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Magneto is puffing his cape out like a cat trying to make itself look bigger, he just can't make it compete with the rotundity of
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Apr 15, 2018 17:36
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The Wingless Wizard checking his stock portfolio.
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Apr 15, 2018 17:46
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Push El Burrito posted:The Wingless Wizard checking his stock portfolio. Before he was a super villain he made an air couch and air shoes. Both were huge failures. Given that the Acts of Vengence happened in the 80's he's probably checking out how much Nike are valued at. And plotting his revenge.
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Apr 15, 2018 18:37
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 I assure you, context does not help.
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Apr 15, 2018 23:14
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where's the touchscreen
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Apr 15, 2018 23:25
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Random Stranger posted:
I would want to be friends with the crows -- calling them "slaves" is not nice.
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Apr 15, 2018 23:44
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I have the worst feeling whomever drew that was a big fan of Dumbo.
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Apr 15, 2018 23:47
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Carried the same way a pair of swallows would carry a coconut.
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Apr 15, 2018 23:49
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prefect posted:I would want to be friends with the crows -- calling them "slaves" is not nice. And crows never forget.
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Apr 16, 2018 00:22
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Push El Burrito posted:The Wingless Wizard checking his stock portfolio.
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Apr 16, 2018 00:43
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Knormal posted:I'm not familiar with this guy. What does he think the average wizard looks like? Well I would guess from his experience they have wings.
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Apr 16, 2018 00:54
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Push El Burrito posted:The Wingless Wizard checking his stock portfolio.
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Apr 16, 2018 01:28
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Rhyno posted:Well I would guess from his experience they have wings. Checks out: 
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Apr 16, 2018 01:30
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Push El Burrito posted:The Wingless Wizard checking his stock portfolio. He’s reading out the funny pages. Kingpin is going ’Yesss, gently caress you Arbuckle.’
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Apr 16, 2018 01:46
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Knormal posted:I'm not familiar with this guy. What does he think the average wizard looks like? I'll have you know that the Fly spell is an integral part of any good arcane spellcaster's repetoire, not just wizards
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Apr 16, 2018 13:04
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Random Stranger posted:Checks out: He looked better as Bambi
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Apr 17, 2018 13:03
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Random Stranger posted:Checks out: Oh so that's what the new robot in Lost in Space is based on!
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Apr 17, 2018 13:49
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 Marvel Saga #8
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Apr 17, 2018 21:13
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Tana Nile filling in for Invisible Woman.
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Apr 17, 2018 21:19
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Darthemed posted:
Someone frame that and hang it up at 20th Century Fox.
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Apr 17, 2018 22:42
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chitoryu12 posted:Someone frame that and hang it up at 20th Century Fox. They've got the formula now to make a hit Fantastic Four movie. Reed has to fight a cyclops, Johnny has to fight some racist caricatures, Ben has to fight the Submariner, and Sue has to stand around doing nothing.
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Apr 18, 2018 00:54
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Random Stranger posted:They've got the formula now to make a hit Fantastic Four movie. Reed has to fight a cyclops, Johnny has to fight some racist caricatures, Ben has to fight the Submariner, and Sue has to stand around doing nothing. Them muffins ain't gonna bake themselves.
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Apr 18, 2018 01:02
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I'm sure they'll make another F4 movie at some point, and the smart thing to do would be to start it in media res and either skip the origin entirety or limit it to brief flashbacks. The only superhero with an origin that's interesting enough to be the backbone of a film is Spider-Man and even then they've done it twice and not that great despite perfect casting of Uncle Ben both times.
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Apr 18, 2018 01:23
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Skwirl posted:I'm sure they'll make another F4 movie at some point, and the smart thing to do would be to start it in media res and either skip the origin entirety or limit it to brief flashbacks. The only superhero with an origin that's interesting enough to be the backbone of a film is Spider-Man and even then they've done it twice and not that great despite perfect casting of Uncle Ben both times. I think Fantastic Four is fully in the clutches of Disney/Marvel now, which means they could actually be decent.
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Apr 18, 2018 01:27
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chitoryu12 posted:I think Fantastic Four is fully in the clutches of Disney/Marvel now, which means they could actually be decent. They don't own 20th Century Fox quite yet, but they will in the near future. And if rumors of both Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr being done after Avengers Infinity are true, you've got a man with a heart of gold but sometimes too quick to action and a technology genius who isn't great at interpersonal stuff because he knows he's always right.
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Apr 18, 2018 01:40
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Skwirl posted:They don't own 20th Century Fox quite yet, but they will in the near future. And if rumors of both Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr being done after Avengers Infinity are true, you've got a man with a heart of gold but sometimes too quick to action and a technology genius who isn't great at interpersonal stuff because he knows he's always right. Chris Evans already played the Human Torch in the first run of Fantastic Four movies. Funny enough, the last Human Torch (Michael B. Jordan) also made the transfer to the MCU!
