That is hilarious, and very Deadpool! Love how they are handling that character!
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And yet, they still often manage to make the heroes relatable!
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This is where I think DC went wrong. They seem to go for very “heroic” heroes, where Marvel heroes can be jerks, drunks, antisocial assholes, etc. You know, like all the rest of us. I remember in the 70s reading Xmen (my gateway drug) and really identifying with them as outcasts, misunderstood, bullied just like me. I always pictured Beast as myself. DC heroes, other than The Swamp Thing, just did nothing for me.
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Yeah, they’re okay… but other than anything Alan Moore did or much of Vertigo, DC doesn’t do much for me either… One thing I’ve been meaning to read is Red Son, though, which has an interesting twist to the superman story. Other wise, I’ll stick with Marvel or indie comics…
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Maybe this was why I dug Ambush Bug as a kid. I tried reading other DC comics and the heroes were all so… heroic, un-flawed, and boring. I didn’t get much out of reading about gods. Reading about a chaotic, messed-up, self-doubting weirdo who played havoc with the comic book universe was way more fun.
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No one ever thinks they’re the bad guy…
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“How would Superman’s ethical code be different if baby Kal-El had been raised in the Soviet Union instead of Kansas” is an interesting idea to explore, but an even more interesting one would be “how would Superman’s views on ‘Truth, Justice and the American Way’ be different if he’d been a DARK-skinned alien baby growing up in Kansas during the Jim Crow era instead of a light-skinned alien baby growing up in Kansas during the Jim Crow era?”
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I had a friend whose favourite is the Hulk, because growing up he had anger issues and could relate. He’s fine now, but that relatable role model really counts.
I grew up loving Wonder Woman, and that made it easier for me to come out to my brother, a big Clint Eastwood fan (movies, not his politics); we both appreciate Truth and Justice and question violence, but from different places.
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It is now redirecting to this
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I can relate. I grew up bigger than most, fairly athletic and assumed to be dumb. When I sometimes demonstrated I actually was smarter than I was big, they could not figure out where to pigeon hole me, and so kinda tossed me aside, since I didn’t fit the stereotypes. Always wanted to be able to hang from the ceiling by my feet though. Cracked my head a couple times trying!
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OH, I like that. You should write that story and pitch it to DC!
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Absolutely. Also, can I request Denzel as his adoptive father in the movie? Because he’s always awesome.
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I think we’d probably all be better off if I left that job to someone like Ta-Nehisi Coates.
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A solid plan, though like many of us, he’s a marvel guy through and through.
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Same here.
My go-to superheroes growing up were WW, Superman, Spiderman and the Hulk.
When I was a teen, I got into XMen and the Avengers.
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Marvel and DC comics were harder to come by in the UK way back when, but I remember Spidey quite fondly as he was more common, like Hulk and Superman.
I grew up on British comics like 2000AD, then standalone series like The Invisibles or League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, then the superhero stuff more recently. I still have little idea who many of the minor characters are, I started late.
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Mmm, for better impact, somewhere in the South would be better. Kansas, I don’t believe they had nearly as many Jim Crow laws as elsewhere. IIRC Education was the primary aspect the laws applied to.
I want to say this concept was looked at in short story somewhere… Only during the time of slavery.
Hrm - can’t find it. Must be making stuff up.
There is a black superman in Earth 23. And of course the Superman stand in after Doomsday, Steel.
Also re-Superhero death - it used to mean something until it didn’t. I know Jean-Grey to Dark Pheonix was a big deal at the time. And the Death of Superman sorta opened the flood gates for more writers to try to pull this BS.
And then you have the deal where comics are less beholden to the past, and constantly are rebooting, creating new stories in the multiverse etc. So someone like Jason Todd is still dead in some places, and the Red Hood in other.
One character they haven’ resurrect is Marvel’s Captain Marvel. They had a pretty hard hitting story about him dying of cancer in the 80s. While there have been some “flash back” stories, I believe they have kept him dead.
ETA _ OK - here was the story I was thinking of. It wasn’t Superman, but a derivative.
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I had never heard of Icon, but the clips in the article make me want to go find it. Thank you!
Here’s my story arc pitch:
Same origin story of the original 1938 issue (putting his arrival on Earth some time prior to 1920), but this version of Kal-El is a dark-skinned alien who is fostered by a black rural family. The “limited” Jim Crow laws in Kansas allow him to spend his early years with a childishly optimistic view of humanity and his potential despite the occasional nervous warnings from his adoptive parents.
Then, sometime in his teens, young Clark heads takes a trip down to Mississippi to help out some extended family of the Kents. A series of events including an attempted lynching by local bigots open Clark’s eyes to the true scope of the horrors of racism. He returns to Kansas frustrated and angry, and realizes even the “limited” segregation of his own state is an insult to the humanity he can no longer tolerate.
With his new purpose cemented and his powers growing ever stronger, Clark sets out on his mission not to defend “The American Way” but to redefine it—by force if necessary.
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I don’t think making it sustainable is the idea.
In the movie he’s pretty clear about things being cyclical. He talks about ecosystems needing periodic depopulation. And clearly thinks the entire universe needs one right now.
Taken that way whatever ecological chaos comes out of it is sort of the point. Civilizations will collapse, species will go extinct. But in the long term everything will stabilize. Biodiversity will spike. And the smaller sentient population will have “more resources” to go around.
It’s basically evolutionary catastrophism. Or more charitably militant punctuated equilibrium.
If you look at Earth’s history life is pretty fucking durable. We’ve had mass die offs along the way where not just 50% of living individuals died. But 80% of all species died out in a relatively short time scale. And not only did life keep going, but there were huge bursts of speciation, and overall biomass on the planet after.
Thanos is essentially making himself the evironmental stress. The catastrophe. At universal scale.
Also it’s pretty clear he’s kind of out of his skull. Since as he tells us this was his first suggestion when his planet ran into a eccological collapse problem. Not colonising other planets to spread their species over a larger series of ecosystems, not geoengineering, not living in space ships. Killing 50% of his own species (at least, maybe he wanted to kill the kitties and fishes too).
The movie actually does a fairly good job of humanizing him, while still making it clear he’s fucking wrong. And I don’t think we’re neccisarily supposed to think he’s thought it through, that it would work, or that it’s even neccisary. He’s basically sociopath Jor-El. Instead of " we can fix this if we act now, or at least we can move". It’s “can’t fix it, don’t try, KILL”.
Not just really into death. But trying to impress the physical embodiment of death because he LURVS her so hard.
Hilariously Death is in love with Deadpool and continually rebuffs Thanos. Killing half the universe didn’t work to impress her.
They needed to do something else with him because even as much as I like comic book ridiculous. That mostly works in the comics at this point because it’s hilarious and cartoonish. It’s primarily played for humor these days. And it probably wouldn’t fly in anything but a comedy.
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