Between Clark and Iris' combined speed, I feel like they could have multiple victory wanks in full view of the SHIELD people without anyone knowing the wiser.
Master Bruce
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Bio
Very well, where do I begin?
My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet.
My father would womanize, he would drink. He would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Sometimes he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy. The sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament.
My childhood was typical. Summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring we'd make meat helmets. When I was insolent I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds - pretty standard, really. At the age of twelve, I received my first scribe. At the age of fourteen a Zoroastrian named Vilma ritualistically shaved my testicles.
There really is nothing like a shorn scrotum... it's breathtaking. I highly suggest you try it.
My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet.
My father would womanize, he would drink. He would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Sometimes he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy. The sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament.
My childhood was typical. Summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring we'd make meat helmets. When I was insolent I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds - pretty standard, really. At the age of twelve, I received my first scribe. At the age of fourteen a Zoroastrian named Vilma ritualistically shaved my testicles.
There really is nothing like a shorn scrotum... it's breathtaking. I highly suggest you try it.
Most Recent Posts
Not quite, I still have a post or two to go before Batman's free to interact with anyone.
Oh.
That... isn't what you...
Well, I'm just embarasssed.
Oh.
That... isn't what you...
Well, I'm just embarasssed.
To me, the difference between DC and Marvel heroes is that Marvel's characters wear their flaws on their sleeve. They're designed to have character traits brought to the forefront instead of powersets. DC's characters are meant to be mythical, in that the powers and strengths are half the selling point, but they all have as many flaws and relatability to me. You just have to find it in the stories themselves. And unfortunately, those have been muddled by too many attempts to knock each one down a peg, from depowering Clark to raising Bruce's paranoia to the Nth degree and having Diana commit murder despite being an ambassador for peace.
Basically, everything wrong with Identity and Infinite Crisis, two of the worst DC stories in terms of their long-lasting effects on the current books.
Basically, everything wrong with Identity and Infinite Crisis, two of the worst DC stories in terms of their long-lasting effects on the current books.
To sort of tie OP Supes, unbeatable Bat-God, untouchable faster-than-instant Flash, too-cool-to-kill Punisher, etc together (as well as a lot of today's comics where Carol Danvers or Squirrel Girl or whoever beats an ineffectual silly-billy villain in one page and then spends the rest of the issue being emotionally validated), the inherent problem with all of them in those iterations is the lack of danger. At no point do you ever feel like the hero might lose, or that they might be tainted or changed by the experience. There's no stakes, no cost or consequence for their actions, no price for victory or penalty for defeat. There's also usually no reward for victory, either, just a reinforcing of the status quo.
This I think is where the superhero genre really needs to get back in touch with its original DNA in the pulps. Superman may be secular-Jesus in a lot of people's eyes, but his lineage also includes Doc Savage and John Carter and Conan the Barbarian. All of which include three things that I think modern comics are sorely lacking: danger, violence, and sex. I'm not saying to make comics outright porn--Clark and Lois should feel a lot more chaste and wholesome than Batman and Catwoman-- but everyone has some innate reactions to sex and death (eros and thanatos if you wanna get all pretentious). They're the most human part of the human experience, and when you remove them, the characters come off as inorganic and neutered.
Wanna know why Gotham City is so much more popular of a setting than Metropolis? Because Gotham City is pulpy as all hell-- everyone is some combination of dangerous, violent, and sexy. Poison Ivy isn't necessarily violent, but she's definitely dangerous and sexy. Killer Croc is about as un-sexy as possible, but he's also the most dangerous and violent person in the city. Harley Quinn often isn't exactly dangerous, but is always sexy and violent. Everyone in Gotham City is trying to kill and/or fuck everyone else in Gotham City, and that's why it's so appealing for writers and readers alike.
Whereas Metropolis is usually just.....nice. Yeah, Lex Luthor lives there and half the city is exploding at any given time, but it doesn't have the same sort of danger as Gotham because it's supposed to match the main character, and more often than not Superman himself is usually just....nice.
That's been kind of my unspoken goal while writing this version of Superman, to reintroduce some danger and sexiness into the character and to the setting, to make his story one that actually gets the blood pumping instead of just having him preach platitudes and be everyone's imaginary friend. I've always liked Superman's heart and a lot of his brain, but it's high time the guy had some balls again.
Interesting. I agree to an extent, and am loving your work in this game as more of a Golden Age throwback to the character, especially as my Batman in UOU is lightly tinged with that aswell. Though I personally think the problem you're describing boils down to a severe lacking of a universal consensus in comics for what Superman's world should be amongat the many attempts to "fix" a character who isn't broken. Alot like many, many writers who can't decide who or what Wonder Woman is.
