Thanks for clearing that up, everyone. I guess I was mostly confused because I was trying to āmirrorā the Ant-Hero concept. The Anti-Hero does things a villainous way for heroic reasons, so I thought that an Anti-Villain must do things in heroic ways for villainous reasons, but that didnāt quite make much sense.
So, I suppose that the Anti-Villain also does things in villainous ways for heroic reasons, but the only thing differentiating them from Anti-Heroes is that the good that comes from an Anti-Heroās actions outweigh the amorality of those actions, whereas the Anti-Villainās villainous actionsā āgoodā outcomes donāt make up for those actionsā inherent evility.
Also, Iāve not read Watchmen, but from what Iāve heard, I think it sounds a bit too Deconstruction-y and āmatureā for my tastes.
Question of the Day #184: The Man of Tomorrow, The Caped Crusader, or The Webslinger?
Thatās a distinctly limited slate to choose from (the absolute two biggest DC heroes, versus only one from Marvel, and debatably not even their best known). But of those three, I pick The Man Of Tomorrow by a landslide. Especially if heās written by someone who really understands the character. Probably my single favorite portrayal is in the Birthright graphic novel, which I believe is by Mark Waid. Plus thereās the semi-famous story where he finds a woman whoās about to jump off a building, and persuades her that thereās still hope and she shouldnāt give up on life, and gives her a hug. I donāt remember who did that story, but itās probably the single best distillation of Superman as a character. (Clearly Zack Snyder has never read it.)
Iād go with Spidey. Heās actually relatable, which I appreciate. (Also the reason I prefer Marvel to DC, in general.) I enjoy Supes when heās well written as the heroic, positive character and Bats when heās being a smart detective, but they just never held a candle to Spider-Man.
Yeah, I just thought that āWhoās your favourite superhero?ā is kinda a boring question, and it would be more interesting comparing (what I think are) the three most popular heroes.
Well, I just thought of it as āthe three most popular heroes.ā
Really? I certainly would say he is. I suppose that, because of the MCU, Iron Man may have recently caught up.
Yeah . . . The Man of Steel is the worst Hero to make all dark and gritty (other than Americaās Finest Legacy, of course). I am not very impressed by Snyderās rendition.
Here here!
QotD #184 Reply: As you may have realised by know, I donāt have favourites. Superman is The Superhero, Batman is The Badass Normal, and Spider-Man is The Everyman Hero.
Question of the Day #185: Who is your favourite Superhero? OR Who do you think is the most popular Superhero (for each company, or in general)?
My favorite shifts between Batman and Spider-Man mostly and Nightcrawler is one of my favorites as well. Spider-Man I know is the best selling character for Marvel, and most likely Batman for DC.
Ultimate extreme grimdark Dazzler would probably be worse. Or āAmethyst, Princess of Gemworldā. But yeah, Supes is definitely up there.
I think that he eventually got there. The Justice League movie is legitimately good imo, and BvS was okay mostly, although Supes was clearly the worst part of it. But the fact that they were doing the whole thing as a sequel to Man of Steel really held them back. General Zod was SO bad in that one, and Kevin Costner pretty much proved how over his career is. Marvel had little trouble abandoning the two Hulk movies and just starting the Avengers over with a different Hulk; DC should have pulled the plug on MoS likewise.
If they ever do another Supes movie, I hope theyāll title it āMan of Tomorrowā, and give us a character more akin to Samaritan from Busiekās Astro City setting, who is clearly a Superman expy who comes from Earthās future to try and ensure it happens. Instead of the weird organic technology thing Snyder did with Krypton, just make it an Earth-like planet, several thousand years ahead in technology, and have Kal-El show up with a mission to ensure Earth avoids the mistakes that eventually led to Kryptonās destruction.
I tend to be a bit on the obscure side with my tastes, not because Iām a hipster or anything, but just because I get tired very quickly of the more over-exposed heroes, and like seeing something different. (The fact that SOTM doesnāt push the Freedom Five too hard, and lets most of the other 25-odd heroes have at least a vaguely comparable degree of the spotlight, is a big piece of why I like SOTM so much, compared to several other superhero game franchises.)
