What to say of Scott Lobdell on Bat-Family titles? First, he messed up big time with Jason Todd’s characterization. Judd Winnick had established the interesting notion that Jason didn’t blame Bruce for his death, he only blamed him of not having cared enough to kill the Joker afterwards. That made a lot of sense and did not make Jason come across as petty, if written well. After all, how could he blame Bruce if Jason himself was the one who had run off on his own, disobeying Bruce’s instructions? Well never mind that, in the New 52, Scott Lobdell ignored that important aspect that made Jason interesting and relatable and showed us a flashback scene with Jason blaming Bruce for ‘letting’ him die!
He also gave us a bland and unrecognizable Tim Drake in the pages of ‘Teen Titans’. I picked up the title at first if only to follow Tim, my favorite Robin, but it quickly became clear this was Tim Drake in name only so I dropped ‘Teen Titans’. And now Scott Lobdell has announced that in ‘Teen Titans #0’, he’ll explain how Tim was, in fact, never Robin. (Despite that New 52 titles have already established he used to be one, so DC once again proves they have no idea what’s going on with their continuity. Didn’t take them long to mess it up!)
It seems to me that so far, every continuity change brought to the Bat-Family that I despised other than Barbara Gordon never having been Oracle (which I think we can blame on Dan Didio, who’s always championed the notion of putting heroes from the 70’s and earlier back in the outfits they used to wear) has been done under the pen of Scott Lobdell.
It’s stuff like this that makes me no longer care about what was once a rich history and continuity I loved being knowledgeable in.
How can I put this… From a purely logical perspective, I have nothing against the character. But when it comes down to it, I just HATE Deadpool, and yet it’s not exactly the character’s fault.
It wasn’t always the case though. As a teenager I used to think his stories were pretty neat and funny and he was a different sort of character. But since he appeared in the ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ movie as portrayed by Ryan Reynolds and since they have the Deadpool movie planned, Marvel has been pushing the character like crazy! Deadpool can be a funny character, but honestly he’s also a one-note character. Certainly not complex (at least the way he’s usually portrayed) and I doubt he’s deserving of more than one monthly series at a time!
And the same way Marvel recently placed a black Nick Fury in their main continuity so people who came from the Avengers movie wouldn’t wonder why Fury is ‘suddenly’ a white man with hair, the once-disfigured Deadpool is now a good-looking man. This is, I’m pretty sure, an attempt from Marvel to line up with the upcoming Deadpool movie because god-forbid they applied make-up on Reynolds and give their starring man a scarred face!
Where am I going with this? You see, Deadpool used to be a character with a small but admittedly devoted fanbase. But when Fox decided to put him in the Wolverine movie and then have him spin-off in his own movie, that was because obviously they wanted to make more Marvel movies with the X-Men license they have. Marvel did the same thing they did with Hawkeye before Avengers came out and really supported him in countless titles. Newcomers saw a lot of Deadpool material out there and it had the effect of making people think he was really cool just because he was well-supported. Whether the character is actually cool or not is not the point, I’m just addressing the fact that you can ‘manufacture’ a character’s popularity and that’s what Marvel did.
The recent ‘geek is cool’ phenomena in pop culture has led to ‘new geeks’, which is awesome, and ‘faux geeks’ who annoy the crap out of me. You know who I mean, that guy standing in line for the new superhero movie who’s telling his friends about the comics as if he’s a credible source of the original material and gets an incredible amount of facts wrong or incomplete and you can tell he just read about the character(s) on wikipedia 15 minutes before leaving his house… Or the girl who claims to love that stuff but then you can see how uninterested she is when you actually try to talk to her about it. (Both examples are interchangeable as far as them being a guy or a girl go, of course, I was just using personal examples here!)
So because Deadpool was in the Wolverine movie and because all his devoted actual fans supported the character on the internet, a lot of faux-geeks gravitated towards Deadpool, a silly (and in my opinion) one-note character that is a lot like sitcoms with a laugh track, you don’t need to catch up that much and you’re basically told when it’s time to laugh. He’s what faux-geeks think comics are, just plain silly. And they CAN be at times and it’s fine, but believe me, real geeks don’t read comics thinking about how silly they are. I want my comics to be examples of good storytelling, not random crap trying really hard to be funny while failing at it.
There are some good and even funny Deadpool stories out there, don’t get me wrong. But it seems to me like Deadpool is the kind of character that the faux-geeks go to when they want to ‘prove’ they know the non-mainstream comic characters (and in the process just reveal themselves as what they truly are). Earlier today I was watching an internet show that was looking at some new video-game trailers and one of the trailers was for the upcoming game ‘Injustice: Gods Among Us’, which by the way looks awesome! The game’s made by the same company as the latest ‘Mortal Kombat’ and features DC characters. The internet show in this case has the bottom right of its screen dedicated to the chat room that those who watch it live use to comment on. Right away I saw a flood of faux-geeks going “I hope they have Deadpool in it!” and countless comments like that. I literally facepalmed. I’m not kidding, I was alone in front of my computer and I facepalmed.
Listen (or read), I don’t snob people who are new to these characters because they don’t know all the stuff I do about them. Or those who just happen to like them but aren’t as devoted as I am to their stories. I’m one of the biggest Batman fans you’ll ever come across, of the ‘real’ Batman from the comics, and yet I’ll never tell someone they’re not ‘really’ a Batman fan because they don’t read the comics and just like the character from the movies or whatever. But when you don’t even know if said character is Marvel or DC but claim to love that character, then yes, you ARE a poseur and a faux-geek! You just claim to like something (and might even have convinced yourself that you do) but really you’re just going with the trend.
If I’ve insulted any fans of Deadpool, look at it this way; If you’re a REAL fan of Deadpool, this wasn’t aimed at you. I was just pointing out how the character you like so much is a magnet for faux-geeks. Of which I’m sure you’re not, my dear reader!
I’m sorry but Wonder Woman was not a role model for young girls and women when first created. I know it’s a taboo thing to say amongst comic-book enthusiasts but she was a really, really bad character and it was painfully obvious that the comic was written by a sexist man (believing himself to be non-sexist apparently) who was into domination. She reinforced stereotypes and was little more than a bondage fetish character. These days she is so much more, but I just want to show a quick comparison of now…
…and then.
While the modern Wonder Woman will blind herself to defeat an enemy and then continue to fight villains while still blind, Golden Age ‘Wonder’ Woman was held back by her… ‘feminine vanity’. Yup, let that sink in!
Is Wonder Woman a great character? Sure she is, NOW. But to be blunt, that’s NOT thanks to her creator!