To me, that's always been because Superman is supposed to be hard sci-fi, not pulp. Batman works as a pulp character because he's basically a pastiche of several of them. Very few writers actually lean hard into Superman's world being part Hickman's The Manhattan Projects and part 50's monster movie that stars an alien protagonist who has all of the powers of a God but the soul and upbringing of a man, which is why I wholly reject the idea of Clark not being relatable.
This isn't directed towards you, Andy, because you already know what I'm talking about. But rather the general misconception of Superman being so overpowered that he's not relatable by any stretch. If you look at him as a powerset and not a character, of course he's not going to be relatable. But take a look at Batman through the same lense. His power is that he has a fuckton of money, knows all the martial arts, and is obcenely brilliant as a detective. That's not very relatable either, but we see Batman as someone on our level because he doesn't have any powers - which in itself isn't why Batman is relatable, since he's a trauma victim with difficulty connecting to other people emotionally, something that I heavily identify with as someone who suffers from severe social anxiety.
Superman, conversely, is on our level because he thinks and acts like us because he was raised as one of us. It's a power fantasy where the most down to Earth guy has to reconcile being able to do amazing things, and his limitations come in through the human perspective. You can't hurt him through conventional violent means (unless you're half of his equally powerful rogues gallery), but you can hurt the people he cares for - which is damn near everyone, making him a much more vulnerable character than people give him credit for.
In case it wasn't obvious, I'm a big fan of Superman. Love 'em. Right under Batman and Spider-Man, he rounds out my permanent top three.
@Master Bruce
If there is space, may I be apart of this as Deadpool?
There's plenty of space, though I will advise you that the game is ending it's current run on September 25th and will be doing a three month time jump ahead, if that affects anything you had planned.
As far as Deadpool goes, I'm not against it, but he definitely needs to skew more towards the heroic side of the anti-hero equation to be applicable for the game. If he's The Merc With A Mouth, he runs the risk of being a PC villain.
Out of curiosity, @Master Bruce, how much of the IC are you caught up with now?
Not as much as I'd like, but farther along than I was this time last week. I'd say about a little over halfway. Byrd actually got me motivated to start again earlier this evening by asking my thoughts on one of his arcs, and I had so much fun with it that I just kept reading. I've also been doing better about reading posts as they come, so there are a few characters I'm caught up with and a few I still have a ways to go on out of sheer post frequency.
My thoughts on The Punisher differ to some extent. Not in that I prefer the ultra-violence version of the character that basically exists as the comic book equivalent of an exploitation action film - I don't mind it, it has it's place and I like Welcome Back, Frank as it's own thing - but in that I don't see Castle so much as a man in perpetual pain as he's someone completely pushed beyond that barrier. Batman is a man motivated by pain, as is someone like Daredevil or Wolverine.
To me, The Punisher is someone with the broken mentality of a dead man wearing a human suit who feels as though he's legitimately transcended humanity to become a walking agent of death. He's basically a hardened war veteran stuck in a Vietnam flashback that never ends. He lost his family, so he feels incapable of emotion and instead has instinct to guide his hand. And what I like about that is, due to that, he doesn't necessarily have to work as a character with nuance and layers ontop of layers - he can just be a force of nature that influences the story.
Greg Rucka's run on The Punisher is excellent and one of my favorite comic book runs of the last decade, and it does alot to expand upon this. There's a scene where Frank is trying to talk sense into a would-be version of himself in the form of an ex-military woman whose husband was murdered at their wedding, and he basically says to her "You want to be like me? Toss away the phone. Toss away the makeup. The fast food. Toss away everything that makes you feel human, because you're asking to be dead. And the dead don't get to have any of that."
It ends with the woman burning the only photograph she has from her wedding day, and it's a great symbolic portrait of Frank himself. In the version I most prefer, he doesn't really actively mourn his family because he's not Frank Castle anymore, in his own mind. He's basically stuck in limbo between life and death, thinking of himself as an afterlife construct of the man Frank Castle was whose sole purpose is to make the guilty suffer. That's the only way, to me, that the skull imagery and the idea of him being the Grim Reaper of criminals works. He's incapable of reconciling being human anymore.
But that's one version, and it's a version I acknowledge isn't written all the time. Sometimes he is just written as a crazy dude who unloads buckets of bullets at criminals and broods about everything. There are some exceptions to the rule, like Bernthal's Punisher in the Netflix series and of course, @Simple Unicycle's gun-fu version that has been really entertaining. The version I described above is just the version I happen to gravitate to the most.
