Superman Through the Ages! Forum

New Jeph Loeb interview here (http://www.playbackstl.com/Current/panel/1005.htm).

Among other amazing news, it looks like he'll be leaving DC for Marvel.  Also talks about Supergirl and more.

:s:

The Ultimates is garbage. I will NEVER forgive Mark Millar for turning Captain America into a thinly veiled Neo-Con parody or having Hulk eating people and spouting references to Freddie Prinze junior. Just a bunch of grotesque imagery and shock value devoid of any heart whatsoever. But then again maybe this is just Mark doing what sells.

I know alot of people are keen to see Millar work on Superman but Ultimates is exactly why I don't want to see him on the book.

As for Loeb and Madueria, this sounds like the kind of team you'd want on a book that was fun and Ultimates is only fun if share a sadist view of superheroes. I'd rather see the team on a Avengers book at least.

I'm a big fan of Loeb's dating back to the Teen Wolf and Commando movies.

But lately, Loeb's gotten away from tight plotlines and mood you could cut with a knife, and more into roller-coaster mode, judging from his recent work on Superman, Batman, and derivatives.  Roller-coaster mode is ideal for the Ultimates, AFAICT (beyond Ultimate Thor, I'm not a big fan).  But I hope that Loeb takes on less during his stint at Marvel, and comes up with work that's on a par with his earlier stuff.  If a writer is going to do a big decompress and tell a story over 10+ issues, don't overdo it on the twists and turns, or dumb readers like me just end up lost and dizzy.

This does bring up one interesting point: Peter David SUUURE does love to make things more complicated, doesn't he?

"Exhibit A" would be Peter David's work on Aquaman, AQUAMAN CHRONICLES and elsewhere to the point where I'm not entirely sure who Aquaman actually is. Before, Aquaman had a fairly straightforward origin and concept: son of a mermaid queen and a surface dweller. Now...who knows? I know there's the wizard Attilan involved somehow, something about blond hair and talking to fish and the Curse of Korvac or whoever, and how two brothers always fight over the throne of Atlantis because of a curse, and...jeez, I really don't know it all.

Somebody (hear that, Rick Veitch? SOMEBODY!) has to streamline Aquaman. My money's on Sean McLaughlin; that guy did a killer Aquaman miniseries back in 1991 that only lasted 13 issues, which had potential.

The simplification of the Supergirl concept was a necessary one, though I am personally creeped out and more than a little disgusted that instead of having Kara's personality, they decided to play her up as a sex object. The first issue of Supergirl has her say "I reveal my midriff because it distracts bad guys from my fists." Real classy. Witness, for instance, the choice of Michael Turner, a "good girl" artist to draw her. The adolescence is ratcheted up a notch when somebody does a Power Girl breast joke. Wasn't that particular barrel of laughs emptied out decades ago?

You think that's bad?

I'm still waiting for a logical explanation why Kara came buck naked in Superman/Batman when she first appeared.  Kal-El was a baby, Pre Crisis, and he at least had those blankets Lara wrapped him in.  Zor-El couldn't be bothered to clothe his teenage daughter?

I realize in the real world that it was a stupid sex-object gimmick to make the boys buy the books.

But we really have no reason in the fictional DCU for Kara to arrive buck naked and stay that way for most of the issue.

Also, we don't have a logical reason how she could get out of her ship given all that kryptonite lying around, esp. given how Batman casually brought her down with such a chunk.

That seems to be the thing with DC. It's always 6 on one hand and half-a dozen on the other.

Everytime they have a good idea, they'll find a way to screw it up on some level.

I also don't understand whats so wrong with playing Kara as a very sweet girl who really looked up to her cousin. Instead, they give her this whole attitude thing and having her hanging out with the Amazons. Of course I don't really enjoy the weird thing they do with Wonder Woman where it seems like she goes from diplomat to Klingon constantly.  I also think this whole more powerful than Superman thing is just very much over compensation and shows what a narrow vision the company has regarding potential female readers.

Assuming that Kara is going to remain Superman's couisin, I think it's important to note that she is not the Earth-1 Kara.

But she does have many elements of the Earth-2 Kara:  The pre-Crisis Power Girl -

Arrives as a teen who was probably in suspended animation during her voyage;
A lot of sex-object appearance and word play;
Rebelling-against-Superman and other male heroes.

