Toph Bei Fong posted:Morrison's put himself in a very safe position here by incorporating goal post moving into the comic itself: if you think about it too hard, you're the problem. If you criticize the work, you're the villains. If you try to take it as simply dumb fun, well, here he is in the interview claiming that his light and fun issue is really full of haunting dark overtones that you didn't pick up on (just like all those old 40s and 50s comics we love to deconstruct). Well, which one is it? Am I supposed to read it just intelligently enough to pick up on {this or that reference to old comic} but not critically enough that I notice metafictional stories have been a thing since at least the comedy of the 1940s (or earlier: off the top of my head, 1666 gives us Cavendish's Blazing World, and 1759 Sterne's Tristram Shandy), and is hardly new ground or enough of an idea to stand on its own, rather than as backdrop for the real story? Jack Kirby and Stan Lee attended the wedding of Sue Storm and Reed Richards. Nova visited Marv Wolfman's office to complain about the quality of his comics, and both Wolfman and George Perez made appearances throughout Teen Titans. Kurtzman and Wood did most of the commentary in Superduperman back in 1953. But then, here I am, part of the problem. I'm not supposed to criticize the reason I want to criticize the comic and its author, or else I'm a monstrous floating eyeball or the evil clockhouse from Nextwave. The point in The Just is that their world has been broken, primarily by Dame Merciless. Despair has taken over. Superman robots and other such tactical realism have eliminated all meaning in people's lives, creating a hollow utopia. The point in Mastermen is that their world has been broken, primarily by Lord Broken. It's literally a broken house, a liberal and tolerant society that is built on the bones of the Holocaust (and the implication, I think, is that Overman stopped the Nazis before they could complete the genocides, and then they finished it during his 3-year disappearance- he very obviously is complicit in the Shoah), and it has to be destroyed. Another hollow utopia. The point in Pax Americana isn't to replace Watchmen, but to comment on it, respond to it, and finally to criticize it. This one features its own hollow utopia, but a more obvious one. The point in Ultra Comics is that Ultra Comics Lives. Even after the comic is closed, Ultra Comics will live on inside your mind. Which is why you're not supposed to read it. Because once you do so, Ultra Comics can no longer be contained. Hell, the point in Thunderworld is not that the Fawcett Comics were secretly dark, but that they were fundamentally childlike, and the characters can't deal with the dark, even in the minor case of Georgia Sivana's self-image issues. The Guidebook, meanwhile, increased my appreciation for things a whole lot when Grant started poking fun at his Darkseid obsession, and when he revealed his most ambitious secret villain yet. It's us.
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Mar 26, 2015 06:52
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ImpAtom posted:If that was Morrison's point then he hosed up badly, both in the writing of the issue and in his choice of subject matter. Picking Captain Marvel for "too childlike deal with serious issues" displays such a fundimental misunderstanding of that era of Captain Marvel that I'd expect it from Geoff Johns. I think people are taking that one line from an interview out of proportion, especially since it isn't contained in the work itself. Look at how they deal with Georgia's self-loathing. Freddie simply tricks her into saying "Sivana" and going back to the body she hates and Mary gets all huffy about inner beauty. These are pretty cruel things to do to someone suffering from body-image issues, as the Uzumeri annotations noted, but those are exactly the sort of thing kids would do. Thunderworld can only deal with darkness by sublimating it, like Binder's original comics did. But at the same time, Billy (and presumably Freddie, Mary, Tawky Tawny, etc.) can read Ultra Comics without getting possessed or haunted. This innocence allows them to defeat the Gentry invasion and go off to help other worlds. Morrison isn't saying that "childlike" is equivalent to "bad" here. I mean, his favorite Superman story is "Superman's NEW Power", which is the apex of what Binder did with Captain Marvel and then with Superman (and so the rest of DC in conjunction with people like Weisinger, Kanigher, Haney, etc.)- rendering adult concepts child-friendly by sublimating them. (There's also something to be said about how Thaddeus and Magnificus transform with the power of Shazam, especially in relation to how Georgia transforms, but that's another thing entirely.) Arguably, it's not just Thunderworld, but the majority of realities, that Morrison is using here for his point. After all, all the other Sivanas are appalled by torturer-rapist Sivana and don't really know how to deal with him. Similarly, Doktor Sivana doesn't show up on the screens or in the guidebook. The Sivanas we see are from relatively lighthearted worlds, like luchador-Sivana or Sivana-26 (Snakevana? Thivana?).
