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Thats one thing that's really pissed me off about every time superman has appeared on screen since Brandon Routh. Superman is supposed to be an idealized version of humanity. Like you said, he's a god amongst us, and what does he do with his unstoppable powers? He talks to teenagers who are thinking about self harm. He gets cats out of trees for old ladies. He's the ultimate boy-scout and that should never be considered a bad thing. I am exhausted by dark and gritty reboots or stories that "deconstruct the genre". Give me something that ends well. That is happy, optimistic, hopeful. Like Superman should be.
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Mar 24, 2022 15:45
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Neito posted:
One of the best things in the DCU adaptation of the Alan Moore Story "For the Man Who Has Everything" was change the perfect life that it showed Batman. In the original comic his dad stopped the mugger and he lives a normal happy life. In the adaptation is was nothing but watching his dad beat up Joe Chill for all eternity.
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Mar 24, 2022 15:46
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MuscaDomestica posted:One of the best things in the DCU adaptation of the Alan Moore Story "For the Man Who Has Everything" was change the perfect life that it showed Batman. In the original comic his dad stopped the mugger and he lives a normal happy life. If I remember right Alan Moore actually allowed his name to be put on that episode because he liked it so much.
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Mar 24, 2022 17:05
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MuscaDomestica posted:One of the best things in the DCU adaptation of the Alan Moore Story "For the Man Who Has Everything" was change the perfect life that it showed Batman. In the original comic his dad stopped the mugger and he lives a normal happy life. Sounds like his dad has no chill
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Mar 24, 2022 17:08
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Push El Burrito posted:If I remember right Alan Moore actually allowed his name to be put on that episode because he liked it so much. IIRC it's like the one adaptation of one of his stories that he likes.
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Mar 24, 2022 17:23
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Fashionable Jorts posted:Thats one thing that's really pissed me off about every time superman has appeared on screen since Brandon Routh. Zack Snyder's Justice League would be right up your alley then, as his ultimate sacrifice from BvS is what brings Batman back from the darkness to unite the world behind the strength of his actions and convictions. Hell, he doesn't feature in most of the film but the impact his actions had make waves throughout the world, so much so that his return in the suit leaves everyone who sees him pretty happy and relaxed
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Mar 24, 2022 17:27
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Jedit posted:It's not exactly a Superman story, but Straczynski's Supreme Power covers the ground. The Squadron Supreme was Marvel's take on the Justice League, with the characters Hyperion and Nighthawk who are respectively Superman and Batman. In Supreme Power Nighthawk is openly antagonistic to Hyperion, who he sees as an agent of the Man who also can't be trusted because he isn't truly human. Nighthawk himself, however, is an embittered reverse racist who at one point calls a fellow black hero something racially charged for being too friendly with their white colleagues. Nighthawk isn't wrong about Hyperion, whose humanity isn't much more than a veneer and who comes to see himself as the 800-pound gorilla, but he's the one who strikes out where Hyperion only ever strikes back. And it's definitely Hyperion's story. And that just makes me think of The Authority where the Superman and Batman equivalents are explicitly a romantic gay couple.
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Mar 24, 2022 17:35
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Aces High posted:Zack Snyder's Justice League would be right up your alley then, as his ultimate sacrifice from BvS is what brings Batman back from the darkness to unite the world behind the strength of his actions and convictions. Hell, he doesn't feature in most of the film but the impact his actions had make waves throughout the world, so much so that his return in the suit leaves everyone who sees him pretty happy and relaxed I did see it, and it was the best of all the snyder supermans, but that he spent half the movie being moody as hell wasnt great. To me that movie was about The Flash being wonderful, and enjoyed it for that.
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Mar 24, 2022 17:41
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The other common complaint that I hate is that Superman is apparently incredibly boring because he's ultra invincible and "realistically" he should be able to just instantly solve every problem and punch all the bad guys so there's no stakes in any of his stories. Which really just sounds like those people have only been exposed to incredibly lovely Superman stories (or just made them up in their head). It's especially funny from a meta-narrative perspective because oh, there's no excitement to any of it because you know Superman is gonna win by the end? Yeah, that's nothing like Batman. Or pretty much literally any other superhero story. Or fiction in general. 
