Zero-G

 "With Great Power" Series  No Responses »
Apr 302012
 

This is it, the last one, the last hour of the party as everyone winds down, drunk, and tired of blogging and reading blogs, and words and letters and maybe they are thinking they’ll just go home and do some math for a while.

 

Ok, on to ZERO G.

This refers to the inevitable space issues where heroes have just about done everything they can do here on earth and have taken to the stars because that is the natural progression of things, right? You’ll be hard pressed to find any of your long running standard hero stories who haven’t at least taken a space ship up once or twice, forget actually flying there.

Like I said, a lot of it has to do with needing somewhere to go with a story. When you’ve got Superman, doer of all things super, your believability starts wearing a little thin when you’ve thrown every super genius, alien hybrid government super soldier at him, and there are only so many of those you can make up before you’re all like, damn, how many people are trying to take over the world anyway?

This is why Season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is often cited as the worst of the bunch. Before that she fights The Master, crazy super vampire Nosferatu looking guy whose prophesied to kill her – and does. Then she fights her boyfriend, crazy hot sociopath vampire Angel. She fights the Mayor, who is my favorite baddy. Funny and scary and gets her where she hurts – by turning her teammate against her. He ascends to a giant snake demon thing and she gets to blow up the school to kill it. Likewise, she has to fight Faith, another slayer and once friend. And then the government super soldier program. All of this culminating in going toe-to-toe with a God.

After all that? She has to spend a whole season fighting three dorks with apparently a limitless expense account with e-Bay, most of which she either helped or took out in previous episodes early on in her hero career. Really? I mean, really? That’s the best they could do? For a whole season? But see, after you fight a God, where do you go from there? It’s the same problem comics have.

So, of course, instead of sending a trio of nerds to throw their collective comic book knowledge at Superman, they just sent him to another planet to deal with a new set of problems. (Alternately – watch the pun, here it comes – writers will send their heroes into an Alternate Universe, which was going to be my original “A” post, but Alliteration sounded sexier. (OMG I AM ON A ROLL.))

 

And…scene! *curtains close*

Yesterday’s Comics

 "With Great Power" Series, Comics, Superheroes  9 Responses »
Apr 282012
 

 

I’m stretching a little with the title, forgive me, Y is weird and I really wanted to talk about this subject. First, you should know that I am not an expert at comics. I know things, but I don’t know all the things, and my knowledge only begins in the mid-nineties for the most part. Lots of you might go, “no no, you’re getting it wrong,” and that’s fine. I might be. Please feel free to chime in.

Sometime, I don’t know an exact date but my gut tells me early to mid-nineties, comics started toeing their way over the standard heroes and villains and PG rating to explore edgier, darker, sexier content and many of those people doing the exploring were independent artists and authors. These edgy, dark comics caught a foot hold and eventually led to the birth of some of the dark and edgy imprints from the big boys (Vertigo and Icon, for example, and the darker series from Image, IDW Publishing, Slave Labor Graphics, Dark Horse, etc). But before that time, the jump from yesterday’s comics to exploration of the psyche of human deprivation, you could expect your ten year old to pick up any comic and it be appropriate language and art for their age group. Comics were for kids and it was fine, sorta, if you were an adult who liked them too, but they weren’t made for you. They just weren’t.

I think, and again, I could be wrong, but I think the turning point for making darker, more haunting stories mainstream was with the publication of The Sandman series by Neil Gaiman. It had no real hero or villain, it was a serial of stories centered around a mythology and there was sex and nudity and murder and torture and the mentally unstable. There were really scary monsters (Corinthian, anyone?) and really disturbing characters, and an exploration of the literary on the medium previously solely intended for the young.

And it was gorgeous storytelling. The retelling of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Sandman #19) landed Gaiman the prestigious World Fantasy Award – the only time a comic has ever won this award. The Sandman series was originally published by DC Comics, but then was published by the Vertigo imprint, which was created by DC to primarily publish stories for mature audiences.

