TV adaptations: upcoming AND arrived.

We can probably blame the MCU for Comic books being such hot property these days. Yay, MCU!

I'm so bored by Arrow, but I really like The Flash and I'm cool with Legends of Tomorrow. I liked Constantine, but I can understand why it doesn't have the mass appeal of lighter DC fare. I struggle a little with reading Classic Hellblazer because of how morally ambiguous it is, and how depressed it can make me feel. Even New 52 Constantine can be a little difficult to take. He's, well, he's an asshole. He is not a nice person, and the people around him are pretty sure to get hurt.

Supergirl is a favourite. I really enjoyed her "adorkable" demeanour, the way she wrestled with her power and what it could mean, and the part of her that was a normal, confused, 20-something who worried about her job, and men, and social expectations as well as the superhero stuff. I loved the relationship between the sisters, and I really, really, really, want a season 2.

Marvel is totally winning when it comes to their partnership with Netflix. Daredevil and Jessica Jones are both extraordinary pieces of filmmaking and storytelling. As adaptations, they take every part of the source material that works. As film, they have a visual power that is breathtaking. I'll rather them both  9-9.5/10, and I'm TOUGH. I'm really looking forward to Luke Cage (sweet Christmas!), and I'm all on board with Game of Thrones Finn Jones taking on Iron Fist.

Agents of Shield works WITH the MCU, and Agent Carter is one of my favourite television characters ever. She's brilliant, tough, and determined, and can I be her when I grow up?

When it come to the independent titles, there is a lot more scope to breathe and explore. Not being weighed down by decades of history and canon lets them have so much more freedom when it come to their adaption. 

iZombie, and Powers season 1 may require a seperate review, but I can honestly say that I enjoy the tv episodes just as much as the comic books.

Given their success, I am super excited for a couple of things. Vertigo's Preacher, the story of a man named Jesse Custer, running from his cultish upbringing, and finding himself possessing and  possessed by the all-offspring offspring of an angel and a demon, literally possessing the "word of God" is due in days. And I'm super excited.

Anything with the ghost of John Wayne, an Irish vampire named Cassidy, a character literally named Assface, and a mission to track down God and MAKE him live up to his responsibilities has my vote.

The other upcoming excitement is the adaption of Robert Kirkman's Outcast. You may know him from, oh, THE WALKING DEAD!!!!!!!

The fact that there is a whole series based on only two TPB's gives me hope, and some worry. It looks freaking amazing though.

Plus season 2 of Powers is coming, and they've reached the moment where the comic book series begins, "Who killed Retro Girl?" I waver between liking the tv Christian Walker, and missing the comic book one, but I do like what they've done with it so far. Okay, Playstation, bring it on.

(and yes, I am re-watching the whole thing in preparation)

The meh of marvel masterworks: bring on the Hulk Vol 2

Okay, Brucie. So, far you are not impressing me. Moping out in the desert in your ripped pants is fine, but at least let Banner go to work often enough to feed you both. AND keep you in purple pants

And there is only so many times that Dr Banner can be in the wrong place at the wrong time before someone figures out that there's something hinky going on. I mean, your girlfriends father is the ranking military officer on the base! Dude!

Though to be honest, neither Betty nor General "Thundebolt" Ross seem to be Mensa candidates.   

(  For example, why is he bringing his daughter out to the testing sites? )

So, Bruce decided to build a robot that even the Hulk can't take out, and goes missing. Being found hanging out at the testing sight in his purple pants gets him suspected of communism, but not hulk-ism. Geez.
Giant Man makes an appearence. He and Hulk have a very manly tussle, half naked and very macho. Unfortunately their date gets broken up by Ol' Thunderbolt sending a nuclear missile their way. Everyone survives. Including the pants. Giant Man doesn't even bother to tell the rest of the gang that he found Hulk. Jerk.

Gasp! Plot! Evil Communist Dude steals Banner's aweesomely sciency Robot ( this is the 60's) and a guy  named Talbot (who ends up in Agents of SHIELD played by the flying man fron Heroes) has turned up to see what the frak is up with Brucie. Oh, no. people are going to think that he's a traitor. Thunderbolt, admiring his hetero-normative, all-American cis-gendered masculinity decides that his daughter should set her cap for soldier boy, rather than that *ugh* intellectual nancy.

Evil Communist Dude disguises himelf as Banner to cause trouble and steal stuff. ECD totally steals Betty Ross, just for the sake of it. On the upside, everyone totally saw the Hulk and (Fake) Banner in the same place at the same time. And even though they were both wearing purple pants, they were clearly two separate pairs of purple pants. 

Meanwhile, Teenaged sidekick Rick Jones somehow manages to circumvent top secret military security and protocol to bring Bruce a new set of non-purple clothes, and they scurry off to prove that they were there the whole time and have nothing to do with any of it.


