the Darker Seid of Life

By all means we at Monitor Duty should have written dozens of histories and recaps and essays about DC Comics’ vile Kirby demon, the evil New God Darkseid.  By now there should be hundreds of references and odes of love.  If kicked we might see it happen in the future, but I do not care to do that now.

Recently when I should have been working I googled for Grant Morrison interviews about Darkseid.  To tell you the truth I do not think that Mr. Morrison has anything profound  or unusual to say about the character but I like the way he puts together words and descriptions.   He puts together ideas that are not necessarily new or great in ways that are interesting and entertaining.  Honestly that is a good thing.  It does not matter whether the ideas are his or not.  His 52 co-writers claim that his virtue is not his creativity but his fearlessness.  He will go where his fellows will not and that seems like a strength to me (and a burden to editors and marketing staff).

Grant Morrison successfully delivers upon the marketing and communication of old ideas mixed together in way that editors would not let less experienced writers attempt.  That is the only reason I bother looking for his interviews.  I like his words; Ienjoy good poetry.  I do not care to give him credit for new meanings or new ideas.

Here is a quick Darkseid link dump.  It might be nice if, in the future, Monitor Duty has the greatest and most authoritative Darkseid link directory.  Let us leave that for the future.

• Marc Singer, who is not the Beastmaster, writes a defense of Darkseid against the Howling Curmudgeon, in that he declares why the character is a good one, but insists the biggest injury upon the character is its overuse.  They agree on the character’s three best stories but alos there are moe good stories with the character.  The most profound note is that the character is used best in stories where he seems to die a permanent death.  I think that the character is not made better by having no inner conflict, but to have the character have an inner conflict is to write him out of character.  Most good characters have inner struggles; to an extent it easier to see the super-villain in this case as a plot device.  In this light most villains are plot devices more than characters.  I can think of exceptions like Lex Luthor (depending on the writer, of course) and Doctor Doom, both of whom are self-realized as Darkseid is.  Yet Luthor (again depending on the writer) has a character arc involving his own jealousy, need for attention, his place in the world, and possibly friendship with Superman.  Doom struggles with vanity above all.  Darkseid has not issues.  He merely is.  He will never grow and he will never learn.  He will simply act, conquer, enslave, and at the end of the story arc in question he will die.  Occasionally he gets trapped in the Source Wall or something.
• A lot of this comes from a September calling for Darkseid essays.  Who has the time?  The point is that Darkseid “is a person” and I cannot say it is wrong because I sadly have read less Kirby New Gods material than I should, due to cost constraints.  As it is, what I declared in the point above is that recently Darkseid is a more a plot device, an abstract menace (as Galactus has almost always been) because while he may have been a person with a personality most writers simply treat him as an abstract personification of a dark ethos.
• The best response is this: by Keith Giffen in his Ambush Bug mini-series.
• Andrew Hickey insists that Darkseid’s desire to seize control of all life, the universe, and the entirety of creation and existence is borne out of fear of death.  Mr. Miracle is the logical counterpoint and the arch-enemy of Darkseid because as an escapological archetype he is positioned outside of the constraints of control.  Yet Scott Free himself is still not a direct and successful contrast because Darkseid name him and set his purpose.  That is Mr. Hickey’s point anyway and I am not certain I buy into it.  This plays all into ideas of “degrees of freedom” but as a Liberal Democrat (in the UK political sense) Mr Hickey’s views about what is acceptable as a definition or execution, application of freedom is suspect.
• The first Darkseid story I ever read was not the entire story but the final chapter of a JLA/JSA team-up story.  As was the the fashion at the time the occasional/formal meeting between the League and the Society finds it self linked to a third super-team, in this instance the New Gods.  I remember Justice League of American #184 (and here is the cover) because the New Gods were not only definitely super-heroes in this incarnation (and there is nothing wrong with that) but Darkseid has a personality, he is a villain with motivations and relationships.  In point of fact the bulk of the story is about relationships as well as a rise to power.  Upon his return from his most recent death in the New Gods strip from Adventure Comics, Darkseid punishes the Injustice Society for accosting his son Orion, clearly with a view of propreitry and seeing Orion as a creature, a prince, someone whose fate is more tied to Darkseid’s whim than mere encounters with bad guys.  Orion’s group consists of a Leaguer and a Society member.  All the split-groups  (I love how they follow the Gardner Fox tradition) consist of such a configuration.  For isntance Batman’s group has Mr. Miracle and the Huntress because both are versions of him in the different worlds of the different teams.  At this point each team resides in a different dimension of the DC Comics storytelling.   Because Darkseid has his relationship with the New Gods he seeks to teleport Apokolips to the spot where Earth-2 resides, destroying Earth-2 and thus landing his domain inside a universe where there would be no heroes, and no heroic New Gods.
• OAFE assesses/contrasts two Darkseid action figures making his size and sculpt major emphasis.  The Mattel version, which is the one really looked at, comes with a Mother Box as his accessory, and despite being smaller than the DC Direct Darkseid figure, is apparently just better.  Of course there is a brief history asserting that Darkseid only recently became a Superman villain despite that his first appearance was in a Superman comic.  He also discusses Grant Morrison’s formulation of the Anti-Life Equation.

