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TwoPair posted:(It also has a great all-time dark ending for a kids' show where after Clark comes up with a way for "Clark Kent" to have survived, the real killer is caught and the innocent man is freed, the mob guy who planted the bomb is caught and questioning how he could have survived, then figures out "He's Superman!" while he's in the gas chamber 2 seconds before they throw the switch and execute him) Hahaha, this is amazing
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Jun 6, 2023 06:21
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The idea that Superman's secret identity as Clark Kent isn't actually a disguise but rather an aspect of his sense of self and as important to him as his super hero identity is such an interesting concept that I love to see explored. Superman isn't Clark Kent because he's trying to hide who he is, he's Clark Kent because he's sincerely passionate about journalism and enjoys pursuing his career.
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Jun 6, 2023 07:32
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Well, then
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Jun 6, 2023 08:10
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:The idea that Superman's secret identity as Clark Kent isn't actually a disguise but rather an aspect of his sense of self and as important to him as his super hero identity is such an interesting concept that I love to see explored. I read somewhere that in the Sandman comics the DC cameos appear as the people they view themselves as. Batman is all monstrous and bat-like while Superman is just Clark Kent. Here we are: 
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Jun 6, 2023 08:40
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:The idea that Superman's secret identity as Clark Kent isn't actually a disguise but rather an aspect of his sense of self and as important to him as his super hero identity is such an interesting concept that I love to see explored. If anything Superman is the secret identity so he can do heroism without people harassing him constantly in his real life.
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Jun 6, 2023 13:17
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:The idea that Superman's secret identity as Clark Kent isn't actually a disguise but rather an aspect of his sense of self and as important to him as his super hero identity is such an interesting concept that I love to see explored. The Kents didn't raise Superman, they raised Clark and did the best job they could.
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Jun 6, 2023 14:15
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Das Boo posted:Well, then Oh you’re doing work for the new Futurama seasons? Nice nice.
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Jun 6, 2023 14:28
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More imps soon! https://twitter.com/IMPmurderpros/status/1666053273948942337?s=20
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Jun 6, 2023 14:51
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:The idea that Superman's secret identity as Clark Kent isn't actually a disguise but rather an aspect of his sense of self and as important to him as his super hero identity is such an interesting concept that I love to see explored. There is a great John Byrne story in which Luthor trains an AI on all available data about Superman and Clark Kent, and it immediately figures out that they are the same person, only for Luthor to destroy the computer because he cannot believe that a powerful person like Superman would live a humble life.   CLICK! CLICK! CLICK! WHIRR! CLICK! WHIRR! CLACK!
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Jun 6, 2023 14:58
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I guess with most comic characters, there isn't even really the question of who is the "real" man between the alter ego and the common human identity. Nobody questions whether Spiderman is more the person than Peter Parker. It's just that with Superman and Batman, some other writers like to get kind of edgey about it. I guess also crossover and team-up stories don't often have time to bother with the characters' personal lives, so Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent don't show up in Justice League stories. Sometimes it can even seem like the secret identity system is a relic of another time from how many more recent superhero things eschew it.
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Jun 6, 2023 15:42
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SlothfulCobra posted:I guess with most comic characters, there isn't even really the question of who is the "real" man between the alter ego and the common human identity. Nobody questions whether Spiderman is more the person than Peter Parker. It's just that with Superman and Batman, some other writers like to get kind of edgey about it. I guess also crossover and team-up stories don't often have time to bother with the characters' personal lives, so Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent don't show up in Justice League stories. I think in the world of comic publishing, secret identities were useful to keep the world in stasis for dozens or hundreds of issues about a single character. The MCU trends more towards lavish scifi epics where it is a given that the world is massively different than the one we know. And yeah, there's no time for personal lives, theres so much constant danger that heroism has to be a profession rather than a vigilante impulse.
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Jun 6, 2023 15:54
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Has any comic ever played games with the secret identity early on not revealing it to the reader and leaving a few options open for speculation? That could be fun, or really lame and stupid.
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Jun 6, 2023 15:58
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pixaal posted:Has any comic ever played games with the secret identity early on not revealing it to the reader and leaving a few options open for speculation? That could be fun, or really lame and stupid. There has definitely been a bunch of comics where a mysterious new hero shows up to help the protagonist with their identity not being know, but it being heavily implied its someone the protagonist knows. There are also scenarios where that has happened at least briefly with the protagonist, but I can't remember at the top of my head.
