Quinn

May 26, 2012 2:51 am I was thinking Brainiac, since he called the humans "meat," but I like the Reach connection, since they used sonics like Beetle. I think it's interesting that Beetle (and everyone else) thinks that Kord invented the scarab, when we know the truth is something else altogether. That couldn't possibly come back to haunt them.

May 18, 2012 5:26 pm I was going to buy this, but just these three pages are giving me flashbacks to the Image '90s. Damn it. I was looking forward to this book, too. Now I have to go put on some Nirvana and put a game in my Playstation 1.

May 15, 2012 12:08 am Power Company was vastly underrated. Hunter: the Age of Magic had so much potential. I think I bought every issue (and "Life During Wartime," which came out the next year), waiting for it to get good. I wanted so much for it to be good. So much.

May 11, 2012 10:46 pm He's gone from Most Important Mutant in the World to "everybody's weird uncle." It's the one thing that X-Men East and X-Men West can agree on: when Uncle Charlie rings the doorbell, everybody gets really quiet, hides behind some furniture and pretends to be out saving the world. @CaseyJustice: I can see that sitcom, now: the wacky non-adventures of Xavier, Dakken and Hercules. It would be a cross between Seinfeld and Two and a Half Men, because nothing would ever happen except Hercules being a PG-13 Bad Boy as he and socially conscious Xavier tried to raise the socially awkward Dakken.

April 25, 2012 5:25 pm I was talking about this with someone last night, and I kept answering questions with, "well, it's complicated, but..." It *is* complicated. Both Roberson and DC are right, and wrong. Both the Siegel&Schuster heirs and DC are right, and wrong. Is it okay for Jack Kirby to have spent his life being ground down and taken advantage of because he was a bad businessman? Probably not. Is that how America works? Absolutely. Is it DC or Marvel's job to mollycoddle artists who sign bad deals in good faith? Not legally. Would it be nice if they did? Sure. It's complicated. The things is, boycotts don't work unless they are led by a major national figure. David Brothers, despite the lovely article, is not such a figure. Neither is Chris Roberson. And if enough people did boycott Marvel or DC that their parent companies noticed, Disney or Time Warner would just shut the doors on the comics arms, rather than change the policies or pay back royalties out of the goodness of their corporate hearts. (That's an oxymoron, after all.) All the same, Jack Kirby not getting his due isn't workers dying on factory lines. It's not farms without sanitation. Unless we plan to give up computers and become locavore vegans, it seems little silly to get stressed about people being ripped off two generations ago. At the same time, how small a thing does a "right thing" need to be before we should do it? If an industry you love if breaking your heart by abusing the people who make it possible, isn't it right to support those people? Or do we just accept that every comic book writer and artist, no matter how talented or beloved, is just a cog in the machine, and that, at the end of the day "Brian Michael Bendis" is just as replaceable as every nameless 70's writer? If every single writer and artist quit the industry over this, tomorrow, the characters and the books would continue with new names, who would be just as beloved and "famous" in no time at all. Creators don't matter: the company matters. Because the company owns the characters, and even the greatest Marvel or DC writer "owes their soul to the company store." As fans, so do we. Because it's complicated.

April 9, 2012 1:40 pm Best thing about James Robinson writing this: we won't have to worry about crossovers messing up his creative plans.

March 30, 2012 2:41 pm That's the subtitle for Avengers 2: "You will believe that a robot can cry."

March 4, 2012 2:11 pm I don't think it's "teen-speak." I think it's "Dick Grayson-speak." Or maybe I like it because I talk exactly the same way.

February 17, 2012 4:48 pm I'm not a huge Ant Man fan, but the fact that he made a mistake and will spend the rest of his fictional life trying to get past it is an interesting aspect of his character. He feels bad (as opposed to, say, Chris Brown), and that makes him marginally more acceptable. Flaws make characters interesting. This is why I don't read any Captain America, Spider-Man or Thor: they lack flaws (Peter comes the closest, but in the end he always does everything just right, which is still boring). The character of Hank Pym may, if the past is any indication, be around for another 50 years, staying the same age and emotional maturity. The fact that he will carry his regret with him for the rest of my life, and probably the rest of my son's (if copyright law continues the way it has been), makes this character more nuanced and interesting than a hundred Mary Sue Peter Parkers or Wish Fulfillment Tony Starks. He is a C-list character, which means that he can afford to be more nuanced. A-list characters, just like main characters on TV shows, can't afford to be, nor can they afford to change much, because fans react badly to that kind of thing. Like I said, I'm generally agnostic on the character, but this aspect (not the wife-beating: the stories that came after) make him, for me, a more engaging character that most in the Avengers corner of the Marvel stable.

February 14, 2012 12:07 am New continuities *are* confusing for people. That's why Batman: the Animated Series, Batman: Arkham Asylum and the Batman comic book all have exactly the same tone, history, expectations, character and rules for behavior. Otherwise, it would be too much and no one would buy the newest of them, the video game, if it was different from the others. Absolutely true. If people are confused by multiple Earths (as Karen Berger was in 1985), then your feelings are true and valid. Personally, I'm confused by math, which is why no one ever asks me to do any, and I have never gotten any value out of trying to wrap my head around basic addition and multiplication. Whew. I'm sure that it will be fine, because if people are confused, they won't buy it and commercial success is always a perfect arbiter of quality. This is why I'm glad that crappy comics like My Boyfriend Thor and Captain Britain and Some Other People and SWORDS in SPACE were cancelled, because they must have been very, very bad. Because they were confusing. And confusing things are bad. Like math. And different continuities. Thankfully, Scott Snyder's Batman comic is exactly like the Adam West show. Otherwise, I'm not sure I'd understand that it was Batman.