The Spinner Rack

I love writing this blog but I hate that it’s on my professional portfolio, so while I’m going to leave it here, I’ll be writing for a new project from here on out. Check out the Spinner Rack, the new blog on a site called Shortbox Summary.

Multiverses and Mounting Anxieties

Reality sucks. That’s why a lot of our fiction is about the off chance that it doesn’t.

What used to be shared on whispers in basements has become mainstream and brought all its strange concepts along with it. Parallel Earths and multiverses aren’t quite as old comic books, but they’ve been there for a while, and now, they’re all the rage in the largest parts of mainstream fiction.

Loki introduced MCU fans to the multiverse, and What If?, the new Disney+ animated series is exploring it on a weekly basis. Over at DC, Dark Nights Death Metal led into Infinite Frontier which introduced readers to the Omniverse, a place where all possible interpretations of their characters are all infinitely valid and infinitely real.

With the MCU I get it, it’s the next logical extension of stakes. They spent 20 movies and 13 years saving the universe, the only thing bigger than that is saving every universe. Add in the fact that limitations exist on film that you’d never find in a comic. Peter Parker has been 29 or whatever for like… a million years, but it won’t be long until Tom Holland’s Peter Parker stops being a cute precocious teen and starts being a dude who you might not want to be friends with.

Blink and he’ll be 40. Blink again and he’ll be a photo at the 176th Academy Award In Memoriam section. Dude’s operating on a timeline that, just like the rest of us, is measured in years coda’d with asterisks.

And that’s where the appeal of comics steps in. In 1961’s Flash 123, when Barry Allen met Jay Garrick, the original Flash, DC Comics was just trying to explain why there was an older Flash that previous readers remembered. It was a narrative device that needed some massaging so readers could comprehend how Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, the only heroes to survive the fad of superhero comics in the 30’s and 40’s wouldn’t remember The Flash and Green Lantern while they’re hanging out with, well a different Flash and Green Lantern.

It happened on another Earth, very much like our own, but not our own. Genius, really. And it’s the same loophole that will let Marvel recast Tom Holland when the dude doesn’t want to sling web anymore, so that’s neat too.

Flash (heh) forward 60 years, and one of the most ambitious and successful interconnected series of films are betting their entire future on it. I listed a few earlier, but let’s rundown all the recent explorations of the multiverse currently happening in nerd-dom. A bunch of these are from the MCU, but they’re worth mentioning:

1. Disney+’s Loki introduced the concept of the Multiverse to the MCU

2. NetMarble’s Action MMORPG Marvel Future Revolution releases to mobile devices

3. Spider-Man: No Way Home’s trailer shows Peter and Dr. Strange breaking the Multiverse

4. Disney+’s What If? series explores different worlds from the Multiverse

5. DC Comics creates the all-encompassing Omniverse in Dark Nights: Death Metal

6. Future MCU film: Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness

7. Sony’s Into the Spider-Verse

8. Timeless: A new Marvel comic event about an emergent timeline Kang doesn’t like

9. Avengers Forever: A new Marvel comic event about the Multiverse’s Greatest Heroes

10. DC restores multiple valid and possible realities In Infinite Frontier

11. Every Rick and Morty episode, ever.

Don’t dig the aesthetic, dig the story.

And that’s where I stopped counting. Not for any discouraging reason mind you, I just think 11 examples of culture glomming on to one idea is enough to make my point.

I think the reason people are so entranced by the idea of the multiverse is because everyone does the same thing that Marvel is doing every Wednesday - they ask “what if?”. That conditional question answers everything.

What if I didn’t get a parking ticket?

What if I never went to college out of state?

What if my parents weren’t shot in an alley after we got out of seeing Zorro?

What if 9/11 didn’t happen?

It’s the Sliding Doors moment of everything, and why the hell wouldn’t you be asking ‘What If?’ every goddamn second of every day right now? Have you seen today lately? Today sucks. Every new headline from Afghanistan, the 17 Hurricanes lining up on the east coast of the US, the pandemic, the unemployment, the seeming deterioration of institutional government, documented police brutality, the uncontrolled spread of misinformation, impending climate catastrophe, Tom Brady being Super Bowl favorites for the fucking Buccaneers, and about a thousand other things I can’t even think of because I’m too busy thinking of the first thousand things that remind me every day that today sucks.

But I think fiction analyzing what if is a good thing. An encouraging thing. A worthy thing.

Imagine having to do this twice. Three times. 57 times.

Since 2020, it felt like so many works of art were touching on the idea of temporality being a prison. The Hulu movie Palm Springs being my favorite - a completely nihilist exploration of reliving the same day over and over. But there was also the game Returnal from Sony about an astronaut who crashed on a world and every time she died she found herself back at her crash site, with the memory of what she’d just done but without the physical mark of progress. Hulu made another timeloop movie called Boss Level that looked way more fun than Palm Springs but way less smart. The recent Xbox exclusive 12 Minutes traps you in a loop where you have minutes to respond to unchecked tragedy, but you get infinite times to try and save yourself from it.

These reflect the anxiety of living a meaningless existence, exacerbated in social consciousness because of the Pandemic and the years of truth losing objectivity. Those two circumstances coalesce into the futility of simply existing. Every day felt exactly the same and time is a shackle that keeps us in place, because everything you experience and internalize isn’t real anyway. I am trapped in today and guess what? As previously discussed, today sucks.

If time loops are existence presented as a prison, then the multiverse is the tunnel that Andy DuFresne had been digging for 12 years.

Even though it may seem like a trend that people are chasing in their art because scientifically it sort of makes sense even to people without a PhD in astrophysics, and narratively it’s the only thing bigger than what the Avengers just pulled off in Endgame…. it’s pretty optimistic, isn’t it? The grass is greener on the other side of the wall between our realities, so let’s go kick it over there for a sec.

People want to believe in a better world, even if it’s not their own. They want to save a world, even if it’s not their own. A world where you might be better, taller, richer, happier. Maybe you have ten kids or maybe you have no kids. A world where you’ve never gotten a cavity - the multiverse is infinite, every possible you at every possible moment in every possible state exists and our fiction is diving into it headfirst. You might think it’s depressing to look for a life that’s better than the one you have, instead of making your life the one you wish it were. I think it’s hopeful, personally, because at the very least we’re imagining things to be better, even if we’re too pessimistic to believe it could be us that’s better, it at least acknowledges the concept of better. Maybe we’ll make this world better and worth saving, by ourselves or by someone else, across the bleed between universes. Somebody has to want to save this place.

It would suck if someone didn’t, but that’s reality for you.

Judging Comics by their Covers

I’ve tried writing this twice already. Squarespace crashed and it doesn’t have an autosave function on laptops so that’s neat. It’s ok though because I wrote a long, flowery thing and I realized it was kind of like when you’re looking for a recipe online and someone tells you about the time they broke their tibia in college and how that was the key to them figuring out how to build a better ramen base or whatever. I don’t want to write something like that, so maybe Squarespace did me a favor.

I haven’t written in a while. i’ve been busy with a new job, I’ve been tired from a new job, and I’ve been lazy when I’m not doing work for my new (wonderful, incredibly exciting) job. That’s the gist of what I wrote the first time.

I think it’s a good thing to judge comics by their covers. I think that’s a totally normal, healthy, and good thing to do. Comics are more expensive than they’ve ever been but they’re still a relatively cheap form of entertainment. Services like DC Infinite, Marvel Unlimited, Hoopla, and Comixology make them even cheaper, which is super exciting.

It’s never been easier or more affordable to read comics. So how do you know which ones to read?

Judge them by their covers. If you dig it, backtrack and read the story from the beginning. Or don’t. There’s no right way to read comics. I do my best to point you in some cool directions, but I’m not a particularly cool guy, I’m literally always home, so what the hell do I know?

Some of these covers are old, some of them aren’t. The only real thing they have in common is that they stuck with me. In some cases it’s been years, and they still come up instantly when I think about what makes a comic iconic to me.

Covers don’t need to sell you on anything but the 22 pages you’re about to read. They’re literally just an advertisement you don’t mind looking at. Some of them are advertisements you want to look at. Some of these stories suck, some of them are incredible. But no matter what, their covers - good grief. Comics, man. They’re the best.

Man, what a weird assortment of covers, right? I was able to google 90% of them with the exact title and issue number. The other ten percent, I was within 4 issues. That’s not a brag.

But it proves my point all the same. I don’t even know if all of these are good covers, let alone good stories, but that doesn’t matter. See something interesting? Grab it, flick through the pages. You might like it. Hell, you might even remember it 17 years later and be able to google it from memory.

These aren’t the best covers and they’re not my favorites either. They were literally just the ones that convinced me to spend $3 I could’ve spent elsewhere because they were so damn cool to me. They’re these nails that have been hammered into me and no matter how hard I shake or pull, I can’t remove them. They’re imprinted on me, They’re in my comics DNA. They are my comics DNA. Gary Frank is a great artist, but there’s no reason I should be thinking about his cover to Avengers (vol. 3) 62 all these years later.

Except I am. Comics, man. They’re the best.

Representation Matters

In 2013 I stopped reading comics. I wish I could say it was because Marvel’s event Fear Itself was boring, or because DC’s The New 52 disregarded a lot of what I liked about the universe, but the truth is I was broke and couldn’t buy comics the way I wanted to. This was before digital solutions really existed and my favorite torrent site had been raided so that option was out too. A series of part time jobs in a new city meant I barely had enough money for rent and living, so comics hit the wayside.

And that sucks because a few years later comics got interesting again because they got different and I was back, hitting the shop every week. New heroes were taking up old identities, and the industry shifted to better reflect a changing demographic. Just as comics were getting more interesting, vocal comic fans on online forums got more annoying.

And then they just got outright shitty.

Single comic issue sales were down (despite collected editions, game sales, box office returns and everything else going up) and a certain group of people (read: racist, misogynist pricks) got vocal about the fact that “a woke social agenda” was ruining comics.

They thought a woman becoming a a hero that had traditionally been a man was a bad thing. They thought a gay superhero was a bad thing. They thought there was only enough room for the same thing that’s already happened 10,000 times. They couldn’t see something different. They couldn’t see why it was important.

They call someone pushing for representation a social justice warrior, like fighting for social justice is a bad thing. They’re assholes, they’re dangerous, and they’re holding this country back.

Representation matters and stories like Anthony’s are why. Click the tweet to check the whole thread.

I have to share why this image, and this storyline, really means a lot to me, on a very personal level. Here comes a thread, and some of my backstory.
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#CaptainAmerica pic.twitter.com/lDcSoMGFZv

— Anthony Abatte (@Brucewaynebrady) April 26, 2021

Representation matters.

I know what it feels like to read a story and see someone who looks like me being a hero and doing the right thing. Everyone deserves to see themselves in media being courageous, bold, and heroic.

Don’t you dare try to take that from someone else.

Semiotics, Iconoclasm, and Cap's Shield

When you watch Falcon & Winter Soldier you’re not just watching super-powered people punch each other, you’re watching ideologies clash. It’s not political as in democrats and republicans but it’s lower-case ‘p’ political in that two schools of thought are arguing with each other, they’re just doing what your parents always warned you not to do and letting it bear out with fists.

By their very nature, superheroes are political extensions. Batman is a political character because the state isn’t equipped to handle the threats he is. Superman is a political character because he’s a farm-raised immigrant constantly fighting a megalomaniacal billionaire. Everything is political whether you want it to be or not.

That’s part of the reason I find Falcon & Winter Soldier so compelling, because of the politics behind the show’s iconography. There are two things constantly referenced as matters of impressive weight; Cap’s Shield and the implications of a black man being the one to hold it. In the most recent episode we see Sam and Bucky have a real conversation about why Sam gave up the Shield in the first place, and what it meant to Bucky. Here’s a transcript from a part of their conversation because I am notoriously bad at embedding quotes into paragraphs.

Sam: The legacy of that shield is complicated, to say the least

Bucky: When Steve told me what he was planning I don’t think either of us really understood what it felt like for a black man to be handed the shield. How Could we? I owe you an apology. I’m sorry.

Sam: Thank you.

Bucky: Whatever happened with walker wasn’t your fault. I get it. It’s just that shield is the closest thing I’ve got left to a family. So when you retired it, it made me feel like I had nothing left. It made me question everything.

[some time passes]

Sam: this might be a surprise but… it doesn’t matter what Steve thought. You gotta stop looking to other people to tell you who you are.

This is the heart of the show, what it’s really about. These characters don costumes and they become ideals on two legs who can make a difference. They’re not fighting for themselves, they’re fighting for what they believe in. It’s not about Sam winning the day, it’s about good winning the day.

That blurry line between who they are as people and who they are as an ideology is an extension of semiotics, the study of symbols and their meaning. Think about a stop sign. It’s a red octagon with white outlining and the word STOP in giant, white, impact font found at most intersections in the country. Now take away that white outline around the edge of the sign, and you still know what it means.

Now take away the word stop and… you still know what it means.

The symbol is so impossibly ingrained into your brain that you don’t need the flourish of the outline or even the literal message of STOP to tell you that a giant red octagon means you need to stop. Hell, take away the octagon, and you roughly still know what a giant red polygon represents.

The iconography of the movies haven’t reached lizard-brain memetic recall within public conscious, but it’s getting there. Thor’s Hammer, Wonder Woman’s Lasso, Harry Potter’s wand - all of this stuff means something to people, and at the top of the list for the MCU, even above the Infinity Gauntlet and the Arc Reactor in Iron Man’s chest, is Cap’s Shield. It has to be.

You don’t need to see them to know who they are

That Shield means something, but the promise of what that Shield was supposed to be never meant much to Black America. That point is hammered home in the second episode when we meet Isaiah Bradley, the man who should’ve been Captain America in Steve’s absence but instead was reduced to a lab experiment, one who only escaped because a nurse helped him fake his own death. He had to live out the rest of his life in secrecy, betrayed by his country, experimented on by his fellow soldiers. That Shield means nothing but heartache to him. Seeing the way Isaiah was treated, Sam felt justified in giving up the Shield, that a black man couldn’t carry the Shield, because a black man never had…

Until he saw that it’s necessary for him to carry the Shield, entirely because of what John Walker did with it. Dude was deemed worthy of being the new Captain America by Washington and within a week he was using it to collapse someone’s chest into a bloody pulp. That was the imagery of Captain America, his symbol, his ideals, used in a way he never would’ve wanted, drenched in the blood of someone who was, by extension, executed by the state. It was a complete misappropriation of the symbol, and one that Sam couldn’t stand for.

