Spike1138

March 2, 2012 11:09 am I don't get it - shouldn't he be really old? He doesn't look old. How come he isn't old?! Earth-2? The hell, you say... That ain't no Earth-2 I recognise...

March 1, 2012 5:51 pm The thing is, at what point does a character or a work of fiction become folklore? How ingrained and incorporated into the Zeitgeist does a story or a character have to become before in becomes part of the cultural grammar and such common currency that it becomes part of the venacular? I'm sure that's where Alan is probably coming from, when you consider his neopagan, shamanistic view of authors and creators as storytellers. If a character can be both an original piece of intellectual property, a brand essentially, AND an aspect of the popular consciousness, a trope even, then at what point do they begin taking on the status of fairy tales? It's not when they get turned into a Disney movie , that's for sure... Disney in their golden era certainly adapted every bit of public domain folklore and every European folklore they could lay their hands on, knocked out their own remix of it, stamped their copyright on it and moved on without worrying about it. Sometimes, it's just out and out folklore and legend (as with Robin Hood), sometimes it's a traditional fairy tale that everyone just *knows* and nobody really wrote it (like Snow White or Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty) and sometimes we know the names of the people who first wrote them down, usually long dead, but they were probably just writing down the traditional stories other people had told to them, as is the case with stories attributed to people like Haans-Christian Aanderson (Little Mermaid) and the Brothers Grimm. You can't *own* characters and concepts like Snow White or Robin Hood, even if you know who first created them or put them on paper - if everyone has an idea of those characters and stories in their head, everyone has created their own version in their head and they belong to everyone, by virtue of the fact that they are endemic and ubiquitous in the culture. In the same way, (almost) everyone knows that Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes. And even though almost straight away, they began doing things to him and Watson that are completely removed from Conan Doyle's original work - after the first couple, the Basil Rathbone films timeshifted to then-present day Blitz-ravaged London, 1940, as opposed to the 1890s so Holmes and Watson could battle Nazi spies and saboteurs - the character himself is iconic and unbreakable. Anything that's been around longer than Mickey Mouse and is still recognised as an identifiable story or character rather than just a trope is similarly unbreakable and unassailable and thus belongs to everyone in that way, even if legally, that isn't always true. Which, I happen to know, was a key element of the notion underpinning Alan's thinking when he came up with LoEG, and you see it a lot in his other work as well to some extent in things like Promethea, 1963 and even Supreme to a greater or lesser extent.  If all these characters exist within and inhabit the collective unconsciousness of our culture, they occupy the same space and there's therefore no reason why they meet up and have adventures.  When you get into the post-Mickey Mouse era of 1928 or so (for anyone who doesn't know, the lifetime of US copyright ownership on a given work gets extended, like clockwork, every time that the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, Steamboat Willy, is about to lapse into the public domain, which would potentially mean that Mickey himself becomes legally owned by anyone who wants to make use of the character - thanks, Sonny Bono), things begin to get legally tricky, even if the psychology underpinning doesn't... Something which, in one of my favourite bits of Alan's writing, he decided to have a great deal of fun with in The Black Dossier.... Now, no-one owns Robin Hood.  No one really owns Sherlock Holmes, even though we know the name of the man who created him. He belongs to everyone, he's such an established part of the public consciousness. BUT someone (or some collection of people) DOES own James Bond.  And to that, I say:- Bollocks.  No they don't, don't be silly. "James Bond" is shorthand for "spy" in the minds even of people who've never read a Bond novel or never seen a Bond movie (which isn't that many, because apparently, half the population of the entire globe has seen at least one Bond movie, I read somewhere.) Regardless of who *legally* owns James Bond (Kevin McClory has a great deal to answer for, there), in reality, no-one owns James Bond, he's part of modern folklore, along with Indiana Jones, that's why they get spoofed so often.  The "nasty little thug" and potential rapist "Jimmy" in the Black Dossier is a far more accurate and honest re-use of the frankly abhorrent Bond of Flemming's early novels than Roger Moore getting laid in zero gravity on a space shuttle, orbiting a world that contains indistructable giant mutes with metal teeth, hovercraft gondolas and Space Marines with laser rifles. And yet, Campion Bond's family embarrassment "Jimmy" is named only in a circumspect, tongue in cheek way, since one of these versions was produced by someone authorised who "owns" James Bond, whereas the other is not, and their version is therefore the only "real" one. Of course, if you asked Grant Morrison about this, as with Batman, he'd no doubt say that they're *both* real, (both in continuity and in the sense of being actually REAL people) just branching off into different vibrational planes and quantum realities, which is why their lives don't make any sense unless view from up really close. Which may be part of the reason why Alan hates him. But he may be right. James Bond remains James Bond, in spite of the Space Marines. Dorothy Gale will always be Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, Alice will always be the girl who fell down the rabbit hole, and Peter Pan's bossy girlfriend whose name no one can ever remember will always be the bossy, humourless woman who comes into his life, makes him tidy up, and guilts him into growing up by raining all over his carefree bachelor lifestyle by telling him he needs to be more responsible and start acting like a man. You can't own the "bossy girlfriend" character, it's a trope, it's timeless. Even if, in this case, someone actually does... And, bizarrely but true, Wendy Darling is, in fact owned by Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital Trust. (even though every child in Britain can tell you what a "Wendy House" is, despite never having read Peter bloody Pan...