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Mar 26, 2015 15:32
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DudeDeuce posted:I have a question. When Ultra starts his adventure "out of the box" - he flies around Nu-City and sees a billboard of what looks like a hero long gone with Kryptonian writing on it. Is he on another Earth (that is probably one of the mystery Earths in the guidebook) or is he in his "dreaming tank"? It's real. Granted, that doesn't mean it wasn't created by Earth-Prime as a place solely for Ultra Comics to lure in Intellectron.
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Mar 26, 2015 15:45
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ImpAtom posted:Morrison does that sort of thing with characters of all ages. He is not a flawless superbeing who never has any weird biases in his writing. I think there needs to be more than an out-of-book interview and "someone was cruel to someone with body issues" for me to buy it, especially as many people both in and outside of comics don't even recognize body issues as a thing beyond light comedy, Morrison included. ImpAtom posted:The robot children thing is very obviously shades of that and it's understandable why he went that direction for them. The Fawcett thing is where I disagree, either that it wasn't Morrison's intention or if it was that Morrison is displaying a Johnsian level of misunderstanding of the era. I trust Morrison's analysis enough to believe he wouldn't read Fawcett comics and come away from it with that. I'm not saying that they can't deal with adult threats, which is obviously false from reading the comic, but they don't really get them, except when they're treated in a Binderian way and sublimated into some fantasy/sci-fi concept. Morrison is suggesting that this is a positive thing, because they're the only world that unequivocally triumphs over the Gentry. This plays into what he means when he says that he summoned up Metron once, too. And also with Ultra Comics. I also think that you're giving Morrison too little credit here. If you look at how Georgia is drawn compared to many of her other incarnations, there's something interesting going on with how she's drawn and how that relates to her transformed state. Toph Bei Fong posted:When I ask "What does it all mean?" or "What's he trying to say?" I don't mean in the plot point sense. I understood the issues just fine. Y'all make some salient points and good analysis, and I'm very interested in reading more of it. The final, bigger point will probably have to wait for Multiversity 2, but I think that one thing you're missing is that Nix Uotan is very heavily Morrison himself in Final Crisis, or at least people interpreted him that way. So what does it mean that Morrison becomes a servant of the Gentry, attempting to recycle Darkseid once again? Especially given that he's recycling both Final Crisis and Seven Soldiers? I think that the bigger points are Morrison's main obsession since Animal Man of not being cruel to fictional characters, of treating them with some dignity, and also that comics have become stagnant, and he shares a lot of the blame for doing this. We have a number of different worlds here. We have actually moving forward with time and letting the characters grow old and die and new ones emerge. We have doing cheerful, good-hearted adventure stories. We have putting characters in different genres and playing with those conventions. We have high-concept stories. We have genuinely adult stories which attempt to push their limits artistically. We have metafiction. And all of these are under attack by poisonous ideas we've gotten into our heads. But we can defeat them. Even the most poisonous one of them all.
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Mar 26, 2015 16:45
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Lord Krangdar posted:This Ultra story was like a much less scatalogical and random Filler Bunny issue, complete with the dreaming-tank. Eh, I don't think that it's so easy (and it's also really cynical). After all, while we have Adam indicating that analysis is in conflict with wonder, Captain Marvel tells us that analysis and wonder are part of the same thing, and then in Ultra Comics we have Intellectron telling us that comics are meaningless and a waste of time. So I think that, in that case, what we're meant to understand is that science and magic, analysis and joy, are both products of the same thing- taking the world/comic book seriously. I feel that a lot of these "conflicts" are false dichotomies and that there's more of this to be uncovered. I doubt that Morrison is really trying to say, for example, that we can never move on from what Hannibal Lecter-Sivana represents, or that we can't let new characters, younger characters, become prominent because they wouldn't be able to do anything.
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Mar 27, 2015 04:54
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WickedHate posted:The story ended, but isn't the Gentry still sapping our lives away the more we spend time talking about the series? Why are you listening to the bad guy, who's trying to get you to let it go by leaving the story unfinished?
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Mar 28, 2015 02:29
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Die Laughing posted:Sure, but does discussing and analyzing the book improve your life in any way? Maybe now you'll be watching some stupid movie on Netflix, think "This is some Gentry poo poo.", and turn it off so you can do something more constructive. Why are you assuming that he's talking through the villain? Fact is, you've let the Gentry in and now you've convinced yourself that you're caught in the Oblivion Machine. But there is no Oblivion Machine, and there's nothing wrong with reading comic books.
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Mar 28, 2015 03:24
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Die Laughing posted:There can be if you read lovely books. Well, yes and no, I think. He's saying that reading critically is good and part of enjoying something, but he's also making an interesting argument with how he takes "this is a totally new comic, like nothing you have seen before" right after borrowing a trick from Jack Kirby's OMAC #1 (and of course from lots of stuff before), and putting it in the mouth of the villain. I think that he's arguing against snootiness over comics and genre fiction and especially trying to make hierarchies of what's more or less shameful.