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Apr 18, 2018 01:44
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chitoryu12 posted:Chris Evans already played the Human Torch in the first run of Fantastic Four movies. Funny enough, the last Human Torch (Michael B. Jordan) also made the transfer to the MCU! It'd be a whole new cast (though it'd be funny if they kept Michael B Jordan, most of the white audience wouldn't notice as long as his hair was different and they didn't reapply the scarification makeup, which they wouldn't).
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Apr 18, 2018 01:54
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Skwirl posted:I'm sure they'll make another F4 movie at some point, and the smart thing to do would be to start it in media res and either skip the origin entirety or limit it to brief flashbacks. The only superhero with an origin that's interesting enough to be the backbone of a film is Spider-Man and even then they've done it twice and not that great despite perfect casting of Uncle Ben both times. The 20-30 minutes every superhero movie seems to spend on origin crap makes me think that every screenwriter needs to be forced to sit down and really absorb the first two pages of All Star Superman. Even for “no (public) name” superheroes, unless there’s a reason why the origin story is key, it can probably be compressed into a few minutes and scattered throughout the film. E.g., why would you need an origin story for, say, Namor? “Imperius Rex!”, king of Atlantis, wears a Speedo, tries to mack on Sue Storm, pretty straightforward. I wonder if the Black Panther movie is also an exception to the “origin story is unnecessary to the film and also not interesting” rule. And maybe Ant-Man too?
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Apr 18, 2018 03:09
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Nonvalueadded User posted:I wonder if the Black Panther movie is also an exception to the “origin story is unnecessary to the film and also not interesting” rule. And maybe Ant-Man too? The problem is when movies keep getting remade so we've seen it all before. Batman doesn't need an origin scene because we already know it and nobody does anything interesting with it. Same for Spider-Man (and I'm glad Homecoming skipped it, that movie didn't suffer in the least for doing so). If you've got a new character, the story of why they do what they do can be great, but people need to stop pretending a reboot is the same thing.
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Apr 18, 2018 03:23
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Bruceski posted:I think a lot of heroes have important or interesting origins. As you said BP and A-M make their origins central to the movie, The First Avenger and Doctor Strange as well. All of the movies you mentioned in your first paragrapg feature origin stories that are severely divorced from the comic origin.
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Apr 18, 2018 03:29
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If you want to adapt an origin story into something that works as a self-contained story, the story has to be about something other than where the character came from. Spider-Man's is easy because the ol' power-and-responsibility theme is classic and Peter's awareness of the circumstances of Uncle Ben's death is a complete narrative in its own right. But if you're doing, for instance, a Superman origin story, it's got to be about Jor-El and the destruction of Krypton, which precludes including Superman himself unless it's framed through circumstances that cause him to become aware of it, such as battling a remnant that also personifies the planet's negative qualities. And you can tell an excellent story about that, but it's such a narrow and peculiar corner of the space of known good Superman stories that it's stifling. Iron Man's origin story works great because every Iron Man story is the same Iron Man story, and it's possible to keep telling it over and over: Tony Stark, in a moment of humility, recognizes that the unintended consequences of his prior recklessness have hosed others up even worse than they are currently loving him up, and he resolves to make things right by recklessly causing new problems, which works for a while because he's very clever. They made like five or six movies with that exact plot and it's showing no signs of fatigue.
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Apr 18, 2018 03:47
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Nonvalueadded User posted:Counter-example: Iron Man’s origin...um...as ably demonstrated in his film. So I guess we wouldn’t really need to see that again. Dramatic characters go through an arc over the course of their story. They change, the grow, they end up in a different place at the end of the story than where they started. Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter are good examples of a such characters. And stories featuring dramatic characters are mostly about that character and the challenges he faces and how they change him. Iconic characters don't change very much (or at all) over the course of a story. They end up pretty much in the same place they started, and the story instead is about the challenges they face, the ways they surmount those challenges, and the other characters they meet along the way. James Bond, Indiana Jones, Sherlock Holmes, the detectives and attorneys on Law & Order - their stories are much more about the process of what they do than the way the things they do change the circumstances or inner lives of the main characters. The stories are procedural, not dramatic. You'll notice that description of iconic characters covers pretty much every superhero character in existence. Which is a problem for Hollywood, because the standard template for Hollywood screenplays is built around the main character undergoing a dramatic arc. So when the time comes for someone to write a Hollywood screenplay for Spider-Man or Superman or Green Lantern or whoever, they are gravitationally attracted to the one kind of superhero story that does feature the main character undergoing a dramatic arc and changing over the course of the story - the origin story. Which is why so many superhero movies have to spend their entire first act on the origin of the character and their powers, and their final act is always the main character coming to terms with their new superpowered life.
