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Post by Bob Reyer on Feb 21, 2016 8:02:24 GMT -5
I thoroughly enjoyed them and put together a complete set of Marvel cards series 1, 2 and 3 at various local comic shows. Bobby, I own a couple of those myself, at least one X-Men (I'd have to go look, and it's too early in the morning, with too little java!), a great Kingdom Come set with Alex Ross art, but I think my favorite is the collection of Amalgam Universe cards:
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Post by BatFonz on Feb 22, 2016 7:43:08 GMT -5
Damnit there was a Moonwing book, I now have to search and get that! - I thought Amalgam was lots of silly fun, I still have Super Soldier + Dark Claw.
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Post by Bob Reyer on Feb 22, 2016 8:54:09 GMT -5
Damnit there was a Moonwing book, I now have to search and get that! - I thought Amalgam was lots of silly fun, I still have Super Soldier + Dark Claw. Simon, Way back when, I did an on-air segment about Amalgam, and even posted an article which, if you choose to, you could read here.
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Post by BatFonz on Feb 22, 2016 12:00:45 GMT -5
Thanks Bob nice little overview - given me a collectors mission to track down the Moonwing issues now - I have a Amalgam collection which is a weighty tome but I am not sure if it is the DC or Marvel version or the 'complete' [Vol.1!?!?] UK edition... more 'Tec work required.
So much good comics fun - I often wonder if either of the big 2 will ever have a fun event as their annual thing rather than these universe shattering clustermucks!
Next stop: Bruce Wayne: Agent oF S.H.I.E.L.D
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Post by Bob Reyer on Feb 23, 2016 6:07:31 GMT -5
Thanks Bob nice little overview - given me a collectors mission to track down the Moonwing issues now - I have a Amalgam collection which is a weighty tome but I am not sure if it is the DC or Marvel version or the 'complete' [Vol.1!?!?] UK edition... more 'Tec work required. So much good comics fun - I often wonder if either of the big 2 will ever have a fun event as their annual thing rather than these universe shattering clustermucks! Next stop: Bruce Wayne: Agent oF S.H.I.E.L.D Simon, You never know, but with The Big Two controlled by an even "Bigger Two" that are so invested in "branding", I doubt that they would allow something like the Amalgam Universe to happen. For your viewing pleasure...
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Post by Bob Reyer on Feb 26, 2016 7:19:36 GMT -5
Chris, The art isn't bad at all, but the action does seem a bit heavy-handed compared to the original, and it seems that Ms. Marla Drake has become a "Senior Marine Engineer" somewhere along the way. One of the comments on the preview page is from Trina Robbins (our once-and- future TC guest!), and Ms. Robbins and I share a feeling about what seems the direction of the series. That said, I am going to check it out, as I've been known to be wrong before!
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Post by Tony on Mar 3, 2016 23:17:36 GMT -5
So I just tweeted (a very-much-abridged version of) this to Bobby, but I wanted to express it to you as well, Bob, and this seemed like the best place to do so.
I want to thank you so, so much for your perspective on the Iron Fist casting on this week's TC. You provided a vital and much-appreciated voice, to a massive degree you represented my own opinion and perspective perfectly, and I genuinely, deeply wanted to thank you (and Bobby) for articulating something so well that I've been feeling for months and months now, but struggling to get across, myself, publicly in any sort of coherent way.
It's just really refreshing to hear that side, and Bobby said it as well, that there's nothing inherently wrong or regressive or racist or sexist or intolerant or anti-representation or anti-diversity to want an adaptation to respect the source material or to be authentic to the images and characters we've seen on the page for all these years. I get a great deal of satisfaction out of authenticity on screen, be it in casting or costuming or a character's personality; it's something that's important to me in terms of my enjoyment of these things (a foible perhaps), and it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with my preference for or opinions on representation or diversity. And I think that nuance is lost on a lot of the people who are angry right now at the casting.