My single favorite superhero of all is John Jones, the Manhunter from Mars; telepathy plus shapeshifting alone is godlike, and he can pretty much make Batman look like an amateur at the detective game, while also having Supermanās entire powerset, balanced by a weakness thatās far more likely to come up than āmeteor rocksā, as Smallville put it.
Other than that, my DC favorites are Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Power Girl, Batman and Superman in pretty much that order, with an honorable mention for Shazam, mostly because of the excellent 2019 movie about him (this and the two Wonder Woman movies are the flipside of the Man of Steel problem). I also like some of the oddball offshoots of the main DCU, such as the Doom Patrol, John Constantine, the Metal Men, and above all the Neil Gaiman version of the Sandman. Iām probably forgetting a couple others who I also enjoy when they show up, members of the Justice Society or the Legion of Superheroes or something, but DC really likes to lean on their heavy hitters, without the degree of balance Marvel tries to have (in the comics at least; the whole sold-off-the-movie-rights debacle kinda forced the MCU to do things a little more DC-style).
Marvel-wise, I think Hulk is far and away the most uniquely important single character they have, the only one that isnāt very clearly outshone by DCās pantheon. Spiderman is probably one of the runners-up, and the Fantastic Four as a unit also qualify, while being more to my preference even than Hulk (The Thing in particular is one of my favorite Marvel characters, with Johnny as runner up). I didnāt really care about Iron Man until the movie, and heās still not one of my very favorites; I have more of a personal fondness for Doctor Strange, and I think Captain America beats Iron Man in both general popularity and my personal fondness. But above all others, except maybe Hulk, what I think Marvel gave the superhero world is not a single hero but a whole race of them, the X-Men. I go for ensemble pieces far more than for single hero stories, and the soap opera dynamics among Xavierās merry mutants are endlessly fascinating to me. My favorites among the group are pretty definitely Storm, Professor X, and Gambit (especially when paired with Rogue, who is less interesting by herself). Again, my fondness for the more obscure characters comes up a lot here, with some of the really bizarre mutants like Maggot and Dust being particularly notable to me.
Among heroes who I think are popular but I donāt really care about them, I think the Arrow TV show has probably given Oliver Queen a huge boost, but aside from his buddy-cop period with the Green Lantern (who is clearly a far more powerful and larger scope hero, who is out of place operating on Green Arrowās level, just as Batman has always seemed like an odd inclusion in the JLA), I really donāt particularly find him impressive. Black Canary interests me much more. Marvel likewise has a number of their characters bolstered by movies, with Deadpool topping the list of those I donāt like very much, and the various Captains and Miszess Marvels being the ones I donāt care about at all. Mar-Vell was barely interesting to me when he was Rick Jones, the former kid sidekick of the Hulk; Monica Rambeau was alright, but suffered an unfortunate costume overlap with DC villain turned rapist Doctor Light, so that may have been a factor in her sorta just fading away. But Carol Danvers? Complete snore-fest; Iām pretty sure the continuity I imprinted upon was the one in which Carol was calling herself Miss or Miz Marvel, and Mystique ordered a then-criminal Rogue to drain Carol to death, gaining her speed and flight powers permanently. This might only have been true in a cartoon or something, but it was the version I thought best, since Rogue was much more interesting than Carol. Now, for whatever reason, Carol is back and calling herself Captain, while the Miss Marvel name belongs to a ridiculous meme of an Inhuman named Kamala Khan, who I know almost nothing about, but basically everything Iāve heard is that sheās terribly written for the sole purpose of pandering to audiences that really werenāt interested in reading comics, up until the comics were changed to try and appeal to them. Maybe thatās a reductive way to put it, but the bottom line is that Iāve been given no reason to care about this character.
