Category: Stream of Consciousness

Ephemera: The Day the Clown Cried

2012-06-13, 6:38 pm
Categories: Movies, Stream of Consciousness

The other week I went to Phoenix Comicon with some family and friends.

On the train ride home, my uncle commented that cons aren't like in the old days -- it used to be this was your only chance to connect with other fans, your only chance to see the movies that were screening. Now, he said, everything's on the Internet.

I got to thinking -- are there any famously obscure movies that are so obscure they aren't on the Internet?

Yes. The Day the Clown Cried is not on the Internet.

Appropriately, I first heard of the movie from TV's Frank Conniff, in his blog on the Cinematic Titanic site. (I'd provide a link, but the old blogs don't appear to be up anymore.) CT is, of course, dedicated to mocking bad movies, and Clown is something of the Holy Grail of bad movies.

It's a Jerry Lewis flick about a clown in a concentration camp. It's supposed to be a Serious Film. It spent years in development hell and, when the rights reverted to the authors of the book it was based on, they refused to allow its release.

Lewis has a copy. He screens it for friends sometimes. Harry Shearer saw it in '79 and said, in a 1992 Spy Magazine article,

With most of these kinds of things, you find that the anticipation, or the concept, is better than the thing itself. But seeing this film was really awe-inspiring, in that you are rarely in the presense of a perfect object. This was a perfect object. This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is. Oh My God! - thats all you can say.

Aside from that, there are some tantalizing bits about the film on the Internet. There's a Wikipedia page, of course, and Film Buff Online has a review of the script. The most exhaustive fan site appears to be Subterranean Cinema, which has multiple revisions of the script, footage from the set, the above-linked Spy article, and pretty much everything there is to satisfy your curiosity on this curiosity.

I can't help thinking that some day, the complete film will be on the Internet.

Whatcha Got Cookin'?

2012-06-12, 6:48 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness

For dinner tonight I made myself a chile relleno burro.

And as I was working on it, I thought hey, why don't I try beer battering this sumbitch?

But a look through my pantry showed that I am stocked only with good beer, of the variety I would not want to use for cooking. (Although there is a local place that makes a burger with Arrogant Bastard, and will sell you what's left of the bottle...)

I need to remember to pick me up some Simpler Times next time I'm at Trader Joe's.

As it was, the relleno was pretty amazing even without beer.

Well, I say "without beer", what I actually mean is "with beer consumed only between bites".

(Last time I went to Top's they were selling Stone IPA for twenty bucks a case. That shit is crazy.)

Migraine

2012-06-11, 6:22 pm
Categories: Games, Stream of Consciousness, Work

Stayed home from work today with a migraine. One of the worst of my damn life -- no nausea with this one, fortunately, at least, not at first, but just this awful skull-crushing agony as if a thousand Thetans were pounding at the inside of my skull trying to ec-scape.

Woke me up at about 3:15 AM, too, which to the best of my recollection is a first. I've often woken up in the morning with a migraine, but seldom in the middle of the night. I was covered in sweat, too; don't know if that's some new and exciting feature of the migraine, or if I was running a fever, or just because I live in Tempe, Arizona and it is June and our lows are around 80 degrees this time of year.

Got up at 6, called in, popped a prescription migraine pill (with codeine!), and went back to bed for a fitful in-and-out-of-consciousness "sleep" until about 11 AM.

(Tangentially: I had a job, a couple of years ago, where some middle-management fuckwit had the bright idea of combining the sick line with the help desk. One day I called in and, hours later, got a call from work asking where the hell I was -- I explained that I'd called in, but apparently the help desk hadn't gotten around to my ticket yet. I came in the next day to discover that my ticket had finally been submitted at 4:45 PM, which, as you might suppose, is not the optimal time to let an office know that a worker will not be coming in today. Like, I think by 4:45, they've probably worked that out.

Best of all, I was then randomly selected to fill out a survey about how satisfied I was with my interaction with the help desk.

I made a point of not raking the tech over the coals -- I noted that help desk techs have a lot on their plate and often poor mechanisms for prioritizing their tickets; if you've ever worked help desk I don't need to tell you that nobody ever submits a ticket as low- or medium-priority -- and said that trying to combine the sick line with the help desk line was a fundamentally bad idea.)

Anyway. Ate some instant ramen, washed another codeine down with a few cups of coffee, and that managed to knock the headache down from "I can barely move" to "dull, ever-present throbbing". And I don't know if it was the codeine, the caffeine, or the pain, but by this point my coordination was completely shot.

Then I fired up the ol' Nintendo.

