TeslaCorps

Stin Rants: Baby Edition

I don’t particularly like children.

Generally speaking when they begin talking (and start having ill informed opinions about things) I stop paying attention to them.
This is not particularly their fault, as even a good scotch takes at least 12 years before it’s even drinkable, and even WORSE than the ill informed children is the existent-only-in-fiction “Precocious Child”.

You know what I mean.
The Precocious Child is pervasive in cinema and television. It was the entire basis for the existence of “Full House” and it’s been the foundation of Dakota Fanning’s career. And don’t even get me started on the travesty that is “Two and A Half Men”. It’s really REALLY persistent in comic books which is even worse. I’ve frequently dropped a series because there’s just one too many Precocious Child zingers that a ten or eleven year old will throw at a grizzled, old, veteran hero who spent the majority of his life battling the criminal element in City X and watching his friends and family slowly die off. It’s ridiculous and terrible and 99% of the time the Precocious Child deserves a righteous smack in the mouth.

I’d like to note that I’m not advocating violence towards children, just violence towards fictional shitty children. Good? Good.

Judd Winnick writes Precocious Child all the time, even when he’s writing adults. Jason Todd continues to be a Precocious Child even having come back from the dead with a fist full of undeserved Snark. The beloved and occasionally frustrating Joss Whedon has a tendency to write acceptable Precocious Child, but even then he’s still writing Precocious Child.

Which brings me to a new trend I’m starting to see in comics these days, and that is the “Dead Baby”.
I suppose it started with The Walking Dead Issue #48. Spoilers for damn near anything follow from here on out (and if you hadn’t figured that out already when I said Dead Baby, get out.  Just go.)

Lori and Judith, the brand new non-zombiefied baby she had, were shot in the back as the group fled the prison. It was shocking and emotional and I made the mistake of reading that comic first out of my weekly haul. After finishing it I had to put it down and couldn’t read anything else. I just spent the next few hours trying to wrap my mind around what had happened and drinking whiskey. It was my favorite single issue of last year and still haunts me, because holy shit Kirkman just killed off Lori and Judith.

Then I read Rogues Revenge issue #3. A true spectacle to behold because Inertia (who is very much an asshole Precocious Child) kills Weather Wizard’s baby by exploding him with a snap of his fingers shortly before proclaiming himself Kid Zoom. He blew up a baby. On our very own podcast we proclaimed this to be amazing and one of the better parts of the series.

And then…

Well, then they ripped a baby in half, while eating it, in Crossed #1. Which isn’t surprising given the Avatar Press mandate of “YOU CAN WRITE ANYTHING. YES EVEN THAT”.

And then, in the Punisher Xmas Special a mercenary murders an entire room of newborn babies in a hospital. Which fit in very nicely as a parallel to the original christmas story of murdering the first borns and all that (From the bible, pre-crisis continuity) and worked even better because it gave Frank Castle a reason to kill said mercenaries in a brutal manner.

And then, in a recent X book that Peter David specifically asked me NOT to talk about on the internet something not-quite-but-close-enough-to-count-dead happens to something that may or may not be a baby.

And then in the last issue of Dark Tower: Treachery (Uh…also written by Peter David…hmm…) there is a full splash page of a dead fetus that they then describe as having been “Licked clean” in front of its Father.

And being a person who fixates on trends and genre shifts, I’m starting to wonder when and why the impetus to kill a baby became a recurring plot device.
I’d like to point out, I’m not against this per-se. I think that anything that tells the story the way the writer means to tell it is fair game, and if regular non-comic book literature has no restrictions, comics shouldn’t either.

But this is a bit odd. We’re talking about a storytelling trend that has been exhibited in DC, Marvel, Image, and Avatar, and those are only the one’s that I know about. So it isn’t limited by publisher or distribution. Also the spread of writers who’ve used this technique ranges from established vets like Garth Ennis and Peter David to relative newcomers like Jason Aaron and Robert Kirkman (although I really don’t know if it’s fair to put Kirkman in that slot anymore). So it isn’t as if this is a technique only used by a certain vintage of writer. Even more than that, this is a trend that’s crossed through the  fantasy, horror, superhero, and crime genres, so it isn’t even really genre specific.

