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I've read definitions repeatedly of what expys are and I'm still not clear what they are, the definition is so broad as to include pretty much everything. If I'm understanding things correctly, some of the best expys off the top of my head include: John Constantine, an expy of Sting Static, an expy of the teenage superhero archetype typified by Spider-Man Darth Vader, an expy of Darkseid Black Racer and the Scarlet Skier, expys of Silver Surfer Homer Simpson, an expy of Walter Matthau Superman, an expy of Philip Wylie's Gladiator and also maybe Jesus Christ Bruce Banner, an expy of Dr Jeckyl Ben Grimm, an expy of Jack Kirby And yeah, Marvel "cosmic" stuff was built on the foundation of weird rear end Kirby/Ditko stuff that didn't get established nearly as much in DC books as in early Marvel, and then was expanded by a bunch of drug-influenced youth in the 1970s. DC has pantheons of mythical gods and 4th dimensional imps and Lords of Chaos and Order but none of them are nearly as black light poster ready as Marvel's.
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Sep 1, 2017 20:19
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Lightning Lord posted:An "expy" IMO is specifically a character who is created to be a version of an existing character and it's obvious. John Constantine for example isn't really an "expy" of Sting, he's a character who's visually based on Sting and was a punk musician as a reference to that, but otherwise isn't really like Sting at all. A better example would be Willoughby Kipling from Doom Patrol. They're meant to function as that character and be a reference to them when those characters can't be used for reasons like copyright or editorial nixing it. I think what complicates this is that many expies gain a life of their own. Hyperion started clearly as a cute reference to Superman in a Marvel book and wasn't really intended as more than that, but eventually became far more. quote:The key difference between this and Captain Ersatz is that an expy, while deliberately based on some other character, is still their own person, while Captain Ersatz is obviously the same character but with the Serial Numbers Filed Off. Please keep this distinction in mind before adding an example here. quote:Also note that a fictional counterpart to a real-life person would not be an expy. quote:Like, X-O Manowar isn't really an expy of Iron Man because despite both having power armor they're radically different characters. Black Racer isn't an expy of the Silver Surfer because he serves a different purpose in the narrative despite them both being "cosmic guy flying around on sporting equipment" Back in the old man yells at clouds aged out of touch bullshit era of the 2000s, people called these "analogues" which is equally vague, or just talked about how characters had similar traits. I'm not against new lingo but I'm still genuinely not sure the standards for these things. It's easy to see how Nighthawk started off as "A Batman", but he stopped being that in a lot of interpretations. Is Night Thrasher a Batman? Midnighter? Moon Knight? Spawn? Big Daddy? Fantomex? Jesus from the Walking Dead?
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Sep 1, 2017 22:01
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TV Tropes is also the first five hits for expy on Google and I'd never seen the term prior to it coming up on here, does it have roots outside of TV Tropes?
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Sep 1, 2017 22:19
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Doom 2099 was one of the first Warren Ellis projects (followed quickly by the Authority, and Mek, and then half of the other things he's written) where I realized that his sort of edgy rebellious "the world is full of bastards, everyone's a bastard, there are no good guys only hard bastards willing to outbastard the worst bastards to achieve a level of bastardness just a tiny bit less bastardy than the real bad bastards, and maybe they're the heroes our bastard world bastarding needs, you bastards" dovetails really easily into believing autocratic fascism is pretty awesome so long as it's a cool dude doing it. I'm pretty sure Doom 2099 isn't actually supposed to be the bad guy, and I am 110% convinced that the Authority are the heroes of Ellis's run, no matter how much puppet-master defense he's done since the book came out and started getting critical readings. In the actual Doom 2009 comic, Doom's coup was violent and his rule was harsh, but Ellis kept showing him materially improving the lives of citizens, and the (((globalist))) corporations he wrested America free from were run by literal alien vampires. When he finally got overthrown, it wasn't by Spider-Man or the X-Men or any sort of heroes, but by a genocidal (possibly alien) financier named Herod who slaughtered millions to depose Doom and put a barely lucid, drug addicted, animal-torturing, jerking-off-into-the-American-flag clone of Captain America in as a puppet president as part of his plan to stripmine the planet, work all humans to death, and then fly off into the stars. When those are the alternatives to Doom ruling with an iron fist, how is he supposed to be seen as the bad guy?
