Of Wolf and God

This is, and remains primarily, a superhero comics related blog, but that's not to say I can't write about other topics here. Especially if they relate to the things that interest me about about superheroes, in comics or otherwise. With that in mind this post has nothing to do with X-People, Bat people or Spider-people.It has to do with a man, a Wolf Man.

No One Feels Bad About Decapitating A Robot

The next X-villains are ones that almost everybody of my generation is familiar with. In the animated X-Men series of the early nineties, they were the antagonists of the two part series premiere. I give you the elite  robotic mutant hunting force of the world, the Sentinels.

Art by Buster Moody

Certain aspects of the sentinels as a concept make them ideal for villains in an early nineties Saturday morning cartoon. They have relatively little individual personality (most of the time) which allows more space to establish the individual X-Men and women's personalities, they let you introduce the idea of non-powered humans hating and fearing mutants in a way that has substantial metaphorical weight, and ,best of all, they are robots. That means you can have Wolverine do whatever you want to them and it's a-okay. Decapitations and eviscerations aplenty are perfectly acceptable, as long as it's happening to a big dumb robot. The title of this debut episode is Night of the Sentinels, a riff on Remero's classic debut that launched a thousand apocalypses. Sentinels tend to be used like the zombie as a creature our heroes can abuse almost anyway they like without moral reservation. Our heroes can't murder the human scientists and politicians and average people on the street who react poorly to their fear of being rendered obsolete by quirks of genetics, but they can abuse the robotic manifestations of that hate and fear all they like. It's a role they play well, but as with the other X-folks I've looked at here, I wonder if the narrow role of a robotic anti-mutant gestapo is really the best that can be done with these guys.

Four Colors in Decay

We live in the declining years of an Age. We have been for about six years, now. It's only in the last six to seven months that the haze started wearing off, and the real evidence began to surface. I give you the last page of the first Detective Comics #1 published since 1937 as my exhibit A.

The face of the Nu-DCU

Wolvie and Cyke: A Love Story

Well, here we are Valentine's Day week. What better time to discuss our favorite mutant twosome? True they have there occasional conflict. What long term couple doesn't? At the moment they are experiencing a pronounced 'schism'. One of them has been around since the very beginning of the series, and the other is the most popular thing in yellow and blue spandex ever conceived. With the X-franchises general focus on adolescence and adolescent drama it makes a lot of since to have a couple of guys around to represent adolescent angst about hair growing in odd places and 'power' spurting out of control.  They also speak to a classic pairing that's come down through the millennia: the man of the city and the man of the wilderness. Yup, they're quite the pair.

From Thought Faucet

An Uncle Telling That Embarrassing Story About You When You Were Five - Forever.

I think we all have at least one. Some person, maybe an uncle or aunt or cousin, maybe a parent or sibling if you're particularly unlucky, who has this one very fixed impression of you as a person. That impression doesn't change no matter what you accomplish and no matter the opinions of those who know you best. Maybe they see you as the baby, or the slacker, or just the one who doesn't like peas. They will continue to believe these things about you regardless of how many plates of peas you shovel down in front of them. No matter where your life takes you, this person will insist on dragging you back to the moment at which they've decided you live. Professor X has someone like that too.

Idea for a New Feature

I'm getting a little tired of just bouncing back and forth between X-Men and Batman as I have been for awhile now. I still plan on finishing up my X-Men analyses. Juggernaut is next, then Wolverine and Cyclops, the Sentinels, The rest of the more minor X-Men, and finishing up with Apocalypse. I've been thinking of a new running feature I could do between those articles, Lame Hero/Rogue Reclamation. Readers could send me examples of characters who they feel are too losery or lame or just plain boring to function properly in their roles, and I will think about the character and see if I can think of a way they could be rehabilitated. Ideas will be accepted here, on my twitter and Facebook accounts, and at my e-mail address if you have it. The only ones I wont do are Aquaman, because I'm bored with hearing reasons why Aquaman is lame (He's currently getting a revamp from Geoff Johns anyway.), and Wonder Woman characters, because I plan on tackling Wonder Woman as a whole after I'm done with X-Men.

The Bat Symbol Throughout the Ages: A Visual History.

Some time ago I read this post about the ways that the Bat-signal has changed over time. It's an interesting meditation on the uses of said signal over the decades, and now in a time when its function could easily be replaced by the Bat-beeper or the b-Phone. In particular, I'm like the portions of the above article that discuss the way that the bat-signal of years past has functioned as an almost physical object symbolising Batman's dominance whereever it's projected. You see, I've been playing Arkham Asylum off and on since I got it in October. This may spoil part of the game for some people, but it came out in 2009, so yeah, spoilers away. Early on, Batman is exposed to Scarecrow's fear gas and experiences vivid hallucinations. This culminates in a platforming section, where the player is stalked by a gigantic manifestation of the Scarecrow whose gaze will kill you if he sees you. How this is relevant is that after reaching the top of a tower of ruins Batman defeats giant Scarecrow, for the moment. How? By shining Bat-signal onto Scarecrow that blasts him like a big freakin' laser beam.

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In the spirit of that article I linked to before the nightmares started, though with less analysis and sophistication, I present: The Bat Symbol