This amuses me.

The other day Variety listed some actresses up for "the femme lead" in Superman, and specifically stated it wasn't Lois Lane.

It sounded suspiciously like a boneheaded idea of trying a romance story with Superman and some other woman.

This caused some angst for people who went "Wait.. That can't be right. What female character would be BIGGER than Lois Lane in this? Is she even gonna be IN it?" The only idea that made sense to me was that it might be a villainess (or they made a mistake, and it was just a female lead but not The Female Lead).

I'm gonna go ahead and do my "I was right" dance now at the newest rumors. Not only is it a villainess, but revealing the identity of the villainess these 3 actresses are up for seems to contradict some of the statements Snyder has said about the film. (Yeah, this is as big a rumor too but it makes a hell of a lot more sense than letting Lana fricking Lang lead a Superman movie.)

And the one who leaked it also went out of their way to say "Lois Lane will be in the film."

Does anyone else think this got into Variety, too many people went "NOOO" and they suddenly went "Oh shit, we gotta correct this one... but with some deniability so we won't spoil it"?

Place your bets, folks

By way of Let's Be Friends Again comes this bit of Brightest Day:



Well, Roy Harper is back on drugs, Wonder Woman's mother died in flames, Aquaman is short a hand and according to Chris Haley, they're planning to do Eclipso vs the DCU again. (And don't get smug, Marvel, what with offing a member of the Fantastic Four and taking us to a dystopian timeline where the X-men never existed.) So now's the time to speculate on what's next in the Brightest Day Event. Is it...

1) Wonder Woman loses her friend in a very special issue.

2) A Big Time Demon calls the crummiest villains in the universe together to offer them new power.

3) The Justice League finds that having wiped the memory of an enemy was a bad idea.

4) Hal Jordan hosts Parallax and/or the Spectre again.

5) The Flash is put on trial for murder. (ETA: Oops, they just did this one.)

6) Dark Seid versus the Legion of Super-Heroes.

7) Guy Gardner goes into a coma, and comes out with the mentality of a 14-year-old boy.

8) Supergirl sprouts wings of flame.

9) The skies turn red and a mysterious white nothingness advances menacingly on our heroes.

10) This issue: Superman DIES.

So far this year is a bit surreal

I returned from escorting the locksmith to find someone had left a NATO medal on my desk with a certificate. (My name is on the certificate, and it appears to be in French.)


I discovered that after seven years I could still explain the difference between Pulse Amplitude Modulation, Pulse Duration Modulation and Pulse Code Modulation. (I need a whiteboard and a flashlight, though.)

I put this thought out there, and am confident it will seep into someone's fanfiction and/or fanart soon.

I became one of those nerds who answers college assignments with nerdy stuff, despite having promised myself I wouldn't. Not only that, it was discussing the meaning of the term "canon", a word that makes me cringe.

I learned that the car that shares my last name has this slogan:


I learned that I am genuinely more radical than the sexual assault response coordinator on base. Also, I'm told by a coworker who attended an Army-sponsored women's rights meeting while deployed that I am WAY more radical than they were. (Among bloggers I'm pretty moderate, but in the military looks like I'm as far left as will enter a recruiter's office.)

I saw an officer give a briefing...

That last one was the same day I explained the modulation differences to a room with three Airmen and a smartass new NCO. I was constantly worrying that my communication skills would fail me and I'd be unable to properly answer the question, I'd look like an idiot, and they would conclude that I (and, by extension, all other women) knew nothing about the actual job and that that was why I was always filing stuff. I'm not great at getting my point across with my voice, I prefer writing it out. I actually managed it, though, and helped them out.

A few hours later, we all went to a mandatory briefing where they put on a video on drunk driving. We all shrugged, because driving drunk is widely considered to be the stupidest thing you can do while in the military. It causes the whole base to get in trouble, basically, and it is easy to avoid with the support network we've set up. Then he stressed that the next speaker was entire voluntary, and had suggested this himself. And I watched an officer, a man in leadership position walk to the front of his unit, in front of all of his subordinates, and calmly, smoothly tell everyone he'd done the stupidest thing you can do while in the military.

And I'd been nervous about forgetting modulation techniques I hadn't discussed in half a decade.

Rumors

There is a bad Wonder Woman TV pilot script floating around, and pretty much everything on it sounds like a checklist of "Things that will annoy Wonder Woman fans." I feel safe in ignoring this as a prank or a journalist reading the absolute worst possible interpretation of events at the moment. Even if it's real, scripts go through a shit-ton of changes before they show up on screen.

I think it's just that we've seen so much horrible shit in her comic and horrible idiocy suggested by Hollywood about her that we'll believe anything as long as it's bad enough. I expect heavy drinking on premier night, but I'm not breaking out the whiskey yet.

As long as I'm wishing for things...

I've realized recently that if Marvel were to write a comic just for me it would be an ongoing series starring Magneto and focusing on how he relates to his family. You could set stories where he's a good guy and a bad guy, because he certainly switches, is horrifying or sympathetic, and where he fights the X-men or helps them, but the main draw for me would be a promise of seeing the family ("the family" is to be referred to with Ron Howard's voice because I've watched too much Arrested Development). ALL of his children and grandchildren (even Luna now that she's got funky mind powers) qualify as super-heroes, and he is a Big Time super-villain. If you do not find that interesting, I don't understand you.

Right now in Children's Crusade, the main thing that keeps me picking it up (other than desperate hope that Wanda will do something) is watching Tommy, Pietro, and Magneto all try to out-smartass each other. (Billy and Wanda should join in once they've finished laying out the exposition.)



