Shamelessly Promoting A Friend

One of my partners in crime over at Comics Nexus has also recorded his thoughts upon Wizard Magazine's decision to snub the female half of their former core demographic in favor of more articles about how much they enjoy pixilated cleavage.

Words of Questionable Wisdom: The Pop Culture Column For Men!

Give it a look-see. It's even better than my column despite containing 100% less Al Bundy.

Looking To The Stars - Wizard: The #1 Irrelevant Men's Magazine

Hello children! Sorry I've been gone so long. You know how it is. You take one week off for Halloween and then you wind up taking another week off because you're feeling sick and the doctor's bill wiped out your budget for buying comics that week.

But I'm here now! And ready to hop back in the saddle and take up arms against the grand old dinosaur - Wizard Magazine.


"Now Starman", I hear you all say metaphorically. "Why are you even bothering to write about Wizard Magazine? Nobody I know even reads that hack-rag anymore!"

You explain to me further, "Their comics pricing guide is pointless in a time when there are many websites that offer the same information for free and ebay has created a much more accurate gage of what people will pay for a comic. You can get all the latest mainstream comics news, reviews and comedy from any number of on-line sites, like your very own Comics Nexus and the magazine has become more about pop-culture and less about comics in the last few years, anyway."

And then you exclaim, "Why, apart from the occasional interview and the photos of a half-naked Kristen Bell, there's no reason at all for anyone to buy Wizard Magazine anymore!"

Well, you know what, oh nameless rabble with whom I am having an imaginary and increasingly long-winded conversation? You are all absolutely right!


To use a metaphor, Wizard Magazine is a an aging athlete. We've all seen this type of person - probably even knew one in college. He was the guy who graduated but is still in denial about his salad days being over. He talks non-stop about how good he used to be in attempt to make himself still seem good. He still goes to the same bar he went to as an undergrad after work, still hits on the same co-eds with no success and wonders in his quieter moments when the world passed him by. He wonders why everyone acts like he's an adult when he still feels like a care-free, wise-cracking 21-year old. He used to be respected but now the world has no use for him.


It's a fair comparison. Apart from being an organizer of some of the biggest and best conventions in the Sci-Fi/Comic Con game, Wizard hasn't really been relevant to the Comics Business for a good long while. Sure, the big boys at DC and Marvel throw them a bone once in a while, but The Internet has ended the days when Wizard was the be-all and end-all of Comic Book News and Reviews. Why wait a month to pay five bucks to hear what Joe Quesada has planned for Marvel Comics when you can read about it once a week at Newsarama for free?

So why am I writing about them? Because of this latest sad attempt at relevance.





The #1 Men's Pop Culture Magazine!

Right...

Now, this did cause quite a stir last week. Naturally, a good number of female comic readers were offended at the fact that the most prominent print-periodical for comics in the world basically said "We're a boys only club" - an idea that the industry itself and feminist comic fans in particular have been fighting for years. The fact that the same issue had semi-nude pictures of "Heroes Hottie" Kristen Bell didn't help matters. Nor the fact that the issue had a game wherein the reader is supposed to identify a female video-game character by her upper torso. Guess what this feature was so tactfully named?





Of course several came to the defense of Wizard. Some pointed out that the offending comment was only on one of their three alternate covers and further suggested that it was probably just a joke. But Wizard itself has been silent on the outrage, in so far as I can tell. This suggests that Wizard honestly doesn't care if they offend female comic fans and that they honestly are trying to reinvent themselves more as a general pop-culture magazine for men rather than as a general-interest comics magazine for everyone. Which, given reports of Wizard having gone out of their way to get female feedback at their conventions this summer, is a double-slap to the face.

As for me personally? I can't get too worked up over this, though I did feel the need to comment upon it. Wizard Magazine is a business and if it improves their business to cater to the lowest common denominator and the baser instincts of heterosexual men-child than to provide quality comics news coverage, more power to them. There's plenty of other print-magazines out there that still do provide comics news without the boobs (Comic Foundry comes to mind) so it's not as if this is the huge disaster it might have been a decade ago for fangirls and fanboys with a conscience. And there's always all the fine folks on The Internet News Sites and Blogs, right?