There's something I learned, around the age of 12 or 13: playing video games helps with the pain.

My mom and my grandparents didn't really buy that, and I suppose under the circumstances I can't blame them -- I was, after all, saying I had a migraine, and then staying home from school and playing video games all day.

But now there's research backing what I understood intuitively as a child: video games have an anesthetic effect. In recent years there have been studies in distraction therapy suggesting that video games have a real and measurable impact on pain management. (For one example: Applications of virtual reality for pain management in burn-injured patients, via the NIH, 2009. There have been other studies besides.)

I find that quieter games tend to be a bit better. And games that don't have a lot of text, because reading makes my head hurt.

I also tend to gravitate toward the familiar, stuff from when I was a kid -- Super Mario World and the like -- and I suspect there's a "comfort food" aspect to this. Though, on the other hand, SMW requires twitch reflexes, and when my reflexes are scrambled by codeine and caffeine it can be a much more frustrating game -- which doesn't help with pain.

Knowing that, today I started with Xenoblade. It's not too heavy on the text, I'm over-leveled enough that it's pretty low-key and not difficult or frustrating, and it doesn't require much in the way of hand-eye coordination or precise movements. (Well, most of it doesn't. Fuck you, Valak Mountain.)

But what it does have is big, vertigo-inducing vistas. Fuck. I was about three minutes in before I started getting nauseous and had to turn it off. Don't know if that's the migraine or the codeine, but I popped a motion sickness pill and decided to try Super Mario World after all.

I picked up my save from the last time I had a migraine and worked my way through Twin Bridges. So I guess my reflexes weren't completely shot.

Then I had a hot bath.

Now here's a question: what the fuck is up with bathtubs?

The standard American bathtub is a rectangle, and it's, what, four and a half, five feet long? And its deepest point is where your fucking feet go.

Who came up with that shit?

I'm actually kinda curious: were bathtubs designed this way because of the belief that baths are for children and teeny-tiny elfin women, or is it that only children and teeny-tiny elfin women take baths because no average-sized human adult can fucking fit in one comfortably?

Decided not to shave afterward. Still jittery. Just because I have the wherewithal to abandon Yoshi to a tragic fate on my way to Soda Lake doesn't mean I trust myself to run sharp objects across my face.

Anyhow. Guess my point is, "staying home playing video games" isn't always as much fun as it sounds. Sometimes it doesn't mean you're slacking. Sometimes it means you're doing everything you can to deal with excruciating pain.

All things considered I'd much rather have gone to work. Because aside from the "excruciating pain" thing, I don't get sick pay, and I'll spend tomorrow playing catchup.

So it goes, I guess.

Doctor Who: Earthshock

2012-06-10, 7:37 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness, TV

So back in 2008, after my sixth consecutive post (and twelfth post overall) in the Old Doctor Who thread, Brontoforumgoer Bal had this piece of advice:

So Thad, I know you love Doctor Who, and so do I, but uh, this whole thread is just you talking to yourself. Maybe you should just start a Doctor Who appreciation blog.

Well, he makes a good point. I'm not going to turn this into a Doctor Who appreciation blog, but I am going to repost some of my old episode reviews here.

I wrote a few back on the Pyoko boards but none of those appear to have been archived, so I'll just start with the first one I wrote on Brontoforumus: Earthshock.

Originally posted on Brontoforumus, 2008-02-22.

The original post contained spoiler tags. I'm going to omit them here. So, be forewarned: an extremely well-known spoiler from a 30-year-old Doctor Who serial, that is in fact probably the best-remembered sequence in the entire Davison run, follows.

Earthshock is a Davison-era serial best remembered for the death of Adric.

One of the reasons it is best remembered for that is that the rest of it is pretty thoroughly forgettable.

I hope you like stories where the Doctor materializes in the middle of a murder investigation, is falsely accused and taken into custody, and his captors don't believe his story until the real killers show up and start shooting people...because for some reason that happens twice in this serial.

The more interesting angle is the attempt to establish a father/son relationship between the Doctor and Adric. Unfortunately, Adric is at his most obnoxious here and what we see is full-on teen drama, which amounts to "You treat me like a child, you're not my real father, I liked Tom Baker better, I wanna go home, waaaaaaah." (And really, who didn't like Tom Baker better.)

Just to review Adric's faults, since the spotlight's on him here: while he predates Wesley Crusher, he's pretty much in his mold. He's the precocious child who somehow manages to show up all the adults on the show every time there's a problem to solve. Adding teen angst to his character traits does not make him more sympathetic.