Looking back I can’t recall older examples of Dead Baby. My rear view mirror with comics isn’t as extensive  as some, but I don’t particularly remember them killing off the spider baby on panel. I’m wondering where this comes from, is it something trending culturally where the only type of violence that can impact us anymore is that against children, and even more “innocent” than children: babies? And if that’s the case and this keeps happening will even this impact be lost eventually causing us to go full circle and come back to killing…I don’t know…Grannies?

Even in the above mentioned examples the act of the Dead Baby is always used to add gravitas and impact to specific scenes and isn’t something that’s thrown in lightly, so it isn’t a matter of gratuitous violence for violence sake, it is still a storytelling beat that delivers the intended effect. And I’ve yet to see it used comedically (although now that I mention it, I’m pretty sure Cerebus chucked a baby off a church roof in “Church and State” but…I mean that was Cerebus. Dave Sim is serious even when he’s kidding).

I’m not really sure what my point is, I’m not even sure if this is a trend or if I just so happen to have filled my longbox with infanticide through my own twisted tastes. I do know this: to date, nothing has hit me as hard as that issue of The Walking Dead.

-Stin.

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Top 10 Comic Book Romances

Spinning out of Graphic Detail 24, I have become inspired to create my (very much on-the-fly) Top 10 List of Comic Book Romances.  Just to preface what should already be obvious, this is my list, it doesn’t reflect the opinions of Stin, Charles, any guest we’ve ever had, or even my thoughts as far as next week.

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Episode 24 - Moore Bayoutiful Than Ever Before

Swamp Thing; also The Flash Companion, Secret Invasion #6, Simon Dark #12, and Fables #75

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Episode 20: Danny Does Daoist

http://www.teslacorps.com/graphicdetail/podcasts/content/podcasts/GD_020.mp3

We discuss the Immortal Iron Fist (Fraction/Brubaker/Aja); also, weeklies Booster Gold 1,000,000, Scalped #19, Omega the Unknown #10, and Final Crisis: Requiem.

The Overflowing Mind of Positive Effluence, The Snarky Fist of Five Cabby Caps, and the Drunken High Pitch Anger in Motion all humbly unite to bring you this, our 20th podcast, in which we discuss the great nature of the being that is expressed through “The Immortal Iron Fist”.

And with that my patience at imitating fake Martial Arts movie dubbing is completely used up.

It’s a relatively short series run (16 issues) and we all universally like it, so this episode we mainly discuss our various favorite moments and things we liked, along with some debate over what we think of creators leaving at the top of their game and whether or not they’ve left the series in the middle of an arc.
We also talk about the style of the book, it’s major themes, Danny as a character, when it’s okay for a reader to leave a series, and the gorgeous art found within the book.
Then we go into our weekly picks:

BOOSTER GOLD one million: Randal’s pick and the end of Johns’ run on the series. For Randal it wrapped up well enough that it saved the series, for the rest of us, while it had it’s pacing issues, we all agree the series ended well.

SCALPED #19: My pick, of a comic that everyone should be reading because Jason Aaron is a genius when it comes to writing amazing characters. Naturally the other two aren’t reading it, but Randal (!) is actually convinced (!!) to give it another shot (?)

OMEGA THE UNKNOWN #10: The end of a series that Charles really wanted to be better than it was due to his nostalgic love of the original series. Tune in specifically to hear Charles actually be disappointed in something and (mildly) condemn it for being a shoddy execution of a concept he used to love.

FINAL CRISIS: REQUIEM: Our group pick. Did you guys know Martian Manhunter died in the first issue of Final Crisis? And that it apparently pissed off a bunch of fanboys for some reason? So they decided to completely disregard that issue with another issue and it still sucked?
If you didn’t know that now you do. We also kinda get into our reaction to the events going on these days, including a discussion of FINAL CRISIS: ROGUE’S REVENGE.

