UPDATE: Round 1 voting is over. Vote in Round 2 now!
The people have spoken, and the brackets are ready for the Mix March Madness 2014 Webcomics Tournament!
Thanks to the thousands of people who voted in the seeding process, as well as all of you who added your favorite webcomics to the list. We’re adding all of the webcomics you suggested to our directory.
But now, the challenges start!
It’s always interesting to see your children grow up. In my case I don’t have any flesh and blood children; I have the offspring of my imagination, of my heart and mind – the characters I’ve created in my stories, especially in my comics. By growing up, I mean seeing them in other media. And occasionally their sending money home.
In that regard, the most grown up of my offspring is, without a doubt, Amanda Waller, a.k.a. the Wall. She first appeared in the DC miniseries Legends but was created for my version of the Suicide Squad. For those of you who don’t know, the Suicide Squad was a covert team that Waller put together using jailed supervillains. They were sent on secret missions pursuing American governmental objectives and, if they succeeded and survived, they were set free or had their time significantly reduced. If they died – no loss. If they failed or were uncovered, they could be easily disavowed – hey, they were bad guys doing bad guy things.
Waller created this version of the Squad and was herself created to do that in the DCU. Len Wein and John Byrne are credited as co-creators since she first appeared in Legends but Amanda originated with me. (The same way that Tim Truman is, rightly, co-credited as GrimJack’s creator although the character also originated with me.) As conceived, Waller was middle-aged, black, heavy set, on the short side, and with no super-powers; just an iron will and a terminal bad attitude which is why her nickname is “the Wall”. I’ve always said that some aspect of the characters we write exist within us; it’s been pointed out to me that would mean that I have an angry middle aged black woman inside of me. Maybe I’m just channeling Tyler Perry.
She’s also one of my favorite characters to write; actually, I don’t so much write her as just take dictation and pay attention to where she wants to go. She gets the job done and doesn’t care what she has to do along the way; she is morally a gray character by design. Some think of her as an anti-hero; the site IGN listed as her 60th Greatest Comic Book Villain of all time. For my view, she’s not a villain but she is deeply flawed. Just the way I like my characters.
Waller has appeared all over the place – in video games, in animated series (Justice League Unlimited as one example), animated movies, television shows, and movies. I find seeing the different variations of her interesting and gratifying, especially financially. I have what is called “participation” with Amanda; DC licenses her out and I get a taste of the money that comes in because she was an original character. I don’t have the same deal with the Squad itself; there was an earlier version. Amanda, bless her, sends some money home every now and then.
Both Amanda’s appearance on Arrow and in the New 52 DC Universe is changed; rather than older, stouter, and shorter, she’s now model thin and young and, well, sexy. I’ve always thought of Amanda as many things but “sexy” was not one of them.
I don’t control what happens with Waller or where she goes or how she looks; she is owned by DC Entertainment and Warners. I knew that going in. She is their property. That said, I think the changes made in her appearance are misguided. There were and are reasons why she looked the way she did. I wanted her to seem formidable and visually unlike anyone else out there. Making her young and svelte and sexy loses that. She becomes more like everyone else. She lost part of what made her unique.
Still, I look forward to the Squad episode of Arrow and not only because of the eventual check that it will bring in. It’s interesting to see how your children turn out and to see how much of you is in them whether they are flesh and blood or just the children of your imagination.
Each year Unshaven Comics has been around, we’ve declared a goal to meet. At first, the goal was simple: make a comic, and sell it at “the con”. Done. The following year? “Sell more books than we did last year.” Checkity-Check. To be fair, this has remained a sub-goal every year thereafter. In 2013, our goal was to attend literally as many conventions as we could possibly get into, and sell as much merchandise so-as to afford a trip to the glorious Valhalla of conventions, San Diego Comic-Con. Suffice to say, had we emptied out all our coffers? We would have succeeded. But, spoiler alert: We didn’t get accepted as artists for the alley at SDCC. So, we’ve wiped the tears away, and looked towards 2014. As suggested to me by Joe Olmsted, who I’ll actually talk about here in a just a bit, I’d like to share with you the conventions Unshaven Comics will be attending this year… and why we chose them.
Well, this is new… we have a three way tie for the last two spots in the Mix March Madness Webcomics Tournament!
We’re taking the top 128 vote getters from the seeding round and putting them in a single elimination tournament and we don’t want to give the top two seeds a “bye”… so it’s time for a Sudden Death Runoff between Bear Nuts, Evil Inc., and the League Of Super Redundant Heroes!
Vote below, and the top two vote-getters will make it to the first round! This is Sudden Death, so we’re closing voting at March 14 at 11:59 PM EDT– only six hours to vote!