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Jun 6, 2023 16:14
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SlothfulCobra posted:I guess with most comic characters, there isn't even really the question of who is the "real" man between the alter ego and the common human identity. Nobody questions whether Spiderman is more the person than Peter Parker. It's just that with Superman and Batman, some other writers like to get kind of edgey about it. I guess also crossover and team-up stories don't often have time to bother with the characters' personal lives, so Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent don't show up in Justice League stories. Bruce Wayne being the alter ego of Batman is at least interesting to consider. But Clark Kent is Superman, not the other way around.
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Jun 6, 2023 16:16
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pixaal posted:Has any comic ever played games with the secret identity early on not revealing it to the reader and leaving a few options open for speculation? That could be fun, or really lame and stupid. Probably one of the bigger cases of this was the Thunderbolts. A lot of the Avengers and heavy hitters get taken off the table by a crossover, and so these new guys begin showing up in books saving the day, then they eventually get their own #1 a few months down the line and it's where you learn they're the Masters of Evil rebranding as heroes on the last page. It's still probably one of my favorite runs as you slowly have them split between "wait, people LIKE us? Why did we not turn sooner?", the really twisted ones who are kinda getting off on shoving the obvious in people's faces, and a leader who is going "stick to the plan STICK TO THE PLAN" as everything unravels
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Jun 6, 2023 16:26
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pixaal posted:Has any comic ever played games with the secret identity early on not revealing it to the reader and leaving a few options open for speculation? That could be fun, or really lame and stupid. ShadowHawk was a 90s antihero who liked snapping the spines of badguys. Everything about them was a mystery, culminating into a battle with a copycat white supremacist calling himself Hawk's Shadow. HS thought SH was "taking back the streets" by attacking black people, until SH took off his mask to show that he was black, too. The issue it happened in was the first time I'd ever read the N-word in a comic before, and the issue after that had a special cover where you could lift up ShadowHawk's mask. Waffle! fucked around with this message at 17:07 on Jun 6, 2023 |
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Jun 6, 2023 17:05
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SimonChris posted:There is a great John Byrne story in which Luthor trains an AI on all available data about Superman and Clark Kent, and it immediately figures out that they are the same person, only for Luthor to destroy the computer because he cannot believe that a powerful person like Superman would live a humble life. There's also a great story from the comic based off the animated Superman that talks about Luthor's rise from poverty to build the biggest building in Metropolis for the sole reason he could look down on everyone else and then saw there was a man who could fly.
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Jun 6, 2023 17:45
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I've pretty much only seen Luthor as a businessman stories, and I don't think any comic supervillain businessmen come close, but I do like that in his original roots as a scientist, the reason why he hated Superman was because he made an experiment go wrong and was the reason why Luthor went bald.
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Jun 6, 2023 18:07
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For a number of years until recently, they had Clark's identity revealed to the world and it honestly wasn't a bad change despite not too much being done with it other than Luthor being really upset about it
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Jun 6, 2023 18:08
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I think the whole secret identity concept feels like more of a relic for heroes whose civilian lives don't get a lot of focus. The afore-mentioned Spider-Man is actually a really good example because his whole dual life as Peter Parker and Spider-Man has always been a core aspect of his character, to the point that a sizable chunk of his rogue's gallery end up having some connection to him as both Peter Parker and as Spider-Man. The secret identity thing really ends up feeling most out of place for heroes who don't really have their own, active solo series. When it's a series focusing on a crossover hero team like The Avengers or The Justice League then the heroes having separate, civilian lives ends up just adding a weird hurdle to the writing because the focus on these kind of stories is typically on the interpersonal dynamics between the various team members so there just isn't a lot of time to explore the individual heroes' lives outside that team. Somebody mentioned Marvel as generally placing less emphasis on "secret" identities for their characters (Barring a few high profile exceptions like Spidey and Daredevil) and I think that's largely because they've had more of a focus on crossovers and team-ups from the beginning of their inception as a company rather than DC's approach of originally having a bunch of separate heroes that were sort of slowly merged into existing in the same universe through crossovers. I think it's why there's a lot more heroes in the Marvel Universe whose civilian identities are just public knowledge like the Fantastic 4. This also just makes me realize how loving weird the X-Men are as a superhero team. Like, it's always seemed kind of ambiguous as to whether or not the fact that ta bunch of private school students and teachers are running around in weird costumes fighting government robots. Really, even their focus as a hero team is weird compared to your Justice Leagues or your Avengers since they don't really fight crime? They're primarily a mutant rights advocacy group, but most of their superhero fights don't really spring directly from that angle so much as they're the result of every single person in Xavier's mansion having these bizarre, complicated histories with government experimentation programs, time travel and space aliens. It's like if Martin Luther King Jr. had an evil, alien brother he had to don a robot suit to fight in-between speeches... * - New as in "Only appeared within the past 4-5 decades, these boys be old.