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Sep 6, 2017 04:45
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TenCentFang posted:Wait, what? They aren't? I'm legitimately perplexed by this. I never got fascist-y vibes from it until they literally took over the USA, which I thought was well after Ellis. From a Slashdot interview: quote:Yes. The Yellow Peril characters - Fu Manchu, Wu Fang, etc - were disgusting. Part of the extended joke that was THE AUTHORITY was in seeing people really not react to Fu Manchu sending out thousands of his inscrutable Oriental menaces to divebomb major white world cities. (For those who need the cheat sheet, THE AUTHORITY was a twelve-episode superhero fiction series where the eponymous team fight Fu Manchu, Ming the Merciless and God (dressed up as Cthulhu).) I can't find any interviews where he's talking about the Authority in these same terms, but he was doing it a lot and while a lot of the unilateral violent actions the Authority perform in his volume *could* be read as kind of fascist in Ellis's run, much like Doom 2099 any nuanced exploration of our protagonists' actions and motives are kind of muddied when the antagonists alternately want to "scar the Earth in their image" with thousands of superpowered suicide bombers, turn the entire planet into a "rape camp", or eradicate all life.
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Sep 6, 2017 14:03
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Guy Goodbody posted:I like that DC seems to keep the superheroes fighting superheros stuff mostly to alternate universe stuff like Injustice, and lets the superheroes be friends in the mainline universe. I feel like both companies go through cycles of "everyone is fighting!" / "everyone is friends again!" Without sounding like too much of a dick towards DC, Marvel also feels like they've done a lot better job of building up a wider variety of characters people care about, so you can go through periods where Captain America and Iron Man are friends but the Inhumans and the X-Men or Ms. Marvel and Captain Marvel or Wolverine and Cyclops or whomever are just one group not getting along well, while in general there isn't a "civil war" going on. Which honestly was how the Marvel Universe was for most of its existence, with various heroes beefing with other heroes in the background or foreground. Would anyone really give a poo poo if Cyborg and Firestorm had a huge falling out? Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 20:27 on Sep 6, 2017 |
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Sep 6, 2017 17:17
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Aphrodite posted:Identity Crisis, Infinite Crisis and Amazons Attack are now officially outside the last decade.
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Sep 6, 2017 20:26
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Guy Goodbody posted:All of those might have superheroes fighting superheroes(except Amazons Attack) but none of them are at the level of "The most important thing going on in the world right now is large scale conflict between superheroes" like Civil War, Civil War 2, World War Hulk, or X-Men vs Avengers
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Sep 6, 2017 22:05
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Guy Goodbody posted:Superboy Prime was in incredibly minor character in the DC Universe, and as far as I know, yeah, Infinite Crisis did permanently establish him as a villain. So that's not really comparable to Cyclops. And I don't think that being a jerk to people is comparable to conquering New York at the head of an alien army, and being mind controlled into fighting someone isn't comparable to trying to imprison every superhero who disagrees with you.
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Sep 6, 2017 23:07
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TenCentFang posted:It's kind of like anime. Over in Japan, they're stuck catering to a tiny market social recluse perverts because they're what keeps studios in the black, which means all that gets made is the pervert catering, which means that no one else watches anime, which means all that gets made is pervert catering, and so on and so forth. I'm somewhat more familiar with the manga market, and I know it's incredibly diverse and stuff from lots of genres are successful with lots of demographics, but it does seem to be a few set of specific genres that ever get translated into English. I kind of assumed anime was in the same boat. Is it not?