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Mar 28, 2015 05:55
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StumblyWumbly posted:I hear you, I love the comic, and I do hope you're right, but the idea that Morrison wants more critical reading is a bit undercut by the criticism that harms Intellectron. It isn't valid criticism, it's just folks getting sick of the dark spectacle and moving on. Ultra Comics doesn't die, though. The story ends, but Ultra Comics lives on in your head, which is why the Gentry tell you at the end of the comic that you've been infected and need to report to a quarantine zone. And that criticism should be looked at in the context of the story, where Intellectron sets the trap by saying how this is -finally- an intelligent comic. So when we realize that it looks pretty stupid and is just a giant egg with wings, that hurts it because we're breaking out of the trap and refusing to let it win. Of course, the real victory comes from trapping Intellectron in the finished story. EDIT: I also think that the Ultra Comics comic we see in the other issues and in Ultra Comics itself have different endings from the one we read, because we're from Earth-Prime/33 and Ultra Comics is made of us and interacts with us. But other characters can't interact with Ultra Comics in that way. Effectronica fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Mar 28, 2015 |
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Mar 28, 2015 17:43
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Toph Bei Fong posted:But the internet commentary (perhaps from the Comic Cosmos Forums seen in Multiversity #1?) that starts to bring him down is "The villain is a giant egg with bat wings? That's so stupid!" before he recalibrates to absorb wasted time and energy. Not quite the same level of criticism... But then here we are again: by criticizing that the ending of the book doesn't quite work during a commentary about book endings not working, we summon and give power to Intellectron and are hence part of the problem. But the issue isn't with Intellectron's shape or character design (which I think is pretty cool, personally, and some very fine work by Doug Mahnke, David Baron, Gabe Eltaeb, et al), and shouldn't be with spending time discussing a comic which is intentionally written to be discussed and analyzed... Is this from an interview? Because I don't get where this is coming from, textually.
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Mar 28, 2015 17:50
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Toph Bei Fong posted:Intellectron's line: "This is only silly comm-ix-makes no sense-" after it turns out that the kids need Rex Ultraa to protect them from the thing in the box that couldn't escape until Ultra brought the box to their headquarters that they'd been defending from the forces that want to keep the box outside. How would they know they don't want the thing when they have no idea what's inside? If Ultraa is powerful enough to eat Ultra, why hasn't he retrieved the box himself? Because the whole setup is a trap to allow Rex Ultraa to eat superpowers so that he can use the multiverse gate to go home. Everything we're told until UC figures it out is a lie. But the gate itself is a trap to allow Intellectron bodily entry from the Bleed.
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Mar 28, 2015 23:19
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Toph Bei Fong posted:*snip* Ultra Comics is a weapon against us. Against our world. The whole point is to sucker you into reading, and then inject you with despair. But we have the power to change the comic we're reading, because when we've seen panels from UC in other issues, they've been different, and also because we are Ultra Comics. We have the ability to reconfigure the ultrastuff into whatever we can think of. We can rework the story into a nonlinear narrative. We can criticize. We can think about the story. Most importantly, we can chain Intellectron, who is only an idea. We are engines for generating ideas. By reading the story, and following Ultra Comics, we defeat the twisted, parasitical "superheroes" like Ultraa that we believe are the only thing defending us from the despair of the Oblivion Machine. We then defeat the Oblivion Machine itself, first by laughing at it, and then finally by thinking an ending to the story and putting it under our control. Intellectron believes itself to be in control. But it isn't. It orders us to turn the page, but when we do so, we get closer to defeating it. It tells us the comic is real to prepare us to be hurt by the death and destruction of Ultra Comics, but by accepting this, we get the power to stop Intellectron. The Oblivion Machine is in us. It's in all of us. Everything that we do, even looking at other people, increases entropy, moves us closer to death. Comics are no different. But we can take this fact, and conclude the opposite of what Intellectron wants us to think. More importantly, the goal isn't to forget it, but to contain it, to think up a cage that it can't escape. Which we can do, some with ease, some with difficulty. I mean, you look at these pages where old bits of continuity exploit children to eat new characters, and you conclude that it's all nonsense, it's poo poo, and Intellectron has won. But let's go back to the Flex Mentallo panel, where Flex answers Wally Sage's implied questions immediately afterwards. "What do you say? Gamble a stamp. I can show you how to be a real man!" We can ideate ourselves- you can ideate yourself- out of the trap.
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Mar 29, 2015 14:03
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