I like the edgy indies and stories published by the naughtier imprints of the big publishing players. I was never devoted to many of the superhero comics, here and there but I found trying to keep up with them to be exhausting – both on my psyche as a reader and on my poor college pocket book. I liked the stories I knew had an ending, even if it was a ways down the line, there was a stopping point and eventually I’d find it. As I grow older, I like the super short stories even more, a 4-10 comic run seems to be my sweet spot.

In the late 90s I discovered Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and had a love affair with anything Jhonen Vasquez penned. I was also going through my leathery goth girl phase, so you know, his boots sort of did it for me anyway. Johnny was published by Slave Labor Graphics, who also tends toward the stories that wouldn’t be appropriate for anyone who likes bright colors.

After that there was Preacher, which has some of the most graphic and gross scenes I have EVER seen on the printed page. And Roman Dirge came into my life, followed by a long and varied list of tiny print run stories with disturbing covers and beautiful storytelling. Some of which I sometimes feel I am the only one who has ever heard of them and they sleep quietly in boxes in my closet.

 

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X-Factor

 "With Great Power" Series, Superheroes  6 Responses »
Apr 272012
 

Source: http://misfitscastconfessions.tumblr.com/

In this post, the X-Factor has nothing to do with X-Men or the X-Factor team that Jean Grey (shudder) helped found.

X-Factor refers to an innocuous, unassuming THING the camera or the artist zooms us in on early in the episode, movie, or story. It’s particularly obvious in comic books because real estate goes at a prime in a comic book – there’s not enough screen time for things that don’t mean anything. So if the artist wants you to focus or notice something that seems otherwise unimpressive – a character’s stuffed teddy bear she loved as a child and just found, a first kiss, a forgotten phone, a newspaper article just visible over the character’s shoulder – these things will come into play at the climax of the story.

X-Factors are usually pretty obvious, but not always. Television shows are bad at making X-Factors seem like a surprise. Warehouse 13, Star Trek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, these shows are RIFE with X-Factor objects. Remember in the episode “Once More With Feeling,” at the beginning of the episode we see Dawn slip a necklace into her pants and then later we find out that necklace is the singing/dancing demon’s talisman? Of course they give us a little twist in that Xander’s the one who actually used the talisman, not Dawn, but still. The resolution is hidden within the X-Factor and the characters will figure it out just at the last minute.

In an episode of MISFITS, a boy working at a diner discovers he has the power over dairy products. He starts by video taping himself making milk pour into his cereal, then takes his show on the road to his diner where he makes creamer containers explode (although you can tell this isn’t America since our little creamer buckets are usually cheap non-dairy though vaguely milk like.) His power is discovered by a publicity agent and suddenly everyone knows about people with power. The misfits decide to throw their hat into the Get Famous This Can Only End Badly ring, and off they go. Nathan shoots himself in the head on national public TV while wearing a tux and standing in a glass box. Heroes they’re not.

The milk kid gets all jealousy and decides he’s going to get everyone and kill them by manipulating the dairy in their body. It’s pretty gross, actually, but there is a scene before you goes all Lactose Serial Killer on everyone where the gang is sitting around eating pizza, but Curtis isn’t having any. “I’m lactose intolerant,” he confides. And there it is. The X-Factor that will come into play once the Lactose Kid starts curdling milk in people’s brains.

The Ocean’s Eleven franchise kind of humps this trope for all its worth, which is fine because they do it really well. They tend not to zero in on their X-Factors letting your brain kind of skim over them so later you can go OMG HOW DID I NOT SEE THAT.

 

 

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Willing Suspension of Disbelief

 "With Great Power" Series, Superheroes, Topics in Writing  9 Responses »
Apr 262012
 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the term, but he didn’t invent the idea. Coleridge was a masterful poet, though, and embraced the supernatural when his fellow writers largely abandoned it. (Oh Samuel, would you have only lived forever to know my love and devotion! Our babies would have been beautiful and creative.)

Coleridge wrote, “It was agreed, that my endeavors should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetry faith.”