ECD's boss, the self named "The Leader", despite failing to get his hands on BB's stuff, has decided to keep trying to science himself into world domination. Turns out, in a gasp-worthy twist, The Leader was exposed to gamma rays, and turned into an evil super genius. Who is green.
He spends quite a it of time fan-boying over fellow gamma green Hulk, and hoping that they can start a super secret support and/or world domination club. Maybe their theme song could be 'It's not easy being green'?

The Leader decides to science some big pink stretchy bouncy android type marshmallow humanoids. 

Including shrinkable ones, and 500 foot tall ones that make the army bring out their super bombs. Hulk fixes this in a particularly Marvel way.

                                                         
                                                         

Thoughts re. The Hulk Vol. 2.

How many times can Banner get secretly kidnapped by communists and have the army think he's defected, yet still come back to his government contracts?
If the President of the US has been told about Hulk/ BB, why couldn't he at least let some army top brass know, so that they stop arresting him?
How does the Hulk manage to pick up pieces of, like, road or roof and shake it like a blanket in order to take out how convoys?
How do they manage to mess up Betty Ross with Spiderman's super minor character Betty Brandt?
What the heck is up with Betty's hair?

It was all extra meh, but here's more meh

Had a week of super extra meh, and really didn't want to do anything other than read something trashy, and re-watch old Stargate episodes. Also, I was up to Avengers #4, and it's totally super extra meh.
I'm not even going to bother going back to volumes 1-3 in order to review them. NOT EVEN FOR YOU! I'll catch you up though......

The O.G. line-up of the Avengers was Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, and Giant Man. And his girlfriend/ assistant/ sidekick The Wasp, I'll get to the ugh of that later.

Iron man ran off to have his own book. He gets mentioned occasionally, and at least his super good special friend Tony Stark is still bankrolling the whole thing. Which is good, because things get destroyed a lot. Thor also ran off to have his own book. He sends some friends and villains by occasionally. The Enchantress for example. In this volume she tries to trick Hercules into taking on the Avengers, except honor and a freaking sulphur arrow (!) shut it all down. Hulk was barely around to start with, then threw some big tantrums and ran off (to have his own book). He's busy running around the desert, pining after the daughter of the General who wants to annihilate him, and kidnapping poor Dr Bruce Banner who has nothing to do with the Hulk, no connection whatsoever, totally.

Cap is still feeling sorry for himself. At least he's managing to still hang around to lead the Avengers while he has his own book. There's a lot of flashback and side adventures going on.

Then there is Hank Pym aka Giant man aka Ant Man aka Colossus aka do I even care at this point? Hank was off doing super serious and important scientific research for a while. He rejoined when he managed to frak things up, and get stuck at 12 feet tall. And sulked a lot. But then he scienced stuff, and yay, he's back again. He got some fancy new duds, and a new name, but he's still the same condescending, chauvinist pig he always was. The way he speaks to Janet Van Dyne is super gross. 

PLUS, putting my feminist on, why does she only get to shrink? Is it too unfeminine to let her be a giant too? Why does she have wings, but he doesn't? And the name, the wasp! Seriously! How often have you heard women being insulted by calling them waspish.Plus she spends a lot of time being superficial and self-defeating. UGH. Holy Hannah, Stan Lee. She's a freaking superhero.  Let her be freaking super.

Meanwhile, since half the roster has run away to make more money for Marvel, they've started to fill the ranks with ex-villains. Wanda and Pietro Maximoff were finally able to ditch Magneto, and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, and follow their hearts to be heroes.
A big part of vol 4 is about them having to go home in order to get their powers rebooted. Only to discover that their home town has been invaded by an evil alien! Mwahahaha! Said alien wants to steal everones powers so that he can go back home and win a pointless war. Pointless because there is nobody left on either side but frigging robots!

There's also Hawkeye. Oh, Hawkeye. Thank all the gods that you get a costume upgrade. And a personality upgrade. This is cool. This is badass.

. 

. 

This is not. Plus he doesn't even bother to coordinate his quiver with his outfit, Red and yellow? With the purple? Oh Hawkeye. Originally he appeared as an Iron Man villain. A super sexy soviet spy named Natasha aka the Black Widow seduced him into it. He didn't do a very good job at it, and ends up becoming a hero instead. He's still pining over Natasha, but luckily she was brainwashed into the whole thing. So it's okay! Except...... Colonel Fury convinces her to become a double agent for SHIELD, leaving Hawkeye in confusion and despair, thinking that she's gone back to her old ways. We'll just have to see where this goes.

The rest of the volume is taken up by FF villain the Mad Thinker, who has created super hats, and super gloves and shit for his minions, in order to take out the avengers, in order to take out the Fantastic Four. Yep. That's the plot.

