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Hate Pt. 1
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It's now December and that means the end of the year is nigh. Looking back on the year in comics there is just one thing that cheeses me off, GRANT MORRISON IS STILL WRITING BATMAN! A lot of you may be chomping at the bit to ask me why I hate Grant Morrison. I don't like his writing, with both Batman: RIP and Final Crisis as examples. Morrison writes over the heads of most readers and those that understand his writing have an encyclopedic knowledge of the character he's writing. I don't have the time or the talent to memorize every nuance of Batman or what ever character Mr. Morrison is writing this month and will leave a mess in his wake. It's like he's the Godzilla of comic writers; coming from the ocean to tear up the continuity of a beloved character or team of characters and just go back into the ocean to wait to ravage another character or team. Then it is up to the new writer to fix up whatever messes have been made and fix up things so it all makes sense once again. It has been said that those of us that hate Mr. Morrison's writing is because we don't understand all the subtle clues he leaves in his comics about the big plot reveals like in last month's "Batman and Robin" comic about how "Bruce Wayne has been financially supporting Batman the entire time." (I read that sentence, scratch my head and cock my head to the right.) How is that supposed to be some big reveal? Is he trying to say that Bruce Wayne is not Batman at all and Batman is in fact some sort of crime fighter that is not his alter ego? For me Bruce has been, and always will be, Batman, and until things are fixed and Bruce Wayne is Batman once again I will not even try to read a Bat title. Sometimes being bogged down in almost 80 years of character development can really hurt a story, but when Crisis happened back in the 1980's things were kind of reset and we only had to deal with 25 years of back story rather than all the way back to his first appearance. It also seems like that Batman has more books on the market than Deadpool. At least Deadpool is entertaining when he's written by the correct writer rather than some drama twit who thinks making characters drug addicted is really groundbreaking. What's next in Mr. Morrison's bag of tricks, revealing Bruce Wayne is gay and a drug addict? Double the drama for half the price. Oh noes! I put that into the universe and if that happens then I will take full responsibility for it. Morrison, you almost atoned for all your past sins with your answer to this question from an interview at Wired.com:
Morrison: I agree. That has been one of my favorite Batman versions for years. I think it was great to step away from what Christopher Nolan was doing with The Dark Knight, and give Batman back to the realm of fantasy. Beyond that, I think there's some great psychedelic work in Batman: The Brave and the Bold. The dialog is good; the stories are really put together well. It's a great show that should be on at 9 .p.m. in the evening somewhere. I'd much rather watch Batman: The Brave and the Bold than Glee.
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So Long Stargate Universe
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The ratings for the Sci-Fi Channel's (I refuse to call it the other name) latest entry into the Stargate franchise is not doing so hot. This is leading to speculation in some internet circles that the show is canceled after this season is up. Part of this may have been because Sci-Fi channel moved Stargate Universe from it usual Friday time slot that most of the Stargates ran on, to Wednesday. Why did they move Universe and other Friday shows to earlier in the week? Because they now have the rights to WWE's Friday Night Smackdown. I don't know who Vince and Linda have nekkid pictures of at the Sci-Fi Channel to get Smackdown on there, but this was a mistake. Let's look at the other networks offerings on Wednesdays:
CBS: Survivor, Criminal Minds, The Defenders FOX: Human Target, Hell's Kitchen NBC: Undercovers (Canceled), Law & Order SVU, Law & Order LA The producers of the show claim it is because they alienated a lot of fans by ending Stargate Atlantis in favor of Stargate Universe. Some fans are saying that because the show has taken a different tone than the previous two shows it has really not given them incentive to watch. This is what in fact attracted me to Stargate Universe. After two shows of pretty much the same thing just with different bad guys SGU was supposed to be the characters cut off from Earth and the Pegasus galaxy and be stuck on a ship. Granted some of the things they went into detail with in the first three hour episode could have been condensed into a two hour "movie." I just think they really dragged their feet with this show and could have been a lot wiser in getting the ball rolling on the premise within that two hour movie than a three hour drag your feet marathon. Also they were supposed to be out of contact with Earth, but they have the communication stones that were introduced way back in Stargate SG-1 to contact Stargate Command with. How is that being cut off from Earth? I picked up both parts of Season One from Amazon and have yet to watch it, but I figure I'm in no rush since I'm just going to buy the season two disks when they are offered on Amazon. I think that the ultimate thing that hurt the show was breaking up the show into two parts in one season. This means that the first half of the season is run in the summer and into the fall and then the second half in the spring. While this did work for new Battlestar Galactica, that was a few years ago when everyone was not streaming episodes from a web site or Hulu. Breaking up the episodes into two half's of a season means that you have to build up the momentum that the show had in the first half of the season all over again in the second half. You would think that networks would not do this sort of thing because the public has such a short attention span that most shows that make it through November sweeps air reruns of the current season just to get new viewers up to speed. Wise Up Sci-Fi Channel!
