Comic book suggestions bleg

First, a confession: I don't buy comics. I know, there goes my street cred. By 'comics,' though, I mean regular monthly issues of ongoing series. I prefer stand-alone graphic novels, limited series, or trade paperbacks (the comics industry term for volumes collecting a single story arc, usually of 4 to 8 issues, from an ongoing series).

That started to change around this time last year. For the first time. I decided I really wanted to pick up a series as it comes out rather than waiting for the collected volume: Hellboy in Hell #1!

Hellboy is such a great character. As Anung Un Rama, he was born to be the harbinger of the world's destruction and leader of the armies of hell, a monstrous Dark Age villain. Instead, Hellboy prefers to be more like a Golden Age hero, simple and chaste and uncomplicated... if he can get away with it. It's a great dynamic.

I also love Mike Mignola's art. It's difficult for me to explain why; aesthetic preferences aren't something I understand very well, even in myself. But something about the sharp angles, the extremes of light and dark, and the moody scenery really draw me in.

I bought the first four issues, and am excited to pick up #5 tomorrow!

At first, I thought this was the only comic that could convince me to pick up the regular issues. Then I heard about Sandman: Overture. For those of you that don't know, The Sandman was a series written by Neil Gaiman from 1989 to 1996, and is one of the best ongoing comic series ever made. I read the entire collected volumes through the public library last year, and it blew me away. When I heard that Gaiman and artist J.H. Williams III were writing a new 6-issue bimonthly series starting in October, there was no way I wasn't going to pick it up.

I've picked up a few other stray issues here and there trying to find more regular comics to follow, but so far nothing I've wanted to spend $3 or $4 on every month. A tight budget and specific tastes will do that, I suppose. Aquaman has a new writer at the end of the month, and I already know I like the artists, so I'll be trying that out, but beyond that I'm not sure where to look next.

Most of my current collection of trade paperbacks are from the 1980s--Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Mike Grell--and a few others with deep writers like Mark Waid. I like Paul Dini and Bruce Timm's Batman animation (but who doesn't?). I like Darwyn Cooke. I'm more of a DC guy than Marvel, although I really liked Chris Claremont's and Joss Whedon's X-Men and J. Michael Straczynski's Thor. The Walking Dead is fantastic, at least in collected form.

The point of all this, my friends, is that I'm looking for another monthly to pick up in December. I'd like to hear from any of you who have tried out recent titles. What are your favorites, and why? Know of anything that sounds like it would be my style? I'd like to try it out. Help me catch up to the new century in comics!

Some Comic Creators Don't Want Your Money

Gail Simone will go Red Sonja on the next
fool who says comics aren't for women.

Not if you're a woman, that is. A group of well-known comic creators made comments at a panel discussion about how women are neither the target audience nor the protagonists of superhero stories, and to the extent they're in the stories at all horrifying things that happen to them aren't that big a deal.

I'll give you a second to finish your epic eye roll.

Here's Gerry Conway, known for creating the Punisher and killing-off Gwen Stacy, among his accomplishments:

I think it’s a mistake to sort of, like, pigeonhole superheroes, or to add so much to superheroes that you’re missing the fact it’s a genre within itself. It’s like saying, ‘Why are there no medieval stories about female knights?’ Because there was only one, you know, Joan of Arc. … It’s an inherent limitation of that particular genre, superheroes.

How the guy who invented Punisher doesn't know that these stories are made up, and therefore can be whatever people want, is really beyond me.

We also have Mark Millar, who wrote one of my favorite comics, Superman Red Son:

The ultimate [act] that would be the taboo, to show how bad some villain is, was to have somebody being raped, you know? [...] I don’t really think it matters. It’s the same as, like, a decapitation. It’s just a horrible act to show that somebody’s a bad guy.

Wait, what? If it's the same as a decapitation, why not use decapitation? Just to mix it up, keep the frivolous violence from becoming stale? I think Laura Hudson (@laura_hudson) responded best: 

If you don't understand how a rape scene is different from non-sexual violence, psychologically and culturally, you shouldn't be writing one. That's not just going to affect your writing, it's going to contribute to a culture where rape is endemic, misunderstood and even tolerated.