And with that, we call it a show, and the trio takes what they learned from our main discussion into our own lives as Charles goes off to spend the next 12 hours meditating on whether a tree falls in the woods and makes a sound if Randal doesn’t care about any trees ever (but thinks that James Robinson could write a kick ass tree) and I drunkenly trip over it and try to punch it to death for not being in black and white and “edgier”.

Oh, and go see Dark Knight.

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Stin Rants: MTVincible Edition

You’ve got to be motherfucking kidding me.

“The New York Times reported yesterday on the imminent launch of “Invincible: The Series,” an animated version of Image Comics’ hugely popular superhero title created by Robert Kirkman and Cory Walker. Developed by MTV New Media and available July 22 on iTunes, Xbox, MTV.com, MTV2 and MTV Mobile, “Invincible: The Series” takes the actual pages of Kirkman and Walker’s comic book and animates them through a process called Bomb-X. The stories are filled with motion, music and vocal performances similar to those of a traditionally produced cartoon.”
http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=17233

Okay let’s…let’s take a deep breath and start at the beginning.

I LOVE Invincible. Allright? I fucking LOVE it.

I’ve said time and again that it is the single best superhero comic book currently being published
This is doubly amazing because I normally hate the everlasting gobstopper out of comics with teenage characters for a variety of reasons, and yet Invincible takes everything I hate and makes it awesome through the sheer power and talent of Kirkman, Walker, and Ottley. The story is amazing, the characters are heartfelt and honest and the art is beautiful, simple, powerful, and reminiscent of the old school Kirby days in its use of color and sequential storytelling. Invincible has even gone so far as to form a central universe that a large portion of the characters found in Image comics (Brit, Savage Dragon, The Astounding Wolfman) have come to naturally inhabit.

Invincible is almost perfect. The one thing keeping me from calling it perfect outright is that the series isn’t over yet, and I’m a bit of a skeptic.

Then they go and do this

For a brief summary, I hated every single thing I saw, heard, and was physically assaulted in the dark corners of my brain by, in that trailer.

I shall now enumerate the ways in which I hate this:

1. MTV new media apparently feels the very best way to express exactly how new media they are is with fucking 8 bit graphics and sound in a variety of 70’s era psychadelic colors, they can therefore go fuck themselves.
2. Pay close attention to this voice you first hear, because while it’s theoretically Mark’s Dad? The voice completely changes later. Sadly this is as acceptable as it ever gets.
3. And then the trailer introduces us to our hero, in single panels, that they continuously wiggle, and then zoom in upon, and then spin the fuck around, before wiping them of the screen and giving you yet another panel. Why? I suppose static images are boring I guess?
4. Also those speech bubbles need to move, they’re also boring when they’re non-wiggling or spinning.
5. Also the actual words in those speech bubbles need to pulsate within the wiggling speech bubbles in the spinning images in front of the image of the sky that’s zooming out.
6. AND FUCKING WIPE THAT LAST PANEL OFF, ELONGATE HECK, AND HAVE THE TAIL OF THE EPILEPTIC WORD BALLOON FOLLOW HIM DOWN so we can illustrate how he actually HASN’T. MOVED. AT. ALL.
7. Whatever boat shoe wearing blowout sporting trust fund coke head marketing douchebag that thought in public (i.e. poor) high school it goes “Girls” then “Acne” then “Homework” needs to choke to death on my fist.
8. Wait wait wait wait WAIT WAIT wait. pause it right after that above bit.
   Do…do you fucking see that? Those are fucking Saved By the Bell scribbles right there. BEHOLD
   Which means now they’re taking two separate things that I love and molesting both of them to make a superhybrid awful thing that I hate. And I can’t even put it in a sack filled with rocks and throw it in a nearby lake like I’ve been practicing.
9. See, when the principal (that’s the principal by the way, which you’d never know from this fucking clip since he’s talking to…no one in particular and pointing at something we can’t see since this is yet another single panel with no other information in it), said that in the comic I didn’t really read it as “You’re not………………..INVINCIBLE……..you know?” Wink Wink Nod Nod Point Point
   Because that would be absurd and hamfisted and also pretty stupid since the principal doesn’t know that Mark is dotdotdotdot invincible since Mark isn’t blahblahblah invincible yet so shut you’re ffffffucking mouth anonymous voice actor. The next time I’m in the supermarket and a random stranger makes a wink nudge “EH? EH?” joke and I beat them to death with a bag of organic carrots because they just taste better, their death will be on Your Head.
10. Okay. The “is this seat taken” sequence of panels now goes one step beyond showing us single panels and we get a whole six! In a row! So to compensate they make them blink like a strobe light and randomly reorganize themselves. That last panel actually moves from being the last one to being the second one.
    Saving you some time I guess.
    