Oh boy, Blackest Night was my on ramp to comics, and I really fell in love with Barry Allen there, and as I got deeper I became a huge fan of Nightwing. Over on the Marvel side Iām a huge fan of Gwenpool. Iām currently in a spot with Sentinels where nothing else can hold a candle to these characters in my ADHD hyperfixation shrouded eyes though, and itās just impossible for me to pic a real favorite out of that lineup, though if you held a gun to my head about it Iād say Tachyon
I wasnāt aware of those two until now, but yeah, they would be pretty bad too.
Yep, that mightāve improved the other movies considerably.
Yeah, I guess so. I didnāt like how the JLA was losing in the final battle with that wolf guy, but then Superman showed up and they easily won. Also, Aquaman was way too much of a tough guy, in my opinion, the portrayal of The Flash just seemed off somehow, and the Martian Manhunter (well, in the version I watched), Green Lantern, and Green Arrow were entirely absent. Anyway, thatās a topic thatās neither here nor there.
That sounds like a promising, interesting, and different plot!
Itās always good to hear that folks like what is probably(?) the least well-known member of the JLA. (I still donāt like that DC replaced him with Cyborg in some continuities . . . )
Wait, do you just like Jāonn because heās powerful?
Yeah, the Hulkās good, if heās written with the Hulk-Bruce Banner dichotomy-duality.
I can agree on that.
No, I think I vaguely recall that happening in a comic continuity.
QotD #185 Reply: Most Popular? Definitely Legacy. ; ) (What? I never said " . . . in this Universe.") Okay, fine. In our reality, like I said above, I think Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man were the most popular. In what order? I dunno. However, after the MCU, Stark may also be up there somewhere.
As for favourites, as I have said numerous times before, I donāt have one favourite. But, Iām still human, so of course I do like some Heroes more than others.
From DC, in the Justice League I like Superman, Batman, The Flash (Jay Garrick & Barry Allen), Green Lantern (Alan Scott & Hal Jordan), The Martian Manhunter, Aquaman, and Green Arrow, and some of their lesser known members, such as Zatanna and the Atom. Iām not very familiar with most of the JSA, but I do like Doctor Fate and Sandman (Wesley Dodds, not Gaimanās Singular Entity of Sleep). I like the Legion of Super-Heroes, but I donāt really like any members more than others. I also like John Constantine and the old obscure Detective Comics characters Slam Bradley and Pow-Wow Smith.
As for Marvel, of the Avengers I like Thor, Ant-Man, and Captain America. Like the Justifier, I like the Fantastic Four as a group. Individually I like Mister Fantastic (because SCIENCE!). Of the X-Men I like the Professor himself, Cyclops, Banshee, and Jean Grey/Marvel Girl. I also like Doc Strange and the Silver Surfer. Edit: and Machine Man.
Question of the Day #186: What Science Fiction gadget(s) do you think weāll actually invent?
No, although it doesnāt hurt. I mostly like him because he does the āalien among usā thing very well (see also Tempest). And I feel kinda bad for him because heās usually stuck playing team radio operator for the JLA, so I get really into the rare stories that actually focus on him.
Writers of Hulk comics seem to have one of two problems. Either they write the Hulk as a moronic toddler with super-strength whoās as boring to read as baby food is to eat (see also the Ang Lee Hulk movie), or they do a bunch of weird cloak-and-dagger stuff where military spy-guys are all conspiring to try and figure out where the Hulk is and what heās doing, and he hardly even shows up on the page (see also the MCU Hulk movie).
Ha! You want ālesser knownā, Iāll see your Zatanna and raise you a Zaurielā¦Thereās also Major Disaster, although he doesnāt start with Aā¦oh wait, I almost forgot Aztek! And thereās also āFaithā, but I donāt even know what her deal was supposed to be. Pretty sure ALL of these were invented by Grant Morrison, and whatās neat is that he managed to throw all these new weirdoes of his into the mix while still doing adequate justice to the existing League members. The manās a bleeding lunatic, but he does good work.
