This just in: the George W. Bush Award for Most Ridiculous Promotion of a Village Idiot goes to Marvel and its brand-new Chief Creative (pause for snickering) Officer, Joe Quesada. To paraphrase Sheryl Crow, there goes the bloody neighborhood...
Edit: The cast of "Futurama" weighs in.
Monday, June 7, 2010
Creative? Really?
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35 comments:
Kazekage
said...
I had no idea "freezing everything in amber" counted as creative think--
Oh, wait. Geoff Johns. Right.
Diana Kingston-Gabai
said...
The real tragedy is that it's becoming a lot harder to differentiate between DC and Marvel, since they're both run by people with very similar views on what is and isn't necessary for contemporary comics. So if we had any hopes that things would improve within a reasonable timeframe... well, the wait may be just a touch longer than we thought.
Kazekage
said...
Yeah, and you'd think Quesada, who came in with all that necessary iconoclastic blood and thunder ten years ago would recognise better than anyone that fresh approaches that speak to people who aren't you age is what will guarantee that there is another generation coming to replace the one that's dying off or walking away . . .
Diana Kingston-Gabai
said...
Well, they don't call him Joe Sell-Out for nothing. :) Much like Bendis, the man's become a representative of every quality he once felt were killing the comics industry.
Kazekage
said...
Well, and this may sound somewhat snarky, I never actually thought Quesada was really all that creative, honestly, and apart from that brief period where he and Jemas successfully balanced each other's worst impulses, history has kinda borne me out.
Diana Kingston-Gabai
said...
I don't know... for all its many, many faults, the Jemas/Quesada era should also be remembered as possibly the last time a major company actively tried to buck the status quo and push the envelope as far as possible. I honestly can't think of another point in Marvel's history where they could've published something as mean-spirited and utterly entertaining as X-Statix, for example.
Kazekage
said...
Yeah, but that was during that rare moment where one's extremes balanced out the other's. If the scales tipped too far one way or another, you ended up with DAREDEVIL: FATHER or MARVILLE remember?
Besides which, Quesada created Exodus before his ascendancy to head of Marvel and . . .wow, honestly, that's worth some big-time demerits for me.
Diana Kingston-Gabai
said...
True, but I think even those dismal failures can be... well, not so much "redeemed" per se, but they represent a genuine attempt to do something different. Not necessarily good (or even readable), but... hell, given where we are now, I'd settle for just "different".
Wait, X-Men Exodus? The guy with the orange skin? Wow. I mean, Carey did a great job with him in the "Messiah Complex" preliminaries, but it required rebuilding the character from scratch. Who knew Quesada's karma could get any lower? :)
Kazekage
said...
Well, yeah, but roads paved with even the best intentions can lead to . . .Marville, y'know. ;)
Yes, that guy. I think I still have his first appearance, back when Quesada was the regular artist on X-Factor (which in practice meant he drew four issues, none of them consecutively. Exodus then proceeded to rampage through a dozen issues in the 1990s, and annoyed the hell out of me with his nebulous powers and inconsistent characterisation.
All things being equal, Quesada's better off being remembered for Ninjak.
Diana Kingston-Gabai
said...
Well, that's the one major drawback of creative freedom: you're equally free to create things that would make Dr. Moreau shake his head and say "Oh my, that just isn't right."
I actually had a decent initial impression of Exodus, because the first time I saw him was when he blew Fabian Cortez's cover during "Fatal Attractions" and gave him a long-overdue smackdown. Of course, since Magneto came back immediately afterwards, there wasn't much need for a character purporting to speak with his voice, so I don't recall him doing anything interesting after that...
I've decided that I don't want to know what a Ninjak is. I'm afraid that if I learn the answer, a few more of my precious brain cells will exit stage left. :)
Kazekage
said...
Yeah, but nostalgia being what it is, people tend to forget that, which is why the same dunderheaded mistakes keep happening long after we should know better.