I think there is something to be said that properly written the villain is a character but this applies to every character.  It is also important to note that the ending of the story as well as how often the character appears has serious impact for story quality.

(1 votes, average: 1.00 out of 5)

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He drives you Bats!

Or Neil Patrick Harris (Dr. Horrible) meets Batman!
Click here

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In Season Four, there’s MORE!

More action! More Violence! More Monarch! More Henchmen! More Bowie! More Super Science!
MORE VENTURE!!!
Although there MAY be less Brock…

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25 years later, Larry Hama’s life makes sense

Larry Hama’s name is synonymous with G.I. Joe. He is known throughout comic fandom as the guy who wrote the bios for the action figures, as the guy who took what could have been a rather silly and short-lived toy line and brought it to life with deep characterization during his very long run on the G.I. Joe comic book.

For 25 years, people have been throwing out the line “And knowing is half the battle!” whenever they were talking to Larry. Until this week, he never knew this was a line from the G.I. Joe cartoon show (or rather, the PSAs at the end of the cartoon show). Larry had never seen the cartoon.

Just imagine what it must be like to have heard this phrase for almost half your life and never realized people were trying to make a joke for your benefit. Larry must have thought this was just some popular aphorism! Now, after ages of wondering, he finally knows why.

And knowing is half the battle!

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Green Lantern: First Flight trailer

I’m stoked. Are you stoked?

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Farewell, Mr. Jefferson

Mr. Jefferson has ended his 50-year childhood.

Here is perhaps the best obituary I’ve seen on him.

Mark Steyn, a great obituarist, talked with Hugh Hewitt about Michael Jackson showing us the price paid for our exploitation of child stars, noting how “Lindsay Lohan is about 22 now. She’s got etched into her face that kind of hardness of a 48 year old woman sitting in a sports bar somewhere in some broken-down loser town in upstate New York who’s been around the town once too often. “

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I Am Wall*E

The audio for the “I Am Legend” trailer synchs up beautifully with the trailer for “Wall*E”! No edits! This is just amazing to watch.

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Bender’s Back, Babay! — UPDATED

UPDATED
Good news, nobody.  Futurama has been picked up for 26 new episodes (number corrected — it’s even MORE, babay!) to begin airing in 2010! They will air on Comedy Central, unless Fox exercises their option to air the episodes first. (Methinks they will. I would. Then, I never understood why that show would ever be canceled.)

Oh frabjous day!

This calls for a blast of my spice weasel. BAM!

Thank you to everyone who bought Bender’s Big Score, Beast with a Billion Backs, Bender’s Game and Into the Wild Green Yonder.