This metaphor is big enough to have its own zip code

The heart of the conflict in Falcon and Winter Soldier is how much the world changed in the 5 years since half the population was snapped away by Thanos. Borders were undone, there was mass-migration by the survivors who moved into new areas and began new lives. Once everyone was returned in Avengers Endgame, people wanted their old lives back, and the tension between those demanding the way things were and those who want the new lives they made for themselves gave way to two distinct groups:

1) The Global Repatriation Council, the group trying to humanely bring back the old world from before the snap and

2) The Flag-Smashers, the group of “anarchists” stealing supplies and food for the refugees that have since been displaced by the returned population

And here’s where semiotics comes back, because there’s a reason the villains on the show are called the Flag-Smashers, and not the Falcon-Smashers. They don’t care about the heroes of the world, they care about what the heroes represent. They’re fighting against the status quo the world is attempting to return to after an alien threat descended upon earth with an army, whooped the avengers’ ass, and used space diamonds to make a wish that killed half the universe. It’s hard to pretend that never happened after it does.

The Flag-Smashers are a perfect villain because they’re fighting iconography, memetics, and symbolism. Falcon and Winter Soldier are individuals with agency and goals but they also represent institutions that extend way beyond what’s on screen, and the Flag-Smashers are a metaphor trying to break down another metaphor, making them more dangerous than most villains that have appeared in the MCU to date. We don’t control language, in this case the shield and what it signifies, it controls us because of its limitations and our limitations to interpret them.

The Smashers are here to redistribute power from the diachronic interpretation of symbols (the implied history/weight of a symbol over time) and that’s literally what defines a superhero. They’re the ultimate iconoclasts, rejecting what comes along with the the Shield (the signifier, the symbol that has meaning) and who they think that Shield is really protecting (the signified, who the symbol’s meaning is for).

Does Sam accept the Shield and the Symbolism it carries? Does that break Isaiah’s heart? Does that open a new door for progress in the MCU? For representation in our world? Do the Flag-Smashers succeed in destroying the GRC and what that organization symbolizes? I dunno, man.

I can’t wait for the final episode tomorrow.

A Modern Monster in a Post-Modern Wasteland

One of the most influential pieces I’ve read in recent years was this article from Vox that talks about how Superhero movies are an endless attempt to re-write 9/11, a quiet confirmation that makes more sense the more you think about it. We’re a species that entered the new century expecting one thing and quickly became rudderless. Superheroes are agents of stability while also being symbols of progress. They’re an evolution of humanity whose sole desire is to keep things exactly the way they are. The 21st century made them a task force instead of a team. They were no longer comic books, they were living things that thought comic books were childish.

It makes perfect sense that comic book movies became popular from a visual standpoint. They’re basically scripted storyboards, they’re big, colorful, expansive stories featuring compelling action and drama all stapled together. They make great action figures, cartoons, and to a four year old they practically market themselves, and it turns out every 30 year old was four once, and nothing cuts through a demographic quite like nostalgia. Of course comic book movies are popular and green-lit constantly.

As interesting as I find that comic book intellectual property became popular when it did, I’m more fascinated at how quickly they became popular. Especially when you consider how… shitty a bunch of the movies are. The first X-Men movie was strictly fine, Daredevil was strictly not. Elektra, Ghost Rider, and the two Fantastic Four movies were particularly soulless 90 minute long commercials for the post y2k edge and angst that Hot Topic and the music channel Fuse were so good at selling to people. Like every villain in each of these movies, the audiences wanted power, and they didn’t care how mediocre the story was to get it.

It’s hard to get more powerful than the Hulk. In 2003, Academy Award winning director Ang Lee made his Marvel debut with a conflicted film that did well enough considering it was one of the first real blockbusters of the 21st century. Eric Bana starred as Bruce Banner, the scientist who through heroism and tragedy would become the titular Hulk. The film itself was stifled from by its own history. The Incredible Hulk was a popular 70’s television show that did the best it could at the time it was airing to show tension between someone who wanted to do good despite the power inside him allowing him to do anything. This was carried in the film mostly as a visual reference in terms of the technology that made Bruce become the Hulk, but it was a long-cast shadow that helped the film as much as limited it.

Lee’s visual flair is something that still stands out. Rather than translate the property from one medium to another, multiple camera angles of the same scene would be on screen simultaneously, the square framing and the shifting point of view perspective mimicked a comic book. Transitions between scenes would occasionally show a character leaping from one frame into another, not unlike the barely-animated 60’s cartoons that were essentially just rotoscoped comic panels. It was am ambitious look that hasn’t been attempted since and likely never will again, now that comic book movies are no longer a niche corner of blockbusters, and instead the engine that drives a majority of movie-going experiences. Here’s another clip from the movie just because you don’t see things like this anymore.

All the visual-identity on display in the film failed to make up for a problem that all-too often plagues the Hulk, and it’s a big problem:

The Hulk is a f’n bummer, and he makes the audience feel bad.

In almost every depiction of the Hulk ever, the one thing we know for certain is that Bruce Banner does not want to Hulk out. That’s what losing looks like. All he wants to do is live in peace and not lose his cool. It’s like seeing someone who’s 6 months sober break down and have a drink, it’s the last thing he wants. But as an audience, we don’t want to see a ninety pound physicist do breathing exercises to avoid a panic attack that triggers a post-nuclear weapon of mass destruction even though it’s in his best interest. Much like the way the Hulk is portrayed, we’re monsters and we want that thousand pound nuclear calamity who can jump across whole states and swings an oil tanker like it’s a baseball bat. We want to see ourselves on screen.

Of course we do, that sounds awesome. Why hasn’t a movie done what they did in the Hulk Ultimate Destruction video game? Let Hulk rip a car in half and use each part as boxing gloves while he takes on a 10 story tall rogue-military mech.

This was the only fun Hulk we got for like 15 years

The Hulk is a modern hero who spent most of the 2000’s wandering in a post-modern wasteland. He’s the Jekyll & Hyde dichotomy from classic 19th century literature made to make sense in a 20th century nuclear America where the future was arriving every single day. Adding to the tragedy was the fact that Bruce Banner was a hero because scientists could be heroes in the 60’s (something I’m sure we’ll see more in a post-Covid world going forward) and every time we saw the Hulk it was at the expense of Bruce and what we could provide the world.

He spent most of the 21st century trapped in the very roots he was designed to be a fresh twist on, and it wasn’t until Thor: Ragnarok and Avengers: Endgame that he finally clicked for audiences because those two films each added their own spin to the Hulk mythology better than most comics have over the years.

In Thor: Ragnarok, director Taika Waititi and writers Eric Pearson, Craig Kyle & Chris Yost made a story where Hulk was necessary. You were dealing with stories so primordial they became myth to a galaxy that wasn’t sure to believe them. Space gods and devils and demons and world-ending prophecies older than time. They didn’t need a scientist so badly that they renamed the Einstein-Rosen Bridge from MCU continuity to the Devil’s Anus. Fuck your science, Bruce. We don’t need you, we need the strongest one there is, and that’s Hulk’s bread and butter.

Dude literally fought a wolf the size of a Mack truck. Bruce Banner became something the Hulk hated almost as much as audiences did because he was unnecessary in the situation, despite how awesomely charming Mark Ruffalo is. Although it should be noted, this is one of the first times we got to see the Hulk through Mark Ruffalo’s interpretation of him, while keeping the Hulk in his new sweetspot, a Tumblr-esque sense of irony and deadpan humor.

In Avengers: Endgame, someone had to use the gauntlet to bring back everyone lost in the blip. Humans can’t survive the energy, but the energy is mostly gamma, the same stuff that powers the Hulk. A Hulk that now exists with Banner’s base intelligence and has moved beyond the savagery we’re used to says something along the lines of “It’s almost like I was made for this”. That line turns the Hulk’s tragic backstory into his destiny, like his accident was our universe’s memetic immune response preparing for the future.

This has been hinted at in the comics, but sparingly. Mark Waid and Leinel Francis Yu’s Indestructible Hulk jumps to mind, as well as Al Ewing and Joe Bennett’s Immortal Hulk. This scene from Indestructible Hulk is an acknowledgement that Hulk’s gonna Hulk, so let’s make sure he Hulks in the right direction.

Instead, they made it the MCU’s third act a way to sunset the Hulk that goes berserk and welcome in the world’s strongest person who wasn’t a liability. They fixed the Hulk. They presented a Hulk that the world needed, and got rid of the one that was such a bummer to look at, no matter how badly you wanted to see him.

He was a modernist hero that was simultaneously too early and too late for a post-modern world when he finally appeared on the silver screen, and one that didn’t quite fit as neatly into the turn of the century, but has since gone on to help define it two decades later. There was no way to examine the way the Hulk exists in a world that resembles our own without discussing the consequences of his existence. The Hulk is the world’s smartest bomb, and there’s no way him going off would be anything less than a State of Emergency or a PR nightmare. But that’s not fun, and these are supposed to be fun. Thankfully, the world of the MCU moved faster than our own and created a setting where the Hulk wasn’t just wanted, he was necessary. It took 16 years, but the MCU finally fixed the Hulk on the big screen.

The Young Avengers are Imminent

Alright, it’s Wednesday night (technically Thursday morning but calendars are just day-math and I'm terrible at math), Falcon and the Winter Soldier’s second episode released just a few days ago on Disney+ and it was a banger. Great action, great tension, a firmer narrative direction… the show is awesome, and it’s way more fast paced than WandaVision was. I appreciate a good slow burn but F&WS has been nonstop gas and it doesn’t seem like it’s going to slow down anytime soon. Good. Run me over with crazy-ass comic action, I don’t mind one bit.

About two thirds through the episode, the MCU introduced a character that I didn’t think would ever appear. This dude:

This is Isaiah Bradley. In the comics, he was one of 300 test subjects for Project Rebirth, the program that gave the United States Captain America. He was the only survivor, and technically the first Super Soldier who ever existed. Dude first appeared in a comic called Truth: Red, White, & Black in 2003. He’s got a dark history. The United States has never treated its black citizens well. Ever. This story was a retcon that showed a dark but believable underbelly that contextually made sense and more importantly got people asking questions about the greatest generation and if they were so great at all.

Isaiah Bradley was a hero. He was also a grandfather to a young man named Eli Bradley. And the fact that they introduced Isaiah in Falcon & Winter Soldier makes it clear that the MCU is heading towards one specific point.

The MCU is going to drop Young Avengers on us and it’s going to change everything.

Young Avengers was a comic book that came out of the ashes of Avengers Disassembled. When the Avengers broke up, there was a void, and young teenagers who resembled former heavy hitters from the Marvel universe stepped in to fill it.

Look at that cover, they’re a team of analogues. Everyone on it looks like they’re someone else’s cousin, and if you’re familiar with the comics (or now the movies) you get it. Oh, that’s baby Thor, that’s baby Hulk, baby Iron Man and so on. You look at it and you get it.

The story itself was rad. This isn’t about the individual issues but I want to take a moment to talk about the creative team. Allan Heinberg was a television writer most famous (at the time) for his work on Sex and the City and The OC (greatest show of all time). He writes the teenage drama well and tells an incredibly nerdy story that makes perfect sense, wrapping in Iron Man, Cap, and even Jessica Jones as the “chaperones” of the story. Jim Cheung’s lines are somehow clean but incredibly kinetic. Motion is conveyed incredibly well during the action sequences but the facial expressions are just drop-dead gorgeous, capturing all the angst, awkwardness, rage, and relief of teenage years. John Dell’s inks add a weight to the characters that are then colored incredibly well, using digital coloring techniques that hold up all these years later. It’s a gorgeous comic, it’s a well-told story, and I cannot recommend it enough.

Anyways, back to the point. Isaiah Bradley was the first Super Soldier. His grandson Eli eventually becomes a hero named The Patriot. Great note giving him Cap’s original shield from the 40’s, a wonderful touch that’s a deep cut to the Marvel comic universe.

That’s one.

In the Ant-Man series of films, we meet Cassie Lang, Scott’s daughter. She was an adorable little kid in the first two who always believed in her dad and she did a great job of bringing a little perspective to the MCU, as one of the few children we see on screen for extended periods of time. Since Endgame, she’s aged five years and is now a young teenager

In the comics, she would go back and forth to her mom’s and dad’s, meaning she’d get to kick it at Avengers Mansion a lot. Scott actually stole Hank Pym’s Ant-Man suit to save her and even though he had a checkered past, the nobility of his intention to save his daughter earned him status as an avenger.

Scott died in Avengers Disassembled, and Cassie was left with this former life attached to the biggest heroes in the MU without a living connection to them. As a child however, she would grab loose Pym particles and play with them the way a child would. This eventually gave her the ability to alter her size, though to my recollection she only ever could be normal or enormous.

Cassie is in the MCU. She’s old enough where she’s a young adult, and not a child. That’s two.

In Avengers Disassembled we learn (or re-learn rather) that Wanda never had twins, she used her incredibly powerful magic to will them into existence. I don’t want to go into spoilers here, because I think it will be part of whatever happens in the MCU, but if you’ve seen Wandavision you’ll know where I’m going with this. We got heroes three and four.

Kate Bishop has been confirmed to appear in the incoming Hawkeye series coming to Disney+. Again, since this character hasn’t appeared yet (and you know my thoughts on MCU mythology super imposing on the comics). But, uh, regardless, that’s five.