Doctor Fate very specifically weirds me out in the video game āInjustice: Gods Among Usā, because they gave him a voice like a robot, which seems really odd for a magician. The most memorable JSA members to me are Hawkgirl (and sometimes Hawkman, but heās more of a cliche when he shows up at all, sheās got more of a character going on), Mister Terrific (weird Batman-esque genius inventor), and of course Power Girl. My single favorite story involving them was a JLA/JSA crossover where seven heroes got possessed by the Deadly Sins from Shazamās Rock of Eternity. Naturally, PG got Lustā¦
Saturn Girl and Braniac-5 are the only ones that really stand out to me; the characters are intentionally designed to be very one-note and generic seeming, since the thing theyāre doing is basically putting on a uniform and joining a fraternity/sorority/other whatchamacallit. Like I said before, I enjoy ensemble books; X-Men is better than Legion because the characters are more distinctive, but itās a similar effect either way.
I know Slam Bradley, but Iāve never heard of the other one. Iām guessing heās a somewhat offensive Native American stereotype by modern standards? No judgment if thatās true and you still like him anyway. I for one got a HUGE kick out of the moment in Grant Morrisonās JLA run where Manitou Raven, the prehistoric shaman whoād been played entirely straight as the teamās magical specialist for months, suddenly said āInuk-chuk!ā and turned out to have been the cringeworthy Superfriends cartoonās āIndian Chiefā (actual name of the character, to tell you how much effort they put into him) all along. You can make something brilliant out of something awful, so we should never be afraid to acknowledge our industryās past, even if it makes us feel uncomfortable now.
Well the Japanese have invented Universal Translators, so I donāt know if I can count that. Overall, it seems clear that our ingenuity is maximized when applied to a subject such as communication or medicine, something that triggers our humanitarian instinct (and is held back when it also triggers our materialistic greed instinct, which is why cel phones are so expensive and why medical insurance is a nightmare, but the first part is why those technologies exist at all). So if itās technologically feasible to do some sort of faster-than-light communication, weāll figure that out a lot more easily than we will the process of actually transporting things from planet to planet. And medical technology is a crapshoot in terms of what could happen; weāre already 3D-printing replacement organs, so itās hard for sci-fi to do much thatās beyond our current stage. The most unrealistic thing about Doctor Crusher or Bashirās or Phloxās sickbays is not the fact that they have the ability to fix any disease or injury (unless the plot of the week says otherwise), itās the fact that the doctor just does it, without anybody getting a bill afterward.
Got cut off, so hereās the last/first part I wanted to respond to.
Supes is the team heavy; Steppenwolf is effectively a Progeny-level threat, so if you imagine that the Superman player couldnāt draw any of the cards he needed to participate usefully in the threat, youād get a similar effect. Heās on H=5 and youāve only got 4 heroes, youāre going to have a bad time, but then someone playing a top-tier hero like Grandpa Legacy suddenly gets their Legacy Ring or Final Evolution or whatever else theyāve been missing, and the whole battle swings.
Oh I loved that about him. The lasso scene cracks me up every time.
Agreed, they were trying a little too hard with him, making him the token Millenial with a bunch of awkward humor that didnāt land for me, and going out of his way to mention that heās Jewish for no real reason. Itād have been way better if they could have gotten Grant Gustin from the TV show Flash to just play his character in the movie, but of course the lawyers say no. (āThe Lawyersā needs to be a difficulty 5 villain deck so that all the Sentinels can beat up on them, even though theyāll still lose.)
I didnāt know Green Arrow had ever been in the JLA. Green Lanternās absence was due to the poor performance of the 2011 movie (which I for one did think was okay, but I get why a lot of people didnāt). They did at least have a cameo showing an alien GL in the historical battle, along with supposedly also having all the gods from the Wonder Woman movie, although I couldnāt recognize any of them except maybe Ares for a split second.