Luckily, Hercules has been hanging around (and in Thor's old room, cos, you know, gods), and he is the one thing that The Thinker didn't think of. Also lucky he's around, as Cap (away on a side adventure being mind controlled by Nazi dude in a mask the Red Skull) managed to drop the super powerful Cosmic Cube into the ocean where the freaking Sub-Mariner could find it. Having his usual tantrum, he decides to try and destroy all the submarines he can find. Cos he can. 

Lots of sound effects later, Hercules and Sub-Mariner kind of call it a draw. The cube, of course, gets lost in the confusion. But I foresee further plot.....

I think that's it. Cap should be back at Avengers HQ soon, and he and Hawkeye can sulk together.

The Meh of Marvel Masterworks Part 3

The Sub-mariner; he of the sassy pants, and sassy eyebrows.

Meet Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner, Lord of Atlantis, ruler and protector of the seven seas. Oh, wait. No, sorry. This is Aquaman, the OTHER Lord of Atlantis, ruler and protector of the seven seas.

This is Sub-mariner. Please note the eyebrows.

At some point in the earliest days of Marvel, Mr sparkly-pants was actually one of the most popular characters that were around. Hard to believe, but the internet says it, so it must be true. Super strong, super fast, and supposedly super-sexy (ugh), he’s also totally super jerky. And kind of rapey, in a repressed 60’s kind of way. Namor has “never taken no for an answer’ (p. 127), and if he decides that you’re cute, he’s going to kidnap you and take you away to be his underwater Queen. I mean, you don’t get a choice about it, but at least he’s going to marry you all right and proper. Plus, maybe you’ll get a super sparkly outfit like his! His Silver Age appearances start in Fantastic Four #4, where Johnny Storm finds him living on the streets with no memory, and *sob* no sparkly green booty shorts.

He helps out a bit, comes on to Sue Storm a lot, and then tries to go all droit du seigneur and kidnap her to be his underwater Queen. Even though he’s actually lost his kingdom and entire race somewhere.

He's meant to be the anti-hero guy. You know, sometimes fighting with the good guys, sometimes against. Plus they try to blame his mixed blood for his idiotically short temper. Apparently the chemistry of Atlantean/ Human DNA is enough to turn him into a tantrumy toddler who can like, bend steel bars, and destroy whole cities, etc.Lots of blah, blah later, and he finds his people, and somehow somebody finds a reason for him to get his own series. Yay.

So, “masterwork” #32: The Sub-Mariner. I have a lot of questions.

The Atlanteans all seem to be blue, so why is Namor the only pink dude? RESEARCH! Ah, ha! Like some other underwater ruler we know, Namor is half Atlantean and half human. And even though there is a sickeningly large amount of emphasis on his blood right to be king, and the whole male primogeniture thing, it is his mother who was the Atlantean royal. During an attempted palace coup, the evil Warlord Kang (his actual title is warlord) tries to take over the palace, and, again super rapey, try to make Namor’s royal cousin Dorma marry him. Of course, she’s only into Namor, and spends a lot of time somehow crying big, fat, VISIBLE tears UNDER THE WATER! (and on that note, how do most of the atlanteans have these awesome flowy cloaks that do their flowy thing under water). Anyway, SM has to go off and fulfil quests that apparently only the true ruler can pass. Oooh, and once he does, he gets a super cool, totally phallic trident to prove how great he is.

Does Atlantis have any kind of system of governance in place? Who was in charge while he was off being amnesia guy? I mean, we know that they don’t have lawyers. Any crimes just get you shoved into a prison cell, or thrown into a trench for monsters to chew on. SM actually decided to sue the entire human race at one point, and goes off to find himself a human lawyer. Who happens to be Matt Murdock. Of course.

Seriously, what is the deal with the booty shorts? All the other Atlanteans have real clothes, including the aformentioned swishy cloaks that magically bend the rules of physics. So why does Namor only ever wear sassy, green sparkly and/ or scaly shorts? With a fancy gold belt with a big S on it of course. Does he just have, like a hundred pairs? Are they made out of fish skin? Who does his laundry? I mean, who does the laundry of any superhero????? I suppose Iron Man has a super fancy robot or something, and Spiderman probably has to handwash his, so that Aunt May doesn’t find out. And we know that Deadpool takes his stuff to the local laundry mat. There’s probably a niche market for drycleaners who can take care of this sort of thing.

Anyway. WHY DOES NAMOR HAVE TINY LITTLE WINGS ON HIS FEET! Despite that fact that he gets all his strength and power from water, he also can fly with these things.Which is illogical, and breaks physics. I mean, wouldn’t they get toally waterlogged? By the Watery Wand of Neptune, Why!

Really, why?

Final analysis, “Imperious Rex” all you want, I'm sticking with Jason Momoa.

(Oh, Holy Hannah, there’s another four volumes)

The Meh of Marvel Masterworks pt 2: Captain America

Ok, Smilin' Stan, onto the rest of the avengers. Let's start with....Captain America.

