beyond the malcontents on the ship, the B-Listers Firestorm and the Atom did well to recede from the limelight. We were given glimpses into their less-than-complicated backstories to at least flesh things out. By season’s end, Firestorm – complete with BFFs Martin Stein and Jefferson Jackson – was transmuting matter and truly working as a single unit. Pepper this in with Jax being able to bust ‘Grey’s’  chops over being a college stoner and you got the witty repartee indicative of an 8 PM drama on the CW. Meanwhile Brandon “Not Fit for the Big Blue Boy Scout” Routh found firmer footing in the forever-awkward Dr. Ray Palmer. Shackled with a romance-plot-that-was-doomed-from-the-get-go, the eternally optimistic Atom granted the necessary silver lining when the plots dragged things down into the doldrums.

From there we reach the lower points of the season and show. For whatever the reasons are, I personally never cared much for our White Canary. I’ve not seen Arrow before, so, the character is a blank slate to me. And given that the entirety of her season arc was to just be the badass girl who is a badass, she was basically on the show to act as a not male member of the team. Ce la vie.

Our other female lead on the show – Kenda “Hawkgirl” Saunders – was just an absolute mess to manage. As one of the strands fraying from the edge of The Flash, the reincarnated Egyptian princess doomed to be killed in every life by the immortal Vandal Savage was played as a vapid plot device for the entirety of the season. One episode, she was a fighting machine laying waste to all sorts of enemies. The next, a depressed waif leading a false life with the Atom as her husband. The next finally granted some clarity in her character, and immediately kidnapped for the final few shows. As strong as she was played – with no backstory – in Justice League (the cartoon), here in real life, the character was truly one-dimensional. Oh, and Hawkman was there for a few episodes too. Meh.

All these paths lead to Rip. The Time Master himself, played by former Doctor Who companion Arthur Darvill, played not dissimilarly from his BBC counterpart. Forever an enigma, always willing to fight the right fight, but always with an air of odd aloofness. As the season lingered, we were given more pieces to the Rip Hunter puzzle. An orphan with a rambunctious side, a Padawan who tripped into real love, and finally a forlorn father clinging on to hope.

While I largely found Rip himself to always be a slave to the plot more than a three-dimensional character, the final episodes better cemented the character moving forward. He is a rebel with a cause. To undo the snobbish and authoritarian ways of the former Time Masters, Rip Hunter will ride the Waverider to save the timeline from any lingering damage that lurks in the odd pockets.

And frankly, time won’t move fast enough for the second season to get here. Tally ho, Legends!

Zorro Comes To Your Home!

zorro-strip-1-6008226

zorro-z-logo-6645222Last week we told you about two upcoming collections of Don McGregor and Thomas Yeates’ Zorro newspaper strips as part of a broader profile of Tom’s recent work. As it happens, this week will see the rerelease of Zorro – The Dailies and Sundays (The Second Year) Collector’s Edition, reprinting all the daily and Sunday strips from the 1999 newspaper comic strips’ second year… and, through the website below, autographed by Tom Yeates.

Also for the first time, the entire two years of their Zorro newspaper strip are collected in Zorro – The Complete Dailies and Sundays. This latter hardcover edition will be limited to only 50 copies and will be signed by all Don McGregor, Tod Smith and Thomas Yeates.

Zorro was introduced as a revolutionary character for old California in pulp adventures by Johnston McCulley. Following a critically acclaimed comic series from Topps, the Zorro newspaper strip debuted in 1999 and was written by Don McGregor and drawn by Tod Smith, Thomas Yeates and Rick Magyar. The strip appeared in major newspapers across North America. The series was clearly a labor of love for these creators, all the while paying homage to past creators while still offering fresh and exciting new adventures.

Both editions will be published July 25, 2016. Fans can preorder before that date at www.ZorroDailies.com or www.ClassicHeroes.de.

The Law Is A Ass

Bob Ingersoll: The Law Is A Ass #390

MARIA HILL’S CONSTANT-TUTIONAL VIOLATIONS

For a place that has Matt Murdock, Jennifer Walters, Franklin Nelson, Jeryn Hogarth, Bernadette Rosenthal, Kristen McDuffie, Blake Tower, Rosalind Sharpe, Isaiah Ross, Holden Holliway, Emerson Bale, Dennis Bukowski, Grace Powell, Matt Rocks, Connie Ferrari, Justin Baldwin, Jason Sloan – Okay, >>gasp pant<< let me catch my breath here – Ebenezer Wallaby, Maria Alvarez, Maxine Lavender, William Hao, Nelson Mandella, and even some guy named Robert Ingersol (no relation); I can’t understand why the Marvel Universe doesn’t have any lawyers in it.