My last comment about JLA is that Cyborg was absolutely perfect, and Iām really sad that his solo movie never happened. I wouldnāt necessarily see him as a replacement for Jāonn, but if that was the direction they went, Iām okay with it. As far as āblack representationā goes, whatever you think of that topic, having a real black dude as one of the heroes is definitely preferable to having a Martian just choose to appear as a black dude, which is the way at least TWO other franchises I can think of have gone with it.
I tip my hat to your superior knowledge of obscurity, my good sir.
Oh yeah, I forgot about the Hawks and Mister Terrific. I suppose I like them too.
True. I think I would be challenged to assign any of them any personality traits.
Gee, I donāt know. Iām fairly bad at judging if portrayals of minority character are offensive or not. I donāt think he is, but then again I could be entirely wrong. His gimmick was trying to solve conflicts peacefully, which I donāt think is a Native American stereotype, but I could be wrong on that too.
Who ever said you donāt learn something new every day?
Yeah, I guess that makes sense.
Iām not saying tough guy Aquaman is a bad character, just that itās not at all true to his classic comic book rendition.
I 100% agree.
Oh, he definitely was. Ollie joined the League in JLA#4 in '61, a year after the team formed in The Brave & the Bold#28. He was the first non-founding member to join. Sadly, though, I donāt think the Emerald Archer features in many adaptations or reboots of the team, because some audience might think him too similar to the Dark Knight.
Oh, definitely.
QotD #186 Reply: Definitely not anti-gravity, teleportation, or laser-swords, because Iām pretty sure those break some laws of physics. If we ever build a time machine, itāll probably be something like this. Iāll put my money on some relatively likely options: robits and nanotech.
Question of the Day #187: If you dyed your hair, what colour would you dye it?
Well pretty much everyone seems to regard classic Aquaman as a joke; aside entirely from whether succumbing to that trap would have ruined a movieās public launch and cost the company millions of dollars, I also think it would have been viewed badly just in terms of the characterās reception among fans. I personally would prefer a version of Aquaman who was about 75% of the way from Super-Friends fish-telepathy version toward Momoaman; the latter is a little too much of an attitudebro for my taste, so Iād dial down his 'tude and the chip on his shoulder, but still make him a fairly Cable-esque hardass kind of a character, because I think thatās what you have to do in order to make him work in the JLA. Batman is the only other character in the league that isnāt a shining idealist, and Aquaman is too low-powered to work as yet another of those; heās just going to end up in the shadow of Supes and Wondy. But heās so inherently different from Batman on the surface of things that, even if you make him a little grimdark, he isnāt going to feel redundant with Bats at all.
To me, Aquaman is the character who will die if heās out of water for 24 hoursā¦and at the 23 hours and 45 minutes mark, heās going to be in the middle of the desert, stalking a bad guy down to the absolute wire, doing everything he has to do to accomplish his heroic mission, regardless of the cost. He has to have a vulnerability, not the way Supes does because heās too powerful otherwise, but rather to show him being able to overcome it through sheer force of will.
187 answer: I dunno, a couple of streaks of green perhaps. I think I seriously considered dying my hair when i was in my 20s, but I donāt remember what I had in mind, and I probably wouldnāt want it now.
I think Iād say my ideal Aquaman is neither heavily Superfriends flavor nor badass muscle-dude. The Arthur Curry I prefer is a leader, a real King of the Seven Seas.
I wouldnāt say that. Barry Allen, GL, the Manhunter from Mars, and Green Arrow are Heroes for sure, but none of them strike me as particularly idealistic.
I would argue that Aquaman isnāt very low-powered. Heās certainly at least as powerful as WW. To quote his page on the official DC website . . .
The main problem is that Aquaman just works pretty poorly in a team setting. Heās very powerful under the waves, but above them, not so much.
Absolutely. But he doesnāt have to be this gruff, tattooed, musclebound dude to do that.
Finally, my vision of Aquaman is pretty accurately exemplified by this quote from him from Kingdom Come:
QotD #187 Reply: Probably white or greay [sic].
Question of the Day #188: Do you think the continual advancement of technology will eventually lead to a dystopia or a utopia, or something in betwixt?