So with all that in mind, join me next week as I enter the belly of the beast and report from Wizard World Texas! Where the guest of honor is... Smallville Supergirl Laura Vandervoort?!?!





To quote Han Solo, "I have a bad feeling about this..."

No Fast Thoughts for 11/7/07...

... on account of I didn't have one single comic to pick up this week.

Now... to catch up on the backlog of books I did get in the last fortnight...

Thoughts on HEROES: Week 6 & Week 7- The Line and Out of Time

True to their promise, this season IS moving a lot faster than the first and things appear to be well on their way to a good mid-season conclusion before they start CHAPTER THREE.



Bob - I can't wait to hear this guy's story. I'm beginning to think that his story about The Company changing direction might be true. By all accounts, Linderman and Mr. Petrelli were partners before joining The Company and both were A-Type Personalities. Ditto most of the people affiliated with The Company that we've seen who were in a position of power who have been whacked since then.

Bob though... Bob seems different. The whole season, he's seemed like a man in a positon of power who is unused to it and adjusting to suddenly being the one in charge. We know so little about him aside from that his power lets him change other metals into gold (and more, if one interview witht he writers can be believed) and that he's apparently had some medical and scientific training.

So imagine this: a scientist who discovered, as he was working on something and wishing that he could get a reaction to work more quickly, that he was able to do so just by thinking about it. It would fit the show's idea of a person getting powers based on their personality or their needs at the moment of activation and it would explain how the heck he'd detect having a power as obscure as an alchemical/transmutationary touch. It would also explain him being a lot less "showy" than the Company founders we've seen who are healers, master swordsmen and... whatever Mama Petrelli is.

Just a thought... it would explain why he backs down so quickly from Mohinder. It would also show The Company has changed a bit as he goes out of his way to help Monica. And why - as Niki points out - he decides to put her to work for The Company rather than killing her outright when doing so would certainly be easy enough.


Niki - So am I the only one who said "Oh, Thank You Lawd!" when it turned out that DL's sudden appearance wasn't Niki trading one DiD personality for another? And cheered when Niki found the control to fight Maury and stabbed herself rather than hurt another?


Nathan - I also liked the fact that it was Nathan who tried to get through to her. They did have that nice talk about her son way back in the first episode of Season 1 and Nathan does know better than anybody what it is like to be fighting to get your kids back and regain control of your life right now. Nathan is impressing me more and more as a character with each episode.


Matt - Speaking of impressed... wow. The shlub finally grew a pair... and they're the size of basketballs!

Out of Time should be the script the HEROES people hand in for Emmy consideration this year because there is not a slow moment or a weak performance in the whole episode. And out of all of the sheer awesome in this episode, the most awesome moment has got to be Matt confronting his dead-beat dad as well as his own fears and coming to that moment of divine catharsis where he unleashes 20 years of anger and worry in one psyche-crippling blow.

"No! I'm not scared of you anymore! I'm a good man; I'm a good cop. I'm a good father, which is something know nothing about. You don't know what it's like to fight for someone that you love; you left. You left. All you have are your nightmares."

Powerful stuff.


Hiro - And speaking of sheer awesome... wow. The jaunt to the past ends in grand fashion with Hiro pulling the mother of all grandfather paradoxes out of the fire. The "I become my own legendary hero" story has been done before but never with quite this much style. And as much as I usually loathe some of the angsty "tragic love" stories that this show has given us... this one, I liked.

Still, even Hiro can't be too heavy-hearted and the scene where he goes to Ando with a gift was pure win. :)

Can't wait for the inevitable "Kensei? You're alive?!?" moment...


Sylar and The Wonder Twins - I actually got into an argument earlier in the week regarding D&D Alignments, the cast of Heroes and how Sylar cannot be "Chaotic Evil" because his power involves understand the inherit order of things.

First- for those of you who aren't D&D fans - let me explain. In D&D, all characters have a moral alignment based on two things. Law vs. Chaos and Good vs. Evil. Law vs. Chaos measures how much you consider a codified set of rules neccesary to living day-to-day life. Good vs. Evil measures how much you tend to put yourself before others.