Yeah, there was a brief window where you could have done something interesting with him when there was that whole jockeying for the "voice of Magneto" thing, but after that he was just a bloke in a cape with a skin condition, an ill-defined power set and the most bat-shit insane origin I have ever read.
Imagine a man dressed in purple pretending to be a ninja by wrapping a lot of towels around him. Apart from that, that's all you needed to know. Valiant had a lot of great comic concepts. This was not one of them.
Diana Kingston-Gabai
said...
I don't even think it's nostalgia per se, because something like Onslaught didn't have many admirers the first time around and I can't imagine that time makes it look any better. It seems more likely that readers have become so accustomed to the impermanence of any creative decision at all that nothing really fazes them as much as it should; rven the outrage over the Peter/MJ marriage wasn't as virulent as it would have been, say, ten years ago.
The fact that they shot him into orbit and left him there for about a decade says it all, really. :)
From what I know of Valiant, they didn't do very well with the good concepts they had, so I can only imagine how horribly they executed the bad ideas...
Kazekage
said...
Well, there are so few people reading comics now and those who remains are so beaten down by event after event, plot twist after stupid plot twist and just plain Barry Allen coming back that the will to raise some hell about it.
Yeah, but unlike Joel Robinson and Mike Nelson, we never wanted him to come back down.
Actually, up to about Unity, they're some decent, internally consistent comics--maybe the style's a bit studied, and Jim Shooter will never be cutting edge, but he's got some goo ideas and does some good stuff with them. Harbinger was actually a pretty decent melange of X-Men and Runaways. If you can find them on the cheap, have a look.
By the time you get to Ninjak though, the wheels have completely come off the wagon and that's still before Acclaim comes in and ruins everything.
Diana Kingston-Gabai
said...
Quite. Even looking back at my own responses, sometimes it's hard for me to believe that I got so worked up about things like that godawful Mary Jane statuette or that Heroes for Hire hentai cover. If K-Box weren't a crazy person I'd be amazed that he can still muster up the RAGE to attack Spider-Man on a monthly basis. :)
It worked out all right in the end, though, largely thanks to Carey; I honestly don't think anyone else has used Exodus so effectively.
"Harbinger" sounds interesting - is there a specific run I should be looking for?
Which just goes to show you that karma is a true power in the universe, since Acclaim went belly-up itself not long after that. :)
Kazekage
said...
I have to be honest, watching him fulminate about Scott Pilgrim has been an adventure. I have never been that angry about a fictional construct since my imaginary friend stopped speaking to me.
I'll have to read those issues--my X-Men Legacy reading has somewhat lapsed as of late. I'm always up for anyone doing something with ridiculous characters from the 90's. Except maybe Random. Screw him.
I would start from issue #0 and read the first ten issues, which should take you up past Unity, which has a major twist that ties up a number of threads in the book and the Valiant universe proper. That'll give you a decent picture of the book at its height--after that you get a somewhat muddled moment in #25 that's supposed to tie up things, then the Visitor shows up and . . .really. Let's not. ;)
I was rather pleased that two bad things canceled themselves out so handily!
Diana Kingston-Gabai
said...
I'm going to reread that series sometime soon - I have vague memories of the first few books as being cute and simple, but clearly something's gone terribly wrong if you and K-Box are in agreement about it. ;)
Actually, I'm almost positive it was before the Legacy rename... before "Messiah Complex" too, for that matter. And yes, Random was there too. :)
A-hunting I will go, then. I'll let you know if I can track them down...
Cosmic justice is slow, but inevitable. Joe Quesada, wherever you are: be afraid. Be very afraid. :)
Kazekage
said...
Well, I at least liked the game so I would still be an infidel in his eyes. ;) I think, for me, I just hated the damn hype and the stupid "Team Geek" expectation people had--no, if I don't want to see the movie, I'm under no obligation to see it, just because you think more movies should be made like that. Because I sure as shit don't. *L*
Man, for reals? Y'know--I want to live on a planet where people remember Random as much as they do Nightwatch or the Antiguard, which would be "never." ;)
I think they collected #0-7 fairly recently, which would be pre-Unity (I . . .think?) But it would be the easiest way to legally get it (unless you luck out in the longboxes) I'd really be intrigued to see what you thought of it--again, it's Jim Shooter, but there's some strong ideas in that book, and it was a great signpost for Valiant at its best.