I've been reading a few of the old Power Girl appearances in All-Star, and it's almost the same thing.

:s:

I agree with you about PAD tending to complicate things to the point where it makes less sense in a monthly comic book and more sense for a novel.  Aquaman was straightforward -- try understanding Genis-Vell.

But to be fair, the bit about Supergirl being a storied bit of protoplasm comes from Byrne and successors.  At the time of Supergirl #1, I don't think anyone outside of Dorkin/Dyer for S:TAS was given freedom to just have Kara come back (and even S:TAS Kara couldn't be Kryptonian).  Whoever was going to take on Supergirl needed to do something that involved Matrix Supergirl, second cousin to Martian Manhunter, a ball of clay with a past.  Obviously, as a ball of unpopular clay, PAD decided to mold it into what he wanted to write about, which proved to be fine stuff apart from not being terribly entrenched in the Superman mythos, which at the time was engaged in disemboweling itself with Electric Bluperman.

PAD's admits he'd have done it differently if he had a clean slate.  I think he wrote something about wanting to skew Supergirl younger, more like Ariella, more like the age of his kids when he was writing it, and have more of a Superboy "learning responsibility to be a super hero" flavor to things.  But he just couldn't take Lex Luthor's former love slave in that direction.  


Tara Reid's antics generally bug me when I am stuck watching them.
Thus, Supergirl being depicted as a Tara Reid lookalike bugs me.

The Powers That Be (well after Byrne) were still quite hung up on not having any other Kryptonian survivors besides Superman, for fear that it'd turn into the pre-Crisis.  But some of Superman's best features are with the Kryptonians that survive him -- Supergirl, Krypto, General Zod and some Phantom Zone inmates, etc.  It's only taken DC a couple decades to see the light...  let's hope this Infinite Crisis stuff doesn't muck things up.

I agree with you that Peter David had to alter the Supergirl concept substantially in order to make lemonade out of the lemons he had been given with Byrne's blob Supergirl.

But ATLANTIS CHRONICLES was about as necessary as a can opener at a robot convention.

Paul Kupperberg, in his guest-issue of JLA in 1983, gave a pretty convincing union of Arion with Aquaman's Atlantis that was straight-arrow simple: underneath Atlantis there was an ancient, more magical version that now is in ruins, which previously was the Arion Atlantis. There. Problem SOLVED. Peter David's "blonde hair is the remains of a curse" explanation would fly, if it wasn't for the fact that I can recall many scenes of blonde haired people in crowd scenes in Atlantis as far back as the 1960s.

Aquaman's concept, once straightforward, was muddled up by having him be the son of a wizard and heir of AT LEAST three curses... Peter David's landlocked cities of Atlantis in the Himalayas was not only a bad idea, but something of a contradiction in terms.

Though I must say, I loved the idea of Aquaman having an Eskimo son, even if said kid was a big whiner.



Lots of more intelligent people than myself have expressed how our society and media have misplaced priorities. Thus, I have nothing to add to this perspective except this: I’m sure the Supergirl writers, Loeb and others, are EQUALLY tired of people who are famous for being famous.

So...why did they create a character in their image?

Because it will attract women readers? HA! Michael Turner and the naked entrance from the pod pretty much sabotaged THAT idea. Here’s a clue: women like reading about WOMEN, not male sex fantasies. Only men like Barbarella; women like Nancy Drew.

A bit of fun cheesecake isn't bad if it's built into the character: ladies AS WELL as fellas admire Wonder Woman, Catwoman, and Xena: Warrior Princess. But this is SUPERGIRL, who is our collective national little sister, our collective national girl next door. C'mon guys, not EVERY female in the DC Universe has to be Wonder Woman.

Aquaman never appealed to me...  give me Sub-Mariner anyday.  As I recall, I liked the Shaun McLaughlin run you'd mentioned..  But, the odds of him coming back for a monthly comic are slim.  He's an associate producer for all of WB's superhero animation, and also did the hilarious send-up on Superman's origin in Pinky and the Brain "Two Mice and a Baby" (the mice playing the role of Ma and Pa Kent!):

http://www.supermantv.net/cartoon-brain.htm


I will say that the much-lauded "Many Happy Returns" arc has some fine female artwork by Ed Benes, which is far more appealing stuff to me than Michael Turner's drugged-out waif-looking Tara Reid Supergirl.  That style played better with Turner's Fathom comic.