Now, I know you may think all of those people – and several others, I didn’t mention for fear of really padding my word count – are lawyers. Marvel may even think they’re lawyers. Trust me they’re not. Based on what I saw in Captain America: Sam Wilson #9, no one in the Marvel Universe would know what to do in a bar, let alone in a bar exam.

It’s like this. Maria Hill, Director of S.H.I.E.L.D., had Cosmic Cube fragments which her superiors ordered her to destroy. She didn’t. Instead she used their reality-altering power to create a super villain gulag that looked like a small American town called Pleasant Hill. She wiped the memories of several super villains so that they believed they were normal people who lived in Pleasant Hill. It was a Norman The Rock-well painting.

Several teams of Avengers found out about Pleasant Hill and went there to shut it down. At the same time, all the inmates dirtied their newly washed brains and revolted. So all hell broke loose.

Meanwhile, the Cosmic Cube fragments coalesced into a sentient being which took on the form of a little girl who left Pleasant Hill and was loose in the world. And did I happen to mention criminal mastermind and terrorist Baron Zemo had escaped and was also loose in the world?

To quote Joe Higgins, the Dodge Sheriff, Maria Hill was, “in a heap o’ trouble.”

Except that she wasn’t.

When Hill was confronted by some sort of informal Avengers tribunal composed of Steve Rogers, Sam Wilson, Rogue, Tony Stark, and The Vision; Hill freely admitted Pleasant Hill violated the Eighth Amendment ban against cruel and unusual punishment. Then she pled her case. She argued she shouldn’t be arrested and tried as that would make Pleasant Hill and the fact that there was a sentient Comic Cube wandering around as a little girl public knowledge. So they had to keep the whole Pleasant Hill debacle quiet.

Which makes a certain amount of sense except for two things; 1) it makes no damn sense at all and 2) we’re talking about S.H.I.E.L.D., a shadowy super spy organization. As a shadowy super spy organization in good standing, S.H.I.E.L.D. wouldn’t arrest or try Maria Hill. It would black site her. Unless it decided to terminate her employment. With extreme prejudice.

Even worse, however, was Maria Hill’s second line of defense, what happens if the lawyers for the Pleasant Hill inmates find out about the cruel and unusual punishment that went on there? “I’ll tell you – Every single one of them – the mass murderers, the cosmic-level threats, the ones with poor personal hygiene – they will all go free.” To which Rogue responded, “Damn it, she’s right,” and the rest of the Avengers tribunal concurred.

Proving, as I said before, that there are no lawyers in the Marvel Universe.

If there were, then one of them – probably more than one, but at least one of them – would have pointed out the fatal flaw in Maria Hill’s argument. That’s it’s complete and utter taurus turds.

Want to know what happens when a court rules a prison is subjecting its prisoners to cruel and unusual punishment? It makes the prison stop doing whatever it was doing that was cruelly and unusually punishing. But it doesn’t make the prison release all the cruelly and unusually punished.

Prisoners are in prisons because they’ve been convicted of crimes. They had their due process. Now the government has the right to imprison them. That doesn’t change just because a prison may have been inflicting improper punishment. The government still has the right to imprison them, just in a different way.

But don’t take my word for it. Look at some history. (Yes, summer school history class. Don’t worry, I’ll keep it short.)

Waaay back in 1972, the Supreme Court ruled the death penalty was cruel and unusual punishment. When it did, it didn’t order the prisons to release all the murderers who were on death row. It just had the prisons transfer them out of death row and into general population. Prisoners who were subjected to said cruel and unusual punishment aren’t automatically freed.

Maria Hill may have been an interesting character once. She’s not anymore. She’s become one-dimensional, strident, extremist, and, quite frankly, boring. And I’d really like to see her disappear forever.

The last thing I want to see is for her to continue on exactly as before. No, wait, that’s the second-to-last thing I want to see. The last thing I want to see is a spin-off series starring Maria Hill; Tales From the Crypto-Fascist.

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