If you look at my monthly pull, the nature of the books I support with my very limited dollar, the books I give my time and money and physical and mental space to, I would say *that* is the pudding which contains the proof, so to speak, of where my heart lies as it comes to diversity and representation in comics. I just counted, and literally over 90% of the books I read and support have a female lead, or a non-white lead, or a LGBTQ lead, or a combination of any or all of those descriptors. I read diverse books, I crave diversity and representation in my entertainment, I support with my meager, near-endangered dollar books with diverse characters, non-traditional characters, and often, as often as I can, female and non-white and LGBTQ creators as well (or, again, some combination of those things). Noelle Stevenson, and Kelly Sue Deconnick, and Fiona Staples, and Jordi Bellaire, and Erica Henderson, and Becky Cloonan, and Joelle Jones, and Leila Del Duca, and Merideth Mcclaren, and Emma Rios, and Kelly Thompson, and Tamra Bonvillain, and Annie Wu, and Emi Lenox, and Sana Takeda, and Muntsa Vicente, and Babs Tarr, and Corinna Bechko, and Lissa Treiman, and Mingjue Helen Chen, and Nicola Scott, and a huge slew of others . . these people are like gods to me; I worship them, their talent, and the stories they're telling, the art they put out in the world, the joy and tears and adventures they've planted in my head forever more.
I'm all about it; those are the bulk of the names that got me back into comics after the better part of two decades with books like Nimona and Bitch Planet and Pretty Deadly and Shutter and Wayward and Kelly Sue's Captain Marvel. I'm a card carrying member of both the Carol Corps and the American Newspaper Delivery Guild (from Paper Girls), the official laminated membership card residing in the highest of high places of honor in my wallet this very moment as I type this. On my podcast we gave our yearly awards for 2015, not entirely dissimilar to the TC awards, and my Limited Series of the Year went to Lady Killer, my Artist of The Year went to Joelle, my New Book of The Year went to Bitch Planet, my Writer of The Year went to Brubaker (ok, white dude, however it was for Velvet), my Comic That You Didn't Think Would Be Good That Ended Up Being Great of 2015 went to Squirrel Girl, my Slow Burn/The Sleeper (started slow but became amazing) award went to Wayward, my 'I Love You Man' Best Recommendation To Me By Someone From This Podcast award went to Lackadaisy by Tracy Butler, my Best Animal in A Comic went to Tippy Toe, and my Book of The Year (the big award) went to The Private Eye, a book that's bursting with all sorts of representation on every level, the lead, the femme fatale, the plucky sidekick, the fluid sexuality, and creator-wise the incredibly brilliant colorist. The only DC book I read every month is Gotham Academy, written by Becky Cloonan, occasionally drawn by Helen Chen, and starring one of the best, most undeniable characters in comics, Maps Mizoguchi (and of course the rest of the book has quite a bit of diversity as well). Squirrel Girl, Hellcat, Monstress, Velvet, Rachel Rising, Rat Queens, Sensation Comics ('till recently), Jane Foster's Thor, the new Black Widow (holy smokes what a great first issue!) . . I cannot emphasize enough how many of the books I buy and devour are consistent with the diversity and representation that I want badly to see more of going forward in comics and tv and film and every other medium.
These things are important to me; increased representation and diversity in media and entertainment today and going forward is very, very important to me. AND EVEN WITH ALL THAT BEING SAID, I still want Danny Rand to look like Danny Rand, just as I'm thrilled that Luke Cage looks spot-on like Luke Cage, and just as I would demand that Kamala Khan (who is awesome), or Miles Morales (who, too, is super awesome), or Shang Chi, or Ororo (who's always been my favorite X-Man ever since I was a wee lad), or Monica Rambeau, or Misty Knight, or Colleen Wing, or Kate Bishop, or Nancy Whitehead, or anyone else you care to name looks more or less like the versions of them that we've seen on the page. That's important to me, and that does not make me a racist, nor a sexist, nor intolerant, nor anti-diversity, nor anti-representation, nor regressive, nor insensitive to the fact that modern entertainment has largely been extremely, overly, overtly, obscenely chock-full of way too many straight white dudes and horribly treated women characters, and yes that's a bummer, and yes let's all work together to continue to help rectify that going forward by putting bigger and brighter spotlights on those already-extant characters that help push diversity in comics and film and tv, AND AND AND yes let's continue to create a bunch more new diverse characters, like Kamala, or Miles, please yes, much more of that.
But . . shoot I seem to have lost the thread a bit; it happens when I get emotional, . . suffice it to say that over the last couple of years I feel like people who value respect for the source material have too often and totally unfairly been painted with a very broad brush, and it's refreshing to hear someone like yourself and Bobby, people who are articulate and passionate and thoughtful and level headed and known to make a great deal of sense on the regular, say "Hey, it's ok. You can desire authenticity and respect for the source material and still be totally not a racist, or a sexist, or whathaveyou. There's room for everybody at this table, and the former does not dictate the latter in this discussion."