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Bye-Bye Heroscape
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Wizards of the Coast announced that they are going to be discontinuing the Heroscape brand of game and focus on their core games instead, which I am guessing is Magic the Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons. Heroscape was a board game put out in the mid-2000's by Hasbro that was innovative. It allowed you to build out of 2" plastic hexes a game board that represented your battlefield and then you either played the good side or the bad side and got to build an army out of the miniatures for that side. The good guys had anything from a group of Revolutionary War soldiers to a WWII soldier that had a grappling hook gun. The bad guys had typical fare from Undead dogs, orks to a boxed set of dragons. This game was just screaming to be played with the D&D 4th edition rules, but those would not come out for several years. After being on the market for about four or five years Hasbro decided to take the game off of the market. This was a crush to gamers everywhere that liked the game. The bad part about the game was the high cost for the main set, but it came with pretty much all the miniatures you needed to play as well as enough terrain hexes to build a pretty sizable map. There was also the whole thing that you could buy non-blind boosters of mini's and get more good and bad guys to play with. Hasbro even branched out to the comic world with a version of Heroscape based on Marvel characters. They never got past the big box starter edition of the game, and that turned off a lot of players. Late last year, Wizards of the Coast, decided to revive the line and make it into something that was kind of like the miniatures game they had for D&D and was also compatible with D&D 4th edition. That game never quite caught on, and as I have mentioned above; canceled the Heroscape line. Heroscape has so many possibilities outside of the normal game. Most of those uses are with the terrain hexes that can be used for other games. Back when I dabbled in the clicky Battletech game I thought the hexes were the perfect size to represent the battlefield that the giant mechs fought on. It was also good for traditional Battletech because the terrain would be made of hexes and you could build up the terrain hexes to represent elevated terrain. There were even clear blue hexes and red hexes that were about half the thickness of a normal terrain hex that represented water and lava. The biggest thing that hurt Wizards of the Coast re-release of the game was that they decided to use some of the less than good sculpts from the Dungeons & Dragons game to make new miniatures for Heroscape. The mini's were so bad that they were out of scale with the ones that have been already released, and had craptacular paint jobs. I did not buy the game from Wizards because it had the Drizzit Drow character as one of the main selling points. If there was ever a character that I did not want to play it's him. Now speculators have jumped on the bandwagon of buying up Heroscape items and selling them for a huge mark-up on E-Bay. It just goes to show you, not everything that is popular is going to be around forever.
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Hate Pt. 2
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Along with my hate of writer Grant Morrison, I hate Frank Quietly's artistic vision of Robin. I know this is coming from a lay person who knows little about art, but I just don't like the way he draws Robin like he's a pouty version of the one from the old Teen Titans Cartoon. He looks like he's just some pissed off teenager rather than a hero that is taking over the mantle of Robin from his predecessor. I also hate that whole spiky haircut he draws Robin with. I used to have the latest incarnation of Teen Titans on my pull list a couple of years ago, but after so much drama with writers and artists and general nonsense like that I switched over to the Titans comic that was coming out. That one I liked because it had all the characters I knew from the old days when I read a spare issue of the book back in the late 1980's. Again there was more drama and stuff that got way out of hand and this whole thing in the latest issues with Deathstroke is getting kind of tiresome. Why does every Titans book (whether Teen or non Teen) have to have as the big bad Deathstroke. If not him then he is manipulating whoever the bad guy in the story is and being a behind the scenes guy. I'm not sure if it has been canceled yet, but I'm pretty sure it is on the chopping block because it is not a Batman, Superman or Green Lantern book. Reading the preview pages of the latest Teen Titans issue (that came out last month) on newsrama.com and I just do not like where this is going. Not only do I not like the team that the writers have put together, but also this whole thing with Robin taking over the leadership reigns of the team even though he's only been Robin for a few weeks in comic book time. Yes, different versions of Robin have been in charge of the team at one point or another, but I think they are missing the boat of bringing in another more qualified former Teen Titan from the days of Wolfman and Perez and that is Cyborg. Last I saw of him though was that he was in pieces somewhere at the end of one of the Titans comics. Someone on Bleeding Cool said that they like the way the new Robin has been presented, they said it was like introducing Guy Gardner to the 1980's Justice League. At least Guy had some reason to be there, but having the new Robin on the Teen Titans makes me want to punch him. He's a smarmy little punk who does not deserve the Robin mantle no matter what the new Batman thinks. I don't think this new Batman would have the guts to punch out Guy Gardner when he stepped out of line.
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Fun Stuff in my E-Mail
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Anyone who has been following my career on the Collector Times knows that I started out writing the collectables column on the site for about eight or nine years before moving on to the Opinion column this past year. I'll branch out and do some other things from time to time (as evidenced by this months review of the video game Gears of War), and sometimes I miss doing the Collectables column when I get an e-mail like this:
It appears that I have a bigger internet presence than I thought. Since I don't keep my articles dating back for more than a couple of years because of a hard drive crash and updating my technology I can only think that I wrote it some time back in the early 2000's when I was really interested in Professional Wrestling. I probably also thought it would funny to have it because it is Perry Saturn in a dress, and after what happened to him when he was protecting a woman I don't think it would be that funny anymore. I generally got e-mails around the November and December months about people looking for things for their kids or themselves when I was writing the Collectables column. This is the first time in a real long time that I have heard from someone about something I wrote that was willing to sell what I wanted. Have a Merry/Happy Christmas and a Merry/Happy New Year, and let's hope that things get better in 2011. Mathew B.
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