I don’t think I’m actually going to review it. It’s possible I’ll change my mind, but right now it’s just not that high on my priority list. Go read John Scalzi’s review if you like, which is close enough to what I’d have said as to serve as an adequate substitute.
Tag: comics
Stan Lee, 1922-2018
I never met Stan Lee. I almost certainly could have at some point, if I’d wanted to; half the nerds I know have a picture of themselves with him at some con or another. He passed away two full days ago and I’m still struggling with tears trying to write this. That seems an odd thing to say about a man I never met. Odd, but true.
Also true: I can think of two people, only one still with us, since JRR Tolkien passed away three years before I was born, whose work has had even close to as much of an influence on my life as Stan Lee’s did. I have been buying comic books for 3/4 of my life, and I probably have 80% of all the Iron Man comics ever printed. Today is Wednesday. It’s new comic book day. I went to the comic shop.
I go to the comic shop every Wednesday. And I have gone to the comic shop every Wednesday for goddamn near my entire adult life, excepting only a short period of time where I lived in Chicago and didn’t have a comic shop in Chicago yet so I was still getting my comics from my local store in South Bend. My two favorite superheroes are Iron Man and the Hulk. Spider-Man is right behind Superman. Number five probably slides around a bit more than the others, but Captain America is as good a choice as any.
Stan Lee created three of those five characters, and had an enormous influence on the history of the fifth. Did he come up with everything about them completely on his own? No, of course not. Steve Ditko, Don Heck, Jack Kirby; the contributions of these men can’t be denied, and they were towering figures in their own right. And we just lost Steve Ditko earlier this year, so it’s been a really bad year to be a Spider-Man fan.
(Steve Ditko designed the classic red-and-gold Iron Man armor. I just found that out. I don’t think I knew that before.)
This is one hundred percent true: I have no idea what my life would look like if Stan Lee had not been a part of it. I have no idea who I would be if I had never encountered Stan’s creations. You don’t get to spend most of your life marinating your brain in stories about superheroes every single week and not be changed by them. To say that Stan Lee was one of my heroes feels like it’s minimizing him.
It’s not enough. He was too big for this. I don’t have the words. I’m reading this over and the whole thing just feels stupid, like I’m not trying hard enough.
Stan was Jewish. Jews typically, or at least traditionally, don’t say “rest in peace.” A more appropriately Jewish phrase to honor the recently dead is May his memory be a blessing. And it’s also more appropriate to describe my relationship with Stan, a man who I never met and whose life’s nevertheless influenced me so deeply and thoroughly that I am unable to untangle what my life would be like had he never lived. His memory– and his creations– will live on, if not forever, but certainly well beyond whatever years may be left to me. Every day. But especially, and undeniably, every Wednesday.
Stan Lee’s life was a blessing. May his memory continue to be.
KOKOMO-CON 2018: The Cosplay
So tired.
Had a really good time.
But SO tired.
Have cosplay.
Spider-Man PS4 first impressions
… because, sure, let’s mention Spider-Man in every single post this week. I’m not a geek or anything, no.
I’m … fifteen percent, I think, into the new Spider-Man game; enough to have a solid early idea of what the game’s about but not far enough that my opinions have to be taken all that seriously just yet. But what the hell; I don’t really wanna talk about my job or politics, I can’t talk about my current Sekret Projekt other than that I have one and I’m not gabbing about it, and nothing especially funny has happened yesterday so I may as well gabble about video games.
And here’s the thing, so far: this game right now seems to be at its strongest when it’s a webbing around New York simulator; moving anywhere is a simply ridiculous amount of fun, to the point where I’m frequently ignoring crimes and activities in favor of just seeing what the most ridiculous way I can get from point A to point B is. The combat is okay so far; the balletic, combo-heavy style that these guys pioneered with the wildly overrated Arkham Asylum series works a lot better with Spider-Man than it ever did with Batman, so combat looks really good and fits the character. That said, the first big boss fight with Kingpin is utterly ridiculous and basically involves endlessly beating on a damage sponge with no health bar over and over until the game decides to trigger a cutscene and move on to the next part where you endlessly do the same two moves on a damage sponge. I really hope all the boss fights aren’t like this; they’re gonna get tedious really fast, and also Kingpin just isn’t that strong. Kingpin is not a “throw you through three walls and bash you through the floor” character, guys. He fights Daredevil. This version of the character fights like he could go toe-to-toe with the Hulk or Thor, which is just stupid.
Also: I keep accidentally doing terrible, not-Spider-Man sorts of things to people. Spider-Man is one of those “doesn’t kill” good guys, right? Which is kind of a problem, because I have a bad habit of doing air combos on bad guys and punching them off the sides of buildings. Very tall buildings. Where I can only assume they fall to their deaths, because there’s no “web them and save them” animation happening after I do that.
I once accidentally threw a car door at a civilian, which was, if nothing else, kinda mean. I didn’t mean to! I swear!
This game also has a case of Call of Duty syndrome. And, okay, it’s a stupid thing to complain about, I know, because video game, but New York is not been and never has been quite this crime-ridden. I mean, holy crap guys, it’s a wonder anyone lives here.
(What’s Call of Duty syndrome? Play Call of Duty on the highest difficulty level. You will die. You will die over and over and over and over and over and over again and you will only eventually be successful by virtue of the fact that you can come back to life after you die. I am then forced to conclude that Call of Duty is harder to survive than actual war, because no one can survive Call of Duty on Legendary and lots of people survive wars. Members of my family have! I’m only alive because my grandfather survived World War II!)
