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Supervillain Saturday/Sunday (Monday Too)
Mar. 1st, 2010 09:36 amSticky eyes, crunchy body—but even though my insomnia persists, broken up with crotch-kick cramping last night, I’ve still managed to both get up on time every day and get Steve out the door by the agreed-upon deadline. Overall, I’m exhausted: Though Cal’s been very charming this weekend, it’s been in between bouts of yelling random snippets of crap (“Oh no! The baby mobile is too quiet!”, “Do you want to see some of my baby pictures?” [“Not hugely,” I replied. “I took most of your baby pictures.”], something which sounds like something about being gay but probably isn’t, just a mispronunciation [like “The Blue Double-you Waltz!”]), doing a hysterical parody of laughter and making noises like he’s pooping his pants (which he sometimes is).
At any rate. Here’s basically the only writing I got done, scribbled over Saturday breakfast—
BAD FATHERS
Old Kronos ate his children, all but Zeus,
who Rhea hid, and flourished well in sorrow—
the boy returned on fire, sickle in hand,
and proved his siblings bitter herbs to swallow.
Though Zeus and Hera married, bedded, bred,
Zeus soon grew bored, and sowed his king-seed further:
Reaped, pruned and grafted, mated with fresh crops;
his family tree was anything but linear.
He kept his monster-uncles in the Pit, pursued
his sisters, daughters, random boys and maidens,
even the spume of Kronos’ severed bits—
how night grew soft with lightning-fast gestations!
Rivers and trees, the sun and moon, pure thought
itself, by the Thunderer’s work, to bed was brought.
And all this riot from one cause alone:
A god-shaped hole, still vomiting up a stone.
Otherwise, I thought about Chapter Three, made plans—the week’s already filling up fast—and maintained my Twitter/Facebook feed, which boiled off at least a few immediate insights. On Friday we indulged ourselves with some spoils from the Hairy Tarantula, Steve’s favorite comic/RPG store, and I ended up with three Marvel “Dark Reign” titles: Dark Reign: Accept Change, Dark Avengers: Assemble and Dark Wolverine: The Prince.
As with the Secret Six, the fun of these scenarios—all born in the wake of Marvel’s Civil War and Secret Invasion runs, during which Iron Man picked a fight with every metahuman in the world, then had to deal with an influx of Skrull conqueror/missionaries backed up by a generation of shapeshifting sleeper agent—is that through a crazy cascade of events, Norman Osborn (Spiderman’s totally-not-pal, the former first Green Goblin) has effectively become the head of S.H.I.E.L.D., which has been re-acronymized as H.A.M.M.E.R. Then, since all the actual Avengers quit rather than work with him, he hired a bunch of supervillains with roughly congruent powers to masquerade as “Miss Marvel” (Moonstone), “Spiderman” (Venom), “Hawkeye” (freakin’ Bullseye) and the like, while also roping in at least one hapless innocent (Kree warrior Noh-Varr, who signed up to kill Skrulls, and is now “Captain Marvel”), the Greek god of War and the Sentry, aka That Human Atom Bomb/Crazy Guy With Godlike Powers who Lives in the Avengers Mansion Because We’re Afraid to Ask Him to Leave.