Marvel could easily pick this up after this series ends, and we'll have two sets of twins plus Grandpa. You already have some serious dramatic potential there, with the two sets of twins trying to become a full family again, and Magneto trying to be an X-man still. While he's trying to do the hero thing, he's also trying to rebuild those bridges now that he's got a couple of stepping stones put down again.

Bring Lorna back from space with the boyfriend, and you have another set of characters to enfold into the family. Polaris and Magneto is already a compelling interaction, Polaris plus the twins (and new twins) after House of M is so fascinating to me that I can't understand why Marvel wants to let this lie.

And while Magneto would be the central character, this would be an excuse to showcase how the family interacts with each other. We could get my Pietro-Lorna teamup here, Wanda and Lorna doing sister stuff (and fighting evil), Wanda and her children, Lorna and her niece and nephews...etc...

Along the way, natural storylines would bring in Crystal and Luna, Hulkling, the Kaplan family, the Shepherd family, Rogue and Professor X for an issue or a few arcs. Tommy could get a little robot girlfriend. Magneto could try to manipulate Pietro into dating a human or mutant woman. (I think he'd leave Wanda alone since even down to the basic "I make bad things happen" power she's not someone wise to mess with, and she's already had two mutant children.) Ideally they'd find excuses to bring back the old Vision (not the dumb emotionless one, or the admittedly nice baby one, but the Vision who married Wanda), Astra, Joseph, and--for me the Holy Grail of potential Magneto stories--Magda.

Marvel, I promise you that unless you put an absolutely DIRE creative team on it I would buy the hell out of this.

Today's Grant Morrison's birthday, so I will blog on his writing.

Now, if you've looked at any other post on this blog you can probably tell that I am a HUGE fan of Grant Morrison and multi-level narrative themes. I have a ridiculously short attention span, so the pacing and the denseness of his stories really appeals to me, as well as the fact that I can read them any number of times and see new things each time. I adore wall to wall weird and screwing with the timing in a story. I'll often let his books pile up issue by issue on my table until I get an entire storyline and can read it all in one burst, then reread it.

Favorites of mine? I read trades of the Invisibles and Doom Patrol like I was addicted. I will never ever get tired of Flex Mentallo or Kill Your Boyfriend. Right now his Batman stuff is the only DC I'm reading regularly. I got into DC as a teenager with his JLA and have been unable to look at the X-men franchise the same since he left the book. Seven Soldiers is just a treasure trove, and contains two of the three best superhero miniseries I have ever read.

He's actually responsible for getting me to enjoy Wonder Woman, Superman, and Jean Grey. Not because I think he was someone who finally found a new use for those characters, but because they really shined under his compressed style. At his pacing, he has to really dig into a character and find a way to get across their core and their overarcing lessons at that speed. There's a lot of room for error there, there are some characters I don't really like how he handles them and others I ONLY like when he writes them but sometimes he presents them at an angle that enriches other portrayals for me. With those three characters, they clicked for me under Morrison. After reading his JLA, I suddenly found myself interested in and just enjoying appearances by Superman and Wonder Woman, two characters I'd previously written off. And his Jean Grey in New X-men actually got me to look back at previous issues that had her in them with fresh eyes. She's one of my favorites now, and I'm super-pissed they left her dead at the end of his run. (Not that he killed her, though. The story was too enjoyable and I think the existence of Future Jean made it all the more temporary.)

The three favorite superhero miniseries I've ever read were written by this guy: Seven Soldiers: The Bulleteer (compelling themes about the youth/beauty standard for women and the sexualization of superheroines, plus the refrigerator fight), Seven Soldiers: Shining Knight (coming of age story with Mabinogion King Arthur and super-science setting), and Flex Mentallo (which remains the most quotable love letter to superhero stories I've ever seen.) If you've ever taken a recommendation from me on anything, take my recommendation of those three stories.

I'm still complaining about this one.

Even today, I can't get over the number of people who want to see Wonder Woman end up with Superman or Batman. I mean, I can handle a little flirting, a story with a date now and then, but I think that pushing either one as the major romance in her life minimizes Wonder Woman as an independent character. It reduces her to a prize for one of the DCU's great Alpha Males, and hurts her standing as a franchise. She becomes an accessory to one of them.

So it really irks me, not just to see so many fans who love this, but to see how often it seeps into the comics and their media tie-ins. In particular, it pisses me off when it becomes a focus in her own book, as her crush on Superman in the Perez run or even Rucka pulling that shit with Batman in Blackest Night: Wonder Woman. She is her own character, she deserves her own love interest but writers can't seem to get them to stick.

And this is DC's fault, because they aged and married off the guy who was meant to be her Lois Lane. Rather than rehabilitate him like they did Lois, and modernize him for the new era it seems they decided just not to use him anymore. The logic was that it was sexist for her to fall for the first man she ever saw. So they made the first man she ever saw into a fatherly mentor, and decided it would be better if her first romantic interest in a man was to be attracted to Superman. Because being attracted to a man that DC will never allow her to outshine is somehow less sexist than the original dynamic of her being attracted to a normal man who is equally turned on by her saving his ass all the time.



It's the dumbest thing they did when they rebooted Wonder Woman, and potentially the dumbest thing they've done in her history. (Even when they killed him off it was better because he had still existed, and they could always bring him back.) They simply haven't been able to recover. Every love interest they've introduced (Micah, Michael, Rama, Trevor, Io, Nemesis) that survives the writer who introduced them gets ignored by the next writer. None of them seem to take. In the meantime, tons of fans argue over whether Batman or Superman suit her better because so few people have seen that she was originally created with a love interest as part of her supporting cast.

Honestly, if they can get anything out of this Flashpoint and JMS reboot shit, it should be that they can bring back Steve Trevor revamped to suit her modern trappings, as a viable love interest. He lasted 45 years, after all. No one else can seem to stick around beyond the next writer.