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Why isn’t THIS the Star Wars Prequel?

Erik’s right. This is a four-minute ad for a Star Wars video game and it is way better than the entire set of prequels that George Lucas directed. Is is more atmospheric, more intense, and the direction is better. (The Sith Lords all lighting up their sabers is amazing.) I know it’s all CGI, but I swear the acting is better!

I think the thing I like best is that it is humans vs. humans. For some reason, Lucas got squeamish about having actual people die in the prequels. It’s all Gungans vs. robots, then robots vs. clones (who are treated as disposable in the Star Wars universe). Plus there are the insectoid Geonosians who designed the Death Star. It’s weird to hear the commentary track for “Clones” where George Lucas says that Jay and Silent Bob don’t have to worry about the construction workers blowing up because they’re Geonosians, not people. First, it’s actually Dante and Randall who talk about that, so Lucas gets that wrong. More importantly, it’s bizarre to listen to a sci-fi guy talking about how only human lives are important, as though insects smart enough to design a weapon are as disposable as the mayflies on your windshield.

I would argue that Clones are not disposable either. In real life, a clone is no different than your identical twin brother or sister, and no one has ever argued that a twin brother can be scrapped because you have one and don’t need the second. (Okay, yes, some people have had that conversation in a Planned Parenthood Clinic, but you know what I’m saying.) But that’s as may be. In the Star Wars universe, nobody grieves for a clone trooper, so it’s clear that they are little different from skin-covered robots as far as Lucas and the people in his universe care.

In other words…the audience goes along with Lucas’ view of things. The robots, the clones and the Geonosians are all disposable. Lucas gets to give us even bigger battles than he’s ever shown us before, and now it’s okay for us to revel in all the awesomeness because nobody worth caring about is dying. Isn’t that just the BEST?

Ugh. I wonder if that is, in a nutshell, why the prequel series sucked? I know, there’s Jar-Jar, bad acting, bad dialogue, weak plots, poor characterization, a huge whiny villain who carves up dozens of children with his light-saber, and the transformation of the Jedi into a society of blood-testing baby-nappers who force kids into lives of servitude where a backwards-talking frog lectures you that you can’t ever fall in love and marry. Yes, that’s true. But at its heart, I think it’s because we couldn’t care about the deaths of the characters. Lucas didn’t even want us to care, and was bothered that we cared.

That poor Jedi who gets run through in this clip? I care. Even with the uncanny valley telling me that he’s just CGI, I care.

UPDATE: Oh dear. The thread that Erik posted quickly devolved into a multi-page back-and-forth about how we must all bow down to Lucas who invented it all vs. Lucas the guy who should have stayed the imagineer/producer. Our own Eric Spratling takes the former; I am very much in the latter category. I will reproduce, for posterity, my additions to the thread (apologies that I borrow a bit from this post).
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Up 3-D

Sorry, folks, I’ve been away for a few days. It was my wife’s birthday; she just turned the same age as me, which means next year when I’m forty I’ll be older than her.

As a late birthday present, we’re going to see “Up” in 3-D tonight. I’m sure most of you don’t need a review at this point, but I may post some comments about it later.

“Up”? Between that and “Cars” (which was originally to be called the much-better “Route 66″ until they feared it would make people think of the old TV show), I have to conclude that Pixar makes some of the best movies in the world but they sometimes have names that are almost impossible to Google search without the modifier “Pixar” or “Disney”.

(2 votes, average: 2.00 out of 5)

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Daft Punk – Technologic

Hutch! make embedded media work!

Took me an hour to post a ten minute dealy and it will not work.

embedding youtube is supposed to be elementary!

(if the video doesn’t show, Hutch must fix it)

Talk about nightmare fuel!!!

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My animations

Here are some clips I made recently.

A test animation:

and a fan clip for the web comic Girl Genius:

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Watchmen animated movie on DVD this week?