Now, I like darker & edgier comics. I've been known to enjoy Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Mike Grell, and a host of others. But if you're not going to treat the darker subject matter with the seriousness the topics deserve, it's not edgy. It's tawdry.

Finally, there's this gem from Todd McFarlane, creator of Spawn (Image comics represent!):

[...] the odd character that is a minority that works is the one that is just a good strong character. They've tried to do minority characters and bring that label and that surrounding [debate] into it. You're aware that you're reading a minority comic book. I think it's wrong.

Crap, all this time they've been trying to make female and minority characters, and they forgot that they have to be good characters, too! It's a good thing we have McFarlane to clue us in. Seriously, though, the implication is that a straight white male character is inherently more likely to be a good character. It might be the case that it's easier for straight white male writers to do a good job with straight white male characters. But to suggest, even slightly, that this has anything to do with the limitations of minority characters and not the limitations of the straight white male writers is pretty ridiculous.

Sometimes I'm a little embarrassed to be a fan of superhero comics.

Comics of the gods?

Complex morality / theology? Check.

Jonathan Ryan has a series of blog posts about DC's current crossover event, Trinity War (part 1, part 2, part 3).

This “event” contains a TON of profound discussion points. How did evil get into the world? What is the cure? How does God play into all this? How will people, including super people, deal with all the implications of it? How can evil have a destructive affect even among those trying to do “good”? [¶] This is what I love about Geoff Johns, the writer of this series. He is not afraid to go after theological and philosophical discussion.

Now, I have to confess that I haven't been reading this series. I'm not as awestruck as some by Geoff Johns (although I do agree that team books are where he does his best work), and I've not gotten into DC's new 52 much. But the post was enough to get a pastor friend of mine interested in reading the series, so you might find it worth the read. I do appreciate that Ryan considers comic-book crossovers to be major cultural events:

You know what I don’t get? I don’t understand how major religious sites have NOT done many stories about this comic book run. I’m really gobsmacked by it. This is a huge cultural event that is addressing MAJOR theological issues. And…..barely a peep.

They've certainly got Ryan's number, and probably a lot of others, too. The best comics I've ever read were fun and action-packed on the one hand, but dealt with deep, complex themes and moral issues on the other. Good comics should be able to do both (as should good comics movies, which is why I'll take The Dark Knight over Iron Man any day). According to Ryan, "What we have is a full on theological debate going on in a comic book; Sin’s destruction, corrupting affects and how it affects the whole world." Bring it on.

A Return to Blogging

Superman Returns?

After a few years without blogging on this page, I've decided to return. My intention is to put up links to articles, blog posts, and videos I find interesting. I'll also post my own thoughts on topics of interest from time to time. I'm planning to deal less with economics-related topics; I'll be leaning more heavily on topics like education, truth claims, mechanics and mystics, comic, and other fun tags from my new label cloud. (If you really want to hear my econ commentary, head over to my more academic blog, Subliminally Unemployed.)

As the first return post, I'll offer a movie review (poster provided) complete with spoilers below the jump break. But before I do, let me open this post with a request for requests: whether you're returning to this blog with me or starting it new, what would you like me to write about? Any articles you'd like me to comment on or share? Post your requests in the comments, and welcome to Metadoxy!

Life-Saving Immorality?

Your taxpayer dollars at work.

Brad DeLong thinks that taxing people in order to prevent an asteroid from destroying the human race is entirely appropriate and moral. He quotes Bob Murphy, on the other hand, as disagreeing:

[T]here is a general moral prohibition against violating another person's rights.... Volokh's... point should be obvious: Just because an asteroid threatens to destroy all human life, that alone is not sufficient to justify violating people's rights. [...] The reason DeLong finds Volokh's views "insane" is that Volokh has elevated his precious political principles to such a height that they trump the survival of the human race. What an ideologue!

DeLong summarily rejects this sort of thinking, summarizing his view as follows:

[...] the sabbath was made for humanity; humanity was not made for the sabbath.

Commentor Daniel Kuehn has a lot to say in response to this position, and particularly to the logic of the position:

If you start where they do - axiomatically defining what a "right" is and defining "immorality" as being the violation of that right - then both the Volokh and Murphy version of the argument follows naturally.