He's overdue, honestly. It's been nearly 20 years I've been enduring the Q. And the Star Trek one was at least the funnier of the two.
Diana Kingston-Gabai
said...
Having seen the movie recently, I must say I don't know what all the fuss is about. Granted that the Big Hype Machine passed me by, as I hadn't seen any promotional material beforehand, but... well, I thought it was rather harmless. Cute, slightly more clever than most of its contemporaries, but nothing to cause the amount of venomous bile I've seen so far. I actually thought casting Michael Cera was an inspired bit of brilliance, because he's worn out his welcome as the adorkable slacker so thoroughly that when Scott first turns up, you'll probably feel an immediate wave of exasperated impatience... which is exactly how you're supposed to feel about Scott Pilgrim at the start of the story. :)
Sadly, the X-books have a tendency to never really let go of anything, even when they really, truly should - witness Onslaught!Xavier having the hots for Jean. I had to hold my soul's hair over the toilet for hours after that one...
No luck so far, but I'm still looking.
Well, he had a good rival in Patrick Stewart - Quesada's main competition is Dan DiDio, and I'm pretty sure the universe wouldn't allow the two of them in the same room without tearing a vacuous hole in the space/time continuum. Not to mention the banter would be seriously lacking (and here the foul spectre of "Marville" once again raises its ugly head...)
Kazekage
said...
That's actually way more nuanced a reply than I'd seen from the Pilgrims up to this point, and I can kind of see how this would actually hew more to the spirit of the books rather than all the folks who keep saying this is the move of the decade and stuff like that. :)
. . .in this case the "O" in "O-Face" stood for "Onslaught." I'm sorry Diana--I think I just sent your soul back to the porcelain bus there. :)
Between that and Mad Men I'm mightily intrigued to see what your reactions to these are. :)
And Avery Brooks once punched him in the face! I have a feeling a lot of that discussion would involve Quesada trying to persuade him that a married Riker doesn't really work, and. . .
"Marville." I like to think it's the "Liefeld" of this century--that one word above all others that explains how bad things can suck
Diana Kingston-Gabai
said...
Movie of the decade? I'd only go that far if we were talking about genre innovation - this is a film that integrates conventions from video games, comics and your typical teenage romcom, and manages to balance these very different languages without dropping the ball. It's the movie's greatest strength, and probably the reason it failed at the box office: if you don't understand the tropes, you probably won't be amused by the way they're all folded into each other.
Oh, we're past that now. ;)
I'll be starting "Mad Men" on Sunday; we'll see how it goes. I may have a lead on Harbinger as well - if everything goes according to plan, I'll have much more time for reviewing in the coming weeks, which means I can finally get back to "Gunmetal Black" as well...
And then John de Lancie snaps his fingers and teleports Quesada to the Cretaceous era where he can do no more harm! :)
Well, let's give credit where it's due - with Bob Harras now in charge of DC, who knows how much worse things will get? We'll have enough schadenfreude to last us a lifetime.
Kazekage
said...
That's pretty much the context in which it's been used and . . .yeah, okay, it integrates them but . . .it doesn't do anything with them that I'm interested in in the context of a Scott Pilgrim movie. But maybe things can be used in other movies in a more effective context for me.
I love what a certain website said about that movie "This scene makes Joan kinda look like a psycho. In fact, the whole movie makes her look like a psycho." :)
All right! The time is here again! I'm looking forward to seeing what you think of Mad Men--I think you'll be starting just about the time I finish up series 4. But I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts on that and Harbinger which oughta be . . .yeah, interesting. :)
He could drown him in some primordial ooze. :)
Well, my feeling is, that if you're committed to fail, fail spectacularly, damn it all. This should make that happen quite nicely. :)
Diana Kingston-Gabai
said...