Again, in Avengers Disassembled (it’s impossible to overstate just how massively important AD was, not just to the Young Avengers but to 2000’s Marvel in general), Vision dies. This one I’m ok with talking about because hey - Vision died in Avengers: Infinity War, and everyone saw that movie already. Anyways, Vision was dead and (redacted) came from the (redacted) and was able to reboot Vision’s body with a new AI based on the mind of (redacted). So, Vision was ostensibly back and had a new, younger personality that made perfect sense. Dude had wants and needs in a way that felt surprisingly natural. His inability to process stuff for once wasn’t because he was a robot, but rather because he was a teenager. If I recall correctly, there’s a Vision floating around somewhere in the MCU that is primed for a personality makeover (though if they didn’t that would be super interesting too).

That’s six.

There’s still two more key characters to the Young Avengers, but as of now they’re yet to appear in the MCU, so I’m worried to talk about one of them because of their connection to a rumored incoming Marvel villain and all the potential spoilers that come along with it. Come to think of it, the other character will likely tie into an announced Disney+ series as well, so, instead, I’ll just post this super dramatic cover because I love it so much.

The Young Avengers is one of my favorite comics. Period. I had read random Avengers comics as a kid because certain covers were too hard to say no to, but something about the Young Avengers made them feel like they were my Avengers. They appeared right when I started going to the shop every week, they appeared in the wake of great tragedy, they were my age when I first read them, and they were just… different. A lot of comic stories are about someone passing the torch to the next person in line, but the Avengers gave up. This was a story about kids taking the torch because there was no one else around to hold it.

What excites me most about the Young Avengers appearing the MCU is that I don’t know what it will be. I really don’t. They were such particular reactions to a post-9/11 America and that stage of Marvel as it matured to meet a weirder world that I don’t know if the original vision jives with modern MCU. Teenagers today are beset by different tragedies and failures of the world around them. The og Young Avengers cast were perfect teenagers 15 years ago when they debuted but they need to be teenagers now in 2021 and I’m so curious to see what that looks like.

Another wrinkle is Kamala Khan, also known as Ms. Marvel. She debuted nearly a decade after the Young Avengers initially hit the stand, but it’s been confirmed that we’re getting a Ms. Marvel series coming to Disney+ as well and the addition of that character would be such an interesting variable to create something completely new in the MCU with the original characters. The Young Avengers are squarely millennials. Kamala is clearly Gen Z. How is it all going to work together? Will it? Will she go straight to the A-Team? I can make guesses, but I’m only shooting about 75% so far.

It’s such an exciting time to be a fan of the MCU and all I can do from the sidelines is recommend books that I think will be relevant. So let’s wrap this up with a reading list that will catch you up on the basis for WandaVision and where I think the MCU is heading in the future:

Avengers Disassembled (Avengers 500-503, Avengers Finale)

Young Avengers 1-12 and Young Avengers Special

House of M 1-8

Young Avengers Presents 1-6

Good grief, these books are so good. I’m going to stop typing just so I can go back and read them again. Until next time, here’s another kickass YA cover.

I wrote something for somewhere

This week I wrote about the rumored PSN store closure for PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, and PlayStation Vita. It’s either great or terrible, nowhere in between.

You can find the article on AppTrigger, a gaming news and opinion site that I’ll be contributing to going forward. That said, you can probably expect to see fewer gaming posts here and more comic posts as I try to balance that all out.

You can read it here. Thanks for checking it out!

The MCU is Re-Writing Marvel History and that's OK

When I can’t sleep I try to read. Looking at comics on my small iPhone screen forces me to squint, and that’s like half the battle of sleeping anyway. Lately I’ve been reading the Captain America run by Ed Brubaker, Steve Epting, Mike Perkins, and Michael Lark (among others) for the first time since it came out way back in 2005. I love it just as much now as I did back then, even if the story starts out slower than I remember.

It’s an espionage thriller 





that’s a love letter to the classic Kirby, Lee, Steranko, and Gruenwald comics with modern twists that catapult Cap firmly into the 21st century. It was a story that nobody thought should be done. It existed in the back of comic book creatives minds, and it was hinted at, but never executed. Until Bru, Epting, and a few other artists did the unthinkable and brought Bucky back. It’s hard to imagine since it’s so beloved now, but this story was met with a lot of backlash from fans. According to diehard comic readers, there are a few people that can never come back.

Uncle Ben.

Thomas and Martha Wayne.

And Bucky.

When the rumors lit up the message boards and industry press, they were hated for it. When readers finally read the story, they remained skeptical. Years later, it’s considered by many as the best Captain America story of all time.

This poor bastard lives to die

If you don’t read comics and you only watch the movies though, that’s pretty much the only Captain America story. It’s the through-line of his entire filmic presence. The First Avenger is about losing Bucky, The Winter Soldier is about getting Bucky back, and Civil War is about saving Bucky. Fans had to wait three years to find out Bucky was alive, comic fans had to wait 42. Time moves differently in comics, it has to, but there were hundreds of stories (thousands?) told without Bucky, where his disappearance and apparent death was what drove Cap. While hundreds of comic characters had seemingly died just to come back a few issues or years later, Bucky was always off the table. (Strangely enough, the closest thing we see to that in the movies is Cap’s regret about not spending a lifetime with Peggy Carter, but that’s another essay for another day.)

That’s where the mythology of it all becomes really interesting to me. I’d guess that four out of five people you ask can recite what happened in the movies, so, is that what’s real? If that’s what everyone thinks happened, does it matter that it’s not?

Hold on, things are about to get stupid. You should probably grab a drink.

In the comics…

It was the Russians who found Bucky and reprogrammed him to be an assassin known as the Winter Soldier. He committed acts of terror and murder meant to stymie western efforts during the Cold War, going into cryo-sleep when not on a mission. When the Soviet Union collapsed, he passed hands until he was reawakened by Aleksander Lukin, a billionaire energy entrepreneur who was the student of Soviet mastermind general Vasiliy Karpov. When Lukin sells the Red Skull a fractured Cosmic Cube, a powerful device that can grant the user anything it wishes, he uses the Winter Soldier to kill the Skull and take back the Cube. However after that, Lukin begins exacting Karpov’s revenge on Cap, a one-time war ally. Things get personal, and he uses the Winter Soldier and the Cube to mess with Cap’s life, making him see ghosts of his past and causing massive amounts of destruction and death in the process. While in possession of the Cube, the Winter Soldier is ambushed by Cap. The Cube is tossed from its container during the fight and Cap picks it up, and uses its power to make Bucky remember who he is. In shame of everything he’s done against his will, he disappears, so Cap and his allies set out to try and find him. Lukin drinks champagne and celebrates the Cube’s destruction since it caused so many problems when he tried to use it, and it’s revealed that before the Red Skull died, he used the diminished power to save his mind by wishing it into Lukin’s body all along.

I’m not crying, you’re crying.

That story rules. It’s also complicated. One thing the MCU doesn’t get enough credit for is simplifying the convoluted history that 22+ pages a month, every month, for 50 years inevitably finds itself in. Two and a half hours every three years is simply more manageable.

Beyond the neatness of the films, their box office numbers demonstrate their ubiquity among casual moviegoers. So many more people have seen Captain America: The Winter Soldier than ever have, or likely ever will, read Captain America Vol. 5, issues 1-9, 11-14, the source material for the film. Yeah, I wrote that as nerdy as possible to help illustrate my point, but it’s my blog and I get to do what I want to here since no one reads it.

If people don’t know that Aleksander Lukin was responsible for the Winter Soldier’s reintroduction to the modern world, that Jack Monroe, a former associate of Cap, was framed for the destruction that powered the Cosmic Cube, that the Cosmic Cube was then used to restore Bucky’s personality and memory… does it matter? I don’t think it does. I’ve been reading comics for 25 years and I genuinely don’t think it matters at all.

Marvel has “if a tree falls in a forest and no one’s around to hear it” their entire comic publishing catalogue.

The MCU has re-written comic book history and that’s ok. Comics are good at a lot of things, but keeping a story straight is infrequently one of them. Excited as I am for new issues of Batman or X-Men to roll out, there’s a different kind of eagerness for a new episode of Falcon and the Winter Soldier. No one asks me what I thought of the latest issue of Avengers. A majority of my friends ask me what I thought about whichever Disney+ show premiered that Friday.

They’ve got more chemistry than a high school report card

The MCU exists not quite entirely on its own, it obviously borrows liberally from the comics they’re based on. What makes the shows and movies great isn’t just what they take from the source material, but more importantly what they leave behind. They trim the fat that give comics some of their most delicious bites and in doing so they’ve completely replaced the works they’re based on. Essentially, the movies are “what really happened”, an alternate timeline that has completely eclipsed the one that birthed it.

The MCU is not how these stories happened, but anyone you ask will tell you that they’re exactly how it happened. So, does it matter?

I don’t think it does. And that’s ok.

Mary-Jane Watson and Mythology

Comic books have become a type of American mythology. We don’t have stories of Prometheus coming off Olympus giving the gift of fire, but we do have these stories we invented to show what we’d do if we had the chance to be greater. Most myths explain why things are. Comics explain how things could be.

The finer details bend depending on who’s telling the story and when it’s being told, but the broad strokes always remain the same because that’s how myths work. Each storyteller adds their own flare but adheres to the same general outline that everyone knows. Not everybody knows the words to the number one Billboard track right now (What’s Next, by Drake in case you were wondering), but everyone knows the words to Old McDonald. Some things transcend and bury themselves in you.

Everyone knows that Superman crashed in the fields of Kansas as a baby. Everyone knows Bruce Wayne’s parents were gunned down in an alley. Everyone knows that the world hates and fears mutants. In the mid 2000’s we knew something else—we knew that Spider-Man loves Mary Jane.

Yes, the book is as fun as it looks.

Originally conceived as fun party girl, Mary Jane famously was best known as Peter Parker’s on again, off again paramour until they married in the early 90’s. She was an aspiring actress and free-spirited woman who embodied the go-with-the-flow attitude that was popular around her inception. She’s always one point in the multi-angled shape that occupies Peter’s love life, or rather, he was in hers. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, because you already know it.

That’s what made Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane such a fun series. We hadn’t really seen young MJ since the 60’s, when she was a go-go dancer at the Gloom Room. Spider-man Loves Mary Jane turns the clock back to MJ’s high school years but in a modern setting. Anyone who reads this blog knows my affinity for early y2k fashion and culture and this book is rife with it. It’s about 10th graders in 2004 and hey guess what I was a 10th grader in 2004, so yeah, this story means a lot to me.

The only annoying thing about the series is its format, but thankfully that’s been corrected in the collected editions. The book was meant to appeal to a younger female audience that was becoming an increasingly large part of the manga market. Mary Jane was a four issue miniseries that came under the Marvel Age banner, an all-age imprint that featured classic heroes and villains in classic situations, without the burden of continuity or complexity. By the time the book sales proved out, Marvel Age folded as an imprint, but a sequel series called Mary Jane: Homecoming was released from the same creative team. After that, it became a twenty issue ongoing series that lasted through 2007.

I don’t like hyperbole but when I tell you this is one of the most important panels in comics, I’m not lying.

So, Mary Jane was the little series that could, and if you liked that show The OC, it was very good. Told from outside the greater Marvel continuity, everything that happens is from Mary Jane’s perspective… and much like The OC (or Dawson’s Creek, Melrose Place, One Tree Hill, pick your poison), it’s a high school soap opera. Mary Jane is trying to be a normal teenager in a world that’s becoming less normal everyday. She’s trying to find out what she’s passionate about, be a good friend, student, and daughter all while navigating the minefield that is teenage love.

There are moments that’ll kick your heart right in the teeth. Through all the ups and downs of the two mini-series that precede the ongoing, Mary Jane can’t shake the feeling that she’s supposed to be with Spider-man, probably because at the time the Sami Raimi directed Spider-man movies told us that Spider-man and MJ were supposed to be together. There mythology goes again, mythologizing all over us.

Her hands are never cold. She’s got Kirsten Dunst’s eyes

Where the tension kicks in, is the triangle that erupts between MJ, Spider-man and Peter Parker. Keeping his secret identity actually a secret, Pete wanted MJ to like him, not his costumed alter-ego. When he finally shoots his shot he misses like Shaq at the free-throw line.

Firestar, a character first introduced in Spider-man and his Amazing Friends, an 80’s cartoon shows up as another romantic interest, which is just another case of the mythology folding in on itself. Every Spider-man story is true and none of them are all at the same time.

One of the more impressive accomplishments was the “Dark Mary Jane” storyline, a play on the Dark Phoenix story from X-Men decades earlier, one of the most iconic storylines of all time. MJ has her heart broken by an upperclassman she’s dating and becomes the wettest blanket in the history of damp bedding. She feels like she can’t sink any lower until she sees Pete in the aftermath of Uncle Ben’s death and she finally snaps out of it, coming back to her senses and realizes that if the death of Peter’s uncle isn’t the end of his life, then her broken heart isn’t the end of hers. By the time Mary Jane realizes the mistake she made turning down Peter for Spider-man, Gwen Stacy shows up in the book to be the newest wrinkle. Because the story of Mary Jane can’t be fully told without Gwen Stacy.

Not every story revolves around Peter though, she isn’t defined by her relationship to any one dude in her life. If anything, the story is about maintaining her relationship with her best friend, Liz Allen, a confident, aggressive young woman who’s Mary Jane’s rock. The men come and go, but the most important thing at the end of the day is her friendship with Liz as she tries to figure out who she really is as a person.

What’s most great about the story is how it takes so many disparate aspects of this character’s 40 year life-span across all mediums and blends them into what feels like an actual, real teenager. All the high-concept drama from the regular book (clones, kidnapping, miscarriage, marriage, divorce) was done away with but it never doesn’t feel like a Mary Jane book. This addition by subtraction is absolute proof that the Mary Jane concept isn’t just integral to the Spider-man mythos but that the character was so strong at her inception she transcends generation, setting, relationships, and even art styles. Mary Jane as a character has the capacity to exist at any time, with or without Spider-man. If you tell a story about him, it’s almost impossible to not have her in the back of your mind. You’re waiting for her like a punchline.