That said, the attempt to explore the Doctor's companions as surrogate family is a noble one. We see a paternal side of the Doctor that recalls the First Doctor's farewell to Susan.

After that it's largely a straightforward Cybermen story; the Fifth Doctor's first (and only, unless you count their brief appearance in The Five Doctors) encounter with them. (As the Cybermen recognize the Doctor and recount his previous appearances, they bring up, by omission, the interesting bit of trivia that they didn't appear during Pertwee's run.) Pretty standard stuff; they're trying to destroy the Earth for what turns out to be a supremely nonsensical reason. (It turns out that a coalition of planetary leaders is meeting on Earth to declare war on the Cybermen; the Cyber Leader plans to wipe them all out in one fell swoop as this will "destroy their unity". Because nothing destroys the unity of a group that wants to declare war on you like assassinating all their heads of state.)

The big payoff is in the last five minutes -- a frantic battle with the Cyber Leader on the TARDIS, while the rest of the cast race against time on the bridge of a spaceship to prevent its lethal collision course with Earth. It's a tense and extraordinarily well-executed climax.

Adric's death is handled surprisingly well. He dies in truly precocious-child fashion, with the words "Now I'll never know if I was right" -- managing to turn his most obnoxious character trait into something bleakly charming. The reaction on the TARDIS is beautifully handled -- stunned, slackjawed silence, which carries over through the credits.

The presentation is slick -- the transition from the caves to the ship shows some good range in setting, and the Cybermen look less ridiculous than they did during the Troughton years. The score is solid, not nearly the overbearing early-'80's synth that characterized some of the late Baker stories.

This is one of those eps that's considered a classic by fans whose appeal I can't see so well watching it for the first time with no emotional investment. (This seems to be a trend among Cybermen stories.) The payoff of the last five minutes is excellent, and the pacing of the story is tight except for the fact that the first and third episode have exactly the same plot, but all in all I'd say it's a pretty average story. At the time of this posting Netflix has it available by mail but not for streaming, and Amazon's purchase price is $12.99, which is fair. (Update 2013-01-29: It's also streaming, free with Amazon Prime.)

Hudson

2012-06-08, 9:42 pm
Categories: Comics, Politics, Stream of Consciousness

News out of the Comics Internet today is that Laura Hudson is stepping down as EIC of ComicsAlliance. It's one of those things where the headline shocked me but the story actually left me feeling it's a good thing -- Laura described the frustration of having to maintain a website instead of just being able to write.

I've been grousing about that very thing on this blog -- and this blog is tiny, has one writer, no comments section, and nobody looking over my shoulder to make sure I don't use the word "fuck".

So, Laura Hudson not worrying about site admin crap and, instead, focusing on writing more articles? Yes please.

Because the woman writes a damn fine article.

Last September, she set the Comics Internet aflame with a post titled The Big Sexy Problem with Superheroines and Their 'Liberated Sexuality'. She wasn't the first person to point out sexism in mainstream American superhero comics, obviously. Nor was she the first to point out that it was a barrier for entry in DC's "New 52", ostensibly an attempt to attract new and lapsed readers.

But her piece was clear, heartfelt, and became something of a rallying cry, the first of many on CA, and linked frequently in other articles on other sites.

She's more patient than I am.

Somebody tries to tell me there's no sexism in American superhero comics, I'm less likely to deliver a point-by-point set of examples and how they make me feel, and more inclined to look incredulous and say "Are you fucking kidding me?"

I don't think people should have to write pieces like that. I think every example, every explanation, that Laura gets into in that piece is blisteringly obvious and self-evident.

But obviously there are people who just don't get it. For many of them, their instinct when confronted with such a piece is to get defensive, or to deny, or just to spew a bunch of crazy misogynistic crap in the comments section. I swear that the CA comments section got permanently stupider after that post. (And people are still writing terrible comments on that single post, nine months later -- you're probably better off not scrolling down to the bottom.)

But I think some people do listen. I think some people do take a look at what they're doing and look for ways to fix it. Just the other week Greg Rucka wrote a great post at io9 discussing superhero misogyny and how to fix it (basically: you want to write a well-rounded female character, talk to some women). The discussion is ongoing -- and with Hudson back writing articles, I like to think she'll keep the heat on.

I think it's a little optimistic to say that Big Sexy Problem could be the most important thing written on the subject since Gail Simone's Women in Refrigerators list -- but I really think it has the potential to be.

Course, she's more than welcome to just post cat pictures from here on out, too. She's earned it.

And she writes a mighty fine Mark Millar Valentine.