At the time, the supernatural was out of popular favor and science was all the rage. Where people once believed in the supernatural – honestly and totally like fairies and sprites and demons actually existed and haunted us if we weren’t careful – the world wasn’t so much falling for that anymore. Science and philosophy replaced superstition and that was that. Like how in the 60s and 70s there was a lot of politics in our literature and fiction, and not so much anymore. Coleridge introduced the idea of Willing Suspension of Disbelief to show how educated audiences could still enjoy the supernatural, even if they understood it wasn’t real. They could let go for the duration of the literary experience to be transported to someplace more sublime, and yet still come back to the world as an enlightened individual.

These days, no one is leaving milk out as gifts to the fae in hopes they won’t touch the laundry or the livestock, but we have embraced Willing Suspension of Disbelief like fervent little children who still believe in Santa Claus. We’ve increasingly made the unreal believable to help pull us into a place where we can capital B Believe, temporarily that the supernatural exists. We have giant movie theaters with surround sound and wrapping screens so we become tunnel-visioned, easily captured. Some theaters have wind machines and vibrating, shifting chairs, so you feel like you are a part of the action. Books have illustrations and playlists and characters have Twitter accounts. Video game engines are becoming so realistic that characters on screen sometimes cannot be distinguished from an actor being filmed.

But, the truth is, we don’t NEED any of those things, not when we have Willing Suspension of Disbelief – everything else  is just an accessory that makes the immersion more fun. The closer we can get to experiencing the Matrix or District 12, the happier we’ll be in general.

Authors are good at immersing us through the power engine of our imagination just fine without the tricks, and for that we can always be grateful. People want to believe. They are ready to believe.  It doesn’t take much to bewitch an audience.

But authors have to be careful. Very careful. Their made-upness has to still work within the laws of the known world. If you’re writing science fiction and you write that gravity no longer works so that your feet don’t stick to the ground and that you require fancy suits to live and move around, your world then exists three dimensionally because the ceiling is just as good as the floor, how would the world work? How would it look? Could a single room become four living spaces so that people no longer need large houses? But once you decide that gravity works differently, you must decide HOW it does work, show examples and give reasons – even if those reasons are based on Quantum Hand-Wavy Science – you must never deviate from those rules. Once set, they are for always, or unless you can come up with a very good reason why it works one way one minute and another way the next. And then you’ve got two sets of rules and you can’t ever deviate from those. And so on. Consistency and Honesty are your secret weapons.

Here’s an example of writers doing it very badly. Everyone raise your hand if you watched the television show HEROES. Keep your hands raised if you just LOVED the first season. Keep your hands raised if you liked the second season. Keep your hands raised if you even kept watching after that.

One of the problems at the core of the television show is that it didn’t understand the rules of its world and the writers kept changing their minds and no one bothered taking their Twizzlers away until they figured out what the hell they were doing. It violated itself with time travel, which is just a bad idea in any storytelling, regardless of medium or audience. Once you introduce time travel, you need specific guardrails as to how it works and how it doesn’t work and you have to explain why the past can or can’t be changed, what happens when it is changed, and why the hell the time traveling character doesn’t run around time fixing the terrible things the bad guys do anyway. And Peter? That character was a wet hot mess. He could “capture” powers from others, take them on for himself, so he had all these powers in his head which he constantly forgot he had, so he’d get into these situations but forget he could time travel, or go invisible, or have super strength, or heal people, or whatever mcguffin power he was supposed to be playing with that week. Inevitably the writers had an Oh Shit moment and retconned all his powers away so they could start over, only Syler was on his way to a Peter-like character meltdown too and someone in a back boardroom was demanding to know who green lit the decision to hire a bunch of thirteen year old comic book fans to write the script for them in the first place. Half the cast got retconned out of the story, including my favorite television moment ever when at the end of one episode a girl is with a group who invade Claire’s house, and the next episode she’s gone. No explanation. It’s as if she never existed in the first place.

The show tanked quickly, and it was no surprise. Once the audience loses their Willing Suspension of Disbelief, the story is over.

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Vicarious Retellings

 "With Great Power" Series, Storytelling, Superheroes, Topics in Writing  5 Responses »
Apr 252012
 

Vicarious Retellings are not limited to the comic book medium or even the superhero genre, but I think it bares its own post, so here we go.