11. Much like the next sequence showing his evolution of a costume that blitzes by in the time it takes a fruit fly to prematurely ejaculate. A costume that you barely see mind you, and is one of the Greatest and most Iconic Costumes since Hal Jordan’s Yeah I Fucking Said It.
12. Okay this takes the motherfucking cake. And I mean that quite literally. Imagine a cake, that fucks your mother. That is how awful and inconceivable the Doc Seismic extreme zoom in of yet ANOTHER single panel with a pulsing color wash and the squiggly balloon with words that shake and letters within the words that shake the opposite way sequence is. Also I’m so very glad the Doc Seismic voice sounds almost exactly like the Blob from the old xmen cartoons. Because when I think Doc Seismic I think “The Blob”.It’s a pound cake by the way, and it is not pleasant.

13. Okay I tried to pause it at least six times during that next “When you’re a teenager” card because when the music, which I can’t even comment on because what the hell do you even say, but when the music goes HUH I’m convinced the card gets bumped by what appears to be Mark’s tits in costume.
    Tell me if I’m wrong, but I demand a screen grab and the fastest gunfighter in the west doesn’t have the reaction time to pull this one off.
14. Why does Mark’s Mother sound younger than Atom Eve? That should play really well when she starts slugging down bottles of vodka.
15. And why does The Immortal sound British and not like, oh I dunno, ABE LINCOLN?
16. Here’s the part where Mark’s Dad goes from sounding like someone who’s earned that Mustache to someone who probably has never had the ability to grow facial hair ever.
17. IN chung VIN chung CI chung BLE. chung. Really. Way to stick that landing.
    

So to recap folks, this is not a cartoon, it does not have motion music OR vocals (especially vocals…fucking principal) that are even remotely similar to a “traditionally produced cartoon” because if they had been making cartoons like this long enough for it to become a tradition every cartoon watching person on the planet would have swallowed their tongues in a fit of convulsion and hatred fucking ages ago.

Beyond the fact that it’s not a cartoon, it’s not even a remotely good representation of an amazing comic book, because they’re essentially reading the comic to you, a panel at a time, at an extremely close range that obscures the art with completely over the top enunciation of every word they say.

Which means that they think you and I are complete and utter morons who couldn’t follow the comic book without their shaking wiggling BULLSHIT.

I urge you all, if the actual cartoons are anything like this, to stay away from them as if they had radioactive herpes an all day sucker and a lisp.

Do me, yourself, and the original creators of Invincible a favor: do NOT accept this pale imitation and read the fucking book.

-Stin

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Whats up with the New Gods?

So, on the verge of Final Crisis issue 2, I’ve decided it’s time to help you guys out.  I’m pretty sure most of you out there have been a bit confused by what’s going on with the New Gods as of late (actually, I’m pretty sure most of you don’t care about the New Gods, but are none the less confused).  So I’ve decided to go ahead and shoulder the burden of trying to explain to you what exactly has been going on in the 4th world as of late, what it all means, and bits of where it’s going.