X-Files

2012-06-07, 7:53 pm
Categories: Movies, Stream of Consciousness, TV

So you know what I just watched?

Well, it says "X-Files" up there, so yeah, you probably do.

My fiancée is out of town and I am bacheloring it up. This is rather less exciting than it sounds; as it turns out most of my friends my age are busy raising kids and said they'd get back to me about going out for beers sometime.

So I've largely been sitting at home playing Nintendo and watching Netflix.

You know, Thursday.

Anyway. I watched X-Files pretty religiously from probably about '96 to '98. I missed most of the early stuff and most of the late stuff. I saw enough to know that when it was on it was on, and when it was off...it got pretty bad.

Tonight I fired up the pilot. And while a lot of shows don't quite click in the pilot, this is definitely one of the "on" episodes. Right out the gate, the show is smartly written, beautifully directed, and convincingly acted. (Yes, even Duchovny. Guy only ever plays one part, but that part is Fox Mulder.)

And they look so young.

There's an immediate charm to it -- and I think part of it is in the tiny budget. There's something that's always fascinated me about watching people try to make something on a shoestring -- Evil Dead, Doctor Who, MST3K (which, incidentally, is the show I stopped watching X-Files for; it was moved into the same Sunday night timeslot in its last season or two). Even terrible stuff -- like, say, most of the movies they actually showed on MST3K -- there's a charm to the trying, to the heart of it all. I said recently that I'd rather watch a cheap, terrible movie like Manos: Hands of Fate than an expensive, mediocre one like...well, anything by Michael Bay -- and I stand by that.

But X-Files, at its best, was something that did great with a tiny budget.

Indeed, I think it was the Emmys, the movie, the relocation to LA, that led to the show beginning to dip in quality.

But even then, even during the Doggett and Reyes era -- when it was on, it was on. (Hell, I may be the only guy who thought the '08 movie had some charm -- course, it helped that I looked at it as just another episode instead of an attempt at a triumphant return.)

Anyhow, the whole series is up on Netflix.

There are lots worse ways to spend an hour...

Selling Out

2012-06-04, 10:07 pm
Categories: Announcements, Stream of Consciousness, Tech, Work

It's interesting -- those last two posts have actually gotten a couple of people to tell me I should post more. A friend I hadn't talked to in a few months, somebody from the messageboard, and, to my pleasant surprise, a stranger. (Or possibly someone pulling a surprisingly elaborate hoax, which I suppose is still flattering in its own way.)

Partly because of the feedback, I'm going to try and write more here.

I've fucked around on the backend a bit; you've probably noticed posts have tags at the bottom now. I've gone through all the way back to when I first started using blogging software in '06, and tagged all of them. I'm half-tempted to go through the older ones, from when I entered everything by hand, perhaps for no other reason but to tally up how many posts each I've devoted to Mike Allred and Kurt Busiek, but that sounds suspiciously like a lot of work for very little payoff. The reason I switched to blogging software in the first place was because I found myself spending a really inordinate amount of time cutting-and-pasting from one page to another.

Speaking of which, I've also updated the KateStory page, fixed broken links, summarized Book XVIII, and added some new character entries, which is exactly the kind of irritating bookkeeping that drives me to go play Nintendo instead of updating the site. Wonder if it'd be worth it to set up a DB so I don't have to manage every character's list of appearances manually. Then again, we haven't done one of these in nearly two years.

And speaking of old crap that seemed like a good idea at the time, I've renamed the "My Personal Life" category, because that was always a pretty stupid name for "What book I am reading/What game I am playing" but which I kept for a dozen years due to a combination of inertia and mild amusement that I could refer to my categories with the shorthand "Life/Stream".

I've changed it to the more boring but more accurate "Status Updates". That still doesn't seem like a very good name, so if anybody's got a better idea I'm open to suggestions.

I ever tell you why this site is called corporate-sellout.com?

I was chatting with an old friend of mine. Girl I went to high school with; we were in drama together, and I went to my junior prom with her.

By this point we were in college. I was a freshman or a sophomore, thereabouts, and she would have been a year ahead of me.

We were still in touch but pretty testy with each other -- you know that age, where you're out on your own but still kinda stressed-out and pissed-off about everything.

Plus, I was still getting over a bad breakup. With her roommate.

Anyhow, we were talking about our majors. She'd picked creative writing and I pooh-poohed it a bit.

Not because I don't believe in writing, of course. She and I are both storytellers, at heart.