An author, somewhere in history, though usually long ago, writes a story that speaks so profoundly to the universal human experience it never fades for time, but the context and details may go out of date. The author is known for this telling, this piece of canon in our literary history. It is easy to want to be that writer, penning the first Pooh stories, or fabricating Wonderland, or toasting tankards of mead with Hrothgar.

These pieces of literary canon are ripe for retellings, modernizations, sexifications, apocalyptifications, and mash-ups. Little Red Riding Hood is as honest today as it was in 1697. Our society still views girls as sexual objects who need a strong hand to keep them on the right path, are still tempted and shamed for wanting to burn brighter than a full cloaked, chaste flower. Our society still believes that girls need to be punished when they stray, more so if they enjoy themselves, still need a strong man’s protection. There are still predators out there who believe girls don’t have the right to say no.

And writers being writers, love to take these stories and retell them from their own imagination. And, I think, writers want to live for a moment at the desk of their icons.

Retellings are good, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Good retellings are good, anyway, and bad ones are bad, just like bad stories are bad and bad writing is bad. It doesn’t matter if it’s a retwirled Tristan and Isolde, or a spunky comedic Snow White. Many of these stories need to be modernized so their messages can be accessed by a new generation who desperately, desperately needs to understand the point of the wolf and the strength it takes to stray from the path.

I have three favorite comics that do this exceptionally well.

  1. Fables by Bill Willingham. Outstanding storytelling and planning, his excel spreadsheets must be a thing of beauty. Fables combines all Fables from all time and cultures, and plops them into this sort of fairy land where each prince, princess, or queen holds court over their kingdoms, each culture of fables have their own countries, but they all exist together by the laws of storytelling we writers already adhere to. Something terrible takes their world though, and they are forced to flee into ours where they live scattered and segregated and always on the run. Fables who look human get to live with humans, while those that don’t are sort of imprisoned at the Farm (or elsewhere, depending on the storyline.) Everyone has a part to play, Snow White and the Big Bad Wolf tending to be at the center of it all. There are spinoffs and more than a dozen graphic novels, all of them beautifully illustrated and exciting. The handsome Prince Charming of all the princess stories? Yeah, he’s just one guy who gets around. He’s handsome and dashing and also a scoundrel, and the ladies eventually leave him, embittered. Rose Red and Snow White are sisters at odds. The Big Bad Wolf is the sheriff. It’s sort of like the tv show Once Upon a Time, but more complex and impressive and also came first.
  2. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Oh my gosh do I love this comic series and the movie too. I love the cobbling together of the world’s greatest literary figures in this secret society that protects the world in secret. Mina Harker? She’s from Dracula. Captain Nemo. Allan Quartermain, Dr. Jekyll, Hawley Griffin (The Invisible Man). Dr. Moreau makes appearances, John Carter too (ON FREAKING MARS.) Emma Peel. Prospero. In the movie they added Tom Sawyer, which I thought was brilliant, also because he was so handsome and roguish (sigh.) I love the idea that all these literary greats exist in one world, their stories were real and EXISTED. I love that the writers had imagination enough to weave them together the way they did. Clever writers.
  3. My third favorite are actually companion graphic novels for a middle grade book series called The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor which is a sort of continuation/retelling on Alice in Wonderland. The books are phenomenal, no kidding, they are cool as hell. I highly recommend them, regardless of your age. They have that sort of timeless quality that Harry Potter and the Narnia series evokes, despite its intended age group. The books are big and can be quite dark. My favorite character, Hatter Madigan, is the queen’s personal bodyguard. When the queen’s sister, Redd, performs a coup on the royal family, Hatter Madigan gets Alyss, the Queen’s daughter, out of Wonderland and into the real world, but they are separated. Alyss quickly loses touch with Wonderland and sort of becomes Alice Liddell, the little girl who inspired Alice in Wonderland. And then the plots of the books unfold from there. But there’s like ten years between when Hatter Madigan takes Alyss to the real world and when he finds her and takes her home to save her kingdom. He spends that time searching the world for her and getting into adventure and that is where the comic comes in. They are in graphic novel form called HATTER M and are beautifully illustrated and really wonderful to read. I live Hatter, he’s too fantastic, sort of a steampunky Sherlock Holmes with a cool hat.

