What TV SHOWS are you watching?

Yeah, the recent DC films are.mostly a miss for me but their animated stuff is on point all the way back to B:TAS. Other than that batgirl/batman hook up movie, ugh.

Snyder has a good visual eye for super action but he didn't get the characters AT ALL. Everything spun off it has suffered as well, maybe Shazaam and Aquaman did ok, but Wonder woman is straight up getting wasted when she should be the one running the show.

Marvel suffers from a lot of the same issues, but at least their movies are fun, if very formulaic in a lot of cases.

I think the key to enjoying DC's characters, as a whole, is to think of them as templates. In that respect, it won't matter that Joker was poor or that the latest version of The Batman (always with 'The') is something ridiculous because the previous versions have often been so good. That's what made it possible for Neal Adams and Denny O'Neill to wrest the character away from the stigma of the '60s TV show.

But that's also the downside to DC's characters: They're not human. They're archetypes. Marvel's recipe for taking over the comics industry in the '60s was simple: Make our characters humans first, superheroes second. DC's are mostly demigods who have no possible parallel to Peter Parker worrying about his final exams while worrying about paying the rent and still having to get out there an stop Electro from killing people. The only DC character who comes close to that is the only "normal" human among them, The Batman, who is still a genius detective, master of unarmed combat and, oh yeah, a billionaire.

No matter what has emerged for the character since the 70s, my image of it is still Steve Engelhart's run. Sometimes his appearances in other media are good version (Batman: The Animated Series, for the most part), some they're awful (the films in the 90s.) But it's a take on a constant, rather than anything developmental, so I've been able to pick and choose.

Englehart's Batman is my favorite comic Batman.

The more I think about it...

The whole "secret identity as a normie" concept is pretty silly and beeds to go. The MCU was very wise to essentially shitcan it from the start.

Superman working as a reporter? Early on i think it was just a device to let him learn of danger or to put him in close proximity to Lois so he could save her over and over when SHE dug up some juicy story. But now he could just work a side gig for Elon Musk taking stuff up into orbit at 100k a pop when he needs rent money.

Comics as a monthly soap opera need a serious revamp. There are too many of them and they are individually pretty silly most of the time. Just look at the Berlanti shows. They all kinda nosedive after a few seasons as the soap gets too thick.

Short intense bursts seems to be the way forward to me.

Josh Look wrote: Englehart's Batman is my favorite comic Batman.

I met him once when I was still running the comic studio. It was shortly after Batman: TAS had used The Laughing Fish for one of their episodes. I thought it was really weird because they credited the writing to someone else. They used the plot and even the dialogue, straight from the comic. He said they had given him a specific type of payment (I forget the technical term) in lieu of a writer credit so that they could use the material (which is owned by DC, anyway) and not have to put out another royalty payment. He said they were quite generous, so he was fine with it.

But, yeah, I was glad when they reprinted his run as Shadow of the Batman in the early 90s. I'd been able to obtain the originals (after reading most of them in the public library(!) as a kid) but I could point a lot more people to the best version of the Darknight Detective that there's ever been.

jason10mm wrote: The whole "secret identity as a normie" concept is pretty silly and beeds to go. The MCU was very wise to essentially shitcan it from the start.

Superman working as a reporter? Early on i think it was just a device to let him learn of danger or to put him in close proximity to Lois so he could save her over and over when SHE dug up some juicy story. But now he could just work a side gig for Elon Musk taking stuff up into orbit at 100k a pop when he needs rent money.

Comics as a monthly soap opera need a serious revamp. There are too many of them and they are individually pretty silly most of the time. Just look at the Berlanti shows. They all kinda nosedive after a few seasons as the soap gets too thick.

Short intense bursts seems to be the way forward to me.

Without a secret identity, a hero has very limited options for lifestyle:

1. No social life, so nobody is in danger. Not easy if you have any living relatives. Also not fun.
2. Only befriend and/or date other heroes, risking the usual issues of dating a co-worker.
3. Constantly fend off attacks on family and friends, compromising your ability to fight crime and save the world.

Also, consider the total loss of privacy, the stalkers, the lawsuits, and hassles from the government. I bet that secret identity is starting to sound like a good idea.

