Social Hooper McFinney's RPF Bar & Grille 7.5 - "Loving the lens flare since 1977!” -!

Incoming rant about comics - BEGIN!

Okay, so, Deadpool - why the hell is he popular? For a while, in the late nineties and early oughts, he's actually fantastic - this lasts until around 2005 when he just becomes a shameless self-parody. "Hey, what will sell Deadpool books?" "Well he does break the fourth wall." "Okay, do that, but more of it." "But that doesn't make sense-" "NOW!"

We forget that Deadpool began as a (pretty awful and shameless) riff on Deathstroke the Terminator, real name Slade Wilson - Deathstroke's whole edgy, gritty, best-at-what-he-does shtick predates the whole "nineties anti-hero" that Deadpool was a perfect example of. Deadpool was created by Fabian Nicieza and Rob Liefeld.

Yeah. The guy who draws like this:



Deathstroke, meanwhile, showed up in 1980 in titles written by the great Marv Wolfman, illustrated by George Perez.



Who's that dude in the shadows? DEATHSTROKE, being introduced like a boss.

Anyways - creative origins aside, Deadpool was a clear take on Deathstroke from moment one, despite the fact that someone decided to call him a parody at a later date. Deadpool has since gone on to transcend these pretty dreary origins, but even then it's taken a good five years for people to move on from "WHOA SELF-AWARE CHARACTERS."

See, this is where I get angry about Deadpool - and it's gonna sound completely unreasonable and out-there and silly - but I have a friend who, as much as she likes comics, is perhaps the most casual fan ever. We get along well because we both agree Batman > All Challengers, but the minute she gets to talking about Deadpool being all "crazy awesome" I roll my eyes. "The Deadpool movie script? Deadpool thinks he's in a musical. Isn't that wild?" Yeah, I guess? I mean, Deadpool's already a hard enough character to sell in anything but the comic medium simply because breaking the fourth wall in mainstream media (as opposed to just leaning on it) is really really weird. Those movies don't do well.

Deadpool works as a fast-talking, slightly-crazy mercenary; when he's flat-out talking to his narration boxes (of which, until recently, there were three distinct boxes with three distinct voices - seriously, just give me a supporting cast!), we immediately forget that this is supposed to be a character in a world. The humour comes from the interaction with other characters and the fact that everyone thinks Wade Wilson is nuts. If you go back to some of the definitive Deadpool issues, he knows he's a comic book character, but he can still hold a conversation with Bullseye. He still has some pathos and emotion in him - he's not a one-trick pony.

So yes, in many ways, Deadpool is pretty visibly popular - he's in a bunch of games, he's in a few animated shows, and HOLY CRAP he's got merch (that part makes very little sense). Deadpool is, to me, this character that a lot of people know but few understand beyond his gimmick - and therein lies the problem - he's a gimmicky character. I really enjoy what Posehn and Duggan are doing on his current title as they bring real character to the guy, and they provide a fun explanation for his narration boxes. It's great and a lot more fun to read, simply because it's not comics for people with zero attention span.

Deathstroke, meanwhile, has been a consistently cool and interesting character since his first appearance. He's Dick Grayson's nemesis, a massive threat to the Teen Titans, and the go-to guy for when the DCU needs a smart but realistic (relatively speaking) villain. He's a great henchman but also a great villain in his own right, and he's just cool! He was the main villain of the Teen Titans cartoon, he plays into the second season of the tragically-cancelled Young Justice fantastically, and he's being shown in live action on the oft-maligned Arrow; Arkham Origins will be his second game appearance (that I'm aware of), as he was just in Injustice - not voiced by Nolan North, which is more than Deadpool can say. He's a multi-use villain that works well within the larger DCU and remains a fairly compelling character.

I really don't know what my concluding point ought to be, suffice to say that I did warn y'all this was a rant

I just really like Deathstroke - he's a guy in his late forties with an eyepatch, guns, and a sword that fights superheroes for money. If that sentence doesn't sell you on him, nothing will

 

My god, all the Titans? What'd he do, trip on them? Gently swat at them with a pillow? I mean, I'm not saying it's easy to kill members of the TT but I am saying I think five of them died on their way to the grocery store last week.

 

Yeah, but Slade isn't the one making a big deal out of it!

 

I'm just saying

 

Random thing here. I just watched Battle: Los Angeles for the first time and I have to say, BEST combination of war and aliens that I have ever seen. Rumors of a squeal and if so, yay! But nicely done movie. Lacking a bit on the character-to-characrer storyline development, but aside from that, great movie.