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Mar 24, 2022 19:17
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Mar 24, 2022 19:20
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Superman in the comics has a kid now and honestly it was pretty great seeing him try to be pa Kent. Also the kid was best friends with Batman’s kid and it was fun because Batman’s kid is an edge lied versus the more idealiistic John. Then they aged John up which sucks
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Mar 24, 2022 19:37
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Fashionable Jorts posted:I did see it, and it was the best of all the snyder supermans, but that he spent half the movie being moody as hell wasnt great. Except for when he stole a hot dog. That's a crime.
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Mar 24, 2022 20:03
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does the kid have powers
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Mar 24, 2022 20:40
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Mescal posted:does the kid have powers Yeah. He's also bi.
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Mar 24, 2022 21:03
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Neito posted:Yeah. He's also bi. I didn't know that was a superpower.
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Mar 24, 2022 21:09
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Push El Burrito posted:I didn't know that was a superpower. It is in comic books. Also causes you to turn invisible on dating websites.
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Mar 24, 2022 21:11
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Kwyndig posted:It is in comic books. Also causes you to turn invisible on dating websites. I don't need to be bi to do that, for I am Extremely Ugly.
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Mar 24, 2022 21:16
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I've been seeing a trend on tiktok in the 'piss off a fandom with one sentence' genre that was basically 'piss off Marvel fans with one sentence'. Most answers to it were the kinda expected stuff like 'the MCU is mediocre at best' or 'Iron Man/Captain America/Spider-Man is a boring character to put your entire brand on', with some people going for deeper cuts like 'Fantastic 4 is way more interesting than X-Men for the 'side universe' stories' or some hot takes about certain current situations in comics canon. Probably my favorite to it was one person going 'Marvel will never have a character remotely as iconic as Superman or Batman and every attempt to make a knockoff version shows why that's going to be true forever'. They went in more detail talking about how basically at best Spider-Man is closest to that and even then most fans don't really know his character deeper than 'quippy' while even the most casual person interested in western comics at least knows the 'Superman is the boy scout, Batman is prickly but has his own moral code' dynamic. Probably the best part though was the direct comparison between Hyperion and Superman. Hyperion is Marvel's Superman, it's pretty overt and nobody really would get offended at that statement. He's an Eternal, came to earth as a baby, raised by humans, all that jazz. There are other characters that fit, Gladiator and Sentry mainly, but they have their own kinda weird baggage that makes the comparison less 1:1 and this is about that comparison so he's who to use. He's even got his own Justice League, Squadron Supreme. The problem is Marvel's inherent world makes it impossible for him to 'do' the Superman act. One of the first modern Squadron Supreme stories was a loving revenge arc against Namor because of multiverse poo poo, and that's fine on its own, Namor's an anti-villain, it's kinda weird to have a revenge arc right away for your Not-JSA but yea whatever. Hyperion ends the fight by LIFTING ATLANTIS and slamming it down again, causing massive death and damage to Namor's people. This led to a big dumb SHIELD vs Squadron Supreme because every Marvel story needs to involve the loving government funded Super Cops. So why was the Not Justice League led by a guy who solves problems by tossing a city around? Well that's because they're an offshoot of a villain group, actually a villain group from multiple alternate timelines including one where Namor was a super hitler who killed a bunch of their people so that's why their first reaction to coming to the mainline universe was to avenge their people, and why it was okay for them to go buck wild on random Atlanteans, because a different version of those guys were bad. You know how DC has like, the one universe where 'oh no everything's opposite, the Justice League are super-fascists who run the world??? What a crazy twist on things' is a cliche but it works because it's one splinter thing that very purposely plays on the norm of DC. Marvel's problem is they think that's a genuinely cool idea that needs to come up all the time forever, not just 'what if heroes...bad???' but the multiverse bullshit too. They can't tell 'human' stories because every five loving arcs someone has to be a clone construct from satan's mirror universe Earth-666.1, so no poo poo they can't focus on the inherent conflict between 'humanity' and all powerful characters like Superman. By the time they resolve how Superman would come to his values despite that conflict it's already time for Lois Lane to be revealed to be an alien plant homunculus from Earth-420 where she was actually a war criminal. I don't know if they're still around but there's now Squadron Supreme of America, a super team made by Marvel's Satan (literally made, they're fake construct people