I think that's where the hype dissonance comes in - taken on its own merits, "Scott Pilgrim" doesn't seem to aspire to be anything more than a fun romp; the fact that it combines different media conventions is innovative, but that's only used for laughs (ie: enemies exploding into coins which are then grabbed up by starving artists). Apparently audiences were expecting something else altogether - a bit like going to see "Shaun of the Dead" thinking it's George Romero's next masterpiece.
And poor Faye Dunaway never worked in that town again. :)
I'll have "Harbinger" by the end of the week - I'll probably get through the first 10 or 12 issues by Sunday.
Wouldn't that affect evolution and turn us all into Joe Quesada? :)
We may have to come up with a new term for the type of Fail so profound and irreversible that other Fails look at it and facepalm themselves into unconsciousness...
Kazekage
said...
The biggest problem I have with the movie and the books are the fans. When I'm paging through the latest EGM and someone says in the sub-headline that, without a hint of irony, says "Edgar Wright Has Successfully Brought Our Passion To Life On The Silver Screen" it makes me recoil in horror from the utter pomposity of that statement and it also makes me want to unleash my Human Extinction Attack Level 3 on the Earth.
She got to be Pierce Brosnan's shrink. That's something. ;)
Rad! This will certainly be interesting. Heh.
Yeah. I'll just throw him into the sun, then. Better safe than sorry. :)
Well, there is Marvel being exposed as liars for that whole "Oh, we're going down to $3 too! LOOK AT US! LOVE US!"
Diana Kingston-Gabai
said...
Is it that different from typical fannish squee, though? The sort of thing you'd find (and ignore) on Newsarama or Bleeding Cool?
He seems rather well-adjusted; must've been a rather dull role. :)
I should apologize at this point - I've had the first twenty issues for a while now, but as I've said before (and will say a few more times, no doubt), my life has been completely overrun by "Dragon Age: Origins". I'm literally doing nothing beyond going to work, coming home, playing the game and going to sleep. As soon as I wrap things up, "Harbinger" and "Gunmetal Black" are next on the list. :)
Sure. And when the sun implodes due to the black hole of suck suddenly thrown into its core we can all blame you for the end of all life on Earth. ;)
You know what saddens me? Not that Marvel lied, certainly not that they were caught in it, but the certainty that nothing's going to change: we're outraged, the readers are outraged, business as usual.
Kazekage
said...
Well, ordinarily if it was some wad on either of those sites, then yeah, I would. When Joss Whedon is singing its praises and sounding like a right doofus doing it, it really does overwhelm my signal-to-noise ratio and make me want to cook a fool. ;)
Well-adjusted for Grand Admiral Thrawn, maybe. He was seriously awesome in that movie, but damn, boy had control issues.
S'OK. I have the same thing happen to me when I get into something new--it can upend everything else I was already working on. :) Take your time--God willing and the creek don't rise I'll be here!
Like you didn't know I'd be ultimately responsible for that? ;)
Well, until the bottom completely drops out, they're not really under any great pressure to change anything so they've got licence to act like assholes for how long that people wanna pay them for it.
Diana Kingston-Gabai
said...
I suppose that's how hype backlash works, though, isn't it? It's talked up to the point where you either lose interest or become outright hostile towards it. Personally, I seem to have something of a "cooling-off" period with these sorts of things: my loathing of Leonardo DiCaprio aside, I had zero interest in seeing "Inception" precisely because it was the Poster Child for Insufferable Pretentious Snobbery at the time. Then last week I caught it on a whim and really enjoyed it. Once you get some emotional distance from outside interference, it really can change your outlook on a specific text.
(Of course, that tends to work in reverse as well: try as I might, I can't sit through an episode of "Jem" no matter how much I adored it as a child.)
I have to say, though, that Joss Whedon recently scored a few points with me with his shockingly well-adjusted response to the Buffy remake. The typical Hollywood response probably would've been rolling around on the floor and screaming like Miss Piggy being denied the lead role in the Muppets' latest musical.