But for other reasons. I thought of college as a means to an end, a financial investment for a financial reward. And, well, I was lucky enough that I really enjoyed something that also was, unlike a creative writing, a lucrative degree. (That'd be CompSci, for those who haven't been keeping score.)

She responded, rather angrily, with "Well, it sounds like I'm studying to be an artist, and you're studying to be a corporate sellout."

It wasn't the worst thing she called me in that conversation (it was followed shortly by "asshole"), but it stuck with me.

Mostly because I make a terrible corporate sellout.

Up to that point in my life, I'd never even worked in private industry; all my work had either been for my family or for the government.

I've worked a few corporate jobs in the years since, but I'm still a bottom-rung IT temp. If I were going to sell out, it would have been for a lot more money than what I'm making.

Funny thing is, last I heard she was doing much the same work I am -- she's probably a bit higher up in the chain, actually, because a few years back she took an entry-level phone support job that I refused.

I can't say I regret refusing that job, because seriously, entry-level phone support sucks and I thank the all-powerful Atheismo every day that I no longer work in a phone bank, but I will say that the job I took instead because I thought it'd pay better and give me more room for advancement was...a miscalculation.

So it goes, I suppose. But I'm still a storyteller at heart.

I enjoy the hell out of writing. And I never really stopped doing it -- I just cut way back on doing it here.

I'm pretty damn prolific over on the forums, and I spend more time arguing with idiots in the ComicsAlliance comments section than I'd care to admit. I think I'm much better off trying to redirect at least some of that effort back this way.

I've probably got a pretty good backlog of standalone posts over at Brontoforumus (and maybe even Pyoko, if I feel like slogging through Wayback pages) that I could just copy-paste up here. I expect I'll do a bit of that, in addition to original posts.

All or Nothin'

2012-05-23, 10:08 pm
Categories: Comics, Politics, Stream of Consciousness

The most baffling argument I've been seeing lately to bolster the "Kirby's family shouldn't get any money" line is, "Well, it wasn't just Lee and Kirby who created the Avengers, it was Lieber and Heck, and Ditko designed the red and gold Iron Man armor, and Millar and Hitch made Nick Fury look like Sam Jackson and and and and and..."

Well, you know, I absolutely agree: Lieber, Heck, Ditko, Millar, Hitch, and plenty of other guys did very important work on Avengers over the years, work which made it into the movie.

The part where it gets fucking baffling isn't the first part, the "Lots of people made Avengers what it is" part. I get that. The part I just can't make sense of is "therefore none of them deserve any money."

Honestly, what the fuck is that?

I saw a guy on the ComicsAlliance comments section the other day argue that if Marvel compensated everyone whose work was adapted in Avengers, it would bankrupt the company.

What?

Tom Spurgeon recently wrote a lovely post titled These Comics-Makers Created The Avengers, spotlighting the writers and artists who made major contributions to the franchise that were used in the movie. He lists Stan Lee (the Avengers, Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Loki, Black Widow, Hawkeye, SHIELD, The Cosmic Cube, Pepper Potts, Jarvis, Nick Fury), Jack Kirby (the Avengers, Iron Man, Captain America, Hulk, Thor, SHIELD, Loki, the Cosmic Cube, Jarvis, Nick Fury), Don Heck (Iron Man, Black Widow, Hawkeye, Pepper Potts, and a good chunk of the early Avengers), Larry Lieber (Iron Man, Thor, Loki), Brian Michael Bendis (Maria Hill, Ultimate Nick Fury), Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch (The Ultimates, which the Avengers movie is largely based on, most notably in the casting of Samuel L Jackson as Nick Fury), Joe Simon (Captain America), Don Rico (Black Widow), David Finch (Maria Hill), Mike Allred (Ultimate Nick Fury), Steve Ditko (the red-and-gold Iron Man armor and a shitload of other refinements of Kirby et al's characters), and Jim Starlin ([SPOILER]). I would have added Adi Granov to the list, too, as that's his version of the Iron Man armor up on the screen, but unlike most of the others he actually worked directly on the movies, adapted the armor for film himself, and got a paycheck and a spot in the credits that's not "Special Thanks".

So okay. That's fourteen dudes.

Let's say that you gave each of those guys (or their heirs, where applicable) a million dollars for making The Avengers. It doesn't have to be a million; that's just a number I'm picking -- partly because it's what Marvel gives Stan Lee every year, and partly because it's a pretty big chunk of change that you can reasonably assume none of them would refuse. (Except Ditko.)