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Stin Rants: Wizard World Philidelphia Edition.

What the fuck Vertigo?

I mean it, seriously, what the fuck. And don’t even attempt to distract me by waving the long dick of Neil Gaiman in my face because that trick? Only works the first seventeen times.
And there are no more fingers on that monkey paw, not a one.
I mean I was actually looking forward to that panel, “Vertigo” I thought to myself, and a silver lining appeared in an otherwise cloudy panel filled sky full of motherfucking fanboys complaining about the STORY of motherfucking Final Crisis ISSUE 1 to the motherfucking ARTIST and then all scoffing and wearing their ridiculous red hats askew when the senior editor of fuck-knows-what tells them “Trust me, Grant knows what he’s doing and issue two and three are better.”
Scoff, Hat, Backpack, Fat Jamie Madrox Cosplay, Scoff.

Again and again. Like a terrible ice dancing competition with neither ice nor dancing.

So again I say what the fucking fuck. Your news is that you’re going to continue to put out the books you’re currently putting out?
No…new…projects then? Or even better, your new projects are full of people that most of us have never heard of making GRAPHIC fucking NOVELS about A) Second Life - way to be socially relevant, B) an airline stewardess falling in love with a man who may or may not be a terrorist - see my comment about A, C) some bullshit about a british team looking exactly like the beatles hur hur hur and see my comment about A yet again, or D) Madame Xanadu - that age old classic.

And then you have the fucking balls to get pissy with the half dozen people at your panel when they begin to question your publishing practices and methods, to the point where you actually ask the people at the goddamn panel if they have any questions about your publishing content?
No. We don’t. Because you barely have any fucking content to speak of.

I mean I love me some DMZ and I’m ecstatic about your continued work with Brian Wood (and thank you ever so much for answering my question about the next volume of DEMO with an “It’s in development”), and I read nearly your entire line of books but seriously…what are you doing to keep everyone excited?
100 Bullets is wrapping up, Ex Machina is wrapping up, Y already wrapped up, and you’re running out of Absolute Sandmen to pump out so what are you doing to stay relevant?

AND WHY NO FUCKING ABSOLUTE PREACHERS? You were actually suprised that all the people at the panel wanted to see that happen? Did you fucking forget? And how could you have possibly had a meeting in your absinthe drenched opium den offices where that wasn’t a good idea?

I want answers motherfuckers, because the other panel I went to? The Avatar panel? Had two Garth Ennis projects, an Alan Moore project, and about a billion Warren Ellis projects FOR NEXT YEAR!
Actually,
You know what?
Nevermind. Let Avatar take the reigns. Let them take your fanbase, because nothing stung quite the way this little nugget of hipster cred did: Garth Ennis, you remember he wrote Preacher? Yeah he said he gets 90% control on the Marvel MAX line and 50% control from Vertigo.
Oh, oh yes internet, gasp in horror because that shocked me too. Fucking Ennis can get away with more at MARVEL than he can at VERTIGO.
And then over at Avatar the publisher told him there’s never anything he won’t be able to say or write, ever.
That’s 100% for you keeping count.

So keep falling asleep and looking tired and getting the munchies and cutting your panels a half hour short, tick tock tick tock.

Also, I never went to a Marvel panel, not because I was trying to make a statement, I just wasn’t interested.
I walked out of 3 panels; two where the fanboys were full of righteous indignation and one where the creators were full of righteous indignation.
And Marvel’s booth could not have been more boring.

The only things that were actually cool at the con itself were the Max Brooks Zombie Survival Guide panel (Avatar, again…) which was actually hilarious and almost worth the whole trip by itself, the aforementioned Avatar panel, and The Garth Ennis panel.

And the fact that Flash t-shirts outnumbered any other t-shirt 2-1.

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Twitter and Comic Creators

The New York Comicon is upon us.