The problem is not the logic itself - that logic is simple enough. The problem is their decision to apply that logic to this circumstance. Deductive logic is a tool - we have long since passed the point where we can claim that it deserves any deeper epistemological priority. [...]  Logic is not a tool for them, as most careful thinkers know it should be. For them it is a path, not to truth contingent on assumptions [I would prefer to refer to this as consistent reasoning or logical validity - N], but to some deeper absolute truth. [...] So to expand on your concluding thought, deductive logic is a tool for humanity, and not the other way around.

Tad Brennan points out that, far from being a primarily political debate, the conflict here is between purely deontological ethics and purely consequentialist ethics, and that the latter lends itself to some problems, as well:

If you eschew lexically-ordered side-constraints, then you have a very pure form of consequentialism. And that's not a bad thing! Some of my best friends espouse pure consequentialism! 

But pure consequentialism can generate some pretty repellent hypotheticals of its own (catalogued by Bernard Williams and others: false conviction of the innocent; harvesting organs from the unwilling; torture of children; etc. etc.).

When people recoil from the consequences of pure consequentialism and consider adopting categorical prohibitions on, e.g., the torture of children, this does not seem to me ipso facto insane.

Finding the right balance of ethical views for the Christian is never as simple and easy as it seems, which is why Christian maturity is a big deal. But this is a circumstance when, again, I don't think Christianity came come down on the side of moral libertarianism.

PS - For those looking for a quick summary of deontology vs. consequentialism in terms we can all understand, may I suggest Mark White, aka The Comics Professor, on the morality of Captain America, Iron Man, and Spiderman!

Business vs. Creativity

I've got yer business model right here!

[W]hen I wrote comics, I lived in the moment, letting my stories tell me what to write about, riffing off the zeitgeist month by month.

This is the main thrust of a short post by Steve Englehart regarding the creative freedom that comic book writers had back before all the blockbuster movies were based on comic book superheroes. Englehart remembers the good ol' days fondly, as we all tend to do when waxing nostalgic: "Once we creators were Marvel or DC." He is less impressed with the modern comics industry:

Today, the comics companies are top-heavy with editorial interference.[...] They expect writers to give them synopses for the next twelve issues in their series, so that when the writer finally gets to that twelfth issue, the material is so old and stale that he might as well just blow his brains out, for all the satisfaction he can derive from it.

I find it pretty common that creative-types bristle when their activity is governed by business-types. Is this because they have different ideas about what customers really want? Or is it because they want their products to satisfy different people with fundamentally different tastes? Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok have a paper on the topic (which I've mentioned before) that takes this latter view. This "different targets" view seems to imply that, as we develop technology that lets us mass produce goods that used to be produced by artisans, we should see see the influence of creative-types fall and the influence of business-types rise.

On the other hand, I know of many who would support the idea that the goal may be the same, but there are multiple ways of trying to satisfy a given target audience, and creative-types will have very different ideas on this than business-types. Sir Ken Robinson would say that we live in a world where we neglect and ignore creativity to our detriment. This "different techniques" view leaves open why one group would gain more influence than the other, but it also suggests that it's possible to reverse the trend if enough people are willing to try. No such reversal seems possible in the "different targets" view.

So which is it? Was Steve Englehart driven out of comics by the inexorable market forces acting on a good that is easy to mass produce? Or is his lament a rally cry to take the power from the suits and give it back to the creators? Or is there a consistent view in between with its own set of important implications?

How to AVOID Deception with Statistics

For those who find my blog interesting, if you're not already reading PHD Comics, you should be. Here's one reason why:

The first one is especially important. When a candidate's approval rating drops by 3%, it didn't drop.

Special Wednesday Edition

Sometimes I come across something so self-aware that, by virtue of this blog's tag line, I have to post it here:

via xkcd.

Cartoon'd

From MadMen Yourself.

Origins

If you want to know someone, what question do you ask? "How do you do?" "What do you do?" "Where are you from?" A friend of mine takes a novel approach: "So, what's your story?"

To know someone, it's not enough to get some facts together. You need to understand what their life has been like. Why they choose what they choose and do what they do. And to know that you need to know how they came to be what they are.

The same is true for getting to know characters, and the why and how are especially true of superheroes. People in relatively ordinary situations reveal themselves over time, their quirks and habits congealing into a coherent identity. But the whole point of superheroes is that they are not in ordinary situations.