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Jun 6, 2023 19:46
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I did like TDK's commentary on outing Bruce Wayne: "You think the most connected billionaire in town spends his nights beating the poo poo out of cutthroats with his bare fists and your plan is to blackmail him?"
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Jun 6, 2023 19:51
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Happy Landfill posted:More imps soon! The big thing about this episode is this is the one we're finally going to be introduced to Barbie Wire, Blitzo's sister
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Jun 6, 2023 19:57
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Das Boo posted:I did like TDK's commentary on outing Bruce Wayne: "You think the most connected billionaire in town spends his nights beating the poo poo out of cutthroats with his bare fists and your plan is to blackmail him?" It also helps that Morgan Freeman’s delivery of that line is spot loving on. TwoPair posted:One of my favorite episodes of the old Superman animated series from the 90s was one where Superman's trying to save an innocent man on death row by actually doing investigative reporting and the real killer blows up a car with him in it. He obviously survives but everybody thinks Clark Kent died, so he goes to his parents' and his dad suggests "well he just can't be Clark anymore" and Superman responds "But I am Clark." It's an important part of the character that while he might exaggerate his awkward tendencies to not give away his identity, Superman is a character he puts on and Clark Kent is the real guy, not the other way around. Then you get the reverse of this in Batman Beyond where Shriek bugs Bruce with a device to make him hear voices telling him to kill himself and a bunch of poo poo. Then at the end; Terry asks how Bruce knew he wasn’t actually suffering a breakdown; and he replies “The voice kept calling me ‘Bruce’. In my head, that’s not what I call myself.” And Terry’s like, “Oh right. But that’s MY name now. “ 
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Jun 6, 2023 20:11
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I feel like all the Superman and Batman takes in here are spot on but all I can think of is how badly Bill from Kill Bill boofed it as an analogy he was making to The Bride. Not sure if it was deliberate to try and show how out of touch and sociopathic Bill is but him trying to plead with the Bride that's she's extraordinary and living a humble life is beneath her comes across as him being very stupid. Because he uses Superman as his metaphor and implies the entire time he disguised himself as Clark Kent was to show his contempt for humanity. That he thinks the average human is weak cowardly and nebbish so that's how he has to act to fit in. Meanwhile it's been stated over and loving over again Superman is more the secret identity while Clark is his real face. If he had the option Clark would loving love to live a simple life as investigative reporter who gets to spend the holidays out on the family farm. The times he's the most miserable is when the burden of his power and responsibility is really weighing on him. He's superman because he feels it's his responsibility to be, not because he relishes his power. And nobody ever talks about how hosed up Bill's personal interpretation was. Sometimes I wonder if it was only the character saying that or Quentin using him as mouthpiece for his own weird fan wank theories. And honestly if he just used Batman the argument would work perfectly well because Batman really does have contempt for the persona that Bruce Wayne puts on. Flopsy fucked around with this message at 20:27 on Jun 6, 2023 |
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Jun 6, 2023 20:22
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The X-Men all had secret identities for most of their history up through the 90s, although they never really did the whole double-lives thing. So many of their adventures were in remote places, it was plausible for them not to be known worldwide, and they had to reinforce that a few times with erasing their records at the US government, faking their deaths, whatever the hell the siege perilous was. Which I guess that's another aspect of why it was harder for Marvel to maintain secret identities compared to DC. There's only so much you can play around with secret identities over time before it starts feeling like a bit of a stretch for everybody not to know, and once some people out there do know, it's hard to keep track of who does and doesn't know. DC's tendency to reset everything from scratch every so often meant that they could just do a hard reset so nobody knows again. It's more awkward for Marvel to do that. Other marvel heroes who lost their secrecy are Thor (because as he went on more elaborate god adventures, the idea of him as Donald Blake, the mortal, fell away) and Hulk, whose separate identities are functionally separate characters, but at some point they were just publicly revealed as the same person and it stuck that way so everyone relevant knows.