From all over the country people will be flocking into the city that never sleeps for the convention, several of the forum members who are New York based are going to be there; Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman (who somehow hasn’t attained living legend status yet) and a huge assortment of other creators.

But I won’t be.
Part of it is scheduling, part of it is a lack of any kind of budget because I buy way too much pop culture related crap.
Most of it is an irrational fear of New York and the assorted…smells…it manages to constantly generate. My germphobia won’t allow it.

The nice thing is that I don’t even really have to go. Most of the creators I’m really interested in meeting or listening to either have blogs or twitter accounts.
For the uninitiated, twitter is a strange little social networking service that allows you to post up to 140 characters worth of information as a message (that they call tweets. Har har har), that then gets sent to the internet and displayed on your twitter page. You can also link your phone to it and start sending messages on the go from whatever mobile device you’re a slave to. It’s sort of like text messaging no one in particular and letting anyone who wants to read it.

I got into this because Warren Ellis has one. Because Ellis is an internet jesus and he always clues those of us in the know in on cool shit.
Then a REALLY cool thing started happening and other comic book creators started using twitter. Then more of them joined in.
And then they started talking to each other. And this is when it became really cool, because they’d talk about projects, break each other’s balls, announce when and what they were working on, all sorts of crap that a comic junkie would love to hear about.

And it occurred to me that this was the first time this sort of information was even available to the comic reading public, unless you had your favorite creators emailing you everyday with random thoughts, but even then you wouldn’t have the interactions between creators that you get with twitter. It gives them the opportunity to be in touch with their audience as well, and the brevity and relative one way street of twitter keeps the bullshit of message boards out of the conversation.

What I really want to see is the indie community embrace this more, it would turn a wide assortment of people onto crap that we’d otherwise never hear about. Which is kinda the mission statement of our podcast in the first place.

Here are the creator twitters that I follow:
http://twitter.com/BrianReed
http://twitter.com/brianbendis
http://twitter.com/Remender
http://twitter.com/mattfraction
http://twitter.com/warrenellis
http://twitter.com/bremxjones (This is actually Kieron Gillen)
http://twitter.com/ivanbrandon
http://twitter.com/mckelvie
http://twitter.com/tonymoore
http://twitter.com/roblevin
http://twitter.com/templesmith
http://twitter.com/brianwood
http://twitter.com/bclaymoore

And this is just a small smattering, people. They’re all over the damn place.
Check it out because it’s free, and funny, and usually cool.

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Randal Reviews: Titans #1

Welcome, to what may or may not be the first of many solo reviews done by me, Randal. You should probably expect a LOT of sarcasm or just ridiculous love of thinsg that make no sense. But mostly, sarcasm.

To start things off, we’re taking a look at Judd Winnick’s Titans #1 with art by Ian Churchill.

I’ve made it clear in the past in reviews and podcasts long since gone by that I don’t really have any love for Judd Winnick. Don’t get me wrong, I liked Exiles and the first 10 or so issues of his Green Lantern run, but that was how many years ago? And I haven’t liked a thing since. He kind of has this tendency to constantly need to throw something big and flashy and shocking and controversial into every story on every book. Homosexual characters that are clearly just forced there for the same of it and fail to add to the story, rape victims, aids, drug abuse, child slavery, I mean this is the guy who had a special gust appearance from John Walsh in his title. But this is about the Titans, a group of established heroes with very defined characteristics quarks and history’s, can’t make any of them gay out of the blue, or give them aids as most of them are parts of important properties, what could possibly go wrong?

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Siegel, Superman, and Chaos Magic.

That a judge was even interested enough to give serious thought to the whole superboy issue a little while ago (which, regrettably, may have had something to do with the death of Conner Kent) was cool enough.

But this?

This is bloody huge: http://uncivilsociety.org/2008/03/the-siegel-superman-decision.html

“After seventy years, Jerome Siegel’s heirs regain what he granted so long ago – the copyright in the Superman material that was published in Action Comics Vol. 1. What remains is an apportionment of profits, guided in some measure by the rulings contained in this Order, and a trial on whether to include the profits generated by DC Comics’ corporate sibling’s exploitation of the Superman copyright.”