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Sep 7, 2017 15:02
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TenCentFang posted:In Japan, "anime" is just the term for animation, period. Disney films are anime in Japan. When it comes to homegrown stuff, it's usually either for kids(shounen/shojo and the really kiddy stuff) or pervert catering, at least if it wants to make a profit. I'm pretty sure even Studio Ghibli has had financial trouble for awhile, and they're supposed to be the premier family anime guys. Geek culture in Japan is not mainstream, and if you're an adult who admits to liking animation, people there are gonna assume you've got shelves full of sticky figurines. I will say that looking at American animation, the really high quality (production-wise) stuff like Studio Ghibli or Pixar is expensive as heck to make, and I wouldn't be surprised if that leads to some financial crunch. But I'm also skeptical of the "gonna assume you've got shelves full of sticky figures". That stereotype/type of fan exists in America for lots of stuff, but all things being equal you can pretty readily admit to being a fan of [Star Wars/video games/superheroes/Game of Thrones/animation] and assuming you're not speaking entirely in Star Wars quotes while wearing a Boba Fett hoodie waiting in line to buy a life size Chewbacca doll to put in your Cantina themed man-cave and people aren't going to back away from you because you mentioned you were excited by the Last Jedi trailer. I kind of assumed that anime was not dissimilar. Doing some really light googling, it does sound as if maybe a lot more people read manga than watch anime, but all of the sources I'm finding are really anecdotal.
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Sep 7, 2017 16:02
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Check out this cover gallery to see how quickly and frequently they tried to change up Ravage's look to find something that worked.
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Sep 7, 2017 20:36
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Wheat Loaf posted:Was Ravage a 2099 exclusive character or did he have a non-2099 equivalent? The only other Ravage I'm aware of is this evil Hulk from the Paul Jenkins / Ron Garney Hulk run in the late 90s. Also it should be said that for reasons I don't fully remember, similar to the New Universe, In this scenario Stan Lee would still be Stan Lee phoning in a character for Marvel 3017.
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Sep 7, 2017 22:59
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Tato posted:Punisher 2099 is totally intentionally over the top. Pat Mills definitely used his tenure to make an even more nutty Dredd and push it to the max. Al Ewing did a good job picking up that ball and running with it by putting Punisher 2099 in Contest of Champions. quote:Ghost Rider 2099 was pretty neat and doesn't get much attention either. It was full on Neuromancer cyberpunk and had some great art by Chris Bachalo, Mark Buckingham, and Ashley Wood. Unfortunately, the inker seemingly struggled mightily with handling Wood's art and many of those issues look like someone just poured black ink all over the page.
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Sep 8, 2017 03:50
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TenCentFang posted:Eh, it sounds fine to me, and West Allen flows well, although it does make one wonder why they didn't go with Allen West. Or based on the Edmondson/Gerads Punisher run, maybe he did and his wife vetoed it.
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Sep 13, 2017 01:11
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TenCentFang posted:Look up yonder in the sky, now, what is that I pray? It wasn't really until the 1980s that superhero comics were entrenched enough in pop culture to be something to protect from the ravening hordes of progressivism and multiculturalism as opposed to just a threat to society in general. This sort of thing has happened to varying scales at least since the 1980s, when having [Captain America/Superman/whoever] question Reagan or a stand-in for Reagan was going to make an American icon into some sort of goddamned commie, or the X-Men preaching tolerance is an insidious pro-gay pro-immigration subliminal. Every time they 'kill off' Superman or Captain America or Iron Man or or Green Lantern or Green Arrow or whatever, it's them killing off a beacon of White Male American Exceptionalism, every time they introduce a character who isn't a White Male it's an Affirmative Action hire, this has been going on at least since the early 1990s, with flare-ups in the 1980s. I think it's just been amplified by the development of social media and the fact that Marvel and DC characters have exploded in prominence because of the film franchises.
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Sep 16, 2017 15:52
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The weirdest thing was that Larry Hama and Michael Golden were pitching Bucky O'Hare at DC (in a false-start for DC's attempt to do creator owned books) right around the time/shortly before Jaxxon showed up in the Star Wars comic, and it was discussed in contemporary fanzines and poo poo. It fell apart, Hama jumped ship to Marvel shortly after, and by the time things got sorted out and the Bucky O'Hare comic actually came out from Continuity Marvel had been instructed to stop adding goofy poo poo like Jaxxon to their Star Wars comics and the character hadn't been seen or mentioned in years.