Down the bottom of this list in terms of sheer power is the “new” Wolverine, Daken Akihiro—Wolverine’s half-Japanese, offhandedly bisexual long-lost son, who has bone-claws, issues galore, his Dad’s berserker rage (he once literally tore the Punisher apart and threw the bits off a roof down into traffic) and the ability to manipulate people’s emotions via pheremonal output, which he uses to mount a Machiavellian quadruple-agent campaign on his boss, teammates and every hero he interacts with alike. Watching him screw around with people, lit and fig, is addictively entertaining—he’s like an outwardly orderly force of pure chaos, a sexy trickster who exploits his own healing factor masochistically in order to make the people he goads into hurting him feel bad. In other words, yeah, it’s like Marjorie M. Liu is writing him just for me.;)
But I love Bendis’s Dark Avengers group mechanics just as much. I love how simultaneously bad-ass and scarily out-of-control Norman is, dressing up in one of Tony Stark’s cast-off suits and calling himself “the Iron Patriot”, preaching a self-help gospel of better living through psychotropic chemistry, then just flipping the fuck out on people. Or Moonstone, who aspires to be the group’s Hannibal Lecter (she’s got a psychiatry degree), but really can’t be arsed to do much more than sleep her way through everybody. Or Bullseye and Venom, who do this equally creepy-skeezy double-maniac buddy act, at least whenever Bullseye’s not threatening to kill everybody (particularly Daken, for constantly cock-teasing him) or Venom’s not trying to eat everybody. Or Ares, who’s the size of a truck, says “Hoy!” and “Aye, verily!”, and prone to giving people crazy pep-talks about honor (when Bullseye mocks one of them he almost puts him through a wall; “You don’t hit me,” Bullseye tells him, to which Ares replies: “I slapped you. If I’d hit you, you’d be broken”).
And the Sentry, whose real name is Bob. Bob’s…a sweet guy, when he’s not psychotic. But he’s just friggin’ scary.
Oh: And Doctor Doom co-stars in the first Dark Avengers run, being utterly awesome. Latveria has been nuked (during the Civil War, I think), but he doesn’t care, because he’s been carrying his entire home-base castle around in a time-cube—so he unpacks it, and gets ready to start all over. Because that is how Doom rolls.
In other news, I also watched Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths, which proves (as I’d suspected) that the one person in the multiverse you never want to run into is a Batman variant with no moral structure at all, and Shutter Island. I’d been avoiding the latter, mainly because of bad reviews, but I’m glad I conquered that misapprehension—it’s really brilliant. A cornucopia of pain, run through the filter of a gothic Rube Goldberg machine; modern opera, basically. And the soundtrack, as ever, is utterly incredible; what Robbie Robertson did was to choose a whole bunch of modern music, from 1950s songs to Mahler to Brian Eno, and cut them together, forming a ceaseless river of mystery and horror in which even the “sweeter” notes are stretched until they hurt.
The climactic piece is particularly incredible, a mash-up of Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight” and Dinah Washington singing “This Bitter Earth”. But now I must go answer emails, and then do some work.
At any rate. Here’s basically the only writing I got done, scribbled over Saturday breakfast—
BAD FATHERS
Old Kronos ate his children, all but Zeus,
who Rhea hid, and flourished well in sorrow—
the boy returned on fire, sickle in hand,
and proved his siblings bitter herbs to swallow.
Though Zeus and Hera married, bedded, bred,
Zeus soon grew bored, and sowed his king-seed further:
Reaped, pruned and grafted, mated with fresh crops;
his family tree was anything but linear.
He kept his monster-uncles in the Pit, pursued
his sisters, daughters, random boys and maidens,
even the spume of Kronos’ severed bits—
how night grew soft with lightning-fast gestations!
Rivers and trees, the sun and moon, pure thought
itself, by the Thunderer’s work, to bed was brought.
And all this riot from one cause alone:
A god-shaped hole, still vomiting up a stone.
Otherwise, I thought about Chapter Three, made plans—the week’s already filling up fast—and maintained my Twitter/Facebook feed, which boiled off at least a few immediate insights. On Friday we indulged ourselves with some spoils from the Hairy Tarantula, Steve’s favorite comic/RPG store, and I ended up with three Marvel “Dark Reign” titles: Dark Reign: Accept Change, Dark Avengers: Assemble and Dark Wolverine: The Prince.