February 13, 2012 1:38 pm "As the saying goes, in all humor there's truth," said the attorney, Devin McRae. "And also, I think from my client's perspective, Mr. Kirkman is clearly speaking from experience." How lucky we are that the justice system works so swiftly in the future now that we've abolished all lawyers. Oh wait.... three years too early for that... Damn.

February 13, 2012 1:25 pm Is it possible that Image comics and the imprints and titles that have spun out of it have caused more and complex, increasingly bitter and divisive lawsuits over creator rights in it's short history than Marvel and DC put together? And if so, isn't it ironic? Don't 'cha think?

February 13, 2012 1:18 pm Different Earth-2, dude. There have been at least three, now. Not including the one in JLA: Earth-2 (which was in fact Antimatter Luthor's name for the main DCU / New Earth when he first discovered it in his dimension) Migraine time!

February 13, 2012 1:15 pm By the way, the passage on Wikipedia which explains the nature of the Power Girl of the post-Infinite Crisis pre-New 52 Earth-2 is the single most convoluted and confusing passage of short text I have read in my entire life. It's Joyceian. It's like reading a random page from Finnegan's Wake after taking a non-stop five day binge on Crystal Meth and bourbon with no food.

February 13, 2012 1:10 pm That certainly isn't the post-Infinite Crisis Earth-2, nor is it the pre-Crisis Earth-2. Something Barry Allen did in Flashpoint by running very fast certainly futzed with it somehow. That's as well as erasing the Vertigo Earth and the Wildstorm Earth and folding them into the new New Earth. Which means that the ominiversal balance established from 52 through Sinestro Corps War and Final Crisis doesn't work anymore. Which is infuriating, because I was just starting to understand it. The basic idea there was that there were actually 53 Earths - New Earth / Earth-0 and 52 parallel Earths resting on top of it in different vibrational planes. We know that this model survived Final Crisis and was still in force up until three issues prior to Flashpoint, because Hot Pursuit was able to show Barry a holographic representation of it. That doesn't work anymore. And since the removal of any one Earth was supposedly to cause a complete collapse of the entire multiverse (or omniversal orarry), why hasn't it? Is it something to do with Barry and his connection with Final Crisis, or even his ability to vibrate himself into parallel Earths at will pre-Crisis? Please God, don't make this in any way relate to the Speed Force, my brain will explode. Thank goodness Grant Morrison is still in the mix somewhere so he can explain - is the multiverse collapsing now because of Barry Allen, does he now some how have Earth Prime "authoring" powers write things in and out of existence like the pre-Crisis Carey Bates of Earth Prime (and indeed Superboy Prime.... yikes) and if so, does this mean that anything is now reversible. And if so, does that mean we can now have Oliver Queen back, please? And can someone please make John Stewart's character make sense now, he doesn't have a past anymore.

February 10, 2012 7:42 pm So.... Hang on, no, wait.... Flashpoint changed the history of Earth-2 as well...? But how... And why...? And hang on, if Flashpoint supposedly folded in both the Vertigo Earth and the Wildstorm Earth back into Earth-0/NewEarth, then does that mean that the Multiversal Orrary of 52 parallel Earths founded on the original lodestone of Earth-0 from Final Crisis are now two short? So does that now mean that there is now one original New New Earth (Earth-0) with only 50 parallel Earths? Or did they get replaced by something else? Or did their populations and histories just vanish and get folded into New New Earth, leaving the Earths themselves empty and depopulated? How the hell does that work??

February 8, 2012 4:07 pm Chibs from Sons of Anarchy would be perfect. Thinking back, Butcher's dialogue is always fairly London/cockney jack-the-ladish, but I don't think anywhere it's ever explicitly stated that he's English. Butcher's an ex-para who served on the streets of Belfast and holds St Patrick's day and Irish Americans in New York largely in contempt, which is consistent with a working class Scottish Protestant background; a great many of the army and SAS squaddies in Belfast were recruited from that background and the actor that guy that plays Chibs is perfect for it. There's a scene I remember where SoAMCRO has been stopped and surrounded by Northern Irish police on the take and Chibs removes his sunglasses, walks slowly and deliberately up to the lead cop, spits at his feet and looks him directly in the eye as he calls him a "Dirty.... loyalist... Bastard..." - that's Butcher!

February 8, 2012 3:56 pm Russell Crowe is NOT Butcher. He's a laughing stock here in Britain, not least because his accent in Robin Hood was so ridiculous and totally all over the shop. Henry Rollins - he would struggle to persuade you he's English, but he looks exactly right, like a double-hard bastard and he can perfectly convey the psychotic cruelty and placid calm that Butcher swings between. Paddy Considine - he'd be perfect, check out his performance in Dead Man's Shoes. Ray Winstons, in a heartbeat, if he was 25 years younger. Jason Statham would be bloody excellent. Perhaps Tom Sizemore at a push, only he ain't that healthy.