She’s the chorus to a song you can’t remember but somehow know all the words to. She was a four-color knockout who lived on paper and celluloid since the 60’s but she’s been tattooed on the back of our eyelids. She doesn’t fight Green Goblin, she doesn’t fly with Superman, but she has to feel like a real person to explain this surreal world we see. She’s an integral part of the mythology of comics, the stories we invent for ourselves when we’re trying to explain what we’d do if we had the chance to be greater.

And MJ is always going to be part of that story because that’s how mythology works, and Spider-man’s mythology simply can’t work without her.

We Were Here is the best $5 I can't eat

Around 10pm last night I got a text from my buddy, Collin. Like me, he’s an avid trophy hunter, except he’s simultaneously better and significantly worse at it than I am. That might sound confusing if you’re not super into games but let me break it down for you.

Collin has more trophies than me (he’s better at it than me).

Collin has more trophies in garbage games (he’s significantly worse at it than me).

He asks me to download a game to help him get the trophies in it and I am immediately skeptical. Dude is like me, he has a deep film background, so I know he has a high bar for gaming experiences. With that said, he has the platinums for My Name is Mayo and My Name is Mayo 2, games where you literally spend hours pressing a button to tap a jar of mayonnaise, so sometimes I’d like to beat him over the head with that high bar of his just to remind him it’s there.

However dumb you feel looking at this, I feel dumber for googling it.

The game he wants me to grab is $5, I don’t talk to the guy nearly as much as I’d like to, and the best part about the Celtics not playing on a Monday night means I’m not in a bad mad from watching the Celtics lose a lead in the fourth quarter on a Monday night.

I tell him yes, it’s downloading, and I’ll be ready to play soon. The game is We Were Here, and I’m so happy I listened to him. We Were Here is the best $5 I’ve spent all year, and I’ve had two (2) pastrami sandwiches from the Hannaford’s deli already.

We Were Here is a two player co-op only game, and it’s sort of like an escape room where one person has to give direction to the other. Doing so will unlock the next area for one player, who can then unlock the next area for the other. There’s no direction in the game whatsoever, it’s a game of evidence and assumptions where you never really know what you’re doing but you know when it feels right.

You have to find a walkie-talkie, that will allow you to voice chat with your partner. Once you’ve got it, you can pull a trigger to talk. You’re either the Librarian, stuck in a locked room with several doors, or the Explorer, someone out in the world coming across weird stuff.

Except the stuff isn’t that weird because it all corresponds to something back in the room the Librarian is in. The Explorer is beset by mystery and you’ll both have to do a series of puzzles and tasks that range from bizarre, to dangerous, to spooky. You’re either leading or being led, the walkie or the talkie.

Weird as this looks, it’s the tip of the iceberg.

It’s an hour long. It’s $5. It’s the best game I’ve played all year.

The gameplay is so… simple. You can interact with select objects, you can jump, and you can crouch but to be honest—the crouching and the jumping don’t seem to matter, so really all you can do is interact with select objects. The entire game is all about communicating with your partner. You’ve got to be curt and accurate because your partner will have to respond in real time or else in many situations it’s game over. You can’t really get lucky in this game. You can have instincts and they can be right, but you cannot play this game with someone who doesn’t listen or doesn’t tell you exactly what they’re seeing or what they need.

Even the act of pulling the trigger to bring up the walkie-talkie is a simple but powerful action because you can cut off your partner in the middle of them talking. Since you’re either stuck in a room or out in the wilderness, you’re powerless to the elements and the puzzles you haven’t solved yet. Your walkie-talkie is the only thing that proves you’re not alone in this weird-ass place. It’s the only part of the game that isn’t a puzzle, the only thing you don’t have to figure out (once you find it, that is). With that said, do you really want to piss off your partner by interrupting them? No, you don’t, because you’ll feel like an asshole (trust me). They made picking up a walkie-talkie have all the weight of pulling a gun’s trigger.

We Were Here started off as a project by students a few years ago and it’s finally coming to PlayStation, along with more games in the series that I now can’t wait to grab. I don’t normally play games like this, where the game revolves around something besides jumping, kill streaks, or combos. Instead I had to think about what I was saying because the lack of clarity would result in a game-over screen, yes, but mostly because I didn’t want to sound dumb to my friend. I want more games like this in my life, where the object is to explore and understand the world instead of save it. I want more games where I have to be a smart person, not a lucky one.

We Were Here was $5. It was an hour. It was weird. It was wonderful. The best gaming experience I’ve had all year took less time to get through than TLC’s FanMail, and it cost less money than lunch.

Good thing I listened to my friend, but I’m still judging him for My Name is Mayo though.

Avengers EndGame as a Service

Last fall, Crystal Dynamics and Square-Enix’s Avengers game released to middling critical reception. Despite the huge brand attached, (notice how everything I write here eventually comes back to superheroes?), the game was moved-on-from by the general gaming public. Incoming revisions to the leveling system and some new content are hoping to turn perceptions of the game around and revitalize is disgruntled and disparate player base.

One of the weirder parts of this reinvention the game is going through is that the game itself actually plays really well. But before we talk about that, let’s talk about the story, which is somehow stronger than the gameplay loop.

The opening level will never get old

In a world without mutants, a sabotaged Avengers Helicarrier with an experimental power supply explodes and inadvertently creates a new race of powered people in the world known as Inhumans. Following their failure to stop the explosion, the Avengers disband, and a familiar looking group known as A.I.M. comes in to oversee the transition of power from Avengers/Stark-tech to a new, fascistic world order. You start playing as Kamala Khan, a huge Avengers super-fan who eventually earns the title of Ms. Marvel thanks to her bravery, wit, persistence, and ability. The campaign is basically the best part of every heist movie - you’re reassembling the Avengers and putting together a crew strong enough to stop AIM and restore the world to the way it should be. More heist movies should just be putting your team together. Ocean’s 11 could’ve been 45 minutes shorter and just as good.

Each of the heroes I’ve played as handle differently but they all feel powerful in their own ways. There’s some overlap between certain characters, but it never results in feeling like a redundancy, at least it won’t until new characters arrive (more on that in a bit). The game can be a little lonely in the beginning, not just because you probably won’t be playing with any of your friends for the first 30% of the game or so, but because it takes a few missions for you to build a roster and bring other heroes along with you to help you free Inhumans and stop AIM. Even the AI taking control goes a long way towards making you feel like you’re on a team with heavy hitters. They’ll help you get to areas you couldn’t on your own, and they’ll revive you when you fall.

“Embiggening” would’ve been Oxford’s 2020 word of the year if it weren’t for… well, you know.

Also, it’s worth noting that the game itself is drop-dead gorgeous. it was rumored to be in development for a long time before it was eventually shown and released and you can see the back-breaking hours the developers put into the game. Enemy animation cycles are fluid, they look like they belong in a world with Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, and they look intimidating. It doesn’t matter how tough you are, even the basic enemies can do some work on you if you let them. The heroes impressively look even better, each having little idiosyncrasies reflected in their fighting styles. Kamala acts like a teenager when she fights, you can see she’s having a ball while stomping out these techno-fascists. Hulk is angrier than usual, his rage is slightly more quiet and controlled when he throws his punches until he cuts lose and really lets someone have it. Stark is incredibly deliberate, seeking redemption with every repulsor blast, and every rocket-powered uppercut.

Playing the game feels great. Looking at the game feels great. Letting the story of the game wash over you feels great. But it’s not a great game. Here’s why:

I can feel myself getting stuffed into a locker just looking at this

Avengers is too nerdy for its own good. To be a game-as-a-service, it had to create game systems that would sink its claws into people and get them to come back everyday. While games like this can absolutely be played for 10 hours at a time, they’re made to be played for like an hour or two a day. Go in, do the missions, get the gear, and incrementally improve your heroes.

But what that game system means is that it takes a lot of work to get your heroes where fans of the movies, comics, cartoons, or whatever, feel they should be. On top of that, the multiplayer is meant to make sense, so you can’t have two Hulks running around the same level. This is being mitigated with overlapping characters (where that aforementioned non-redundancy gets thrown out the window) so you’re not losing time investing in one character just never play as them with your friends. Got a friend who wants to play as Hawkeye? That’s cool, you can play as Kate Bishop, the cooler Hawkeye. No offense, Clint, but you’re boring. Since no Game-as-a-service has really had that issue before, that’s one problem taken care of, but the bigger problem of this game being so nerdy can’t be as easily solved.

There are so many resources that you can collect throughout the game that all power up different gear making your heroes more powerful. That’s not to be confused with leveling your character up, unlocking new abilities, and making your heroes more powerful. Every safe-haven you unlock opens up a new store where you can use your resources to buy equipment, exchange resources for other resources, get new quests that you can complete and exchange for you, you guessed—resources. There are so many micro-economies in the game which extend the life of gameplay and that’s fine because as previously stated, the game is fun to play and designed to be played everyday, but it’s a needless layer of obfuscation that’s been added on top of a fun core for the sake of making the Avengers into a type of game it probably shouldn’t have been.

Throw your shield, get it back, kick it over there. You got yourself a stew goin’.

I’ve played a lot of Anthem, Desinty/2, The Division/2, and other games that lie somewhere between game-as-a-service and MMO. What they all have in common is that they take a mechanic or genre and stretch it out to make sense in a daily model. Destiny 2 is one of the best first person shooters you can play today, and the RPG woven into it does a good job of giving you flexibility in your character and adapting to whatever the situation needs. The Division 2 is a great third person shooter where increasingly powerful and steady loot drops improve your character to take on bigger and badder bosses. Anthem… was soulless, but it was the first month of the pandemic and I couldn’t sleep, so there was that. What makes Destiny and Division successful was that they came from a very video-game place and added layers that caught no one by surprise. They were appealing to video game fans and offering them more.

Avengers was appealing to movie fans and offered them a mess of menus, resources, location-specific stores, and a whole litany of other things that should’ve been smoothed out. The game had the benefit of coming out well after all these games and seemed to learn nothing from how to simplify their structure into something that would appeal to a mass audience. There are people who just like first person shooters, and there are people who just like tactical cover shooters. The people who like The Avengers like action games, but really they like heroes smashing things. They don’t like spending 40% of the time in a convoluted menu micromanaging +1 modifiers to defense while emphasizing a ranged build for a character.

The Avengers nails its gameplay but fails to adequately interpolate the economy of a persistent game into a brand as widely loved as The Avengers. The average person who picked up the game isn’t going to care about having enough ISO-8 to fully power up the wristband they have for the Hulk, they’re just going to be pissed that they don’t have a fully-powered up Hulk. Avengers had a real opportunity to give audiences a game that was infinitely repayable but simplified in a way that spoke to every person who saw Endgame in theaters. The movies did the impossible and made the Avengers cool and fun. The game went out of its way to make them neither.

Which sucks because I love playing it. I just hate everything I have to do to keep playing it.

Beautifully Hideous

Gamers are strange creatures with a stranger habit. It’s weird enough that people identify under the banner of a hobby. Remember when your friend Jacob got really into that food truck by his office and started eating banh mi sandwiches all the time then referred to himself as a foodie? Yeah, that was weird. You don’t go to movies and call yourself a flickie, or whatever, because you’re not a weirdo. We all eat food, Jacob, get over yourself.

But gamers are different. They’re different for a lot of reasons.

This week, a game called Loop Hero released, and it is extremely not my shit. That said, a lot of my friends are digging it so I decided to check it out, and it’s pretty fascinating.

Not my gameplay, not my channel.

I’m not saying the mechanics of the game are fascinating. They’re insanely deep and as previously stated not my shit, but rather the art style of the game. I think this is a prime example of what sets games apart from other mediums.

There would’ve been a time when this game’s looks would be considered top of the field. But Loop Hero released this week, so it’s not top of the field now. That said, the game is undeniably gorgeous because the art direction had a vision that contributes to the feel of the game. This is supposed to feel like an older game so it’s looking like one, with all the bells and whistles that come with modern game design and consumption.

I’m struggling to think of another medium that does that. I guess movies about Shakespeare plays done with the original dialogue? Or the way Moscow Mules have to be in a copper cup? There aren’t a whole lot of examples that jump out to me. The Celtics just lost a winnable game against Brooklyn so I’m admittedly a little distracted as I type this.

this gif is huge but I had a long day so I’m keeping it in because it looks delicious.

Modern movies aren’t using decayed film stock to make their movie about private detectives in 1972 LA look like it was shot in 1972 LA. They’ll use wardrobe, props and era accurate terminology, but the actual creation of it isn’t reliant on technology of the era. There are exceptions, like Mank, which will probably get an Oscar nod for best picture when those eventually come out (it’ll happen, right?) but those are rare to see in film, unlike games where it feels like there’s a retro-throwback coming out every other week.

These games aren’t made the same way they used to be, but they’re meant to play like they’re from another time. If we’re sticking with the 1972 movie metaphor, that would be like going to the theater paying 25 cents for a ticket and seeing people smoke everywhere. Which I guess seems authentic if you’re seeing a movie that takes place in post-war France but not an ideal place to sit for 2 hours in 2021, pandemic aside.

There’s been a resurgence of retro-inspired games. Last year, The Messenger released on Xbox (earlier on other consoles) and the game is straight up an NES game that runs like an NES never could. The game didn’t have to look like that, but it does and fans ate it up because you died just as many times as you did playing Mega Man 3 back in 1990. All the glow up of the 21st century with none of the slowdown from the 20th.

Most mediums that try this treat it like a novelty, a wink, a nudge. It was really important to Quentin Tarantino to shoot Hateful Eight in 70mm, but few people got to see it the way he intended it. Christopher Nolan made a fuss about how important it was to see Tenet in theaters, but there’s still a choice. Game developers conversely have created an entire cottage industry within the the world of games that’s specifically focused on delivering new experiences that look like they fell through a wormhole from someone’s nostalgia. Maybe it’s theirs, maybe it’s yours—either way, this isn’t where the medium is right now in terms its technical evolution. It’s where the medium chooses to be.

Gamers will actively complain about the way puddles look in a game like PS4’s Spider-Man but games like Shovel Knight get praised for their look.

Again, gamers complained about how this looked:

More than they complained about this:

Allow me to lose the plot for a second while I talk about all the other weird stuff that gamers put themselves through that no other art patrons do:

Imagine buying a book and not being able to read that book ten years later, kinda like how you can’t play a PlayStation 2 disc on your PlayStation 4.