The earliest issues were released as Tales of Suspense, and were a Captain America/ Iron Man double feature, which was a pretty good deal. Although there's a weird song that keeps playing in my head
(🎼 science fiction, double feature, ooh, ooh, ooh...see androids fighting, ooh, ooh, ooh🎼)

In the original incarnation, the Steve Rogers persona was the worst soldier in his platoon. Or maybe the entire army. His secret trips and constantly running off so that he can secretly put on his tights, as well as his strangely close relationship with a young teenage boy, leave everybody thinking that he's an incompetent idiot.

While Cap is off saving people, Steve is messing up royally by being missing. Plus he decides to fall madly in love with a girl whose name he never learns. Gag me.

Then he meets some Nazi dude who likes to run around in a red rubber mask (Red Skull). Said Nazi dude takes out Bucky, and turns Cap into Capsicle. So, Cap wakes up from a 20 year sleep in the ice, and to be honest, fearlessly sulks a lot.

His powers seem pretty undefined. The shield hasn't really gotten the backstory that makes it so interesting. Black panther and Wakanda have made a FF appearance or two, but there's no connection yet. He practices a lot of gymnastics, mopes about Baby Bucky and Mystery Girl, and threatens to leave the Avengers a lot. He even does for a while, getting a job as a sparring partner for some random boxer who never reappears. Of  course, his conscience, and moral superiority sends him back to Avengers HQ (kindly donated by Iron Man's "special friend" Tony Stark). Supervillains to defeat include Batroc the Leaper (super strong legs and ridiculous French accent),

 M.O.D.O.K. (A giant talking head), and Super-adaptoid (an android who can basically mimic any powered being). Plus, Cap soon discovers that *gasp* the rubber masked nazi Red Skull has survived, built giant robots to end the world, and brought Bucky Barnes back to life.
Except it's not actually Bucky. Its all a trick, No, Bucky..YET.

Also, remember Cap's nameless true-love? He soon discovers an IDENTICAL but much younger women to be his new true love. Except he hasn't learnt her name either, knowing her only as Agent 13 (it's totally Sharon Carter. If you've seen CA: Winter Soldier, she's the hot blonde neighbour/spy)
Oh, Cap.

That concludes volumes 1&2.

The Invisible Girl

The Meh of the Marvel Masterworks

So, for the last few months I've been reading the collected Marvel Masterworks. We're talking early 60's here. We're talking mass amounts of exposition, misogyny, terrible costumes, shudder-worthy scripts, sexual frustration, and the barest seeds of the characters we know and love.
I'm up to number 43 of 214, just over 20% through. To save you, I'll give you a rundown of what has happened so far....

Marvel Masterworks, Part One.

The Amazing Spider-Man: *sigh* I'm broke, and lying to everybody in my life. I wish people liked me. Like, anyone. Especially these gorgeous women who inexplicably hang around me all the time.
*sigh* and how many near death experiences can Aunt May really have?
*sigh* and how many of my friends and acquaintances are going to turn into supervillains?
Mary Jane Watson: like, cool, daddy-o

The IncredibleHulk
Hulk: I have a surprising large vocabulary for a giant monster. Oh, btw, I inexplicably kidnapped that unassuming, nobody scientist Bruce Banner and then let him go.
Bruce Banner: ....yeah, the hulk totally and inexplicably kidnapped me and then let me go, again.
Hulk: you know that I was only in the Avengers for, like, 6 issues, right? Why are you still following me?

Thor
Dr Donald Blake: I'm just going to go around this corner, and bang my stick on the ground.
*bang*
Thor: Dr Blake? Oh yeah, I just saw him.Do you like my hammer? It's shiny.
*sigh* being a tall, handsome, Norse god who is also a world class surgeon who can take as many super long holidays as he wants would be awesome if only my daddy would let me marry my nurse Jane. She faints a lot.
*sigh*
Loki: evil plan to defeat Thor, evil plan to defeat Thor, evil plan to make yellow spandex fashionable, more evil plans. Dang, why doesn't this work. Maybe I should turn into a gorgeous and talented British actor instead, so I can take over the world one fangirl at a time. Maybe without the yellow spandex.
Thor: *sigh*

The Fantastic Four

Jonny storm: I might be only, like, 12, but I know better than everybody else so I'm going to jump in and "flame on". Oooh, is that a chick?
The Thing: "it's clobbering time" because I can't control my temper I'm going to frak things up for everybody.
Mr Fantastic: because my brain is so superior to, like, everybody, I'm going to mess with amazingly unscientific science and risk the world and my team on a daily basis. Did I mention how smart I am?
Because I'm so so so so smart.
Sue Storm: I just want to set up housekeeping and worry about supermarkets instead of super-villains, because the super-villains keep ruining my beautiful designer dresses.