he formed) because Agent Coulson sold his soul to get a magic item that let him send what was canon earth into a divergent timeline where The Avengers never happened and Squadron Supreme was America's main super team. They're bad, of course, because they're Satan constructs. I think Hyperion tried to kill Black Panther for not being pro-America enough in Wakanda? It sucks and unsurprisingly these characters barely come up, because they're shunted into their own timeline now. All this rambling is to say that's why I think Superman can't age poorly and why Marvel ultimately...really loving does. It's not just the quality of the MCU or the inherent really weak politics in the 'actually we should let the super-cops do everything' and poo poo, that stuff doesn't help but it's not really the main issue. The main issue is Marvel treats the humanity of its universe as a boring thing, a thing the 'lower power' heroes have to overcome to be cool and worthy, a petty and mean and fundamentally useless part of their world that nobody wants to spend much time on. That's why Superman can't work for them, or Batman for that matter, because despite their powers and grimness and positions of massive power over the world as a whole they're defined so heavily by their humanity. Superman is nothing without Ma and Pa Kent, Batman is, as said already, still that crying kid in the alley, and their 'supporting characters' play to this. Superman loves poo poo like working at The Daily Planet, those people are his friends and they keep him grounded. Batman loves his Bat Family, even if they're all heroic types too they're also a found family, other broken people who want to do the right thing while keeping each other from falling too far. If you treat those characters as writing obstacles rather than core components you wind up with 
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Mar 24, 2022 22:36
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Kwyndig posted:It is in comic books. Also causes you to turn invisible on dating websites. Woah now, only male bisexuals get that power. Women get magnets that draw the worst people on the sites.
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Mar 24, 2022 22:54
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IDK I think Spider-Man's "uncle ben died. great power, great responsibility" stuff is about as well-known as Batman's origin. But yeah, I think at least prior to the MCU Spider-Man was the only Marvel character with the same level of cultural staying power as Superman/Batman.
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Mar 24, 2022 23:18
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I think you could make an argument for the Hulk.
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Mar 24, 2022 23:25
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Fashionable Jorts posted:Woah now, only male bisexuals get that power. Yeah sorry about, my memory have holed the detestable practice of "unicorn hunting"
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Mar 24, 2022 23:30
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I mean the X-men are up there even if most that comes from their lovely cartoon
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Mar 24, 2022 23:32
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Neito posted:Yeah. He's also bi. It would make a better story if he didn't.
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Mar 24, 2022 23:38
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Thats a lot of words for "marvel and DC have different universes and tell different stories" tbh. Marvel will never have a superman or batman, but then again DC will never have a spider-man or X-men. Both companies have tried to copy the others successful characters with varying levels of success over the years, but they tell different stories in different ways so the characters are never going to fill the exact niche the equivalent does for the other company. Marvels "version" of Superman isnt Hyperion or Sentinel, its Captain America. He's the moral core of their superhero universe and 99% of the time the centre that holds their superhero team up team together, he's the character that most of the rest of the heroes look up to. Hyperion is an out and out pastiche of superman originally created as a villain for the sole purpose of letting the marvel heroes beat up the own brand justice league, and has never been a particularly important character for marvel, any more than Wild Dog (DCs punisher) has been for DC. Marvel tell lots of "human" stories (or they did when I still read a lot of comics from the big two), you're just not going to find that in Squadron Supreme. Marvel and DC both use their superheroes to tell a wide range of stories, both companies have a lot of good and a whole lot of bad, and frankly to pretend otherwise is some nerd on nerd console war bullshit. Considering that in the modern era there is a whole lot of cross pollination between the talent in both companies its entirely ridiculous to pretend that a writer will spin gold for DC but as soon as they put pen to paper for a Marvel book the same writer is producing poo poo.
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Mar 25, 2022 00:03
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Speaking of which characters are analogs of which, remember that there was a collab imprint between the two for about a year in the 90s called Amalgam where the universes merged for a bit and characters got all combined like Super Soldier (a fusion of Superman and Captain America) and Dark Claw (Batman and Wolverine) and so on. I don't think Spider-Man himself showed up, but the Ben Reiley clone got merged with Superboy I think.