 

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The Unanswered Call

 "With Great Power" Series, Superheroes, Topics in Writing  5 Responses »
Apr 242012
 

Hero stories all work the same way. The hero gets a call to action and then has to make a decision. They can embrace their destiny, or they can turn their back on it. Some embrace their destiny because they understand that destiny doesn’t take no for an answer anyway. Many are strong and motivated and are out the door before the call can be placed. Some are more hesitant, but do so because the call makes them the only ones able to help, and they appreciate that. When you’ve suddenly been given the power to fly, and the call requires you to fly to save the day, it’s kind of hard to argue your place, you know?

But as often as the call is answered and embraced, it is shunned and the hero flees in the opposite direction, suffering from a desire not to disrupt the status quo of their life, or because they are afraid, or because they are too self-centered or cowed to do what is right. It’s a powerful moment when a would-be hero looks into the eyes of destiny and says, “No. I’m sorry.”

If that were the last word, though, we’d never have Star Wars. The Unanswered Call remains the most powerful force in the universe, and it is an angry, destructive force that will break a person in twain before they are even done walking away.

Obi Wan stares into Luke’s eyes and tells him of his destiny to be a Jedi Knight, the last, and Luke ought to have seen this moment for what it was. But Luke wasn’t exactly afraid – kind of but not in a cowardly way. He was afraid of leaving his aunt and uncle behind when the farm needed him. He didn’t want to disappoint them and the Call seemed so wonderfully unbelievable it was easier to do what he thought was right and take care of his family, than throw it all to the wind on some fantasy trip through the stars.

What happens? When he arrives home he finds the farm ablaze and his family murdered.

Did destiny do this? If he had accepted the call, would his family still be dead when he got home to pack his bags? Probably, because it made sense for it to happen this way, but their death had a secondary purpose in cementing the will of the hero within Luke. That being said, they had to go in order for the hero to set off.

In The Hunger Games, when Prim is called to be the tribute, Katniss answers the call like a boss. Her family actually improves marginally by her answer of the call – her mom comes out of her depression to take over the role of mother again. A fire is lit within her sister and her mother and most of her district. If Katniss hadn’t answered the call and allowed her sister to be named tribute, there is a good chance Katniss would have come home that night and discovered her mother dead from a self-inflicted wound, leaving nothing for her but her sister, and so she could then belatedly accept the call and leave Prim in Gale’s hands.

William Wallace in Braveheart refuses the call, desperate to just be a guy with a farm and a wife. Haven’t seen the movie? It goes badly.

Peter Parker is given Spidey powers and the first the he does is try to make money off of it instead of, you know, being heroic. So he goes to a gambling joint and when he tries to pick up his winnings, he’s screwed over by management. As he’s walking out of the office, a thief walks in with a gun and steals all the cash winnings from that night. Peter practically helps the guy carry his stash out, giving a great big F YOU to the dealer in revenge. Hello, Destiny calling, pick up or else.

Well, Peter doesn’t pick up. He refuses the call so blatantly he practically pees on it, just to make his point. The thief then runs out into the street and shoots Peter’s Uncle Ben, who dies tragically in Peter’s arms. (And off topic, is like the only character in comic book universe to actually die and not be retconned back to life by an asshole writer who thinks he can do it better.)

Should a hero answer the call? It doesn’t matter, not really, because one way or another he or she will pick up the phone, the only difference will be whether he goes in guns blazing or whether he’ll be emotionally damaged in some significant way for the rest of his life, which can make for a great story. And whether he’s the first kind of hero or the second is largely dependent on the personality of the hero and what he or she has to live for. Take Sam from SUPERNATURAL. It didn’t make sense for him to drop everything to go be a monster hunter when he was almost done with college and had a career ahead of him and a girlfriend he loved and wanted to marry. It was necessary to take her away in order to give him the permission he needed to leave the rest of his life behind. Sometimes answering the call makes less sense than accepting it. It just ends badly for anyone the hero has ever cared about. Or met. Or live next door to. Or passed in the hallway at school.