I always loved the Wild Cards approach to it. In that universe, Aces are celebrities and most want to take advantage of what comes with being a celebrity, so they engage the whole Hollywood lifestyle thing. Of course, in that world, there are also very few "super-villains", per se, so the risk is less than it would be in the Marvel or DC universes. However, even in Wild Cards, there are those who want to stay out of the spotlight. One of George R. R. Martin's main characters is the Great and Powerful Turtle, who never appeared without his flying shell that allowed him to be Tom Tudbury, junk dealer, when he wasn't fighting crime.

I loved early Wild Cards. Turtle was great, he was mentally unable to use his massive telekinesis ability unless he was safe in his shell.

So many great characters in that series.

As for secret identities, these days any hero would be on IG and twitter, or incorporated a lot more like The Boys than anything else i think.

Larry Correia has a series called Hard Magic, which is basically superheroes with a working class ethic. Put your power to work in the 1930's building America type stuff. Strips away the costumes and whatnot but keeps the epic heroics. Good stuff.

I'm a stan, but people really sleep on George RR Martin's overall work beyond ASOIAF. Tuf Voyaging is a ton of fun, just a short story compilation about himself on a giant time ship.

Gary Sax wrote: I'm a stan, but people really sleep on George RR Martin's overall work beyond ASOIAF. Tuf Voyaging is a ton of fun, just a short story compilation about himself on a giant time ship.

There was a series of stories that got collected as Tuf Voyaging. The protagonist is a cat-loving, curmudgeonly environmentalist who acquired a ship that has the capability to address environmental problems at a planetary scale. Tuf's arch-nemesis is a planet with severe overpopulation and various social mores that compel the people to continue to have too many offspring.

Until the Game of Thrones books, Martin's best work was his standalone novels and novellas, especially The Dying of the Light and Fevre Dream. The Wild Cards series had a great concept, but soon devolved into a really nasty fanfic level of stories, with various writers competing to deliver the most twisted plot twists. I toughed it out for the whole original series plus the first book of the new series, but the low points were pretty ugly. People speculate about Wild Cards becoming a tv show, but I don't think that even HBO is ready to handle necrophilia or incestuous rape.

We are currently working our way through Adam Curtis' latest series of documentaries, the six-part Can't get you out of my head, an exploration of the systems of power including a study of propaganda and populist action as levers of political power and how history repeats on all sides of the spectrum. The big question being asked is "how did we end up here?", the rather depressing answer seeming to be that we never really left. It is fascinating and engrossing and surprising in equal measure.

For anyone unfamiliar with Curtis' work he uses a very distinctive collage style where he plucks obscure and often forgotten archive footage to highlight the history that we conveniently forget when telling our sanitised narratives of the past, accompanied by some incredible soundtrack choices. I think there's a few people on here who would get a kick out of his stuff, I'm watching on BBC i-player but he has much of his work posted on his official YouTube channel

My wife and I have been watching Armchair Detectives on YouTube, and it's pretty much the best gameshow. Each episode is centered around a murder mystery. Three contestants basically watch a British mystery show, and get to choose evidence to examine and stuff. They discuss what they're thinking as it goes, and they have to figure out whodunnit. You get to play along and try to figure it out.

My wife and I fell down the rabbithole of Victorian Farm ( and others ).

It's like "The 1900 House" or Colonial Williamsburg, but in a farm setting with historians trying to rough it out for year in period conditions.

Amazon Prime has most of these, and they've been great in a particularly nerdy way. We're seriously considering adding an extra streaming subscription just to watch the ones Amazon doesn't have. Our families are considering an intervention.

This is one of those things where you'll either bounce off it hard or be totally absorbed.

We took a brief murder show break to watch Murder Among the Mormons on Netflix, which is pretty good and still topical for my area of the US.

Since I'm in the middle of reviewing the whole run of Batman: The Animated Series, I can't really watch it casually. So.i figured I'd indulge in another Batman property and started watching Gotham. The full run is on Netflix. I'm up to episode 8 and it's decent so far. I like the portrayal of young Penguin as a more ruthless and devious character and the cast is pretty good, including some Wire veterans, like Rawls. Jim Gordon's Boy Scout routine is a little tedious but I recognize the need for that plot element. It's not gripping but it's interesting enough to keep watching.

I've started the final season of Search Party. This show is fairly wild, and goofy. It's enjoyable, light television, while not being "good".