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Sep 19, 2017 19:45
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Gaz-L posted:That is a legitimately fascinating thing: I didn't know Hama created Bucky O'Hare, for one, and I'd always assumed the property had stemmed out of the TMNT phenomenon, instead of apparently predating both that AND the Star Wars thing. Plus I just looked up the cartoon's intro, and they sure made the villain look a lot like Andross from StarFox, which I'm fairly sure even the cartoon predates, let alone the comic.
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Sep 19, 2017 22:51
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Endless Mike posted:Is it just hundreds of pages of Mantis fanfic? Source: Steve Englehart, steveenglehart.com Honestly Englehart has a really impressive body of work and all, but this is like whatever that old chestnut from sports where you spend so much time trying to convince everyone an 8 is a 10, people think they're a 5. Steve Englehart truly believes he's a 14 out of 10.
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Sep 20, 2017 16:30
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Zoro posted:https://twitter.com/SuperSpacedad/status/912839403524861953 Later in a different story that alt-right dude (who still wanted to be Hate-Monger even without Adolf Hitler's Clone's Ghost powering him) traveled back in time to assassinate Barack Obama as a baby, but was thwarted by both Nick Furies who were also traveling through time. The Hate-Monger before that was just literally a big Nazi dude the Punisher murdered. The Hate-Monger before *that* was a mysterious magic dude who would try to orchestrate fights between white supremacists and civil rights protests so he could feed on the emotional hate of *both sides*. It was during this story that Rage was deemed too raw and emotional to be part of the team because of how he reacted to those white supremacists. I mean, it was mostly because everyone else on the team found out he was only 13, but still. The Hate-Monger before *that* was a shapeshifting android made by the Psycho-Man who was like a... televangelist I guess? named H.M. Unger. He would preach hate and then sneak off and change into whatever group he was shittalking and shittalk back to make everyone even MADDER, which somehow led to that John Byrne panel of Reed slapping Sue that was all the rage on Superdickery or whatever. Scourge killed Unger. The Hate Monger before *that* was The Man-Beast (aka the Super-Beast, aka the Wolf-Being, aka Karnivore, aka Omega, aka Lord Anon, aka The Prophet, aka Kyle Munson) a half man half wolf that the High Evolutionary made who seemed to get a new name/gimmick tweak every few years so I guess he was the Hate-Monger for a bit? The original Hate-Monger has popped up in between almost all of these other Hate-Mongers, because he is the ghost of a clone of Adolf Hitler, so he'll never really disappear.
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Sep 27, 2017 04:09
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Lurdiak posted:I forget, was Adolf Hitler trapped in the cosmic cube ever resolved? Did that come up during Secret Empire?
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Sep 27, 2017 04:23
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Roth posted:Is that the GI Joe font?   
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Sep 27, 2017 04:54
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Rhyno posted:Someone will probably try to call me out for saying so but Chuck Dixon is a known piece of poo poo. I'm not even gonna offer up an anecdote, he's a rotten human being and I no longer own a single thing he's written. Chuck Dixon has a long documented history of saying some pretty noxious poo poo in interviews, I concur. Beyond that, in all seriousness, either talk poo poo or don't. I mean, I'm not one to gossip, and I don't want to call anyone out, but between you and me, I wouldn't let *my* kids shop at Rhyno's store, especially if he's working, there, if you know what I mean. I don't want to get into it or offer an anecdote. Just watch out. But I'm not one to say poo poo without backing it up.