This could easily set the tone for future lawsuits, especially if the trial goes well and they end up granting Siegel’s heirs any portion of the money DC has been making off the superman franchise. How DC will (or could) react to this is even more frightnening. Will they get rid of Superman? Call him something else? Completely replace him?

How far would they go to save some cash? What would this mean for other original creations. Holy shit, Len Wien might finally see some of that sweet Wolverine money…

But it gets even stranger, because this happened the same exact day that Grant Morrison’s All Star Superman came out, in which Supes makes a pocket universe where he never existed just to see if a world without a Superman could exist. The result we see in the final panel is the creation of a Superman comic in the old school Siegel design.

….Don’t you see? Grant Morrison MADE THAT SHIT HAPPEN!

He’s done it people, he’s cracked the wall between reality and comics. And thankfully he did it in one of the best comics being published right now (I shudder to think what would have happened if this took place in that other all star book. Sorry Bill Finger, you’ll just have to wait).
But really, the coincidence is enough to even warm the cold rational heart of this old skeptic.

I’m glad to see the old folks finally getting their due, here’s hoping it doesn’t spiral out of control and destroy comics completely.
I’m just still amazed that the comics world has gotten to this point at all.
70 years is a long time.

Randal: Old folks finally getting their due? Are you serious?  This isn’t old folks getting their due or young folks reaping their commeupance or anything like that.

This is some sort of wonderful real life illustration of a fucked up legal system.  What you have here is a case of 2 separate entities, neither of which ACTUALLY created the product in question fighting over who owns in.  In one case you have people who won a genetic grabbag so they feel they get to claim inheritance rights. In the other instance a giant faceless corporation who makes most of their bank off of S-man hats at six flags and has done almost as much hard to the character and the brand over the years as they have good.

Ah, but for me you see, there-in lies the difference.  The S-kids want not only money but full creative control rights.  But they want it the easy way.  They want cushy perpetual office jobs where they thumbs up and thumbs down superman decisions and get kickbacks well into eternity which they then can pass onto their kids well into eternity without having spent the last however many years working and building up the Sman machine to the point it is today.  If they want to see a dime of the money, give them full creative control.  And I mean FULL creative control.  That’s right Warner Bros, let that shit go.  Pull every superman t-shirt, hat, comic, movie, tv show, guest spot out of the fucking either.  Create a Sman void.  Then let these kids who just want “what their grand/father worked so hard to create” try to manage a machine like that.  They’d be crushed.  Destroyed.  There would be no more Superman.  If you want to claim rights, claim responsibility.

And that’s why I actually side with the faceless corporation.  Because throughout the years, they’ve done the work.  They built the machine, they put it into place, they maintain it.  It’s akin to a child being orphaned at the age of 8, being raised by another family and growing into a billionaire, and then his brothers and sisters who never had shit to do with him before wanting a piece of the pie.

They may not have created him, they may not have even taught him how to walk or ride a bike.  But they were there for his driver’s license, to bail him out of jail that one time he fucked up major, they were there with the college fund and to give him that first car as a graduation present.  The faceless corp did their job.  And while it probably wasn’t the stuffy old man in the ivory tower who did it, it was still the people who made up the company.

The real solution: Give the money to Geoff Johns.  Or Kurt Busiek, or Grant Morrison.  Hell, even Bryan Singer.  Being part of the Superman mythos is a big, important and full of pressure deal.  Give a kick back to who ever is actually telling the stories at the time.  Make it even more rewarding to be part of the machine for a change.  They’re the people who keep it alive, and also the people who kill it from time to time (Thanks whatever Chuck Austen’s pseudonym was!).  But they’re the people who deserve it.

They’ll never see it, obviously, but in my book the company getting money is a little bit better than some lucky sperm. 

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