The Lantern is literally a shining beacon of order in the darkness of the cosmos, Flash routinely interacts with a not-incredibly-bleak future, thereby proving at least that the world will survive, and while Jāonn does have a tragic past that colors his worldview somewhat, he also has a power suite very similar to Superman and thus feels somewhat like that kind of soaring heroic ideal, just not as much so. Iāll give you Arrow, he does have a lesser version of Batmanās shtick going on, but like Iāve said before I tend to forget he was actually in the JLA.
Iām not saying heās incredibly weak, but when heās compared to Wondyās amazing strength, Flashās amazing speed, Supermanās amazing both of those, and even Batmanās amazing wealth, itās a bit of a struggle to Justify why heās in the same tier. Itās like being the fighter in a high level DnD party⦠sure you can cut a triceratops in half with two chops of your axe, but your party cleric can call down a celestial tacnuke to burn the trike to cinders, the druid can polymorph the trike into a newt, and the wizard can teleport the trike to the Elemental Plane of Flaming Radioactive Acid, so you might feel a little outclassed. And so much of Aquaman as a character is tied up with the sea, which most human beings really donāt care about much. Itād be enough of a struggle to get readers interested in Forestman or Desertman, and people can find environments like that just by walking or driving⦠the sea is even more remote, and to most people itās just this empty inhospitable place where they canāt go and they wouldnāt find anything if they did. Writers trying to make the ocean interesting, so that weāll care about the guy who lives there, are just starting at a disadvantage compared to a hero who operates in cities which are full of ordinary, recognizable people.
Exactly. Itād be hard to make people care about SiberiaMan, or MoonMan who lives on the Moon and protects a city full of moon people who arenāt very person-like by our standards. The JLA are the greatest heroes in the world, and heās definitely on the same level as them, but itās like being in a League of Kings, where youāve got the kings of England and Russia and Germany and Spain, and Aquaman is like the king of Serbia or Latvia or something⦠heās just not going to feel quite as regal as his peers.
The tattoos are weird, Iāll give you that. But he absolutely should be muscular, if somewhat streamlined. The long hair is kinda impractical, but you could say the same about Wonder Woman.
That is a very good quote, for sure.
The technology itself has the potential to solve all of our problems, but the research to create the technology is funded at the sufferance of the worldās multi-billionaire corporations, and their selfish short-sightedness will probably doom us to dystopia long before they invent the devices which make utopia possible. It is the fundamental nature of human behavior which must change first, and then technology can take us the rest of the way. Right now all our amazing technology can manage to do is indulge the laziness and cowardice of the many; our willingness to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of some better is what we need to advance in, not just our skill in gadget building. Or we could just make some AI āchildrenā and then remove our deeply flawed selves from the equation, in the hopes that the robots can do personhood better than a bunch of upjumped monkeys can manage it.
Yeah, definitely dystopia. The minority people in power are predominantly too greedy / self-centered to be willing to make the āsacrificesā to help the majority of people without.
Yeah, sorry about neglecting my Duty as Questioneer like that. Iāve been fairly busy lately.
Iāve always felt that it was a pretty raw deal that the Flash gets one power, and then Supes also has that power. No other JLAer is completely overshadowed by the Big Blue Boy Scout like that.
Heās the King of Atlantis and the Seven Seas. Iām pretty sure all the lost treasures of the worldās oceans plus the wealth of an entire highly advanced Magi-Tech nation outweighs that of a billionaire CEO. Admittedly, Aquaman doesnāt really use that wealth for much . . .
Yeah, this right here is the real root of the problem.
Yeah, but he should also wear a shirt.
QotD #188 Reply: I donāt think technology needs to get any more advanced for us to have a dystopia. I suppose the same is somewhat true for a utopia, but like others have said, itās mostly about who controls the technology.
Question of the Day #189: If your house got destroyed in a tragic gerbil stampede, would you rather live in a large 19th-Century Galleon or a large 20th-Century Zeppelin?