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Technology vs. Religion

 "With Great Power" Series, Superheroes  8 Responses »
Apr 232012
 

Here is a question.

Have you ever noticed there aren’t a lot of hero geniuses and mad scientists? There are a couple, sure, yes. But the vast majority of thinkers and inventors and designers and builders are bad guys, have you noticed? With good guys, something miraculous happens to them and they are granted God-like powers to defend the world in the name of truth and justice.

This got me thinking about the relationship between science and religion and whether there’s a little of that playing out in superhero stories. I definitely feel like there is a message being broadcast that suggests a correlation. A higher power grants miraculous gifts and a hero rises up. Man becomes greedy and uses science to give himself miraculous gifts and becomes evil and tyrannical.

Thoughts? Ideas?

Discuss.

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Secret Identities

 "With Great Power" Series, Superheroes  6 Responses »
Apr 212012
 

Yesterday’s post went up late. Check it out if you haven’t: “Retcon”

Really? Glasses?

A secret identity is like an exercise in futility. Heroes are the only ones who generally make use of secret identities because they want to maintain some semblance of normal life. They want to partake of the world without people knowing who they are. Think about those mega-million lottery winners. They will never be able to trust if people care about them for them or for the fact they’ll pick up the tab at dinner. So it goes for heroes, plus they have to then worry about anyone THEY care about being targeted. A hero has family and friends, or at least, his secret identity does. So he has to keep them safe by remaining anonymous.

But here’s the problem, as I’ve mentioned before, heroes never get a normal life, no matter how hard they try. Inevitably they have to ditch their friends and potential girlfriend to go save the helpless. They end up looking like they are having an affair instead of saving the galaxy. Their friends know they are keeping secrets from them and they won’t tolerate that long. The hero ends up unfulfilled in both of his roles. Secret Identities will give the hero nothing but heartache.

Stupid Friends

Secret Identities require the hero’s friends to be incredibly stupid. The Spirit, though not technically ‘super’, slaps on a domino mask and suddenly he’s unrecognizable by his closest friends? Clark Kent slouches a bit and knocks on a pair of glasses and no one’s like, “Wow, ever notice that Clark Kent and Superman have the exact same slick black hair, square jaw, strong nose, grim mouth, shoulders like a semi-truck and hands that could crush steel? No? Yeah me, either.”

At least Peter Parker covers his whole body when he’s in Spidey-mode, and in a world with actual, honest to God face recognition software, how do any of them stay secret?

 

Villains Wear Their Awesome with Pride

Villains never deal in secret identities because they want to take all the credit for their no-good-ness themselves. Granted, sometimes villains just drop their former personalities and lives altogether and embrace their new villain identity and that’s sort of like a secret identity, except they don’t care so much for who they left behind. Villains are proud of the work they do.

 

Follow the Batmobile

My husband and I got into a conversation about this not long ago. So in the old TV show, Batman drives his very iconic batmobile back to his batcave down that dirt road through the fake barricade sign that drops out of the way. Now, Batman uses bat shaped tracking devices all the time. Why did no villain ever reverse the trick on him and follow him back to his secret lair beneath Wayne Mansion?

 

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Retcon

 "With Great Power" Series, Superheroes  4 Responses »
Apr 202012
 

 

I’ve decided today is a good day to go all meta and introduce a little bit of irony into my blog. See, I forgot to post my “R” post friday like a good girl. It sat in my draft folder, waiting patiently, but I just forgot, right? So this morning I’m going back and backdating it, undoing my forgetful past by making it seem like the post was always there.

The irony? My “R” post is called “Retcon.”

What is “Retcon?” Retcon stands for Retroactive Continuity. The past has already happened but for whatever reason the writers go back and change what happened or how it happened or some minor but important detail.  Retconning in comics is prevalent mostly due to the fact different authors take over every time a new storyline is introduced for a new title series. Because authors like to have it their way and are loathe to be bottled into the established facts and continuity of another writer, they initiate some crazy hand-wavy storytelling and viola, they get a clean slate despite the establishment of the character’s history.