That's s probably what made him Bond material. :)
It wouldn't be so bad if the game didn't have branching storylines, which means that as soon as I reached the end of the saga, I designed another character and ran it through again. It was... exhausting. But gratifying.
Sure, but I'd like to have plausible deniability just in case. ;)
On a list of reasons to Get The Hell Out, that's probably right under Haunted Vaginas. :)
Kazekage
said...
Well, it's not that I'm not open to reading it some day, and I have thumbed through them from time to time at the bookstore but I just can't get on board, especially when people call it "the movie of our generation" or stupid things like that. I can't help but feel stupid under those circumstances.
(True, true. That said, what is the over/under on the Jem revival, do you think?)
I prefer Mightgodking's reaction, myself. :)
I've done the same thing myself--I had a game where you had to hit every possible path in story mode to unlock everyone . . .I began to wonder if I needed more constructive hobbies. :)
When I am preparing an article wherein I will be saying good things about Rob Liefeld, that is how desperate things are now. :)
Diana Kingston-Gabai
said...
Hyperbole. It's the best thing EVAR. ;)
The cynical answer to that question would probably be "It's already happened and it's Hannah sodding Montana." Sans Misfits, of course, because God forbid you'd want a bunch of teenage girls showing drive and ambition rather than have the universe handed to them on a platter.
I suppose that's another downside to this whole remaking trend: sooner or later you're going to hit a subject that 1) hasn't been gone long enough to justify the effort and/or 2) is so significant to the zeitgeist of the time that remakes just won't interest anyone who's either seen the show when it was airing or got the DVDs afterwards. (And really, DVD packs are so ubiquitous these days, it's not like there's this massive well of nostalgia that can't be fed...)
I find that the amount of effort I'm willing to spend is directly proportionate to how much I enjoy the game: something like "Super Meat Boy" is just too bloody difficult for me, so I really can't muster the energy to go about finding all the secrets and whatnot. But the bonus ending for "Braid" was totally worth standing still on a platform for 90 minutes.
Well, that explains those cows spontaneously exploding all over the countryside... ;)
Kazekage
said...
Hence, why Scott Pilgrim will get increasingly more ridiculous subtitles on my blog whenever I refer to it, now.
Yeah, that sounds about right. I wonder what it says about the culture that idealised success can only palatable when it happen consequence-free. Nothing good, I imagine.
Yeah . . .this may or may not be what tripped up Tron this year, but who knows? Maybe it's enough now that cult hits return in new forms and spontaneously generate or continue the older cults and success or failure is irrelevant.
It depends. If it's stuff that doesn't feel like hopeless grinding or is required to flesh out everything (Dynasty Warriors Gundam was like that--successive play-throughs were required to unlock new characters and their Story Modes) and it doesn't feel too repetitive. :)
It's Earthworm Jim all over again!
Diana Kingston-Gabai
said...
Do promise me you'll give it a retry when the scars fade, though. :)
It's not the lack of consequences that bother me so much as the lack of agency - to the extent that there's any acknowledgment that the protagonist has to make an effort to succeed, it's usually some trifling matter resolved in twenty minutes, with the crisis somehow working itself out. Jem may have been over-the-top in so many ways, but the writers made it clear that she couldn't just sit on her bum and expect the universe to fix her problems for her.
Well, there's something to be said for keeping the fandom alive for another generation... but then, it doesn't seem like the existing fans particularly care for things like "Tron: Legacy" or "Superman Returns". They're running a greater risk of poisoning the chalice altogether, as it were.
There are times I get the completist bug and pause the main storyline so I can go side-questing for 40 hours, but I find it depends entirely on the game - "Last Scenario" had me burning through every possible bouns level, specifically because each one was tied into the main storyline in some way. But collecting flags in "Assassin's Creed" for bragging rights? No thanks.
Better Earthworm Jim than Diablo 2, when the cows fought back. :)
Kazekage
said...