Imagine seeing a movie but not all of the actors that should be on screen are there unless you pay for them six months later, kind of like how characters are added to fighting games after the fact.

Imagine buying a vinyl and sitting there for 40 minutes while your record player gets really ready to play it, sort of like how you have to install a game on your device before playing it.

Imagine buying a painting that used the wrong shade of red so the artist has to come in the day of purchase and recolor it, not unlike a day-one patch to a big title.

Imagine thinking this is a bad controller, and being so wrong.

Gun to my head… I think that’s great. Genuinely. All of it. All these hurdles we jump over just to stomp on mushrooms and thwart alien invasions.

I love the peculiar quirks of this peculiar hobby and finding my own personal line of what’s acceptable then talking about that with my friends and learning theirs. “No other medium does this” sounds like a negative but when I italicize it and you read it slower like you’re Owen Wilson figuring out where the files are in Zoolander you realize that no other medium does this. No other medium can. Any of it.

I staunchly believe that nerdy people have made nerdy things less fun, but the fact that gamers are so happy to identify by something they do for fun (something that they seem to hate as much as they love) is so fascinating on a psychological level. Despite all those bullet points I just rattled off, there’s no more clear an argument than a game’s visuals. The deliberate intention to look like something from years ago, to be some artifact from gaming’s past rather than something modern is so unique to the industry. Gamers will think your game is pretty unless it’s hideous, and a lot of the time it isn’t hideous enough to be considered pretty at all.

Like I said, gamers are weird.

Nintendo and the Art of Pricing Art

Nintendo has been killin’ it lately. After the bungled launch and bungled-er life of the Wii-U, it’s nice to have a strong, healthy Nintendo that’s releasing high quality games for a platform that, three years after its launch, is still in high demand.

A Nintendo Direct on February 17 showed a variety of games that’ll be hitting the console either this coming year or the next, including an incredibly deep looking game from SquareEnix called Project Triangle Strategy. A Pokémon Presentation a week later showed us a new game that’s poised to bring the Pokémon brand forward with the new open-space philosophy Nintendo has been applying to their games in recent years. Things seem to be nothin’ but gravy for Nintendo. Even this moment was handled a lot better than it could’ve been:

However, Nintendo revealed remakes coming in a more immediate timeframe than the highly anticipated Breath of the Wild 2 and Pokémon Legends: Arceus. In doing so, they inadvertently traded fans asking what’s on the release calendar for fans asking ten year old games cost how much now?

This July you’ll be able to get a remake of the Wii’s final Zelda game, Skyward Sword. Its graphics have been enhanced, its motion controls have been reconfigured for both the Switch’s Joy-Cons and for handheld mode, and it costs $59.99. There are themed Joy-Cons releasing alongside for $79.99. There will likely be a bundle of the two for around $150 US. When Skyward Sword first released in 2011 the game was $49.99, as all Wii games were. There was also a special edition bundle that included a gold-themed Wiimote Plus, an enhanced controller that was necessary for the game (though available elsewhere. The bundle was $79.99.

In the fall, you’ll be able to grab remakes of Pokémon Diamond and Pearl. They were originally released for the Nintendo DS handheld in 2006 and were $39.99 each. When they release on Switch later this year they’ll presumably be $59.99, as most Nintendo titles are.

grass hasn’t pissed people off this much since the 1930’s

Sorry those two last paragraphs had a lot of numbers and were very boring.

Several of Wii U’s biggest titles were released to critical acclaim but a non-existent audience. A lot of those games would be re-released on Switch including New Super Mario Bros. U, Donkey Kong: Jungle Freeze, Pikmin 3, and about a dozen or so others. They released years ago on a high-definition system and if you were to ask Nintendo (and consumers), they’re really good titles. So good that Nintendo thinks Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze has just as much value in 2021 as it did back in 2014, which is why it still costs $59.99.

Some of their games have actually appreciated in value. Diamond & Pearl are going to increase 50% over 14 years and Skyward Sword about 20%. over 10. Hell, even Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee use old art assets from previous games and the same general roster/characters/world design of the original games. Those released for $29.99 in 1998, which means they appreciated 100% over 25.

the venn-diagram of agent carter and nintendo games is actually just a circle

Every other game publisher (and developer, for that matter), sees their games depreciate over time, until enough sales can get the games retired to ridiculous “get them off our shelves, please” prices, even on digital storefronts. Everyone’s trying to get rid of their games, and we’re more than happy to buy these incredible artistic achievements for cents on the dollar because game developers are suckers.

That’s not true, I was just being dramatic to make up for all the numbers. I really hate math and I don’t know how to show it. Sorry, I think a few more are coming.

I don’t like paying more for things, but I do appreciate Nintendo planting a flag in the ground and saying our games are worth this. Just in time for Mario Day, (March 10, Mario, it’s cute), a bunch of first party titles are for sale well below MSRP for the first time I can remember, some as low as $38.99. As anecdotal as this sounds, that doesn’t happen. Not since the Nintendo Select line of games for Wii, Wii-U and 3DS, where hit titles were repackaged as essential parts of the gaming vocabulary and available for $20.

But hey, even there—the most popular games on the Switch are worth three times as much as the most popular games on Wii-U. Because like me, Nintendo also maths.

one of the nerdier things about me is having a strong opinion on the Nintendo Select package design

Things cost more now. Inflation is also a thing. The Joy-Cons are decidedly more impressive and better technology than Wii-Motes ever were. Skyward Sword on Switch is going to look prettier than it ever did on Wii. Shining Pearl and Brilliant Diamond are going to have features that weren’t possible on the DS. These are going to be better games. They should be worth more. But there’s another thing.

While other devs and publishers may be making a better argument for video games as art in their craft, Nintendo is the only company arguing games are art economically. They’ve made pricing their art an art itself. It seldom matters if you buy a Nintendo game when it releases or years later - it’s going to cost at least the same price, and in the cases I just laid out, even more. Nintendo games, like paintings, are investments as much as artistry, and a huge component to art is selling or buying it. Van Gogh liked painting but he also liked eating, and if more people bought his paintings there’d be more Van Gogh paintings. More Nintendo games sold beget more Nintendo games made.

Most often, when a game is rereleased, that lowers the price of its previous releases. Stubbs the Zombie is being re-released on modern consoles and already the complete in box price has dropped about 14%. Now the only people who want Stubbs the Zombie are the people who want Stubbs the Zombie, not the people who before actually wanted to play it. Demand is dropping because soon enough you’ll be able to buy it on your PS4, Xbox One, and hey… your Nintendo Switch. Nintendo loves releasing old games for a lower price on their console. They just don’t like doing it with their games. And that’s fine, that little Nintendo Tax.

It’s being passed on to you, the consumer, the people who love Nintendo the most. I get why that sucks when you just want to play Luigi’s Mansion 3 but refuse to pay $59.99 for a two year old game. They’re a billion dollar company making games about plumbers and you’re an actual plumber. I’m not telling you it’s fair or unfair, right or wrong. Nintendo is pricing its art what they think it’s worth and by all indications, people agree that it’s worth the $60 price tag. You’re being given the opportunity to pay the artist instead of some dude on eBay. Don’t be like college-me and thumb your nose at Pokémon Platinum just to want it 12 years later.

WandaVision and the Ultimate Goodbye

For the first time since The Last Dance debuted, I’ve consistently had something to do on the weekends. Every Friday, like a lot of nerds, I’ve been looking forward to the latest installment of WandaVision and what feels like a return to appointment television, a relic of the last century and early Y2K era before on-demand entertainment, binge drops from content providers, and Game of Thrones’s final season quality drop-off became the new normal.

And about 20 minutes into the finale of WandaVision, I noticed something else from the 21st century rearing its oddly-specific head around the corner: the Ultimate Universe, and its last throe of relevancy.

For those who don’t know or may have forgotten, the Ultimate Universe was a new publishing imprint by Marvel that began in the year 2000, just as the superhero movie boom started to take hold at the box office. The idea was basically this—What if the Marvel universe started today, instead of the early 60’s? What if there weren’t loud, garish costumes? What if the Hulk wanted to kill Freddie Prinze Jr.?

No, I swear this is a real comic, honest.

The Ultimate Universe (Earth-1610 for those keeping score at home) modernized Marvel’s most popular characters for the new millennium, and for the most part reflected the characters audiences were introduced to on the big screen.Jean Grey doesn’t wear a Green and Gold lycra catsuit with a giant phoenix emblazoned on it like an idiot. She dresses like the baddest ass who ever badassed their way out of a Staind music video, like a badass. This isn’t a cartoon. These were real heroes, for a real world. Nobody dresses like a Bavarian dessert dish in the real world.

Jean from the comics

Jean from X-Men III: The Last Stand. Notice how she’s taller. They changed that for the movies.

These movies were successful and in turn the comics that inspired them were changed to better resemble them. When the changes seemed too drastic, the Ultimate Universe was born to more effectively look like the movies. Accepting these differences became the norm for seeing these characters get film adaptations. It was a compromise that audiences made with the films producers - we accept that a man shoots concussive laser blasts out of his eyes, but we do not accept that he would wear a skin-tight blue suit with a yellow bandolier & belt for him to keep… well, we never found out what Cyclops kept in his belt pouches. But we knew having them at all was bullshit. It was a bad idea and the creator should feel bad about it.

Daredevil’s costume went from red to maroon. Batman needed a reason to explain his cape’s ability for the gliding shape. Spider-man had to make his costume out of excess fabric from a pair of Nike Prestos. Costumes were being changed as a concession because comic-accurate gear doesn’t translate super well to a 60 by 30 foot screen. Hell, even the costume Steve wore in the beginning of the Captain America movie, when he was touring on the USO show, was his comic-accurate costume, and they put him in that to make him look stupid on purpose. Once the movies became what everyone knew, the comics had to be just like them.

Then I watched the finale to WandaVision. Slight spoilers ahead for people who don’t stay at home on Fridays.

In the final episode (final two, really), it’s revealed that Wanda is the most powerful witch in history. There’s even a prophecy about her destroying the world and everything. For her entire appearance history in MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) movies, she’d only ever been known as Wanda, but rival witch Agatha Harkness named her The Scarlet Witch. While it’s a title in the MCU, it was her chosen name in the comics. The audience is left to assume her future story-arc will explore what the title means and how she’ll measure up to it, but it seems like there’s another reason they never called her that before. No, I’m not talking about Fox owning the rights to Mutants.

I’m talking about the Ultimate Universe.

There were basically two approaches that creators took to the Ultimate Universe. The first is more or less what Ultimate Fantastic Four and Ultimate Spider-Man did; retellings with modern influences. These two titles in particular were effectively cover songs with a few words changed but the same chords used to create basically the same feeling. They were a rare case of catching lightning in a bottle. Twice.

The other approach as seen in Ultimate X-Men and and particularly The Ultimates (their version of The Avengers), was to basically dial every nob up to 11. Cap was a World War II vet who came back so Patriotic he better resembled the nazis he almost died fighting than the Steve Rogers we currently know. Iron Man was a raging nihilist alcoholic who would have illicit affairs with celebrities on the ISS, like a Richard Branson you didn’t want to punch as hard (but still pretty hard). They weren’t superheroes, they were nuclear deterrents used by a Post-9/11 military industrial complex. They talked to their publicist as much as the Pentagon and you know what else? They didn’t have costumes.

They had tac-gear and low-rise leather pants.

nothing 2000’d quite as hard as the 2000’s, when you think about it.

Even Wanda’s powers were slightly changed. In the traditional comics, she dealt with chaos magic, something that let her alter reality thanks to an ancient power that no one really understood. In the Ultimates, she basically deals with chaos theory, where she uses hex-fields to alter the probability of something happening or not happening. it may seem like semantics, but old Wanda summoned obtuse magic to get what she wanted. New Wanda hacked the Universe get what she wanted. Y’know, because the year 2002 and computers. And she did it like she won VIP tickets to a Nine Inch Nails concert from calling into a radio station thanks to her Cingular Wireless mobile device. Again, because 2002.

That’s what made the finale of WandaVision so fascinating to me. By giving her the name Scarlet Witch, they made the MCU inherently more comic-book-y. They gave her a hokey name (that I love and am so glad to see return) and changed her from this maroon trench coat wearing powerhouse into a comic book character. Her new costume is obviously inspired by the Ultimate Universe, given the tight, dark leather, sleek angles, and ribbed texture that make it look more functional than fashionable (though still head-turning). But this little nod was merely a last gasp of the Ultimate Universe, a bed of inspiration that no doubt helped create the MCU in a time when people wanted heroes but didn’t believe in them. The heavy genre-lean her character arc took in the series is a return to a more campy version of what used to be a supremely modernized take. She’s not Wanda anymore, she’s the Scarlet fu#^ing Witch.

Like I mentioned when talking about the two approaches to the Ultimate Universe, it wasn’t just a look, it was a feeling. And as we get further away from the Post 9/11 world that drove the Ultimate Universe and its dramatic demand for heroes to do something, we’re getting closer to the original Marvel Comic universe. It’s one where heroes are more loosely defined and more allowed to have fun. WandaVision wasn’t about anything except grief and overcoming it. That’s a simpler story I don’t think we could allow heroes to explore even 10 years ago, because the audience so desperately needed them to save us. It would’ve been selfish of our heroes to save themselves.

The comics no longer have to be like the movies, but the movies are now becoming more like the comics.

As the movies and shows continue to release they add their own particular wrinkles to the greater Marvel mythos. The more things change, the more they become what they so staunchly tried to not be 20 years ago. Thankfully though, 2003 called and doesn’t want its costumes back just yet. As the Ultimate Universe stops being a narrative inspiration for the movies it so clearly inspired, it’s only fair that it becomes an aesthetic inspiration. Because the Ultimate Universe is not just a feeling.

It’s a look, too.