As with the Secret Six, the fun of these scenarios—all born in the wake of Marvel’s Civil War and Secret Invasion runs, during which Iron Man picked a fight with every metahuman in the world, then had to deal with an influx of Skrull conqueror/missionaries backed up by a generation of shapeshifting sleeper agent—is that through a crazy cascade of events, Norman Osborn (Spiderman’s totally-not-pal, the former first Green Goblin) has effectively become the head of S.H.I.E.L.D., which has been re-acronymized as H.A.M.M.E.R. Then, since all the actual Avengers quit rather than work with him, he hired a bunch of supervillains with roughly congruent powers to masquerade as “Miss Marvel” (Moonstone), “Spiderman” (Venom), “Hawkeye” (freakin’ Bullseye) and the like, while also roping in at least one hapless innocent (Kree warrior Noh-Varr, who signed up to kill Skrulls, and is now “Captain Marvel”), the Greek god of War and the Sentry, aka That Human Atom Bomb/Crazy Guy With Godlike Powers who Lives in the Avengers Mansion Because We’re Afraid to Ask Him to Leave.
Down the bottom of this list in terms of sheer power is the “new” Wolverine, Daken Akihiro—Wolverine’s half-Japanese, offhandedly bisexual long-lost son, who has bone-claws, issues galore, his Dad’s berserker rage (he once literally tore the Punisher apart and threw the bits off a roof down into traffic) and the ability to manipulate people’s emotions via pheremonal output, which he uses to mount a Machiavellian quadruple-agent campaign on his boss, teammates and every hero he interacts with alike. Watching him screw around with people, lit and fig, is addictively entertaining—he’s like an outwardly orderly force of pure chaos, a sexy trickster who exploits his own healing factor masochistically in order to make the people he goads into hurting him feel bad. In other words, yeah, it’s like Marjorie M. Liu is writing him just for me.;)
But I love Bendis’s Dark Avengers group mechanics just as much. I love how simultaneously bad-ass and scarily out-of-control Norman is, dressing up in one of Tony Stark’s cast-off suits and calling himself “the Iron Patriot”, preaching a self-help gospel of better living through psychotropic chemistry, then just flipping the fuck out on people. Or Moonstone, who aspires to be the group’s Hannibal Lecter (she’s got a psychiatry degree), but really can’t be arsed to do much more than sleep her way through everybody. Or Bullseye and Venom, who do this equally creepy-skeezy double-maniac buddy act, at least whenever Bullseye’s not threatening to kill everybody (particularly Daken, for constantly cock-teasing him) or Venom’s not trying to eat everybody. Or Ares, who’s the size of a truck, says “Hoy!” and “Aye, verily!”, and prone to giving people crazy pep-talks about honor (when Bullseye mocks one of them he almost puts him through a wall; “You don’t hit me,” Bullseye tells him, to which Ares replies: “I slapped you. If I’d hit you, you’d be broken”).
And the Sentry, whose real name is Bob. Bob’s…a sweet guy, when he’s not psychotic. But he’s just friggin’ scary.
Oh: And Doctor Doom co-stars in the first Dark Avengers run, being utterly awesome. Latveria has been nuked (during the Civil War, I think), but he doesn’t care, because he’s been carrying his entire home-base castle around in a time-cube—so he unpacks it, and gets ready to start all over. Because that is how Doom rolls.
In other news, I also watched Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths, which proves (as I’d suspected) that the one person in the multiverse you never want to run into is a Batman variant with no moral structure at all, and Shutter Island. I’d been avoiding the latter, mainly because of bad reviews, but I’m glad I conquered that misapprehension—it’s really brilliant. A cornucopia of pain, run through the filter of a gothic Rube Goldberg machine; modern opera, basically. And the soundtrack, as ever, is utterly incredible; what Robbie Robertson did was to choose a whole bunch of modern music, from 1950s songs to Mahler to Brian Eno, and cut them together, forming a ceaseless river of mystery and horror in which even the “sweeter” notes are stretched until they hurt.
The climactic piece is particularly incredible, a mash-up of Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight” and Dinah Washington singing “This Bitter Earth”. But now I must go answer emails, and then do some work.
