Thursday, August 23, 2007

I would like to recall my previous Shenanigans!

It takes a big man to admit that he made a mistake.

Today, Tony Bedard has proven himself a big man.

From Tony Bedard's personal forum at: Comic Book Resources:

Yeah, folks, this is just a good old fashioned f*ck-up on my part. Sorry.

To be honest, I probably took on too much work over the last year and rushed, uninformed stuff like this crept in. I have no idea where I got the notion that Shado was Connor's mom, but I did think that. I appreciate the mistake being pointed out, and I hope it didn't ruin the rest of the issue.

I recently made another mistake in SUPERGIRL 20, where I said a veteran of the Battle of Mogadishu was a former Marine, when the people who fought that fight were Army Rangers and Delta Force.

These may seem like small errors, but they show a basic ignorance and lack or respect for the facts on my part.



***


Well, let it never be said that I'm not a fair man.

Therefore, let it be known to all those upon this Internet that I take back my taking back every nice thing I ever said about Tony Bedard from yesterday.

I still hold Mike Carlin or whichever assistant editors dropped the ball on this one responsible but I can highly recommend the Black Canary mini-series and Supergirl again, without any reservation whatsoever.

Now let us never speak of this again until the inevitable corrections which are sure to follow the trade-paperback collection of this storyline.

9 comments:

  1. Well, Tony's not alone. When I found out that Connor was supposed to be a badass Asian martial artist (since, of course, all new non-powered action heroes have to be Asian martial artists), I actually thought of Shado as well. Granted, maybe the time-frame didn't quite fit, but Green Arrow had aged about 10 years in 50 years of publishing. You could just push the Grell stories back a little, or leave them in the 1980's, & in a few years, Connor would be the "right" age.
    Granted, before it was explained to me by another fan, I knew Connor from one story in an Adventure Comics special, if that; so that's not like being a writer on his book.
    Oh, wait. Tony's not on the Green Arrow book, he's on the Oracle & friends book. OK, I can excuse that.
    I should scold the editor, but I'm just smiling that I'm not alone in my confusion.

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  2. I blame Wizard Magazine and Judd Winick.

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  3. I blame Bush.
    Then again, I blame Bush for everything from the rise in global terrorism to Tammy banging her just-operated on big toe with her cane - unless you think Judd Winick and WIZARD Magazine are responsible for those, too? ;)
    Best,
    Tim Liebe
    "I wish King George hurt as badly as my big toe!" - Tamora Pierce, quoting Benjamin Franklin in 1776

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  4. I hate to say this, but I actually liked Winick's writing on eXiles , and enjoyed reading his run better than ::heh:: Tony Bedard's (who I just found out via Wikipedia took over the book from Winick with #46). I can't recall reading any of Winick's other work, so I don't know if his work post- eXiles would have me agreeing w/you or not.
    OTOH, I've flipped through enough issues of WHIZZER - er, WIZARD to think you were right in the first place. They really ARE, if not exactly Satan then certainly a fairly significant sub-demon, of Big Two Comics,
    Best,
    Tim Liebe
    Curious as to just WHAT Winick did that's horrible....

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  5. I hate to say this, but I actually liked Winick's writing on eXiles , and enjoyed reading his run better than ::heh:: Tony Bedard's (who I just found out via Wikipedia took over the book from Winick with #46). I can't recall reading any of Winick's other work, so I don't know if his work post- eXiles would have me agreeing w/you or not.

    Well, not having read eXiles by either of them, I can't comment on it. I HAVE enjoyed some of Winick's independent works - Blood and Water for Vertigo, the biographical Pedro and Me and of course, Barry Ween.
    Winick seems to falter, however, when he has to write any character who is not his own creation or any character who has to fit into an established history. He also has an annoying tendency to make sure that any cast of characters he writes is "racially/politically" balanced.
    While this worked pretty well on a book like eXiles were most of the characters were brand new or alternate universe versions of existing characters, this isn't a bad thing.
    Hell, it wasn't even all that bad of a thing when Winick was writing Green Lantern, gave Kyle Rayner a personal assistant named Terry and then did a whole story on Terry coming out to his friends and family purely because he wanted to do a Very Special Episode of Green Lantern on the subject of gay teens outing themselves.
    It became a worrying thing shortly thereafter, when Terry all but disappeared from the book except for when he was calling in sick to work because he was hanging out with his new boyfriend at the GLBT Youth Center and the narrative ground to a halt as we are told about how it is a Very Good Thing such organizations exist.
    It became a bad thing when the entire book changed direction after a Very Special Issue in which Terry was nearly beaten to death by homophobes and the incident so apparently so disgusted Kyle with humanity that he elected to leave Earth and travel the spaceways. Which REALLY didn't fit Kyle - the most social and "human" of all the GL's - at all.
    And things went past bad and nearly became self parody after Judd took over Green Arrow and...
    * broke up a non-existent relationship between Green Arrow and Black Canary (it was unclear at that point whether they were a serious couple or not) because "people cheat on each other all the time"
    * went against the whims of Kevin Smith and made Ollie's adopted daughter Mia into the new Speedy
    * revaled Mia to be HIV positive in the most painfully bad Very Special Issue ever (Put it this way - Oliver Queen, the most promiscous man in comics by many accounts - doesn't know ANYTHING about HIV or AIDS, leading a doctor to go into the standard 4th Grade Lecture. :P )
    * had her continue her career as a vigilantee after being found to be HIV positive - despite the protests of many HIV Support groups as being patently unrealistic (though they appreciated the effort to promote awareness of the condition)
    * ignored the history of the character in numerous ways; the most grevious example being Oliver Queen suddenly having a secret identity, despite years of continuity saying otherwise and an Obituary that named him as Green Arrow on the front page of the Daily Planet.
    * changed Oliver Queen from an educated man who quoted Hemmingway and came to his liberal views after years of thought and soul-searching into a slogan-shouting, loudmouth with the emotional depth of an ant's footprint.
    Does that answer your question? :)

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  6. Oh, yeah, that answers it, all right! ::sigh:: Has a tendency to forget about using Western Union to send messages, does he? And (though this is hardly unique to his writing!) tends to toss character continuity out the window, too? Okay, every writer sometimes slips on a continuity banana peel - hence Bedard's BoP #109 boo-boo, and his subsequent apology. (See? I R a comix riter - I kin pull my postz back on trakk! :D ) But yeah - that many times, it sounds like Winick Just Doesn't Care what's gone before.
    If you think some of his indie writing isn't bad, I'd recommend reading one of the eXiles TPBes he wrote (Books 1 - 8, I think - I'm at my office now, and Tammy filed all the trades at home). I think it's a title that played to his strengths rather than his weaknesses.
    Best,
    Tim Liebe
    Gotta Watch Those Continuity Banana Peels!

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  7. Am I the only person who wants to retcon Mia's condition to a false positive, & write a Very Special Issue about that?

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  8. What?! Get back here and give me my summaries for stuff I don't read, dammit! >;D

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