To me, The Punisher is someone with the broken mentality of a dead man wearing a human suit who feels as though he's legitimately transcended humanity to become a walking agent of death. He's basically a hardened war veteran stuck in a Vietnam flashback that never ends. He lost his family, so he feels incapable of emotion and instead has instinct to guide his hand. And what I like about that is, due to that, he doesn't necessarily have to work as a character with nuance and layers ontop of layers - he can just be a force of nature that influences the story.
Greg Rucka's run on The Punisher is excellent and one of my favorite comic book runs of the last decade, and it does alot to expand upon this. There's a scene where Frank is trying to talk sense into a would-be version of himself in the form of an ex-military woman whose husband was murdered at their wedding, and he basically says to her "You want to be like me? Toss away the phone. Toss away the makeup. The fast food. Toss away everything that makes you feel human, because you're asking to be dead. And the dead don't get to have any of that."
It ends with the woman burning the only photograph she has from her wedding day, and it's a great symbolic portrait of Frank himself. In the version I most prefer, he doesn't really actively mourn his family because he's not Frank Castle anymore, in his own mind. He's basically stuck in limbo between life and death, thinking of himself as an afterlife construct of the man Frank Castle was whose sole purpose is to make the guilty suffer. That's the only way, to me, that the skull imagery and the idea of him being the Grim Reaper of criminals works. He's incapable of reconciling being human anymore.
But that's one version, and it's a version I acknowledge isn't written all the time. Sometimes he is just written as a crazy dude who unloads buckets of bullets at criminals and broods about everything. There are some exceptions to the rule, like Bernthal's Punisher in the Netflix series and of course, @Simple Unicycle's gun-fu version that has been really entertaining. The version I described above is just the version I happen to gravitate to the most.
<Snipped quote by Roman>
The only thing I'll say is that it may be a stretch for Matt to be DA right out of law school like the sheet implies. It's an elected position and there's a lot, like a lot of politics involved to get to that level in a city the size of New York. ADA would be good though. Unless he spent years as an ADA before making the leap and you planned on mentioning it in the actual posts. If that's the case then I'm good.
They call him Byrd 'The Factual Stickler' Man for a reason!
But yeah, I agree with my Co-GM. Everything else looks good, and as soon as you've edited to reflect the change suggested, you're pretty much good to go.
I'm gonna say something that will probably get me killed; I do not care for the DCAU Batman.
Batman in the first three seasons of B:TAS was wonderful, and I loved Kevin Conroy's voice then, when he made a point to have some actual inflection and make his Batman and Bruce voices different. But as soon as it came time for him to start mixing it up with the other characters, IMO the character stopped being interesting. The writers' blatant favoritism when it came to Gotham characters being treated as innately superior to the rest certainly didn't help, but I also think they leaned way too hard into his whole "cold and calculating" outer shell to the point where that's basically all he was. And while I know that from Season 4 of BTAS to the present day, the monotone deadpan version of Conroy's voice is the definitive voice for most people, I feel like it makes him the least interesting part of any scene he's in, to the point where it often feels like Mark Hamill has to pull double-duty to bring the energy to their tag team.
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Because, despite the fact i agree with you, she sells product.
She does, but only because a certain version of her was given to the public at large over the version that had already proven popular to people who weren't necessarily comic book fans. I guarantee you that if they reverted her back to her Dini characterization, none of the fans of the new version would bat an eye. Margot Robbie could show up in the next film wearing the classic outfit and doing the Looney Tunes schtick and I'm sure people would see it as a natural progression, even, from The Queen Of Hot Topic.
You're not the only one.
When I read Batman: White Knight, I went in with every intent to hate it. I hated the concept, I hated how 'progressive' and 'current' all the reviewers made it seem. So I finally broke and had to read it for myself...
And I loved it.
One of the best aspects of it though is the acknowledgment of Harley and how it tackles why and how the current Harley is so different from the Harley we came to know and love through BTAS. Honestly, White Knight in many ways is a love letter to at least the last thirty years of Batman's various publications.
I recommend it for anyone who has yet to read it.
I agree with that. I can also see why people would be turned off by it, especially the rockier first issue with the ridiculous method in which Batman tries to "rehabilitate" The Joker, but Murphy did some astounding world-building for both a pre-existing universe and a mini-series that honestly feels like it could be in canon until the very end. And yeah, my favorite part was definitely the separation of Faux Harley and Harley Prime, to the point that Murphy created the only version of Post-New 52 Harley that I've ever liked with Neo Joker.
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