If I hadn’t been visiting the Watchmen trailers I wouldn’t have seen this:

An animated version of “Tales of the Black Freighter”…plus, “Under the Hood”, out on DVD to coincide with the movie!  Wow!  And voiced by the “THIS IS SPARTA!” guy! Double wow!

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Bolt needs a more believable premise

The trailers for Disney’s film Bolt look funny, especially that gung-ho hamster character. However, I can’t imagine the movie will be very good for one simple reason.

The main character is a dog who thinks he has superpowers, but he actually just plays a super-powered dog on TV and the show’s creators hide the truth from him so that he doesn’t know he’s on a show.

In other words, he’s never heard the word, “Cut!” Nor has he ever had to retake a scene. And apparently, there are no stunt-dogs or stand-in dogs. Also, every one of his adventures must be done sequentially.

Can you buy that?

I’ve often been baffled at how much we average citizens know about movie-making (and TV, natch) that the movies assume we don’t know. By that I mean: I think a LOT of us know that movies are grueling series of retakes, they aren’t shot in sequence, there is no soundtrack playing while they do it, stunt-people are used, stand-ins are used during back-and-forth conversations that are then assembled to look as if two actors are opposite one another, etc.

How does it occur to movie-people, who know this better than anyone else, to make films that are entirely dependent on a fictitious style of movie-making in which all special effects are done in real time and action scenes go on for five minutes without any cuts? Think of the Robin Hood-esque movie within "The Rocketeer" where there’s a soundtrack playing during the fight scene and the entire fight scene has to be redone due to an actress’ flubbed line in a close-up. Nobody makes movies that way. Or the countless films that rely on the "movie being made by hundreds of hidden cameras everywhere" premise, the most recent being "Tropic Thunder."

When I saw the trailer for Bolt, I couldn’t believe the premise at all. Too bad.

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Clone Wars trailer released online

Some Russian site leaked the Star Wars “Clone Wars” trailer a month early, before it is officially shown before Speed Racer. IESB has it.

Meh. I don’t think I’ll even go to the theater for this one. The Prequels just sucked the joy out of Star Wars. I probably could have ended that sentence after the fourth word.

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Eric Cartman on National Public Radio this Saturday?

Bizarre.

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Homer Simpson in real life

http://pixeloo.blogspot.com/2008/03/homer-simpson-untooned.html

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“Superman: Doomsday” (2007) – Not That Bad

I made a trip up to New York City over the weekend and swung by the Virgin Megastore to kill some time.  They were having a decent sale on their digital media so I picked up “Doctor Zhivago” and “Superman: Doomsday” for prices lower than any I’ve seen elsewhere.  I also feel like the two ginormously-different titles speak much about my personality.

I wondered if I would regret purchasing the “Superman: Doomsday” DVD due to some negative reviews I’d read about it.  I’m pleased to say that, indeed, I am content with the chance I took.

*possible minor spoilers ahead, and one major one which I’ll give another spoiler-warning for*

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Justice League: New Frontier Trailer 2

This is the second trailer. The first one was on the Superman/Doomsday DVD

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There’s a reason Dale uses the fake I.D.!

I think one of the funniest stories of the week is that an American jihadist has sworn out a fatwa against “Rusty Shackleford”.  No, not the dual identity of Dale Gribble of Dale’s Dead Bug, but the internet username of an anonymous blogger who posts at The Jawa Report. 

The details of the story are pretty simple: “Rusty” posted graphic images of beheaded American soldiers which he captured from Al Jazeera footage.  Then Samir Khan posted the pictures on his web site to celebrate the beheadings, but he made the Internet no-no of linking directly to the images on The Jawa Report.  So Rusty changed all the images to offensive images calling Samir out.  And this all leads to Samir calling for a fatwa on “Rusty Shackleford” and his family.

How hilarious is it to have a fatwa declared upon the fake I.D. of a fictional paranoid character?

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