[socialpoll id=”2191719″]
To speed the process, there will be no paid votes for the Hero Initiative in this round.
In a few days, Starz will premiere the second season of their original series, DaVINCI’S DEMONS. Stars Laura Haddock and Tom Riley give us a preview of what’s coming up on the show, plus bad news for the Big Two in the bookstore and some very cool TWILIGHT ZONE toys are headed to your shelf.
THE POINT covers it 24/7! Take us ANYWHERE on ANY mobile device (Apple or Android). Just get the free app, iNet Radio in The iTunes App store – and it’s FREE! The Point Radio – 24 hours a day of pop culture fun. GO HERE and LISTEN FREE – and follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.
“Whose side are you on?” That’s how Marvel touted its mega-event of 2006-2007, Civil War. Me? I’m on the readers’ side. So, even though Civil War ended some time ago, we’re still living in its aftermath and I’m still looking for a way to prove it couldn’t have happened.
Civil War started because the New Warriors, a team of “poorly-trained” super-heroes, tried to boost the ratings of their reality show by capturing a group of super-villains on camera. One of the super-villains, Nitro, the villain who can blow himself up over and over, decided that rather than be captured, he would blow himself up “real good,” killing over six hundred people, including a school bus full of children.
Everyone blamed the New Warriors. I don’t know why. Maybe because it’s easier to blame the heroes than the super-villain who actually killed the six hundred people. Maybe because Civil War’s plot needed a plot device that would prompt Congress to enact a Superhuman Registration Act. All I know is that in the eyes of the law, the New Warriors shouldn’t be blamed for Nitro’s acts.
See, the law has this thing called the Doctrine of Emergency, which says people can act in emergencies without being subject to normal standards of care. The doctrine exists to encourage good Samaritans, so the law seeks to immunize them if they try to do good in an emergency situation but cause some harm as a result. So if a person performs emergency CPR on a heart attack victim and accidentally breaks the victim’s ribs, the good Samaritan isn’t liable for breaking the heart attack victim’s ribs. In the same way, if a group of super-heroes takes on a group of super-villains who are attacking a city, the heroes shouldn’t be held responsible if third parties get hurt or killed in the fight; and they especially shouldn’t be blamed if one of the villains acts on his own and kills said third parties. God, if the Doctrine of Emergency didn’t exist, can you imagine the property damage and wrongful death suits that would have been brought against Superman after [[[Man of Steel]]]? Instead, he got thanked by some Metropolans in the middle of a bomb crater.
Civil War had major problems in its premise because of the Doctrine of Emergency. The New Warriors shouldn’t have been be liable for the deaths that Nitro caused. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that the law may not be on its side, the Marvel Universe Congress passed the SRA. After all, when has a little thing like the law not being on its side ever stopped Congress?
The SRA required all super-powered individuals in the Marvel Universe to register their identities and super powers with the federal government, so that the government could train meta-humans to use their powers properly. Riiiiight. Our government couldn’t even train FEMA agents how to book passage on Orbitz to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, it’s the perfect organization to teach Captain Wrigley how to keep his mutant-powered minty freshness fresh all day.
Under the SRA, failure to register was a criminal offense. Several of the super-heroes, most notably Captain America, opposed the SRA. They refused to register, and immediately became outlaws and fugitives because the SRA and its registration requirement went into effect the day it was enacted. Which is the second legal reason why Civil War couldn’t have happened.
In the real world, laws have a phase-in periods. New emission control standards don’t go into effect overnight, before any automobile manufacturer had a chance to comply with them. Car manufacturers are given time to get their cars into compliance with the standards; usually years. Registration laws also have phase-ins periods. When the Selective Service Act was enacted, the federales didn’t start rounding up the unregistered at the stroke of midnight on the day the law went into effect. No, the SSA gave people a period of several months to register before they were called draft dodgers.
Why? Well, what if someone was in Europe on the day the law went into effect so couldn’t register? Should he be a criminal under those circumstances or should he be given time to return from Europe and register? Now multiply that problem a millionfold for super-heroes. What if, when the SRA went into effect, a super-hero was visiting the Blue Area of the Moon, or fighting Blastaar in the Negative Zone, or was dead and hadn’t been retconned back to life yet? Should said hero be guilty of violating the SRA?
So, if the SRA had a phase-in period, and it would have had one, that means Civil War hasn’t actually happened yet. Remember, the Marvel Universe time moves much, much slower than real time. In the Marvel Universe, the SRA’S months-long phase-in period probably wouldn’t be ending until right about now. We still have time to give Captain America and Iron Man a copy of Civil War #7, with its oh-so-obvious solution to the problem, and keep them from fighting in the first place. We can keep Civil War from happening.