But, again: webbing around is fun. And I’m gripey about some other aspects of the game but they keep adding new fun ways for me to beat people up and we’ll see how things go as the game continues. I also (and this may mitigate my annoyance with the Kingpin fight) am kind of enjoying some of their alterations to the “standard” Marvel canon– Peter is working with Otto Octavius, who isn’t Dr. Octopus yet, and Mary Jane Watson (who is adorable) works for the Daily Planet. J. Jonah Jameson appears to be some sort of right-wing podcaster or radio host now, which I can work with, I suppose.
The boy loves it, by the way. It’s the first PS4 game I’ve let him play, so he’s relying a bit too much on handing me the controller, but he’s having a blast with the web-slinging.
More to come later, assuming I don’t get distracted by Dark Souls II and play that instead.
In which I need you to share my excitement
Okay. I need y’all either to actually be comics fans or at least be willing to pretend to be on my behalf for this post. You can do that, right? Yes? Good.
Miles Morales, in the seven years since he was first introduced, has become one of my favorite comic book characters. He’s up there with Iron Man, the Hulk, and Superman at this point. And when Brian Michael Bendis left Marvel and Miles didn’t immediately have a new series on the docket, I was genuinely worried. There was talk that the character was going to be renamed or reimagined; there was an especially gross rumor going around, one that was so bad that I actually wasn’t able to just dismiss it out of hand, that the character would be joining SHIELD and would henceforth be known as “Spy-D,” which would have meant I needed to go out and set things on fire, and that no court would have convicted me, because setting things on fire is a reasonable reaction to Marvel deciding that Miles Morales isn’t Spider-Man anymore and he has to be “Spy-D” now.
Saladin Ahmed just announced on Twitter that he’s writing the new Miles Morales book. Which is called “Miles Morales: Spider-Man.”
One of my favorite fucking writers is writing an ongoing series about one of my favorite fucking characters.
It was already a good day, guys. I was gonna come home and write a post about how I spent all day today and most of yesterday interacting with nice kids and it was something I really needed and I was in general happy and in a good place. And that’s before I got this awesome fucking news.
Hall of Heroes Con this weekend!
BEHOLD: My booth, such as it is. I generally take pictures after I’ve got myself set up but it clean escaped me to do so until after I’d covered everything up and gotten ready to go, so have a picture of a table with a black cloth on it! There are books and shit under there! Exciting!
The Hall of Heroes Con is in the Lerner Theater and the surrounding area in scenic downtown Elkhart, Indiana. I’m in booth H4, which is basically immediately outside the main vendor area on the second floor. I’m of two minds about the space; on the one hand, virtually everyone who goes into the vendor hall is going to walk right past my booth, but on the other hand it’s kind of at the end of a hallway and people will walk past me as they’re walking out of the main vendor area– so hopefully they won’t have spent all their money already.
I will, of course, post as many cosplay pictures as I’m able to take; I heard from the main organizer dude that they’re expecting about 15,000 people over two days, but the weather forecast is set to “Noah,” so hopefully that won’t depress turnout any. But one way or another, I’ll be there from 9 to 6 tomorrow and from 9 to 5 on Sunday! With Oreos! Come on out!
A really brief movie review
Teen Titans Go! To the Movies is very likely to be exactly the movie you think it is going to be.
#REVIEW: BLACK PANTHER
Or, as I like to call it, Shuri: The Movie, Part One.
Guys, I saw this movie almost a full-ass week ago, last Friday, and I’m just now getting around to writing my review of it because I’ve been waiting for The Giddy to go away so that I had at least a little bit of a chance of writing something that didn’t sound like I was pausing every couple of sentences to wipe drool from my mouth.
(One possible solution to that problem: long-ass sentences.)
I can’t do it. Giddy is all I’ve got. I loved this movie. Loved loved loved loved loved loved loved this movie. Every single fucking second, every character, every scene, every setpiece. Every single character in this movie is amazing, every single actor and actress is gorgeous (I have identified myself as a cishet man for my entire life and fuck it I am making an exception for the Black Panther cast) and goddammit if Shuri doesn’t show up for at least a cameo in every Marvel movie from now on, if for no other reason than to make fun of Tony Stark, I will be gravely disappointed.
I said this on Twitter, I’ve said it in person to half a dozen people, I’m saying it again here: I already knew that Lupita Nyong’o and Danai Gurira and oh holy god Angela fucking Bassett were goddesses and superior actresses and that I was going to love the hell out of them being in this movie. I was wholly and entirely unprepared for Letitia Wright, who is absolutely amazing and steals every single scene she is in. I have a Shuri Funko Pop sitting on my desk right now that I bought at the comic store yesterday and I am eagerly anticipating something with a better mold coming out soon. I want a statue.
(Okay, one tiny flaw: I didn’t realize how much I want a Riri Williams movie until I saw this one, if only because I want Riri and Shuri to have whatever the teen girl equivalent of a Science Bros movie is. Picture the stinger at the end of Avengers 4: We look over the shoulder of a young black woman as she reads an article on her computer about Tony Stark’s heroic death in battle with Thanos. The camera stays behind her as she stands up and opens her closet to reveal a suit of gray armor inside it. Come on. Make this happen.)
I’ve had a few people ask me if this is my new favorite Marvel movie, and I’m not sure. It’s top-tier, absolutely, up there with the first Iron Man and Avengers and Civil War. And even of those three I’d put it above Civil War just because only Iron Man and Avengers got me to this level of long-term giddiness after I saw them. So, how about this: as of now, after one viewing, it’s my favorite Marvel movie that I didn’t literally spend decades waiting to see before it came out. I think that’s probably fair.
Go see it, right now. And then go see it again. It’s wonderful and you’ll love it.