Black Ops Cold War: drugs are a helluva drug

the war on drugs

(spoilers ahead, for Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War, and the 90’s, too)

Growing up in the 90’s there are some things that just seep out of pop culture and leave a pot-leaf-shaped stain on the back of your brain stem. You’re impressionable, you’re curious, and you’re dumb. Most 11 year olds, probably think cocaine has a ‘y’ in it, but they see this scene and they’ve got nothing to say but “oh that makes sense”, because drugs.

Or you were brave enough to hide halfway behind a door while your teenage sister and her friends watch Trainspotting, and you pretend to understand whatever the hell this was supposed to mean.

Drug scenes are fun because they excuse you from reality. They dance the line between scary and surreal while they put the world on hold and show you the cracks of the universe that few people ever get to see.

Video games play with this idea too. Though you usually find that Ubisoft is most eager to show you a hallucinogenic world, when you’re doused with Fear Toxin in Arkham Asylum, Batman completely loses his apex-predator status to take on a stories-tall Scarecrow who can literally kill you with a look.

Nintendo’s Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island is probably one of the more famous examples when they let you touch fuzzy and get dizzy. Originally just a flex for Nintendo’s Mode 7 Graphics chip, it nevertheless asked an important question: If the game is on drugs, aren't you on drugs too?

I was reminded of it most recently when playing through 2020’s Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War campaign. Spoilers ahead, for the spoiler-queasy.

Black Ops: Cold War Crimes

Set in 1980, you’re CIA Operative Bell, former war vet who’s been chasing a Russian wildcard named Perseus, an agent who’s been a thorn in the United States’ side since the Vietnam War. Turns out ol’ Persy stole a nuke of American origin and found a way to daisy-chain every nuke in Europe. You’re constantly jumping between current efforts to stymie the Russian spy effort in the west and missions from the past that give you clues about who Perseus is and how to stop them.

However, about 3/4 through the game, it’s revealed that you’re not an American with a longstanding service record at all, but actually a recovered Russian agent who’s been brainwashed and conditioned to believe they’re American. Is it dumb? Yes. But it admittedly still got me to loosen my jaw a smidge when it’s revealed that “We got a job to do”, a phrase that Adler’s been repeating throughout the game is 2020’s “Would you Kindly”, and despite the better execution this idea had in Bioshock, it’s still fun when all the pieces come together.

I’m going to be blunt so I can avoid being anything less than perfectly clear: the Interrogation mission in Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War is one of my favorite video game levels of the past few years. It mixes unreliable narration with an almost rogue-like level design that lets you explore every corner as you decide to follow Adler’s suggestions or defy him down to the smallest, pettiest details.

Adler is running you through “your” debrief of a skirmish in Vietnam and expects you to follow his every command. To the point that when he says you jumped out of the helicopter and grab an M-16, there’s an exasperated “Or maybe it was something else” when you grab an MP-5. It’s a subtle but important distinction that immediately informs you that while he’s telling the story, you’re the one in control of it.

Adler

chain-smokes like

he’s made out of

gasoline and jazz

The basic premise of this lie-palace Adler’s constructing around is that you were on a mission where you found Russian involvement in Vietnam. He’s trying to get you to remember more details. So this incredibly small level you’re in has four possible paths to go down. Whether you listen to him or not, you generally get to see all of it - no matter which path you choose, eventually you find a Red Door. All he cares about is that damn door and what’s on the other side of it.

Did you die? Nuh-uh. That’s not how the story went. Try again. Try to remember things more clearly. It’s day and and there are 40 hostiles. Don’t go left, go right. Go into the cave by the waterfall. No, that’s not right. You’re pulled out and brought back to your crashed helo. Maybe this time it’s night and you have a bow. Now it’s still day and you actually had a grenade launcher.

It doesn’t matter. None of this is what Adler wants. Find the Red Door.

My favorite Motion City Soundtrack song - That door with the Red Door

The War. On Drugs.

Whether you follow his instructions or not, you run through the same level’s winding paths. Eventually, the local fighters change to small versions of Adler, turtleneck and all. This isn’t Adler losing his cool, this is you losing yours. You’ve gone from a memory you can’t remember, to a reality you can’t comprehend. This is the drugs and they’re finally working the exact way you don’t want them to. There are metaphors everywhere but none of them make any sense. This is when the level takes it up a notch. This is why I can’t stop thinking about it a month later.

This is when reality breaks and it is beautiful.

You can’t remember how many times you’ve been through the level. The only person more frustrated than Adler barking orders at you through your drug-induced haze is you because nothing makes sense. You discover a hatch like you’re in the first season of Lost. You go down it. Holy crap are those zombies? You laugh in defiance. Adler demands you stop lying.

Every path ends with a Red Door. You always go through it. Sometimes you’re in a lab, sometimes you’re not. Maybe the building is decrepit, maybe it’s brand new. You find an ominous chair and you sit in it. Maybe there’s a cadre of high-ranking Russian officials obscured by cigar smoke and you’re excused for being late. Give me a second, I need to watch the moon landing.

Adler for the love of God can I please bum a smoke?

It doesn’t matter. We’ve Got a Job to Do™. After clearing out the enemy village, you go forward. The path splits right before some empty ruins. There’s a Red Door in the ruins. You walk through it and you’re back in the helicopter. you get back to the fork in the road. You go left, and a hundred yards later, maybe you go left again. You hold off fire from an outpost until some F-4 Phantoms bomb them. In the rubble you find the Red Door. There’s always a Red Door.

You ignore what Adler tells you to do, or maybe you don’t. Maybe you’ve exhausted every command he’s given you and at wit’s end there’s a single, solitary Red Door in front of you and there’s literally nothing for you to do but go through it. Maybe you do your best to fight his demands - Red Doors literally start raining from the sky. You had every choice before - left, right, village, outpost, waterfall, hatch—but those are all moot now. All that exists anymore is a Red Door and good god I hope this is this the right one. Go find another Red Door for the first time again. Time is a flat circle, after all.

You’re back in a familiar hallway. It stopped being a Call of Duty game eight doors ago and you realize you’re in a horror game. You turn the corner of the hallway. There’s another red door. It moves further from you. It disappears. You turn another corner and there it is. You’re going too slow so you’re injected with more drugs. The world turns sepia and you have no idea what you did wrong. Doors on either side of you are open but slam as soon as you approach. Gunfire starts hailing out of them. Adler stands at the end of the hallway. Is he Perseus? is this a metaphor or a revelation? The door slams and you’re reminded how little you matter.

You keep going. The Red Door led to a hallway you’ve never been to before but you’ve seen a dozen times. You almost think you’re playing the P.T. Demo instead of what used to be the gaming world’s most linear story. You go forward. You never reach the Red Door. Reality broke ten minutes ago and you didn’t even notice because you were trying to hard to save the world after disobeying Adler and trying to break the game.

The walls literally start caving in. You swear they’re about to disappear and Adler will show up to tell you your real-life social security number and how much you weighed the day you were born. Adler is god and you’re his Sisyphus trying for an eternity to open a door he promises will end this. You crouch through the shrinking hallway and finally, the door opens. You get what Adler wants, which means you get what you want.

You get out.

With that, Cold War gave Call of Duty its most memorable level since the original Black Ops more than ten years ago. Halfway through being last year’s best Michael Bay movie, Cold War dared to be last year’s second best Christopher Nolan movie.

this is your drug level on brains

AAA gaming’s safest bet turned in its biggest gamble in over a decade. Holding a gun is tradition in a Call of Duty game, it’s ritual, it’s expected. What makes Interrogation so iconic is the risks taken when you weren’t holding a gun. The inherent danger in a drug-riddled game sequence is the new reality you create on top of the artificial reality you’ve already constructed. It’s like building a sandcastle on top of a house of cards. Either the drug sequence is more interesting than where you’re already spending a majority of your time, or it’s immediately less compelling than where you used to be and you can’t wait to get back.

Cold War threads the needle by changing gears so completely and turning the world’s most prominent shooter into a horror walking sim. The most vital thing is comprehending the world around you instead of blasting it to pieces. The jump from popcorn blockbuster to psychological thriller is equal parts immediate and complete, forcing you into a situation where headshots don’t matter. It takes your expectations and squashes them like a grape between the toes of an old Italian woman. Which is more or less how my brain felt after finishing the level and expecting a pew-pew game.

When the world stopped shocking us it became source material. Breaking reality is the only path left for Call of Duty to remain interesting, to explore the how come instead of the how loud. Much like the game, it doesn’t matter if you agree with that or not, we’re going to end up there eventually.

The red door is the only choice left.

And we back

And we back. And we back, and we back, and we back, and we back. And we. And we back, and we back.

So, it’s been a while, huh? The last entry I wrote after hours at work waiting for some coworkers to finish a project so I could grab a beer with them. 

Then that job ended. 

Then I found out the bookstore near me had a killer used comic section with a ton of out of print books. 

Then I read all of Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson’s Transmetropolitan.

Then I got on a plane for the first time since I started having anxiety attacks.

Then I was in Maine for like two months and worked as a bartender/waiter. 

Then the Patriots were something like 8-0. 

Then I got a side-gig hosting Pub Trivia at my favorite bar. 

Then I went to LA for Christmas and had an awesome time with my brother’s family. 

Then the Patriots lost their first round bye in the playoffs. 

Then Mookie Betts was trade to the Dodgers. 

Then with the help from an incredibly awesome art director, I re-did my portfolio.

Then the Patriots lost in the playoffs. 

Then I started a new side project called Shortbox Summary and read like 9,000 comic books without doing much else in my spacetime.  

Then Billie Eilish won like every Grammy. 

Then the Niners lost a Super Bowl they should’ve won. 

Then Parasite won like every Academy Award. 

Then I started feeling like despite the Celtics record they had a really good chance of making it to the Eastern Conference Finals and making it to at least six against the Bucks. 

Then the government told us there was no Pandemic. 

Then there was about to be tipoff between the Utah Jazz and the OKC Thunder and something as banal as a man running from the locker room to the officiating table quickly became one of the most surreal moments of my life. 

Then it turns out there was a pandemic. 

Then Tom Brady signed with Tampa Bay.

Then 10 weeks passed. 

And that’s pretty much everything that’s happened to me since the last post. It was nice doing things for myself and not writing about them, but my fingers are starting to go a little stir-crazy for something besides a controller so I’m going to use them now. 

I haven’t written about games in a hot minute but that’s not to say I haven’t played any since my last post. In fact, I’ve played a shitload of video games. How many games go into a shitlo-489. 

Sorry, I got too excited to not share. I’ve played 49 video games since the last time I wrote about them. 

And I’ve watched all of Seinfeld twice, but that’s a story for a different post. I’m not going to write about all of these (I’ll bold the ones I intend to, though in a much shorter fashion than before), but I can absolutely rate them, so, let’s go. 

18 - Spider-Man (PS4) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

19 - Assassin’s Creed Origins (PS4) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

20 - Stories: Path of Destinies (PS4) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

21 - Lego Batman 2 (Vita) ⭐️⭐️

22 - Heavy Fire: Afghanistan (PS3) ⭐️

23 - Heavy Fire: Shattered Spear (PS3) ⭐️

24 - The Walking Dead (PS3) ⭐️⭐️⭐️

25 - Burnout Paradise (PS3) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

26 - GTA Vice City (PS4) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

27 - Far Cry New Dawn (PS4) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

28 - Horizon Chase Turbo (PS4) ⭐️⭐️⭐️

29 - Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune (PS4) ⭐️⭐️⭐️

30 - Blood and Truth (PS4) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

31 - Tearaway (Vita) ⭐️⭐️⭐️

32 - Batman (PS4) ⭐️⭐️⭐️

33 - Assassin’s Creed Liberation (Vita) ⭐️⭐️

34 - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (PS4) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

35 - One Night Stand (PS4) ⭐️⭐️⭐️

36 - Lara Croft: Go (Vita) ⭐️⭐️⭐️

37 - Lego Harry Potter: Years 5-7 (Vita) ⭐️⭐️⭐️

38 - Reverie (Vita)  ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

39 - Burnout Paradise Remastered (PS4) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

40 - Driveclub (PS4) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

41 - Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Switch) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

42 - Super Mario Odyssey (Switch) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

43 - Full Throttle: Remastered (Vita) ⭐️⭐️⭐️

44 - Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey (PS4) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

45 - Goat Simulator (PS4) ⭐️⭐️

46 - Aer (PS4) ⭐️⭐️⭐️

47 - Star Wars Battlefront II (PS4) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

48 - Adam’s Venture: Origins (PS4) ⭐️

49 - Trover Saves the Universe (PS4) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

50 - Music Racer (PS4) ⭐️

51 - Drowning (PS4) ⭐️

52 - Uncharted 2 (PS4) ⭐️⭐️⭐️

53 - Uncharted 3 (PS4) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

54 - Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader (GameCube) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

55 - Tomb Raider Definitive Edition (PS4) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

56 - Assassin’s Creed II (PS3) ⭐️⭐️

57 - Star Wars Battlefront II (Xbox) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

58 - Ultimate Spider-Man (Xbox) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

59 - Gears of War Remastered (Xbox One) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

60 - Gears of War 2 (Xbox 360) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

61 - Gears of War 3 (Xbox 360)  ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

62 - Gears of War 4 (Xbox One) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

63 - Star Wars Battlefront (Xbox) ⭐️⭐️⭐️

64 -  Hitman Go (Vita) ⭐️⭐️

65 - Far Cry 3: Remastered (PS4) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

66 - Super Mario Galaxy ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I know, right? That’s insane. That’s so many games! Some of them took over a hundred hours (I’m lookin’ at you, AC: Odyssey, you little slice of wonderful) and some took a little over 50 minutes (Drowning means well, but isn’t worth the money or even the abbreviated time). According to the time between first and last trophies, some took years (AC: Liberation, Drake’s Fortune, Uncharted 2, ACII, Lego Batman 2, Burnout Paradise, Driveclub, Star Wars Battlefront II, Lego Harry Potter).

I’ve purchased properties, earned revenge, robbed banks, conquered worlds, uncovered ancient secrets, bested gods, and even left a one night stand’s house wearing their underwear. Video games are freaking awesome, man.

But there’s one in particular I’ve got to talk about first.