So okay. That's fourteen million dollars. (Thirteen if you acknowledge that Ditko would certainly refuse; twelve if you take Stan out because he already got his million dollars.) Out of a movie that has grossed over a billion so far. Without factoring in merchandising, cable, DVD, etc.

According to mathematics, fourteen million is 1.4% of one billion. Or, 28% of the $50 million that Robert Downey Jr. allegedly made from the movie (according to anonymous sources, reported by Hollywood Reporter). Now, before anyone accuses me of saying Downey got paid too much or didn't deserve that money -- that's not my argument. He was in the movie; he's the main talent that this entire franchise was built on. And he's a great actor. Good for him, and I don't begrudge him a single thin dime he's earned from it. No, my point is merely that if Marvel Studios, Disney, Paramount et al can afford $50 million for one guy, it can afford a total of $14 million for fourteen guys.

"But," goes the inevitable argument, "it won't stop there! If you give money to those fourteen guys, everyone will want some! Where do you draw the liiiiiine? If you give money to those fourteen people, you have to give money to every single person who ever worked on an Avengers comic! And then the guy who drove the delivery truck is going to want a piece of the action!"

(I would like to add that that last bit is not an exaggeration. I saw a guy use that exact argument once in a debate about the Superman rights. I am not kidding even a little.)

Well, first of all, that's a stupid slippery-slope argument. Just because you agree to compensate fourteen or so people does not mean you agree to compensate everybody. That's stupid. If you make that argument, you're stupid, or at least pretending to be stupid.

(Well, I shouldn't say "at least" -- I happen to think pretending to be stupid is much worse than actually being stupid.)

You can draw a clearly-defined line. For me, it's a pretty simple one: the people who deserve compensation are the writers and pencilers who created any of the specific characters, costumes, locations, devices, or stories adapted in the movie.

And yes, there's ambiguity there. But guess what? Marvel's already got to sort out ambiguity. Is Scarlet Witch an Avenger or an X-Woman? Do the Spider-Woman movie rights belong to Marvel Studios or Sony? There are already lawyers whose job it is to sort out those distinctions; they can sort out whether Jim Steranko had a significant hand in the Avengers source material too.

(And an aside: on the "What about the inkers, colorists, and letterers?" question, I don't believe they qualify as creators but I do believe they deserve royalties. I don't think they should get royalties from the Avengers movie, but I absolutely think they should get royalties from any Avengers comics they personally worked on.)

Cartoonist Scott Kurtz recently put this asinine argument to work:

And to say that Jack Kirby is responsible for that Avengers movie is a ridiculous notion and insulting to the combined hard work of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of creators who have put their efforts into keeping our modern mythos of super-heroes alive and well.

Well, okay, there may be tens of thousands of people who have worked on superhero comics. Maybe. And yes, arguing that every single person who has ever worked on a superhero comic should get compensated for the Avengers movie would be incredibly fucking stupid. Which is, I suppose, the main reason that nobody, anywhere, ever has actually made that argument.

But for shits and grins, let's say a thousand people have worked on Avengers over the past 50 years or so. I think that's a pretty high number, but let's go with it.

So okay. In that case, if you were to compensate every single one of them, you couldn't afford to give each of them a million dollars.

But you know what? If you gave each of them ten thousand dollars, you would then be giving them about one percent of what the movie has grossed.

I am not, of course, literally suggesting that every single person who ever worked on an Avengers comic should be paid ten thousand dollars. I'm just saying that they could, and it would amount to a rounding error, which makes the weaksauce "If you give money to the Kirby heirs you have to give it to eeeeverybodyyyyy!" slippery-slope argument that much weaker.

Anyhow, that's a lot of words, and there are guys who've made this point a lot better than I have, in under 140 characters.

Evan Dorkin:

So, others worked on The Avengers et al after Kirby et al. That's your answer? Really? Buildings without foundations collapse, assholes.

Kurt Busiek:

Speaking as one who worked on AVENGERS after Kirby, @evandorkin -- I couldn't have done it without someone creating the characters and book.

Oh, and I updated my Preemptive Response post of answers to all the most obnoxious clichés that inevitably crop up in every discussion of the Kirby heirs' attempt to reclaim rights to his characters. Why, no reason at all.

Thad Doesn't Review The Avengers

2012-04-27, 6:05 pm
Categories: Books, Comics, Games, Movies, Politics, Status Updates, Stream of Consciousness

Here's the thing: I'm boycotting The Avengers.

It was Steve Bissette who convinced me, in a blog post last summer just following the summary judgement against Jack Kirby's heirs. After that judgement it looks like the heirs will never receive their due through the legal system, and the court of public opinion is their last recourse. I haven't bought Kirby-derived Marvel product since.