Not to mention that the particulars and dynamics of Danny's story and how it's been told historically (often by top-class writers and artists who deserve respect) are also at stake, here, like you and Bobby and Joey all pointed out in one way or another. Yes it's important to recognize the problematic elements in the things we love, where and when they exist (and there are problematic elements in damn near everything, so vigilance is required, and humility, and retrospection), but with Danny Rand specifically a huge part of the story is using the stranger-in-a-strange-land outsider dynamic to help discuss and contemplate the nature of ethnicity and nationality and cultural identity and all that, and I think a source-material appropriate casting of that character (which is the direction they've gone) helps make that aspect of the story run smoother than it otherwise might've. The contrast of "painfully white privileged New Yorker orphaned and raised in the Far East" should make that aspect of the story really pop, and if it's done/written well, it has every potential to be extremely effective and not in any way racially insensitive or "orientalist", but rather the exact opposite. The crux of the story is one of cultural cross-pollination and the breaking down of ethnic barriers, nature vs nurture, not the opposite, and in the Fraction/Brubaker/Aja Immortal IF run they did a wonderful job of showing you that there have been oodles of Iron Fists over the years, and only two of them, it seems, have been caucasian (both during the post-colonial era of world history, which I find to be an interesting nod to the globalization of the last 150 years or so), and that Danny's not the epitome of Iron Fist, he's not the greatest Iron Fist ever, he's actually a bit of a (lovable) screw up, who never really studied as he should have, and has yet to achieve his full potential, and as you said has never quite been accepted in Kun Lun, even after all these years. To me, these are all important (and recently too-overlooked) aspects of Danny's story. He's not the Great White Hope, but rather a fish out of water, full of conflict and qualms and prone to mistakes.
And might that story still have been told with a latino-american, or a middle-eastern american, or an african-american? Yes, sure, definitely, I believe so. But to cast an asian-american would have seemed at once like pandering, and also simultaneously discomfortingly close to the "asians: thus kung-fu" trope, which again is something you guys brought up to good effect on the show. AND (!), as you well-pointed out, to say "Ugh, they cast a white Iron Fist. That's inherently racist and a perpetuation a story that's been inherently racist since its inception" is absolutely, incredibly disparaging of the people who created and wrote those stories over the last 40+ years. Again: I see that as painting with an overly-broad (and to be honest pretty offensive) brush, and although I respect the hell out of Marjorie Liu, for instance, who I met at Image Expo last year and who I adore (she's such a ridiculously kind, and gracious person, a joy to talk to, and I love, love, love Black Widow: Name of the Rose and Monstress), the sort of rhetoric that she and many other people have used to discuss this situation is very extreme and makes an awful lot of assumptions, to me. Like you mentioned on the show, why not Shang Chi? You want an asian hero from the marvel universe to put on screen, there are several great ones to choose from not named Danny Rand, and if you're not satisfied with the selections available (which is totally fair), then be like G Willow Wilson and create the character you yearn to see. Like Melinda May, who I believe Joey brought up; May's an incredible MC/TVU character; she's my favorite on that show by miles, and I say that as a generally pretty big fan of pretty much everyone on that show. And they created her new for the show! Awesome; love that; more of that please.
And with that I officially have no clue where I'm taking this and have probably already repeated myself several times just in this one, ranty, over-long post. But yeah, I wanted to say thank you, truly, because even though, as a grown-ass man, I theoretically shouldn't need my hand held, or for someone to give me permission to hold an opinion, that's not always the case in reality, and in this instance it turns out I did need to hear someone(s) I respect and look up to say, more or less, "It's ok to want it to look like it does on the page. That doesn't inherently make you a bad person, it just means that you're neurotic. But you know what? We're all neurotic. Cheers to our favorite neuroses." I needed that so badly, and you guys gave that to me this week. Thank you.