 

I get squeals when I watch movies I like too

 

Sorry. I meant sequel.

 

If you're gonna have a typo, that's an awesome one to have!

 

In light of Peng's rant about Deadpool, I'm just going to leave this right here--



--and run. Very, very fast, away from Peng.

 

Yes, they are that delicate.. After all, remember this guy?



Let's leave aside that this was Adrian Chase's debut outing as the Vigilante. Let's leave aside that he was in his forties/fifties when he first learned how to go all Batman on crime. Let's leave aside that the entire Murder Machine of Spear, Slasher, Scorcher, Tanker, and Cheshire were basically a once-only outfit. Basically, Chase guns down (or, in Scorcher's case, quite literally knocks his block off) the entire supervillain team while the Teen Titans are basically doing ... well, not a lot of anything.

And the Vigilante's gunsight was cool.

 

Vigilante also had a pretty good two-parter written by Alan Moore, and then faded into an obscurity so obscure that I'm pretty sure more people can recognize Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld on sight.

 

People wanted Deadpool in a movie, THEY GOT HIM!

 

I recognise both. Some of the stuff that happened in Magic Barbie Amethyst was bloody intense for a comic aimed at little girls: Dark Opal turning into an anthropomorphic spider and then basically sucking the life out of Lord Topaz still comes back to me, and that was about, what, 25 years ago I read it?

 

Yeah, that sounds like about the right amount of time. She actually came back recently as part of DC experimenting with their fantasy properties. Didn't work, although their continued efforts to goof around with Z-listers has given me cause to keep hoping for a B'wana Beast ongoing.

IT'S GONNA HAPPEN EVENTUALLY. THEY'RE GONNA UNLEASH THE BEAST.

 

Speaking of obscure characters and retirement, let's talk briefly about The Crimson Avenger.

I actually had this comic (or at least the one in which it was a backup story) when I was a kid. Never saw anything of the original hero, but his (literally) last story probably makes up for it. Travis Lee is in a hospital room, thinking about life...




... and then he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Now, it isn't the dying, but the injustice of dying meekly that irks him.

So it's a good thing Travis spies a tanker ship blinking "SOS" in code with its lights from his hospital room window. Suiting up one more time as the Crimson Avenger, Travis dives out his window, making his way to the bay via flagpoles and such.

On the south side of town, a Spanish mother complains about the price of food in her apartment, as her niño toddler Umberto slips and falls over the ledge!

She gives a "single soul-chilling scream" -- stifled by the Crimson Avenger catching the kid in mid-death plunge. "Gracias dios, señor!" This hero would be in her grateful prayers that night as he swung away, explaining that before she was born, he was "El Vengadore Rojo."

Hopping an unauthorized ride on a helicopter's landing gear, the Crimson Avenger finally reaches the tanker. Well-armed mercenaries had taken the vessel for its experimental, unstable, highly volatile chemical cargo. Though machine guns blazed, they fared poorly at finding a target through the red fog bombs dropped by our hero. A grenade was far more effective, as it set off a chain reaction with the chemicals, deemed so dangerous they had been scheduled for a mid-Atlantic deep-sixing.

Learning that the whole shebang was about to take out the city like a hydrogen bomb, the Crimson Avenger has the crew and crooks hauled into lifeboats. Then, he navigates the tanker as far from the city as possible...



Afterward, police pull survivors from the water at the docks. The ship's captain wants all the credit to go to their savior...

Except "the smoke was too thick to see him clearly... and he never mentioned his name!"

But then ... the last panel...





...I'm sorry, I've got something in my eye, I...

 

... Time out, it's called the Xbox what?

Edit: chainsawsuit has provided a handy run down of the specs:

 

Still has a strong chance of getting my money in lieu of the PS4

 

I'm probably going Sony next (This?) gen, the ability to purchase used games is extremely important to myself and my somewhat less than lucrative stipend.

 

Good point - but I love Achievables!

 

The only thing that remains to be seen, at least in my mind, is why I would transfer my old gamertag to a new machine if it's not backwards compatible.

 

Maybe it'll accomodate that, somehow? Like they'll update Live so you can keep your 360 tag active. At least, that's what would make sense.

 

My tag predates my being online - it's more like my own personal record of "look at all the achievements," and if I can have that on the new machine in a more streamlined, fresh way, I think I'm gonna do that.

 

Well it's been a few to many years since I've been around here, wonder if anyone remembers me.

 

Also damn, when did I become a Jedi Master? I sooooo don't remember having that there before o.o

 

Hello there, chanbill5390. Long time no see.