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Jun 6, 2023 20:37
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Jun 6, 2023 21:12
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Considering how Marvel has some sort of death grudge against Peter ever growing up or having any kind of stability in his life I've kinda pulled away from Spiderman in recent years (Although the spiderverse films are the exception). When you can actually see the gears for the mobius strip the investment kinda falls to the wayside.
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Jun 6, 2023 21:29
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Flopsy posted:When you can actually see the gears for the mobius strip the investment kinda falls to the wayside. This is why I could never get into mainstream American comics, even as a kid. It's also why the superherofication of our film industry has been dispiriting for me.
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Jun 6, 2023 21:52
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Neeksy posted:This is why I could never get into mainstream American comics, even as a kid. It's also why the superherofication of our film industry has been dispiriting for me. Same, to a certain degree. Like I do like these characters and grew up with a lot of them, but I feel like the endless serialization nature of their stories ends up hurting long term investment. It makes me think of Alan Moore's philosophy that informed the writing of Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? - That to become a true mythological figure a character's story needs an ending, and that gets me wondering as to how these characters would have fared under a system that treats their stories as a looping cycle rather than an endless serial narrative? Like instead of Superman always having an active, ongoing narrative that never resolves, the comics instead treated it as though each new creative team behind the Superman character was doing their own take on the same story. Every 10-20 years the story of Superman concludes and then a new interpretation starts up where the details are different but the broad strokes follow a similar outline. It's a format that more closely fits traditional mythological figures like Hercules or King Arthur, but it makes me wonder if the character would have achieved the same level of success in our capitalist society under that model or if the never-ending nature of these comics is integral to public engagement? I also think the superherofication isn't just limited to the film industry: The post-Lost model of tv writing feels rooted in so many of the same techniques that were common in super hero comics. Chris Claremont's run on X-Men seems a particularly relevant point of direct comparison.
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Jun 6, 2023 22:10
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Yeah if things never end either you write the same stories over and over again or the characters eventually lose their identity. Both of which are not desirable. It doesn't help that you have writers that have radically different ideas about who the characters are, so you can have a really neat story arc going but then a new author takes over and its promptly dropped.
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Jun 6, 2023 22:37
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I definitely fell out of keeping current on superhero comics because any kind of investment will be inevitably wiped away by some crossover or reshuffle, but I did read a bunch of old stuff a little while back because there's some interesting plots you get when you can plow through old titles. Peter Parker's life has usually been some kind of unending torrent of misery to generate a steady amount of angst, but the first ~10 years of Spiderman are unusual in how he does steadily go through life at a realistic pace, graduating from high school three years into the run, and then lags behind in graduating college because he's a mess. I think killing off Gwen Stacy was actually one of the bigger crass moves of the comics trying to keep him from growing up, since the event basically wiped out Peter Parker's entire personal life (and leading up to it, the writer didn't seem otherwise interested in any of the characters he was throwing away). A number of other marvel characters got to grow from teen to adult, but I think the process takes a longer and longer time for characters created later as the universe gets more stagnant, and young adult characters will just kinda be frozen there forever.
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Jun 6, 2023 22:38
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IShallRiseAgain posted:Yeah if things never end either you write the same stories over and over again or the characters eventually lose their identity. Both of which are not desirable. It doesn't help that you have writers that have radically different ideas about who the characters are, so you can have a really neat story arc going but then a new author takes over and its promptly dropped. For all its many other issues this is why I like Manga more, one author and typically has an ending
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Jun 6, 2023 22:39
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IShallRiseAgain posted:Yeah if things never end either you write the same stories over and over again or the characters eventually lose their identity. Both of which are not desirable. It doesn't help that you have writers that have radically different ideas about who the characters are, so you can have a really neat story arc going but then a new author takes over and its promptly dropped. Neeksy posted:This is why I could never get into mainstream American comics, even as a kid. It's also why the superherofication of our film industry has been dispiriting for me. socialsecurity posted:For all its many other issues this is why I like Manga more, one author and typically has an ending All of this. When a story doesn't have an end you just retread old poo poo or vomit up worse and worse excuses for why things have to stay the same. It's literally a plot point in Across the Spiderverse on how constantly clinging to old canon is emotionally exhausting and kind of stagnates the narrative as a whole. Uncle Ben's death shouldn't be a punchline but it's done so consistently it's emotional punch is starting to wear off which is really sad. The whole reason I got more drawn towards manga in my teen years is i was getting really sick of the lack of a cohesive narrative or characterization in american comics. Nowadays you've got some better options but still the big names cling to this business model. It's kind of miserable, like literally being stuck in a never-ending loop where the characters choices don't matter because status quo will get restored in the end one way or another. Why the gently caress would I want ot invest in something where nothing even matters? Flopsy fucked around with this message at 22:47 on Jun 6, 2023 |
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Jun 6, 2023 22:44
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I don't think it's going to change either - there's so much money in rebooting each franchise through other media that they can't really change anything - the comics can explore new characters and more outlandish concepts, and maybe a few stick if they're really good, but it's all in service of doing a new spin on each character through TV, film and games every 5 - 10 years for a new generation of fans. The comics don't generally get that luxury, only other media.