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Post by Tony on Mar 3, 2016 23:41:20 GMT -5
^ Also, heading this off at the pass, Idris Elba as Heimdall passes muster, even with someone who craves authenticity to the page as much as I do. He's a goddamn force of nature, and one of the best actors going, and impossibly charismatic, and to be perfectly honest with you without the aide of google images (or my old Thor issues) I'm not sure I would remember what Heimdall originally looked like anyways. His talent and charisma won me over from the first time I saw him on screen, and I'm thrilled to count him an exception to this personal rule. #IdrisElbaForAllTheThings
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Post by BatFonz on Mar 4, 2016 5:04:09 GMT -5
So Idris Elba for Iron Fist? sorry couldn't resist
I thought it was a fantastic debate with great points being made by Bob, Bobby, Joey and Steph - what makes a great discussion is the various viewpoints being well thought out and well argued on all sides. I thought there were several thought provoking points made, Bob supported by Bobby made a touching reminder of the characters history and it can feel like by changing a characters origin or race you are saying there is something wrong with the original concept and following that thought process through that the creator was doing something wrong or had some hidden agenda. Steph's point that when dealing with a universe created by primarily straight white males that there will be few existing options for adding diversity and we should look at every chance prior to moving forward was valid perhaps it could work on this occasion, perhaps not I don't have the history with the characters story to know personally.
What I do know is Joey for me made a beautiful, eloquent and emotive monologue which convinced me that if people understand what the character is at their core, what their underlying story is and can represent that in the right way with the kind of passion Joey clearly has for the character then regardless of race it will capture the essence of who they are.
I don't think there is a right or wrong for this specific case - is it wrong to want the original Danny Rand represented? No, absolutely not. Is it wrong to want to consider changing his race to increase diversity while keeping the essence of the character and critical elements of their story? No, absolutely not.
It was a genuinely interesting debate, the best kind, the kind that makes me look at my thoughts and opinions and question them, that will never be a bad thing.
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Post by Bob Reyer on Mar 4, 2016 8:03:01 GMT -5
Tony and Simon,
Thank you both so much for taking the time to craft just amazingly impassioned and literate posts that help to continue the intelligent discussion of an important topic. There are many angles to this, and even with passions high, it's important to respect other opinions, and that comes from understanding why they are held.
On a more general track, as do you gentlemen and so many others, I want the universe depicted in comics (movies and TV as well) to reflect and represent the world around us. For me personally, I believe that goal is better served, and with less rancor, through the creation of new characters or those that honor the legacy of an older one, much as did the Kamala Khan Ms. Marvel or the John Stewart Green Lantern. I fully understand the business concerns that sometimes drive the creative decisions, but as I've said in the past, when you see the amazing tapestry that DC wove back in the 60s by using their multiple Earths to pass the mantle from one generation of heroes to the next whilst allowing the originals to still exist, I'd love to see Marvel and DC do something similar today. This would allow that diversity we all seek to flourish, and in a small way they have, what with DC's "Earth-2" and Marvel having two Caps and two Spider-Men running around concurrently, but a larger initiative could create a gateway for a new and more inclusive readership while embracing the tastes of veterans as well.
Thank you again for being part of this amazing community!
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Post by wylietimes on Mar 5, 2016 9:58:39 GMT -5
I would have had no problem with Danny with an Asian background, but generally prefer Danny to match his comic appearance for his relationship with Luke. Especially with recent sayings being thrown around by potential presidential candidates about "making America great again," many ignorant people mistake that for get rid of Latin American, Muslim and believe it or not black people.
We really need comics and comic adaptations to show something better that we should aspire to. Friendships of all different backgrounds and colors. It's really the biggest reason we need the new young readers and for super heroes to be something more. To say this might be happening in the world, but if you want to be like your favorite heroes, here's how you should act.
Finally, and somewhat unrelated, but the new PMIF series broke the top 10 and landed at number 8.
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Post by Bob Reyer on Mar 5, 2016 13:15:09 GMT -5
I would have had no problem with Danny with an Asian background, but generally prefer Danny to match his comic appearance for his relationship with Luke. Especially with recent sayings being thrown around by potential presidential candidates about "making America great again," many ignorant people mistake that for get rid of Latin American, Muslim and believe it or not black people. We really need comics and comic adaptations to show something better that we should aspire to. Friendships of all different backgrounds and colors. It's really the biggest reason we need the new young readers and for super heroes to be something more. To say this might be happening in the world, but if you want to be like your favorite heroes, here's how you should act. Finally, and somewhat unrelated, but the new PMIF series broke the top 10 and landed at number 8. Bobby, Your words on the nature of heroism and how they should generate aspiration are so, so true, and beautifully put! I'm a huge Luke Cage fan (as you can tell from this! ), so it's great to see that so many others took a chance on the new PM/IF. ps) There's a rumour going around that the Marvel/Netflix brain-trust is looking to add Shang- Chi to the "Iron Fist" cast! rrr
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