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Oct 1, 2017 04:28
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site posted:I agree with you but why didn't you add an anecdote?!?! Omggggg Considering Rhyno was referencing his not-actually-rescinded "look Mark Waid is a sexual predator I don't have any concrete evidence but It Is Known that Mark Waid preys on underage girls" which is the sort of thing that you know, there is no concrete evidence or googlable information or corroborating evidence because Mark Waid has been involved in the comics field since the early 1980s and even people who actively dislike him have never heard or mentioned the concept he's a pedophile or a creep or whatever, that is not the same thing as saying "Mark Waid was a short tempered crybaby" or "Mark Waid gets way too mad about continuity, like he'll want to fight you over continuity" or "Mark Waid wrote some tone-deaf social commentary" or "Mark Waid made light of a fellow pro being convicted of murder in an actual DC Comic" or you know, like a hundred unflattering stories about Mark Waid that exist in the world, all of those are at least broadly accurate and corroborated by multiple sources. "Frank Miller published an Islamophobic comic" is not something you need to "add anecdotes" about, it's something that exists in the world. Saying Spider-Man is a Marvel character is not something you need to provide evidence for. Chuck Dixon turned into a right wing extremist after 9/11 is not a controversial statement. If I said that Spider-Man is actually an elaborate anti-semitic parable or that Frank Miller was born a woman, I would need to provide evidence or not say that poo poo "I don't want someone to call me out for telling an anecdote, not to get into it, but he's a real piece of poo poo" is the sort of dog whistle thing you say when you want to imply that person is a murderer or rapist or something. It's not something you say when you don't want to spend ten seconds finding widely known quotes from media interviews. Or if you do, it's because you want to imply that the person killed someone, not that they called a guy a "homo" back in 2004. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 05:00 on Oct 1, 2017 |
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Oct 1, 2017 04:56
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Zoro posted:Lolwhat? I lived in NY all my life, how can you be afraid of New York? I can only imagine that being true for a country bumpkin or someone with severe anxiety. Not that I'm mocking severe anxiety issues, I'm just saying that's who I would imagine would have problems with New York as a concept. Frank Miller still lives (or at least owns a place and spends time in) New York City and has for over forty years, so saying he is "afraid of New York" is probably not accurate in 2017, but you never know.
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Oct 1, 2017 16:13
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Timeless Appeal posted:I find it hard to not imagine Miller having some antiquated views of East New York, Harlem, and the entirety of the Bronx. a) he was in fact essentially a teenage self-professed "country kid" when he moved to New York City during one of the city's most violent, crime-rampant, garbage-striking, arson-crazed periods of its existence, and got mugged at gunpoint repeatedly in short order, and that probably informs a lot of things for good or ill b) Frank Miller also has continued to live in New York City for about forty years now, so his view of it/him being "scared of it" has probably evolved over the decades, again, for both good and ill. I also know people hate talking about bad people/bad opinions as existing along a spectrum and Miller's racked up plenty of bad opinions/bad person(? I have no real evidence of that outside spouting off really bad opinions has to negatively impact your interaction with real humans too) points over the years, but since we were also just talking about Chuck Dixon, for instance. Comparing the two, only one of them voted for Trump and it wasn't Frank Miller. Only one of them campaigned for and contributed comics to organizations promoting free speech, creators' rights, AIDS research, gay rights, and protecting women's reproductive rights (all in the 1980s), and it wasn't Chuck Dixon. One of them is out there contributing to Alt*Hero and Based Stickman comics and doing interviews for Breitbart. One of them is more or less out of the public eye because he almost died a couple years ago, but when he's making public statements it's in support of ACA and Planned Parenthood and Lin Manuel Miranda or whatever, not Mike Cernovich. Lumping the two of them into "conservative old man comic creators" is I guess workable to a point, but it's a pretty broad brush. He (frequently) can't write women, said some incredibly stupid and hateful poo poo about Islam and Occupy Wall Street, his apparent health problems stemming from drinking have really hosed him up, and I don't think I've enjoyed anything he's worked on since maybe the Green Lantern bits in ASBAR. I'm not "defending" Frank Miller other than to say "Frank Miller used to be very talented and he's not a good guy and he's got some very bad opinions. Counterpoint: he does not have every single bad opinion, despite people's belief that he very well might." Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Oct 1, 2017 |
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Oct 1, 2017 17:51
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