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Apr 18, 2018 03:47
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It also makes sense for the MCU to do origin stories because it's actually making an effort to create a consistent universe that moves from a starting point to presumably an ending point far off in the future and a lot of the characters and organizations are deeply interconnected. Captain America: Civil War is actually the culmination of a story that began with the first Iron Man and Captain America movies, and the story of that movie wouldn't make a lot of sense if you hadn't seen the origins of all three of them and Age of Ultron. That movie sets off the plot of Spider-Man: Homecoming by incorporating Tony Stark as a major figure in Peter Parker's life. And now the Guardians of the Galaxy are getting integrated through the upcoming Avengers movie, so there's not really any MCU film that's 100% self-contained and does nothing to set up another film down the line even in a minor way. With the DCU, it doesn't matter as much. Everyone knows how Bruce Wayne became Batman and how Clark Kent became Superman, and the details of those origins have no affect on the story. The rest of the Justice League (except for Wonder Woman) don't even get an origin story, they just show up. Though I'd argue that one of the problems with Justice League is that only two characters even got films to themselves to explore how they got there and who they are as people, so none of the other ostensibly major characters get more than a few minutes to establish them before they have to get on equal footing with the big three. chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 04:01 on Apr 18, 2018 |
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Apr 18, 2018 03:59
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Procedural-heroic stories (Sherlock Holmes, Zatoichi) don't need and usually don't have origins, whereas dramatic-heroic ones (Hamlet, everyone else) can benefit from them. It's a question of whether entertainment is supposed to come from seeing how the character will win, or how they will change. E: drat, beaten There aren't very many procedural-heroic movies these days that I know of, everything's all Tears and Sacrifices and Big Changes. Which is fine, but count me in for compressed, implied, and omitted origins in heroic films. Like in Blade. I want more marvel movies like Blade. 
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Apr 18, 2018 04:02
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I actually think that superheroes are different from the normal procedural-hero type of story. They're a third thing: they're "iterative," as Umberto Eco defined it. Each given superhero story is the kind of procedural, iconic story that people have already talked about. But that story repeats so often over hundreds of issues, dozens of TV episodes, and pretty soon dozens of movies. The story gets slight variations every time it's told, and each iteration adds some new details that stick. Over time the details build up to create a more textured and three-dimensional character, just like multiple layers of oil paint create more texture and dimensionality in a painting.
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Apr 18, 2018 04:26
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FMguru posted:One of my favorite literary theories divides characters and stories into two types: dramatic and iconic. I will take issue with one of your examples, though. Luke Skywalker is an iconic character, Yokel Farmboy with a Great Destiny. Sure, after his family is killed he stops whining about going to Toshi Station to pick up power converters, but when he blows up the Death Star, he’s still pretty much the same guy, just with a few new tricks up his sleeve, like helpful auditory hallucinations. Han Solo is the dramatic character in SW:ANH. He goes from the amoral smuggler looking out for number one, a guy who casually murders a threat and flips the bartender a coin “for the mess”, to a character who has assumed the mantle of self-sacrifice and has traded cynicism for trust and comraderie. I suppose the reason why these two modes work well together only for some superheroes is because the superhero’s origin must be directly tied to the first dramatic development of the character — with great power comes great responsibility (if Peter Parker didn’t have his powers when Uncle Ben was killed, there’d be no opportunity for growth) or atonement requires action (Tony Stark builds the Iron Man suit not only to free himself but as a first step toward correcting the mistake he realizes he’s been making again and again). And I don’t think an origin story for any character, no matter how obscure, needs to be overwrought or complex, though that will require simplifying the origin from that presented in the comics. Think about the JLU episode, “The Greatest Story Never Told.” Doesn’t Skeets showing a 15 second promo reel to bystanders do the job of explaining who Booster Gold is just as well as a 15 minute flashback or prelude about how this janitor wanted to become a hero, so he stole some tech from a museum and went back in time? Finally, one of the reasons why Black Panther’s origin story fit so well was not only because the challenge ritual was integral to the plot, but the slow revelation of details about the origins/family history of the characters heightened tension while making the story more coherent.
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Apr 18, 2018 06:30
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This conversation has helped me realize Superman is just a sci-fi reboot of Tarzan.
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Apr 18, 2018 07:14
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Ponsonby Britt posted:I actually think that superheroes are different from the normal procedural-hero type of story. They're a third thing: they're "iterative," as Umberto Eco defined it. Each given superhero story is the kind of procedural, iconic story that people have already talked about. But that story repeats so often over hundreds of issues, dozens of TV episodes, and pretty soon dozens of movies. The story gets slight variations every time it's told, and each iteration adds some new details that stick. Over time the details build up to create a more textured and three-dimensional character, just like multiple layers of oil paint create more texture and dimensionality in a painting. Did Umberto Eco ever write specifically about comic books? I'd read that.
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Apr 18, 2018 09:56
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Doc Hawkins posted:This conversation has helped me realize Superman is just a sci-fi reboot of Tarzan. Mind blown
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Apr 18, 2018 14:27
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Doc Hawkins posted:This conversation has helped me realize Superman is just a sci-fi reboot of Tarzan. drat. That's way more correct than not. But it raises an important question: Why is "guy in loincloth" one of the most beloved, defining images of our species?
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Apr 18, 2018 14:41
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