A Chaotic Evil person is somebody who does whatever they want to further their own ends, regardless of ethics, the price others have to pay or the laws of whatever society they live in.

Now, call me crazy, but that seems a pretty apt description of someone who traveled around the country, killing people in order to steal their super-powers along with anyone else who got in his way (we see Sylar kill a truck driver, a homeless man and several police officers in the comics)... all so that he could feel "special"... even if he did have some half-assed justification involving an evolutionary imparitive involving natural law/survival of the fittest.

Secondly, we only assume that an ability to know how things work is exactly what Sylar's power is. It's never actually been spelled out just what the heck is going on inside his head when the clocks start ticking. Even if that is the case, there's no moral connection between the ability to understand how things work and living according to a natural order. And even then "the natural order" (at least so far as Nature is concerned) is True Neutral in D&D terms.

Why do I bring this up? Because Sylar's desire to control Maya, so that even if he can't get his powers back he'll still have some degree of control over who lives and who dies... that is some textbook Chaotic Evil behavior there. To say nothing of the fact that he is corrupting a relative innocent - also classic CE behavior.


Claire/West - First of all... HA! to those of you who insisted he had to be a Company plant or her brother or every single whacked out conspiracy theory that said West was anything other than a smart-ass kid who had issues with authority.

I loved the scenes with Claire and West, though. Especially the Chaotic Good/Neutral Good argument about whether or not what they did with the head cheerleader was right after the fact. Small wonder they put her in all but one episode - Claire is a great character and Hayden Pantierre is a greater actress.

I just hope he didn't fly out of the show completely. There's already too much love angst on this show.


Bennet - I think this poster I made sums it up best.

He's always been a grayish character at best - a good man willing to do bad things for the right reasons. But now it's become entirely about getting revenge on The Company for what they've done to his family - the goal of trying to save others from being killed or manipulated by The Company has been forgotten. Without that balance, Bennet is becoming a lot sloppier, a lot more dangerous and it's no surprise that Mohinder decided to turn on him.


The Paintings - Nothing else shows that the show's speed is picking up better than this. We're promised a set of 8 paintings that connect to this big disaster. One comes true in the very first episode. The last one suggests the death of a major character. And now, after one episode in which three of the events happen and we find out two events happened in the last episode, we have six of the events identified with #7 and #8 neatly set up.

Just in case you didn't catch them when we saw them briefly, here they are...

#1 - Kaito Nakamura's Death

#2 - Claire's "Death" after West dropped her

#3 - Bob's hand holding a vial with the different strain of The Shanti Virus

#4 - A mind-controlled Niki trying to break down the door to Bob's office.

#5 - Peter looking on in horror at a large pile of bodies through a window.

#6 - Hiro duels Kensei.

#7 - An angry Mohinder, with a broken nose, shoots a Company-issued gun.

#8 - A man in horned-rimmed glasses lies dead, shot through the eye, as a young couple - the woman a blonde in a cheerleader's skirt - embrace over his body.


Peter - Didn't get much done in the first episode, but wow... what an ending. Of course we all knew some kind of new disaster had to be on the horizion. And given everything else going on, it's not hard to see what the cause was going to wind up being.

I'm pissed that Caitlin has been taken out of the picture and hope Peter can get himself together in time to get her out of the future. He's got enough angst without losing another girlfriend and I really don't want to see the WiR list for this show grow any more than it has to if she winds up dying in an alternate future of a lethal plague.

And yes - I kinda saw 'Adam Monroe' being Kensei coming even before this episode made his links with Maury more obvious. Some of the original material on the show's websites kind of hinted at it, what with The Company having been founded in 1978 - the same year that Linderman came into posession of several authentic Kensei artifacts.

What I'm still trying to figure out is... did he found The Company with the intent of eventually using it to get back at Hiro, who would have been an infant then, after meeting Hiro's dad? Or did he have some other falling out with the group he created and not realize that... "Huh... my co-founder has a son named Hiro Nakamura..."

UGH...

I know, I know. I'm a bad little writer.

I took the first week off for Halloween.

The second week off just kinda happened because of illness.

But I'll be back on form this week when I catch up on comic reviews. And there will be a big damn article on Wizard World Texas the week after.

Promise.