People have argued this one up and down, and done it well -- James Sturm, David Brothers, Chris Roberson, Heidi MacDonald, Steve Bissette again -- so I'm not going to go into an extensive retread just at this moment. But to summarize:

Yes, Jack Kirby is dead. No, his children didn't write or draw those comics. Neither did Bob Iger or Roy Disney III, both of whom stand to make massive bank on this movie and both of whom are in the position of making a lot of money on this movie because of who they are related to. Captain America should be in the public domain by now, but he's not, again thanks to Disney.

Marvel gives Stan Lee a million dollars a year. His contract stipulates that if he dies before his wife, then she (who also did not write or draw any of those comics) will continue to get a million dollars a year until she dies.

Kirby should have gotten the same deal Lee did. And if he had, he would have left his money to his children.

Never mind the rights questions and the work-for-hire versus spec questions. (Personally I believe Kirby did at least some of his work on spec, and Marvel "lost" the evidence among the thousands of pages of art they contractually agreed to return to him and then didn't. But again, never mind that for now.) Just giving some form of compensation to the Kirby heirs at this point would be a step toward rectifying the injustices Marvel did to Kirby over the course of his life. Plus, as Kurt Busiek recently noted, if Marvel (and DC for that matter) started retroactively applying their current standard contracts to past creators, people like the Kirby heirs and Gary Friedrich would spend less time suing them and more time promoting their movies.

Anyway, here's the other thing: last night somebody handed me a free ticket to go see The Avengers, and I realized that yes, this was a loophole in my boycott. If I don't pay to see it, I'm not supporting it.

Now granted, Marvel/Disney/Viacom/whoever paid for my ticket, and it was part of a marketing strategy -- word-of-mouth, buzz, what-have-you. So here's my thinking: if I talk about the movie, then they've accomplished their goal, and I've broken my boycott.

So I'm not going to talk about the movie. If I say I liked it, then I'm doing just what Disney wants me to. If I say I hated it, then that misses the point -- then I'm suggesting people shouldn't see it because it's a bad movie, not for ethical reasons. If you choose not to see a bad movie, that's not actually a boycott. (I remember lots of people in various comments sections saying they would boycott Ghost Rider 2 over Marvel's treatment of Gary Friedrich -- I reminded them that it's only a boycott if they had planned on seeing the movie in the first place.)

But yeah, I saw it. And I'm going to talk about my moviegoing experience.

I suppose you could argue that I'm still giving them what they want, if you really believe there's no such thing as bad publicity and any mention of the movie is good for them...but, well, read on.

The movie was at 7 PM, and my fiancée and I arrived before 5. She'd eaten and I hadn't, so she grabbed us a spot in line while I found the nearest place to grab a slice of pizza.

The slice I bought was mediocre and I would probably not go back. I felt particularly disapponted inasmuch as the theater is a couple of blocks from my favorite pizza place ever, but I didn't have the time or the money for that spot.

(Tangentially, several nights before I'd had a dream where I was lost in the New York subway system trying to find a good slice of pizza. Because yes, of course you can find a slice of pizza on any given corner in Manhattan, but I was trying to find a really good place. I am sure that this is a metaphor for something.)

So anyway, I got back and grabbed my 3D glasses and my spot in line. I love my fiancée but I think I may have to fire her from holding-my-place-in-line duty. Holding someone's place in line requires more than just waving him over when he walks in; you also need to make sure that you leave enough room around you for a human adult to stand comfortably in.

And so began the hours-long wait in line. It went about how these things usually go: standing in line sucks, but you're there with other people who share a common interest. I was next to a kid who had just read Knightfall and gushed about it while describing The Brave and the Bold as "unwatchably terrible" -- well, at least he's a kid who's enthusiastic about comics.

'Round about 5:45, a manager came up to the line and announced that no cameras would be allowed in the theater.

Including camera phones.

IE, a thing that every single fucking person carries in their pocket, because this is two thousand and goddamn twelve.

Now, I know that this completely fucking boneheaded policy was Disney's and/or Viacom's fault, not the theater's. But what is the theater's fault is that they waited until we'd been in line for an hour to tell us. Yes, as it turns out it was written on our tickets -- in an illegibly-tiny, illegibly-antialiased font way down at the bottom —, but how the hell hard is it to post signage and tell the guy at the door to let everyone know as they come in?

