*Not really.

I’m in an odd mood, kiddos. Maybe it’s the polar vortex that’s waging war across our country. Maybe it’s seasonal affective disorder causing a case of the blues. Or perhaps the winds of change are blowing, and the time for revolution is nigh. I’ve simply noticed as of late an upward trend of general unrest. It’s got me equally excited, and potentially depressed. Let’s jump down the rabbit hole, shall we?

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Building a sequel to the hit film 300 wasn’t an easy task, and Zack Snyder talks about the choices he made to get RISE OF AN EMPIRE on the big screen and Lena Headey shares what it’s like to play another tough (but flawed) character. Plus CONSTANTINE gets a cast and Marvel gears up for their 75th.

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So let me get this straight, in order to defeat the villain, the Avengers made a worse villain?

That first villain, Ultron, the living automaton with artificial intelligence and massive daddy issues about its creator Henry Pym, had made things pretty bad in the [[[Age of Ultron]]] mini-series. “Pretty bad” being a euphemism conquering the world, destroying major cities, killing people, and generally not playing well with others. In order to undo the Age of Ultron, Invisible Woman and Wolverine went into the past and visited Henry Pym before he built the first Ultron. They told Dr. Pym that Ultron would destroy the world in the future but also told him he still had to build Ultron so that the time line would stay the same until just before Ultron started the Age of Ultron. So Pym built Ultron, but put a kill switch into Ultron’s A.I. so that Ultron could be defeated at the right time in the future.

Cut to years later and the right time in the future: Invisible Woman visited Dr. Pym again. She showed Dr. Pym, whose memory of the earlier visit had been wiped, a video about Ultron which included instructions on how to activate the kill switch. This occurred just before the events of The Avengers v.4, # 12.1, where, you may recall, the Avengers rescued Spider-Woman from super-villain team the Intelligencia but inadvertently reactivated Ultron. (You may recall it. I had to look it up.)

Because he had been warned, Dr. Pym could change what happened after the Avengers reactivated Ultron. This time Ultron didn’t get away. Instead Pym had Iron Man upload the kill switch activation codes into Ultron. Then, after Ultron shut down, Pym used a computer virus to destroy Ultron. And they all lived happily ever after, no?

No.

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Settle down, now.  Sure, the Oscars have got you all excited, but for heaven’s sake, try to relax.  Take some deep breaths while we return to where we left off last week.

The subject, a week ago, was how mythology and religion had more or less parallel evolutions…  Well, not exactly that: more how what could be a subhead in the mythology section evolved in parallel with another such subhead, comic books.

Both began as technology-spawned mutations of forms that already existed: (drama>movies; comic strips>comic books.)  Both began with stories that were simple, plot driven and self-contained – “this episode” was all there was to this particular narrative.  And, over decades, both changed, in storytelling technique, in the kinds of stories told, and, finally, in the content of those stories.  Heroes became flawed, villains became motivated, plots became complex and, finally, in comic books, the complete-in-one-episode paradigm started fraying at the edges, becoming almost anachronistic.  (I’ve edited comic book continuities that ran about 2000 pages, and I doubt that I’ve got the record.) (more…)