And that means we don’t have to see Tony Stark become someone unrecognizable to anyone who grew up with him when he was a hero. It means we don’t have to see Reed Richards explain that he was in favor of the SRA, because the law was the law and as long as it was the law, we have to obey it; conveniently forgetting that in his own origin he stole a rocket ship, thereby committing the grandest grand theft motor vehicle in history. It also means that we don’t have to see Captain America scolded for not really knowing what the American people wanted because he didn’t have a MySpace page or a YouTube account. (After all, everyone knows that you really measure how in touch with the American people a person is by counting how many e-mails offering financial aid he gets from deposed Nigerian princes.)
So Marvel’s Civil War couldn’t have happened. And we can ignore all those stories that came during and after it. Well, not really, but sometimes don’t you wish you could? I was born in 1952, some ninety years too young to have been in the American Civil War. And after thinking about Civil War all over again, I realized that I wish I had been too young for Marvel’s Civil War, too.
Author’s Note: I wrote a few installments of “The Law Is a Ass” for Comics’ Buyer’s Guide which, for a variety of reasons, it never printed. From time to time, I am going to run one of these previously unpublished installments, slightly edited to bring them up to date. This is one of those times.
This April, the weirdest mutant of them all takes center stage in his very own limited series! Today, Marvel is proud to present your first look at ALL-NEW DOOP #1 – from Doop co-creator and legendary X-writer Peter Milligan and blockbuster artist David Lafuente!
Who is Doop? Actually…what is Doop? (more…)
I love comic books. I have since I was five years old. I even love comic books I don’t like. I love the way the whole of words and pictures is bigger (and better) than the parts. I love the way that great storytellers can take a blank piece of paper (or computer screen) and <a href=”
target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>make anything happen.
Comic books make me a better person.
This point was brought home to me this weekend, when I read this amazing story. In case you don’t read it (and you should because, like I said, amazing), it’s about an autistic young man who found a way to articulate his feelings and communicate with other people through Walt Disney Studios animated films.
Now, I don’t know much about autism,and it is not my intention here to act like I’m any kind of expert. However, in reading the story, I was reminded how much I learned about people from popular culture. The kid in the story used Disney cartoons. I liked them, too.
But it was comics that really taught me empathy.
Any fiction (and quite a bit of non-fiction) can put the reader into the head of another character, will let you see the world through her eyes. Comics can do this, and also let you see exactly how difference another being’s experience can be.
For example, when I was a kid, I loved the Legion of Super-Heroes. I started pretty much when the team did, with three members, two boys and a girl, all white as the driven snow. I liked Saturn Girl, but she was not a lot like me. I had trouble imagining what it was like to be her. However, as I read more stories, the team got more members. Triplicate Girl had brown hair, just like me. Shrinking Violet was shy, just like me.
And there was Chameleon Boy, with his orange skin and his antenna. He was funny. and cracked jokes, just like me. Brainiac 5 had green skin, and he was so smart that sometimes he annoyed the other kids, just like I did. I learned that I could identify with someone who didn’t look like me, whose body didn’t work the same way mine did, who came from a place way way different from Youngstown, Ohio.
Superhero comics literally taught me how to see the world through the eyes of others. What I mean is, sometimes the artist would depict the scenes from a character’s point of view, not from the outside. Along with captions and thought balloons, it was like being in another person’s head.
Later, when I was in Sunday School and learned about Marrano Jews, I already had some understanding of what it meant to have a secret identity. I’d seen people who had them who were not Jewish (although most, I would later learn, had been created by Jews). It helped me to understand other kinds of people who might feel they had to hide their differences from the mainstream.
It’s a little bit roundabout that I made the leap to understanding other humans through Durlans, Coluans and Kryptonians. I felt what it was like to be alien from actual aliens, not from meeting people from other countries. I felt what it was like to be different inside from the Thing in The Fantastic Four, not from knowing someone of another race or gender identity.
Does that sound condescending? That’s not my intention. I’m trying to explain how a five-year old, or an eight year old — and sometimes a 60 year old — needs stories (graphic and otherwise) to see the humanity in other humans. That’s what artists do.
And I’m grateful.
Here’s a new clip that was shown during the Captain America: The Winter Soldier world premiere red carpet event, showing Captain America (Chris Evans) and the Falcon (Anthony Mackie) in action.
With the return this past week of Once Upon A Time to ABC, our favorite twin geeks discuss all the wicked new developments.
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
Stephen Colbert, we have your writer for “The Chronicles of Amber”!
January 20, 2023
The Law Is A Ass #460: Those “For Life” Sentences Are Nonsense
February 24, 2022