So I went back to the car, along with at least one person from every single group in line. Fortunately, this allowed the line to rearrange itself in a way so that I actually had room to stand comfortably when I got back. And hey, it could have been worse -- as I discovered when the line started moving, the guys who got there first had to stand in a really cramped spot, next to lighted movie posters that gave off a noticeable amount of heat.

And then came the wands.

They didn't pat us down, at least, but there were actually people in suits outside the theater entrance who wanded us to make sure we didn't have cell phones on us.

Let me fucking tell you something, Disney and Viacom.

Captain America did not go to war and punch Hitler in the goddamn face so that he could wake up 70 years later in an America where people have to pass through security to see a goddamn movie.

All so that somebody wouldn't record a 3D movie with their fucking phone and post it on the Internet. Because that would really hurt this movie's business, I'm sure.

Well, the good news is it totally worked and nobody managed to sneak a camera into any of the screenings and post the movie on the Internet within a matter of houohhhhh I'm just messin' with you guys, of fucking course somebody did. I checked this morning, just for curiosity's sake, and yes, surprising absolutely no one, a bootleg cam video of the movie is now readily available on the Internet.

What, you mean irritating and inconveniencing law-abiding customers didn't actually stop anyone from pirating something? I sure never would have guessed that from every single time anyone has tried it, ever!

Anyway. After the wanding we were admitted into a theater that really was not big enough for the size of the crowd. I'm given to understand they opened a second one -- which means we would have gotten better seats if we'd shown up later, because as it was we wound up way too damn close to the screen. (We were in the second row. We were told the first row was reserved for press. If the people who wound up sitting there were press, they must have been there for their high school paper.)

The seats sucked, but on the whole I was surprised to find that they didn't really suck any more for a 3D movie than they would have for a 2D one. There was a sense that the whole thing was hovering above us, and of course since you are actually looking at a plane, yes, shapes distort depending on your viewing angle. And there were bits where the screen had some single massive object filling it that made my eyes cross. But still, I don't think it was any worse than if I'd watched a regular movie from that seat. The problem isn't 3D, it's poor theater design.

All in all, I would say the theatergoing experience left a lot to be desired, and I'm certainly going to remember it the next time I think about attending a prerelease screening -- or even a popular new release.

But I will say one good thing about it: it's the only time this century I've gone to a movie and nobody in the audience had a damn phone.

There's been some talk about credits over the last few days -- an interviewer asked Stan Lee why Jack Kirby wasn't credited in the movie and Stan gave the kind of tone-deaf response he often makes when people ask him questions about credit: he actually said "In what way would his name appear?" (He added that "it's mentioned in every comic book; it says 'By Stan Lee and Jack Kirby'"; I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he's referring to the original comics that Jack actually co-wrote and drew with him, because no, Jack does not get a creator credit on most of the current Marvel books.) I know Stan doesn't make these decisions (anymore), but I think he should have responded with "Well, that doesn't sound right; I'll ask around and see what I can do."

People have pointed out since that Kirby's name is in the credits. I didn't see it, but I think it was probably in the "special thanks" section 2/3 of the way down; the credits went by fast and the only names I caught there were Millar, Hitch, and Lieber. (And I'm certainly not saying those names don't belong there, mind; Lieber co-created Iron Man, and this movie is largely adapted from Millar and Hitch's The Ultimates -- indeed, I read an interview where Millar says they're not getting any compensation from the movie and if that's true I think it's outrageous.)

At any rate, my point is, I didn't see Kirby's name in the credits, and I was looking for it.

So, to answer Stan's question, "In what way would his name appear?" Well, Spider-Man had a big "Created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko" credit right at the beginning, and I think the Marvel Studios movies should have the same thing. I realize that Avengers, in particular, has a lot more creator credits, but I don't care; I still think they should be up onscreen in the opening titles, every one of 'em.

(An alternative idea, that I know could never actually happen but would like to see: in the end credits you get a prominent credit for each of the leads. The Iron Man helmet with Downey's name, the shield with Evans's, and so on. You could couple those with creator credits. Prominent, middle-of-the-screen credit saying "ROBERT DOWNEY JR.", and then, lower down and in smaller type, "Iron Man created by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Larry Lieber, and Don Heck". Then the big "CHRIS EVANS", with a smaller "Captain America created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby". And so on down the line. No, this would never happen in real life, because I am talking about messing with the top-billed actors' credits, but...a man can dream.)

Playing: Xenoblade
Reading: The Neverending Story
Drinking: Lumberyard IPA. It was on sale at my local liquor store, and I checked the label only to discover that "Lumberyard" is actually the Beaver Street Brewery, my old college watering hole. It tastes like the good ol' days. And hops.