Sometimes a story is retconned to bring allow a new generation of readers to fall in love with it. This has happened with a lot of the great heroes, Superman, Spiderman, Batman, X-Men. The sheer volume of stories you’d have to track down to start reading Batman from the beginning would stop most people from even trying. So the story gets retconned for a new generation, a do-over with cell phones and computers and super-technology that didn’t exist fifty years ago. Same goes for when movies are made from established stories.

But generally I hate retconning. George Lucas earned the ire of all fandom when he forced Greedo to shoot first. We all know he didn’t, and we’re offended by the notion we’re supposed to accept it anyway because some author says so. It doesn’t matter if the author is THE AUTHOR. Once a thing becomes part of the heart and soul of a fan, it no longer belongs exclusively to the creator. You can’t mess with people’s hearts like that.

You can read about my take on the death and resurrection of Superman here.

I hate Jean Grey more than any other character in the world, save Hamlet, so I’m going to use her as my example to pick at because her retconning goes into the realm of the super ridiculous. So check it out – Jean Grey is Marvel Girl for most of her early life until 1976 when she becomes Phoenix during the events that sort of happen in the third X-Men movie. Radiation gives her immense superpowers and she plays nice for a while but the power corrupts her and she becomes Dark Phoenix and takes full advantage of her God-like powers. She even goes into space and consumes a star, mass-murdering all life in the solar system. Now that she’s gone from sweet Marvel Girl to OMG F-BOMB INSANE, the authors kill her off in spectacular, heart wrenching storytelling and thus brings the character’s story to an end.

Or does it? In 1986, Marvel decides to bring her back, but her morally reprehensible actions from the Dark Phoenix Saga makes it impossible for her to go back to being so in love with Scott Summers she’d die for him. Instead they retcon the original Phoenix Saga and after she’s exposed to radiation she lays dying and is approached by an entitity called Phoenix Force who makes her a deal. She’ll save Jean Grey’s life and the lives of her friends if Phoenix Force can take over her identity. Jean agrees and Jean is put in a healing cocoon that is then lost to time. The events of Dark Phoenix Saga goes forward unchanged and everyone believes Jean Grey, evil super-goddess, is dead. Jean wakes up when her body is healed and goes home six years later with no idea what has happened.

Jean establishes the group X-Factor and Scott Summers (Cyclops) leaves his wife and kid to go back to her, much to the displeasure of everyone in the world. Jean urges him to go home but his wife and kid are gone and sort of just accepts that and runs back to Jean like a puppy. To make Scott look like less of a bastard, his wife shows up after having made a pact with a demon and everyone finds out that she was a clone of Jean designed to breed with Scott to create a supermutant. The crazy wife and Jean have a show down and the crazy wife is killed.

THEN they decide to redo the Dark Phoenix story again, but this time Jean calls out for help to save her and her friends and Phoenix Force answers. This time instead of assuming her identity, Phoenix and Jean merge and Jean places her dying body with a bit of her soul in a cocoon and sinks her into the ocean to be later found by The Avengers.

Jean’s daughter Rachel comes from the future and freaks Jean the f-bomb out and she refuses to marry Scott, but eventually does and eventually accepts her grown daughter who she’s never given birth to into her life. Then Rachel sends Scott and Jean into the future to raise Scott’s son (what happened to him again?) who was sent there? And they spend his childhood there before returning to their honeymoon. They get to meet another of their kids from the future, and it’s weird. Then a bunch of stuff happens and Jean is killed by Magneto, except that gets retconned and she’s killed by someone else, and Emma Frost wants Scott to run the school with him and he refuses and there’s an apocalypse and writers waffle on her and then Jean is resurrected as White Phoenix who changes time and makes Scott accept Emma’s offer, thus preventing the apocalypse. Her new life doesn’t go so well and she’s totally all powerful anyway so she goes to a higher plane of existence and disappears. The End.

Except, not. God, of course not. Nothing will kill this character. She’s like a fungus that feeds on irritating me.

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