Here's to the Young Guns

This morning while running through the normal websites I check out on the bus (twitter, the Ringer, The Verge, GameSpot, etc.), I came across a pretty cool article on Newsarama that talked about a new old initiative from Marvel.

An initiative called Young Guns.

Marvel is preparing to unveil its next class of Young Guns, the up and coming artists who are set to light the comics world on fire. You might sit there and think it’s hyperbole, but it turns out since the program first started in 2004, Marvel has been… well, kinda right. So let’s take a look back at Marvel’s very first Young Guns. 15 years ago

In 2004 I moved back to the States after spending a year with my mom in South America, just in time to start my freshman year of high school. Shrek 2, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and Spider-Man 2 were the top 3 grossing films at the box office. Gwen Stefani finally went solo, and Usher had the Billboard’s top song of the year with Yeah, which was weird, because Britney was the one who released the best pop song of the decade.

Yeah I know that’s not super relevant to Marvel’s Young Guns program, but hey, any excuse to talk about Britney, y’know?

Anyways. Marvel was just coming out of a rough couple years. Over saturation of the market in the 90’s was manageable because of a newfound speculator market; Marvel was making more books than ever because people bought them thinking they would be collector’s items. And then they stopped, because it turns out if a book sells 8 million copies, there’s not enough scarcity to make it an investment, it’s just a thing that 8 million other people also own. They filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and restructured their entire business model. Fewer books, bigger creators. This started in 1998 with the Marvel Knights line, an imprint that was more experimental with its titles and deemphasized the longwinded continuity Marvel had previously beat to death with things like their Onslaught saga.

The House of Ideas bounced back in the early/mid-2000’s thanks to killer writers like Grant Morrison, Brian Michael Bendis, Warren Ellis, Mike Carey, Brian K. Vaughn, Christopher Priest, Ed Brubaker, and countless others.

And all those writers were complemented with insane visuals by extremely talented artists. Marvel knew they had generational talent draggin’ pencils on paper for them (or stylus’s on Wacom tablets), and even more impressive—they had young generational talent. What seemed like a strictly self-promotion product turned out to be a case of shot-calling that saw Marvel go 6-for-6. So let’s talk about what they were doing then, what their best work is, and what they’re doing now.

Steve McNiven

McNiven is a Canadian comic book artist who cut his teeth on CrossGen’s Meridian title. From there, he garnered Marvel’s attention and was put on Marvel Knights: 4, the imprint’s new Fantastic Four series, where he drew one of my favorite pieces of the Thing… ever.

From there he’d do a few issues for Warren Ellis’ Ultimate Secret miniseries, the middle part of his reimagining of the Galactus story for the Ultimate universe. Afterwards, he’d get to what’s probably still his biggest project to date: Civil War.

In 2018, he completed his most recent project, The Return of Wolverine, bringing back the iconic character he and Charles Soule killed in 2014. Civil War is realistically the thing he’s most known for, but he reunited with writer Mark Millar for fan favorite Old Man Logan, a story that great influenced Fox’s Logan film of 2017.

Olivier Coipel

The first major works I’ve been able to find by Coipel are from one of my favorite series; The Legion of Superheroes, which he worked on with the writing team of Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning in 2001. In 2004 he had a two issue stint on Uncanny X-Men Reload with returning legend Chris Claremont, an attempt to drum up interest in the X-books after the departure of Grant Morrison from their flagship New X-Men title. By 2005 he signed an exclusive contract with Marvel and later that year he produced the first book I’d ever seen of his. A little event book called House of M.

Afterwards, he’d do occasional spot work for random series, usually with high profile authors. His next major book of prominence came in 2007 with J. Michael Straczynski when they were tasked with bringing Thor back to mainstream 616 continuity for the first time since 2004.

In 2010 he’d reunite with Brian Michael Bendis for the four issue event Siege, a story that saw Norman Osborn’s Dark Reign come to a head against the hero community. It was only four issues, which is pretty short by event standards, but they packed a lot of action into each book and set up the publishing initiative “The Age of Heroes” that would guide a majority of Marvel’s books for the next few years.

2018 saw him working on a DC book for the first time in a lifetime, a short story in Action Comics 1000 called The Car, something he worked on with Geoff Johns and Richard Donner.

Most recently, he finished a mini-series with Mark Millar called The Magic Order, an adult themed fantasy comic that’s part of Netflix’s investment in Millar’s brand, giving them first right of refusal to develop tv shows based on his properties. I’m only a few issues in but I like it. It’s nice seeing his pencils with some slightly different coloring techniques than he’s usually associated with.

I’m not sure what his next project is, but I’m gonna snap it up because I love Coipel. The first event I read when I started going to the shop week in and week out was House of M, it started the same month I started going to the store so Coipel is synonymous with my love of the medium. House of M is my favorite and probably still the most important book he’s done (it redefined the X-Men for the next 10+ years), but Siege is probably his biggest book. There’s one two page spread that’s just insane and who am I kidding, of course I’m going to show it to you.

Coipel drew someone ripping a god in half.

David Finch

David Finch started his career with Image and Marc Silvestri’s Top Cow Productions, which makes perfect sense if you’ve ever seen the dude’s pencils. He took over Cyberforce after creator/Top Cow founder Silvestri stepped down from art duties. His first Marvel work is for a book I’ve never read but just added to my reading list called Call of Duty: The Brotherhood. Brotherhood, along with Call of Duty: The Precinct and Call of Duty: The Wagon was conceived of post 9/11 and focuses on a group of firefighters (Wagon focused on EMTs and Precinct on Cops) who start dealing with increasingly more paranormal and supernatural elements of the Marvel Universe.

Sounds weird and I want to read it.

He’d work on Ultimate X-Men in 2003-2004 for an extended period of time and afterwards he’d reunite with Brian Michael Bendis and do the then-unthinkable: kill off the Avengers in Avengers Disassembled.

I was six months or so late to this story but if you’ve read any comic thing on this site before you know how fundamentally important that story is not just to me but to Marvel’s entire creative direction for the rest of the decade. He’d work on the relaunch as well, providing interiors and covers for New Avengers on the opening arc and the third, which was especially cool because it turns out David Finch is really good at drawing ninjas.

In addition to comic work, he did some concept art for Warner Bros. during the pre-production phase for Zack Snyder’s Watchmen film adaptation in 2009 that deserves some recognition. Like that movie or hate it, it looked pretty as hell.

In 2010 Finch would sign an exclusive contract with DC and work on several Batman related projects, before doing what’s probably the biggest book of his career yet. Forever Evil was a 7 issue mini/event series that served as the first event of DC’s new continuity initiative, The New 52.

Most recently he’s done work with DC on Tom King’s Batman run coming out of their Rebirth initiative. His style is gorgeous and he knows how to sell a book with stoic looking characters rocking the cover. I love his World War Hulk covers but it was jarring to see his art on the exterior and John Romita Jr.’s looser, exaggerated pencils on the inside.

While New Avengers is probably my favorite book that he’s worked on, he was the cover artist for Marvel’s Messiah Complex crossover event that dealt with the first Mutant Birth since House of M and I just love those covers.

Uncanny X-Men 493 in particular gets me. I’ve always loved Cable and I’d never seen him vulnerable but terrifying like this before.

He may not have the most prolific career, but he has one of the most detailed careers. Looking over his work now it feels like his work started as an homage to Jim Lee but quickly became a standout artist in his own right.

Trevor Hairsine

Trevor Hairsine is admittedly the artist from this list I’m least familiar with. In looking over his bibliography, I’ve actually read a majority of his Marvel work, but since he’s a British artist I haven’t read any of his 2000AD work on books like Judge Dredd or Missionary Man, so I’m not very familiar with his roots. The books of his I do know however, are fucking bangers.

His first real Marvel story was in 2002 with Jonathan Ney Rieber, working on The Extremists arc of Marvel Knights’ Captain America, a story I read for the first time recently and can say is definitely worth checking out, if nothing else than as an interesting artifact of the time.

A little rougher around the edges than some of the other artists from Young Guns, often compared to fellow Brit Bryan Hitch, Hairsine would go on to work on some majorly high-profile projects for Marvel, especially for its Ultimate imprint, where Hitch was also working at the time. He worked with Warren Ellis on Ultimate Nightmare, the first part of the aforementioned Ultimate Galactus trilogy. He’d also illustrate Bendis’ Ultimate Six story.

One of the more important stories Hairsine was a part of was the X-Men miniseries Deadly Genesis with writer Ed Brubaker. It was my first exposure to his work and while I was new to comics at the time, I was overall pretty impressed with his output. He found a balance between the giant widescreen cinematography of the Ultimate universe with slightly more stylized and exaggerated figures more akin to a traditional 616 book.

Deadly Genesis would introduce Gabriel Summers aka Vulcan, a previously unknown third Summers brother related to Cyclops and Havok of X-Men fame. After he was left for dead by Xavier, Vulcan went to hunt down his father, Corsair, in Shi’ar space in Brubaker’s 12 part Rise and Fall of the Shi’ar Empire in Uncanny X-Men. That would set up two cosmic-centered events down the line called Realm of Kings and War of Kings as galactic empires vied for dominance amongst the stars, but alas, Hairsine would only contribute towards the miniseries that kicked the whole thing off.

More recently, Hairsine had been working on DC’s Red Hood and the Outlaws before the direction change for the series. He was producing some gorgeous stuff like the cover below.

My favorite thing he’s done (for Marvel anyway) is probably Ultimate Nightmare. His cinematic style mixes with Ellis’ razor-sharp script so perfectly—each panel feels like it’s 23 frames shy of being a full on movie. I’d argue that because he only worked on the first part of the Galactus Trilogy, that Ultimate Six is probably his biggest project for the House of Ideas, but I genuinely can’t say since I never finished that series, but I plan to soon.

Adi Granov

Adi Granov is a name you know whether you realize it or not. No single person on this list has been behind a more visible contribution to Marvel at large than Granov and it’s not even close.

Adi Granov was a concept designer for Nintendo on titles like Wave Race: Blue Storm and Bionic Commando. He then began contributing to various Wizards of the Coast card games like Star Wars TCG and Wheel of Time. He eventually got his first comic work for Dreamwave, a publisher renowned for bringing back the Generation One Transformers to print. Unfortunately despite the success of the Transformers license and Adi Granov’s stellar debut with NecroWar (art below), Dreamwave went bankrupt and Granov was a free agent.

After showing his portfolio around, he was approached by Marvel Comics to do a series of pinup posters for Iron Man who, at the time, was a B/C tier character. Nobody gave a shit about him at all (keep in mind, this is 2004), but Granov crushed it and was eventually earned the job for interiors on an upcoming Iron Man reboot with writer Warren Ellis for a little story called Extremis.

Extremis is my favorite thing Granov has worked on, hands down. It was a story that was meant to elevate Tony and adapt him from futurist of the 70’s to inventor of the 21st century. Tony goes up against a villain he didn’t think was possible and he’s scared, so he realizes it’s time to redefine the Iron Man.

The art matches the story perfectly. In 2003 we as an audience were not used to seeing art that looked like this. Granov’s realism reinforced Ellis’ messaging that this was a story from the fucking future. The coloring in particular was tremendous. It was digitally airbrushed but it didn’t have the “polished”, rubbery qualities of most digital inking from the day. Instead of crosshatching the characters to death like a lot of the more prominent artists going into the millennium, Granov instead used gradients as shading, This was something of a paradigm shift for comics and hasn’t really been seen since. When a Granov (along with his fellow Young Guns class and other artists like Bryan Hitch and Steve Epting) book came out, it didn’t feel like like they were producing comic art. It felt like they were producing art.

After that, Granov didn’t produce a lot of interior artwork. He was in high demand as a cover artist however, drawing the fronts of books (gorgeously) for the next few years, but his important work was actually as designer for a 2008 film called Iron Man.

Yeah, that’s right. Granov, along with a few others, designed the beginning of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

So, in case you were wondering why the suit looked so good in the movie, it’s because they got the guy who made the suit look so good in the comics to design it. There’s a huge cache of various concept art available at Gizmodo that’s more than worth perusing.

In 2008 he’d start a miniseries called Iron Man: Viva Las Vegas with writer Jon Favreau in anticipation of the Iron Man film but it’d never be finished. He’d work on a Captain America series called Captain America: Living Legend with writer Andy Diggle and he’d get credited as a writer as well due to his contributions to the story. It’s hard to find if he’s been doing anything more recent but I’m sure he’s not hurting for work.

Extremis is easily my favorite thing he’s done, but I heavily associate Granov with the X-Men. Like the aforementioned David Finch provided a unifying set of covers for the crossover event Messiah Complex, Granov supplied covers for the final part of the Hope/Messiah trilogy, Second Coming.

Jim Cheung

Jim Cheung has a curious career. He actually started on a few Marvel books in the 90’s, namely ForceWorks, Spider-Man Unlimited, and Marvel Comics Presents, among others. He’d leave for the publisher CrossGen (where fellow Young Gun McNiven began his career) and work on fantasy series Scion with writer Ron Marz, where Cheung illustrated a majority of the series 43 issue run.

Unfortunately, Scion only ever collected the first half of the series and it’s well out of print. So, while I’m unsure about its quality, I’m not that unsure because it turns out Ron Marz is good at writing and Jim Cheung is good at drawing.

After CrossGen’s bankruptcy and subsequent closure, Cheung returned to Marvel, where he was promptly inducted to the Young Guns program just before working on Young Avengers, a book I recently reread and can say holds up like it’s Atlas. It was a team book that had big stakes for new, young characters and it inadvertently brought him closer to Marvel’s core titles that were emerging in the early/mid-2000’s.

It was the first thing of his I ever read and I was immediately hooked. These characters were around my age and seeing a group of friends that looked somewhat like my group of friends all Marvelfied was almost too much for my adolescent heart to take.

Cheung drew 10 of the series’ 12 issues before moving from the orbit of the Marvel Universe’s center to the nucleus of it. New Avengers: Illuminati was a five issue mini-series written by Brian Michael Bendis that detailed the secret history of a clandestine group of Marvel’s most powerful heroes, including Iron Man, Reed Richards, Dr. Strange, Professor Xavier, Blackbolt of the Inhumans, and Prince Namor of Atlantis.