Superheroes are characters, just like in any other type of story. The best heroes are not those who are very different from the rest of us, but those who are the same. What makes this kind of story work, and why I enjoy them so much, is it puts relatively ordinary people in unthinkable situations, forcing them to grow and change into who they really are. In a superhero story there can be good guys, bad guys, and a whole lot of degrees in between, but the one thing no one can be is wishy-washy. Superheroes are born of extraordinary constraints, and constraints create choices.

I think it's because these kinds of stories are so tied to the constraints that makes the origin story so central to superheroes. It's not so much that the fact that this person can do things no one else can demands justification; we encounter uniqueness in people all the time, and it's not like other movies don't exaggerate reality. No, we need to see the origins of superheroes because the things that bind them to be heroes are why the choose what they do. The origin story is the superhero's story.

Just in case you aren't convinced yet, consider this: the fact that Peter Parker got bitten by a radioactive/genetically engineered/totemically possessed spider is not why he does what he does. Peter Parker is Spider Man because when he tried to just be a dude, his uncle was murdered. Peter believes what he does about the spider because he experienced what he did about his family. With or without magic pixie dust, that story would have been the origin of something.

A few weeks ago I found a 5 issue origin story for the superhero Daredevil at the thrift store, written by Frank Miller no less (you may know him for the original graphic novel of 300, as well as his directing work on Sin City and The Spirit). Really well done. I'm sure it helps that Miller was a regular writer for Daredevil in the early 80s, but he seems to get why the character does what he does. Miller knows Daredevil's story. And most really don't get it, 'cuz was that movie ever bad!

All this is to say, I guess, that I really like superhero stories, especially origin stories. I like getting what a character is about, knowing what they'll do next because I know who they are (as opposed to be because of a rehashed plot). I'd love to see movies of characters like Thor, Punisher, The Spectre, Daredevil, Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Green Arrow, and a whole bunch of others. But the creators have to know the characters, understand what they are about. And to do that, the creators have to be able to tell the origin story. So here's hoping for a host of awesome Superhero Origin movies in the future!

Here's some good (or at least entertaining) origin movies / comics for you:
Batman Begins
Unbreakable
Batman: Year One
Daredevil: The Man Without Fear
The Matrix
Darkman
Iron Man
Heroes: Season 1
Here's Hoping on the Wolverine Movie!

PS- This made me laugh.

If Rorschach were Me... or Very Confused

Roar-Shock's Journal, Easter 2009:

Still getting used to electronic journaling. Wanted to comment on previous entry, but couldn't find archives. Library system must have glitches. Hurm.

Had trouble with Shock-mobile today. Overheated engine, not enough coolant. Own fault, stupid. Big Tony came to help though. Good friend. I know I can be difficult sometimes...

Good day otherwise. Spent day at church and with family. Didn't waste any criminal scum today. [insert comment insensitive to minority group here.]

Wife is pregnant, due any day now. Might not write anything for a while. Or will write more, with deep fatherly insights. Insight # 1: Don't stay up too late. Sleep is your friend. The kind who gets busy doing other things and forgets to call sometimes.

Went to Good Friday service. Moving. Good to be drawn back to the cross. 'Beautiful, Scandalous Night' is a good song.

Still impressed with library computers. Never have to log on to them or any sites, even blogger. Always ready. Not sure why everyone wishing me happy birthday last week on that facebook called me 'Diego.' Not my name, or birthday. Thought was appreciated, though.

Just checked website 'twitter.' "derekwebb: just called 911 to report 3 gunshots with a block of my house." Scratch previous comment on wasting criminals today. Night is young.

What I'm Watching

OK, I'm sure everyone reading this has picked up on the wave of popularity, but I'm hooked on the latest interwebs craze: Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. This particular bit of genius is brought to you by Joss Whedon. His idea was to have a professional television experience without the "middle-man" of the major studios.

Doctor Horrible has superheroes. It has showtunes. It's campy, but not too campy. It's up there with Homestar Runner and All Your Base as far as I'm concerned.

Nothing else interesting to say. I might have something after my core exams next week (pretty intimidating, huh?). If not, you may have to wait for the next zombie apocalypse installment (teaser: zombies become less funny when children are involved).