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Jun 6, 2023 23:00
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There are also too many who are unwilling and unable to let these things go both financially and, frankly, emotionally.
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Jun 6, 2023 23:04
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Das Boo posted:Well, then Oh you better believe I'm excited for the new Superman cartoon. It looks so fun, I'm already on board for six seasons and a movie. Anyway, Lex Luther is one of my favorite villains of all time because he's just so petty. He's a genius with billions of dollars, he could do literally anything in the world and yet the one thing he willingly chooses to devote the majority of his time to is harassing and occasionally trying to murder the world's biggest altruist out of spite. As funny as his motivation for wanting to kill Superman being because Superman accidentally made him go bald I think their dynamic works so much better if Superman has literally never done anything wrong to Lex Luther. Clark was just flying around one day and Lex looked up and thought "gently caress that guy" and that's it, that's his motivation for spending the next several decades of his life attempting to kill the dude.
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Jun 6, 2023 23:06
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It can be more comfortable to separate comics in to arcs to read, like picking your own start and end point to read between and treat that as a unit, or read all of one author's "run", but it's never going to be clean where to start or end unless you're reading like a graphic novel that's already curated and chosen for you, and even then there will be dangling plot threads that you wonder at (which is by design). De Facto I think this is how Marvel comics work now, because individual writers will just get runs of a few years on a title at most until they get rotated out or a crossover event needs to shake things up. This is also an advantage to TV or movie adaptations, because they can curate whatever storylines and aspects they like to combine into their one thing that will have its own limited run with a definite start and end. The one exception being arguably the Bruce Timm-verse of the DCAU was just plodding on forever and was due to get brought back for a fresh round of Batman, but that was finally stopped by an actual real-world death. Most anime and manga I think similarly lack a plan for where they're going in the future and just use tricks to bluff like they have a bigger plan that they're going through, but at the very least there's not a publisher that's just going to rotate out the creatives. There are a few franchises that keep reincarnating into new series with the same status quo over and over again much like Marvel or DC, but those are more the exception than the rule.
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Jun 6, 2023 23:08
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:Oh you better believe I'm excited for the new Superman cartoon. It looks so fun, I'm already on board for six seasons and a movie. There is another Byrne story, in which it is revealed that Luthor's hobby is to offer random women a million dollars to sleep with him and then driving away before they have a chance to decide, so that it will torment them for the rest of their lifes.   Byrne did a great job of making Luthor just the pettiest rear end in a top hat imaginable.
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Jun 6, 2023 23:14
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There was a really funny bit in the Green Lantern animated series where Hal is on the rear end end of the universe and Kilowog makes fun of him for still wearing a mask.
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Jun 6, 2023 23:26
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KingKalamari posted:It's a format that more closely fits traditional mythological figures like Hercules or King Arthur, but it makes me wonder if the character would have achieved the same level of success in our capitalist society under that model or if the never-ending nature of these comics is integral to public engagement? It's funny that you mention mythological figures because that's essentially what they are. They're mythological characters who are still actively growing their canon. New storytellers come by with another amazing tale (read: story arc) to add to the growing list and then the next one comes along and either keeps it or discards it as they tell their next tale and so on and so on until the figure in the story no longer becomes culturally relevant. It's the nature of collaborative fiction. The business that owns it is just a distributor and legal owner though. Anyone can make more Batman stories, they just may not be able to legally profit off of them or have them included in the canon. And even if the rights are lost, as long as the character is beloved, there'll be more stories, good and bad, and what counts and what doesn't is a matter of favoritism and memory.
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Jun 6, 2023 23:29
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