I was actually talking to someone about it today--my biggest problem with it is that people don't see that Scott is the antagonist in his own story. They just groove on the videogame references and the fact that Scott lives his slack-ass dream and . . .yeah. This probably speaks to my lack of faith in other people's reading comprehension, but also it says I am totally right. :)
I agree. As Maria Bamford once said (whilst making fun of the Miss America pageant) "All those future little Miss Americas out there, keep reaching for the stars, because they're the only ones who can help you." It was so much funnier when it was an actual joke, huh?
What finally broke my OCD for Castlevania was Order of Ecclesia, which was the first Castlevania game in a long time I didn't bother to get a full 100% because I'd had enough to the goddamn thing by that time and trying to fill in more of the map and get more cool stuff make me physically ill to contemplate. People will tell you Ecclesia is an excellent game and freshens up the CV series. These people are wrong. Only Lords of Shadow is more god-awful.
I never played Diablo 2, but I can imagine that sort of thing happening, actually. :)
Diana Kingston-Gabai
said...
I don't know if I'd go so far as to call him the antagonist per se - it's a coming-of-age story, and Scott pretty much follows the archetypal pattern of starting out as a self-absorbed twit and eventually growing a pair and acknowledging that yes, other people matter too. I'm still surprised that so many critics demonize him, considering he doesn't actually do anything worse than cheat on his high school girlfriend - you'd think the American Pie generation would've set the bar for utter monstrosity a bit higher than that. :)
I suppose we can console ourselves with the knowledge that they tend to hit the supernova/black hole phase sooner rather than later. Schadenfreude: #1 Cause of LOL-related Deaths Since 1990.
Quite right. I mean, at some point you just want to get on with the bloody story, right?
This is not Photoshopped. :)
Kazekage
said...
Well, you could say that Scott's immaturity and lack of perspective actively contribute to how messed up things get as much as the evil ex's do. I wouldn't say he's a monster, but he typifies that self-centered narcissism that tends to cause a lot of collateral damage between twenty and thirty. So maybe he's not History's Greatest Villain, but he is a very cruel, thoughtless, and vulgar individual.
That train is never late, and thank God.
Well, I'd completed the story, but there were a few bonus bits afterwards that I just really didn't care enough to finish. Running around fully armed in God Mode wasn't quite enough of a draw to keep me playing.
Holy cow. That's insane!
Diana Kingston-Gabai
said...
I still think that's a bit extreme - to my recollection, the only truly bad thing he does is cheat on Knives, and it's clear from the get-go that he's not exploiting her the way you might expect when 17-year-old Catholic schoolgirls are involved. He doesn't instigate the attacks, he doesn't force himself on Ramona, he doesn't actively sabotage his band's chance at success... it seems to me that if he's guilty of anything it's a tendency to wallow in his own misery, and "getting a life" is his way of pushing past that.
The novelty of exterminating entire armies with a wave of your hand tends to wear thin rather quickly, doesn't it? :)
I recall my one and only expedition to the Cow Level - I'd just beaten the game, had a level 55 Sorceress all decked out in her Sunday best... and I lasted maybe thirty seconds. Never went back there and it took a while before I could eat hamburger again. :)
Kazekage
said...
Well, I suppose, of course wallowing in sympathy is pretty negative on its own--it's narcissism, after all, but the whole cheating on an underage girl, while not on the level of say, race-based pogroms or devouring live babies whole, is still a really shitty thing to do, and it almost immediately casts him as less than sympathetic.
I prefer exterminating armies the Dynasty Warriors Gundam way--you fire your rockets, dual-wield some lightsabers, flip over the attacking groups while strafing them with a bazooka and when you land, unleashing a death ray that kills hundreds instantly. Much more visceral thrill than handy-wavy-blowy-uppy. :)
Sounds like the time I played in a Street Fighter tournament. The nicest thing I can say about my performance is that I wasn't cherry tapped. Oh, and it was over quickly. :)
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