Cheung’s attachment to the project was Marvel’s way of calling him a premiere artist. Bendis was the creative force behind Marvel at the time, one part sherpa, one part architect as he helmed the flagship title New Avengers. He built the Avengers up from a flailing old series into a franchise that spawned multiple spinoff books. Cheung drawing Illuminati in particular was a huge deal as the series detailed the machinations behind some of the Marvel Universe’s biggest stories, and set up several major events, including Secret Invasion.

Years later in 2010, Cheung would return to what’s probably my favorite work of his, Young Avengers: The Children’s Crusade. A sequel to the series he worked on years prior, The Children’s Crusade is a mini-series with more action and crazy plot-twists than the average event. To this day I’m still shocked that Marvel didn’t try to push this book harder and bill it as a major story because there were insane consequences.

Children’s Crusade sort of made itself the end of a trilogy, with Avengers Disassembled/House of M serving as part one, Young Avengers as part two, and Children’s Crusade as part three, and Jim Cheung drew half of that, and drew that half =stunningly.

More recently, Cheung has actually gone to the Darkseid over at DC Comics. Last year I grabbed Justice League 1, a relaunch of DC’s premiere team book courtesy of Scott Snyder, Batman author extraordinaire. Beyond more and more cover work, he’s contributed to two interiors, including the debut of the book. I hope he clears his schedule in the near future, it’d be nice to see him hit a monthly book on schedule. The dude’s a killer artist, I just want to see as much of his work as possible. Judging by the cover below, guy hasn’t missed a step.

So there you have it

Marvel crushed it on their inaugural Young Guns event, at least in my eyes. Not only were these cats putting out quality work before they went to Marvel, they put out career defining work while there, and are pretty much all still making mind-bendingly pretty comics today, with Adi Granov being the only real exception, but that dude was always a concept artist who did comic work, not a comic artist who did concept work.

Obviously I’m a little biased because 2004 was when I first started going to the shop week in and week out. These artists were getting into Marvel right around the time I was, so I definitely feel an attachment to them.

The one problem with them is that their books are either frequently delayed or just outright infrequent. These aren’t just artists, they’re auteurs whose fingerprints are all over multiple decades worth of comics. They take a lot of time to produce a book because they see it in a way only they can. I can see one panel and know which one drew it just based off a jawline, a neck muscle or a lack of one. Marvel knocked it out of the park when they selected this class of Young Guns.

Each one is iconic in their own way, and peerless in most other ways. They’re the artists I think of when I think of comics. The new class has a lot to live up to compared to the program’s alumni, but Marvel hasn’t given me reason to doubt their selection process yet.

Happy 15th to the oldest Young Guns. Comics literally wouldn’t be the same without you.

We're in the Endgame Now

On May 2nd, 2008, I had a tennis match. I was on the first doubles team, and my partner and I were an insanely talented duo. We didn’t drop a match together. We only dropped maybe 5 sets in two and a half years playing together, we were ranked 1st in our division, first in Eastern Maine Class B, and the year before we’d go on to win our State Championship match. My best friend Ben was an alternate for the second doubles team, and I don’t think he played that day, but my other friends Nathanael and Jamie did. Amazing players in their own right, they still struggled to close out their matches in a timely manner. I sat there on the sidelines pacing back and forth wildly, confused as to what was taking them so long. The sun was starting to set, and we had a road trip to make. 

After the match finally wrapped we piled into someone’s car, and drove 40 miles north to Hoyts Cinema on Stillwater Ave. in Bangor, Maine - the closest theater to us that played movies on opening day before the tourists showed up for the summer. 

My three best friends and I - we saw Iron Man. We saw the birth of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. 

We dressed for the wrong occasion, but we were dressed regardless

The next month, on June 13th, 2008, the month we all graduated, we saw The Incredible Hulk at the Criterion in Bar Harbor, Maine, between our landscaping and lifeguarding jobs. We liked it, but didn’t love it. There wasn’t the same magic that made Iron Man so special to us. 

So, we were only a little upset when there wasn’t a Marvel movie released in 2009. But that was the last year we were able to say that. 

In 2010 I went to see Iron Man 2 at the Roxie Theater in downtown Burlington, Vermont. My date wasn’t the most enthused, but I was blown away. It’s still one of my favorite Marvel movies. 

On May 6, 2011 I was living in Canterbury England. For a friend’s birthday, I took her to see Thor at the Odeon downtown. She wasn’t the biggest comic book fan, but she loved fantasy. And I just sat there, amazed that I lived long enough to see a Thor movie. It still feels surreal to me. 

I’m sure England loved having me

By July I was bouncing back and forth between Burlington for summer classes and Bar Harbor to see my family. A little over a week after my 21st birthday, I went to see Captain America with my father, still unsure the movie would work. I didn’t like it at the time, and to be honest it’s still one of my least favorite Marvel movies to date, but every re-watch I appreciate it a little more. 

On May 4th, 2012, Avengers came out, a movie none of us thought would ever happen, and a movie that none of us thought would be good, let alone great. We left Burlington to go to Essex, the town over, to see it on a bigger screen. 

We couldn’t shut up about it. The impossible movie came out and it blew us all away. 

And a few days after Avengers, someone would take this photo of me which is way less weird with the right context.

A few months after graduating college, and a few months after a back surgery, it was May, 2013. I’d take myself to see Iron Man 3 at the Roxie in downtown Burlington. The biggest fan of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (y’know, the movie that got Robert Downey Jr. the gig as Tony Stark), I saw it again. And again. I eventually saw it with someone I’d been seeing off and on, and was seeing off and on later.

Now we’re just on, living together in San Francisco. 

Just before the NBA Draft Heist of 2013 (thanks for all those picks, Brooklyn) I’d drive across the country and try to live and be poor in LA. On November 8th, I’d see Thor the Dark World at the Arclight Theater on Sunset Blvd in Hollywood, about a mile west of my apartment. It gets shit on and I don’t really understand why. This was before The Force Awakens had come out, which basically meant it was the most Star Wars ass movie we’d gotten since 2006. I like it, and I think it holds up. 

The next spring, I’d see Captain America: The Winter Soldier at the same theater with my friend Matt. It’s still my favorite Marvel movie to date. 

GodDAMN that Matt kid had a face on him

That summer I’d see Guardians of the Galaxy there too. Then I’d visit Boston and see it again at the AMC Commons just off Tremont. I convinced the On Again/Off Again girl from Iron Man 3 to see it even though she didn’t want to - she was vehemently against it. But it just worked. After that, she was into Marvel, hook, line, and sinker. 

On May 1st 2015 I’d see Avengers Age of Ultron at the Showcase Cinema DeLuxe in Revere, Massachusetts… eventually. It was totally sold out when we tried to go, so we settled and saw Pitch Perfect 2. I wasn’t that mad. Pitch Perfect 2 felt like a Police Academy sequel starring Anna Kendrick. May 3rd though, that Sunday, I’d see Avengers Age of Ultron, with our friends Justin and Kasey. Justin would kick my ass at Magic the Gathering later that night.

Two months later on July 17, 2015, I’d go with my dad to see Ant-Man at the recently rebranded Hoyts Cinema in Bangor, Maine. (now it’s just the Bangor Mall Cinemas 10, much prettier). He had no idea who the fuck Ant-Man was. I had no idea how the fuck an Ant-Man movie got made. 

Three months later, I’d move to where Ant-Man was filmed, and begin my love/hate relationship with San Francisco. 

On May 5th 2016, my best friends from Ad School and I got last minute tickets to see Captain America: Civil War at the recently closed AMC Van Ness in San Francisco. I was underwhelmed by it at the time. I was wrong to be. 

Later that year, on the weekend of November 4th, 2016 On again/Off Again/Now Just On moved out to San Francisco after taking the California BAR exam (she passed because of course she did). We drove down to Daly City to see Doctor Strange, and we grabbed Five Guys right before, so thank god we had incredibly comfy chairs that reclined otherwise I don’t think we would’ve made it. I’m still shocked that a Doctor Strange movie was made. My dad would come out to visit for Christmas that year, and my brother lived in the city at the time. I think that was the first Marvel movie he’d ever seen in theaters. But the AMC Metreon on Mission St. downtown also had comfy chairs, otherwise I don’t think he would’ve made it either. 

My brother became a dad, and I became a swaddle master.

My dad would come out to the Bay again in May of 2017 because my brother became a dad, and my dad became a grandfather. But Pops, On Again/Off Again/Now Just On, and I would sneak out a few blocks south towards AMC Van Ness, grab a few beers, and see Guardians of the Galaxy 2. Another maligned Marvel movie, it’s one of my favorites. It was a story about fathers and I got to see it with mine. I bought the tickets, so my dad bought the beers afterwards at Lush Lounge on Polk Street. We talked about fathers and sons, and I only cried a little. 

Later that summer, just before my birthday, On/Off/On and my now podcasting partner Sarah and I would go see Spider-Man Homecoming for a matinee the weekend of July 7th. Michael Keaton was in this? Donald Glover was in this? The third Spider-Man in my lifetime? I still love it. It has one of my all-time favorite Marvel movie moments, and arguably the best car ride scene since Pulp Fiction. And if that’s not true, it’s gotta be at least top 10.

After being transfixed by the amazing trailer with a killer synth-heavy track courtesy of a band called In the Face of Evil, we didn’t just finally get our first good Hulk movie, we got a fucking banger of a movie, an all-time genre-action classic. That movie fucks. Y’know how I know that? The brother I mentioned earlier who couldn’t give fewer shits about Marvel movies? Even he likes it. The first weekend of November in 2017 we saw Thor: Ragnarok. And then we’d see it again, three more times.

Our Ragnarok crew at Bay to Breakers a few months earlier

February 16th of 2018 On/Off/On, Sarah, and few other friends would come with me to the Kabuki Theater on Post Street in San Francisco’s Japan Town district to see Black Panther, and that movie was a sea change. It still is. On/Off/On and I throw it on probably once a month still. 

We’d also see it at Kabuki again on April 25th of 2018. We had to. Because my friends and I just finished a Marvel movie marathon, rewatching everything that had come out to date. 

Because the next day we’d see an early screening of Avengers Infinity War. It’s one of two times I’ve ever skipped Pub Trivia since I moved here. I’d see it in theaters five times. I couldn’t believe they did what they did. Part of me still can’t. I almost couldn’t enjoy the movie, I bought a ticket for a friend and he just fell off the earth, we didn’t hear from him until later that night, where at the bar we had one of the funniest exchanges I’ve ever been part of in real life.

That July I’d see Ant-Man and the Wasp. To this day, I’ve still only seen it once. I liked it, it felt like a Doctor Who Episode. All I could think was “man, that car chase wouldn’t work in that part of town”. It was one of the last movies I’d ever see at the AMC Van Ness (the last movie being Aquaman, but that’s a different blog post).

That baby my brother had? It was around this time she stopped looking like a baby and started looking like a very small person. Oh, and she started growing hair, that was cool.

It’s also the last Marvel movie I’d see before I started having anxiety/panic attacks, so, damn, I wish I appreciated that movie more than I did at the time. 

On March 8th I’d go back to the Kabuki theater to see Captain Marvel with On/Off/On. We’d go back to see it there two additional times, in a five day period. I wish the soundtrack were better, but holy hell, what a goddamn movie regardless. 

A little over a month ago on April 26th, I saw Avengers Endgame with On/Off/On, with Sarah, with my Pub Trivia partner, Aaron, and my Pub Trivia host, Marty.

I still find it hard to believe that racing to Bangor after a high school tennis match 11 years ago started something that only just ended last month. I’ve lived in six different cities, in four different states, on two different continents. I’ve had three major partners and two major heartbreaks. I’ve battled anxiety, depression, body issues, and homesickness. I’ve been a student at three different institutions and graduated from them. I’ve done work for a website I’ve loved since before the MCU ever existed, as well as work for the video game publisher that made me love video games. I’ve seen my brother married, then later my sister, and become an uncle (almost twice over). I’ve driven across the country four times, had two existential crises, started smoking, stopped smoking, and started again (but currently stopped). I’ve made best friends I no longer talk to and I talk to best friends I realistically may never see again.

I’ve spent my entire adult life with these characters, with this one singular story that’s tied 22 films together over eleven fucking years. And for the first time in over a decade, these characters got an ending. Of course I’m excited for the next Marvel movie, for the next phase, but I don’t need it the way I needed these last 22 films. It’s taken 11 years, to give us 45 hours and 54 minutes of story and finally we as an audience have gotten closure. 

But more importantly, the characters themselves have gotten closure. The story’s not over yet, thank goodness for that, but it’s over for now, and I couldn’t be happier with how it did so. 

I’m absolutely terrible with goodbyes. I hate endings in general, to be honest. I think that’s where my anxiety started, following my first real existential crisis. I think that’s why I love comics so much. Because they don’t end, they just change. I always get sad when Luke burns Vader. I always get bummed when Harry and Ginny take their kid to the Hogwarts Express. Watching Endgame, there was a catharsis, and instead of being sad about it ending, I just sat there astonished that it happened. That it was executed at all. That it didn’t die somewhere along the road. That they committed to something they had no idea would work, could work, or even should work.

There was a movie where a talking raccoon was sad that a sentient, walking tree died. There was a movie where a non-powered, human spy was able to hold her own with atomic monsters and gods of thunder. There was a movie where someone could shrink down to the size of ants and talk to them. There was a movie where walking acid trip with a living cape saved our universe from a dimension made of cancer and malice.

And people loved them.

There was a movie where heroes died. Where villains won. Where you felt bad for the bad guy. Where you secretly sympathized with them. Where you were shocked by them. Where you wanted nothing more than to see them fail.

And people loved them too.

For a little under one third of my life I’ve watched these movies. I’ve celebrated with these characters, and mourned with them. And it was all leading to this. To an ending I wasn’t ready for, but one I will happily accept.

I’ll always remember when the world was ready to believe in Heroes and let itself be saved.