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Mar 25, 2022 00:12
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Push El Burrito posted:If I remember right Alan Moore actually allowed his name to be put on that episode because he liked it so much. As for his participation/response to the adaptation, all we've got to go on is Bruce Timm saying Moore "gave them his approval to adapt it" before production began, and a 2006 interview where Dwayne McDuffie (RIP) said "he liked it" with no elaboration.
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Mar 25, 2022 01:30
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Moore strikes me as the kind of guy who, if he hates it, will give you a 15 minute speech about everything that sucks, but if he likes it he’ll just tell you that and nothing else
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Mar 25, 2022 01:33
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christmas boots posted:Moore strikes me as the kind of guy who, if he hates it, will give you a 15 minute speech about everything that sucks, but if he likes it he’ll just stroke his beard mysteriously and nothing else
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Mar 25, 2022 01:43
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christmas boots posted:Moore strikes me as the kind of guy who, if he hates it, will give you a 15 minute speech about everything that sucks, but if he likes it he’ll just tell you that and nothing else 
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Mar 25, 2022 03:06
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that big effortpost about DC and Marvel probably looks a lot smarter if you actually don’t know much about either company other than what you read on Twitter “yeah marvel has all these multiverses” they say as they quietly try to kick flashpoint and about six different Crises into a corner
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Mar 25, 2022 03:43
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what it actually boils down to and always has is that DC treats its heroes more like otherworldly forces that personify their concept, whereas marvel heroes focus more on human characterization and interactions when DC tries to do stuff like that it sucks, every time, almost without exception. like the time the justice league covered up a rape, or the time superman decided to loving walk across america like that goon with the stroller in the desert you’re never going to see a story about superman struggling to make rent
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Mar 25, 2022 03:46
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Rockman Reserve posted:you’re never going to see a story about superman struggling to make rent That's a shame, because I can picture it in my mind, one of the silly old-timey comics titles: "Can Clark Kent Make Rent?!"
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Mar 25, 2022 03:50
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on the contrary, there's probably some superdickery page out there dedicated to all the times superman was an rear end in a top hat landlord
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Mar 25, 2022 03:56
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I’m imagining a cover where a laughing Superman throws a roll of bills into an incinerator while a weeping Jimmy Olson says, “Superman, that was my rent! Why are you trying to get me evicted?” and the cover text is something like “Super Slumlord?!” with the S in each word being the Superman s shield.
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Mar 25, 2022 03:57
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Mine's funnier because it rimes! 
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Mar 25, 2022 03:59
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yea there's absolutely an old superman where he has to become Jimmy's landlord and evict him or Lex Luthor will blow up the moon or something
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Mar 25, 2022 04:01
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to tie it back to the topic, the reason it seems like DCs heroes don’t age as poorly as Marvel’s is because they’re less people and more logos like, every goddamn rear end in a top hat in DC has some kind of crest or emblem on their chest that they probably loving monologue about at least once a series. marvel has like, spider man, the fantastic four and the X-men using logos (and in the last ones case it’s more like a badge, really). dc has an entire international Batman Incorporated, half a dozen kryptonians with the S, Wonder Woman, about twenty different speedsters, half a dozen distinct Lantern Corps, just tons and tons of characters and organizations entirely defined by the oval on their boobies instead of anything actually approaching a human personality
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Mar 25, 2022 04:07
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Rockman Reserve posted:what it actually boils down to and always has is that DC treats its heroes more like otherworldly forces that personify their concept, whereas marvel heroes focus more on human characterization and interactions Hey Bob, Supe had a straight job https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FX4U6XWYvus
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Mar 25, 2022 04:09
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Absurd Alhazred posted:That's a shame, because I can picture it in my mind, one of the silly old-timey comics titles: "Can Clark Kent Make Rent?!" That's so stupid. Okay wait, that's disturbing. I don't mean he can Super Rob things. But he can't Super Stack Toilet Paper. Maybe it is capitalism that is wrong.
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Mar 25, 2022 04:10
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