[jw_6179]

figuratively the last place on Earth to get this movie

FTFY, since you know, most of us aren't as plugged into the comic/movie industry as you guys are and just watch whatever comes to local theaters.

And yeah, I will change your literal to figurative. Because if you're using the word for its opposite intended purpose, then it has no purpose. It's become a fluff word and a verbal pause. You've taken a word with a very clear meaning, and then reduced it to simply being a word to generically emphasize something. You might as well say "like... totally" instead.

It's hilarious kenzo complains about filler words when he starts his pissy little temper tantrum with one.

"Since you know," "And yeah," aren't verbal pauses that are unnecessary in written form?

[kenzo]

Good points I guess, but at least I'm not bastardizing words to do so? Also, sarcastic quips != pissy tempertantrum, but like, I'm pretty used to being stuffed with straw by you on these forums.

[Toby]

Guys don't worry, Ryan and Brock bitch about 3D for the first half of the podcast before we even get to start the Avengers talk...

[DukeTogo]

Great discussion on this week's episode, but Ryan's DC fanboy meltdown was fucking extraordinary. His sheer disgust with people who have the gall not to like Man of Steel was next level. Other key points were a rabid apologist for grimdark DC movies complaining about too many jokes, Man of Steel's biggest supporter lamenting time "wasted" showing heroes actually rescuing people and the guy who gets morally offended by people saying that the Superman in MoS didn't act like Superman insisting hat AoE's Ultron wasn't Ultron.

Ryan, I hardly every agree with your opinions, but damn if you don't entertain me when you get worked up about them. You, sir, are a champion.

[kenzo]

Expert levels of backhanded complements, Mr Togo!

People who don't like MoS:

Spoiler: show

[Master Higgins]

Great discussion on this week's episode, but Ryan's DC fanboy meltdown was fucking extraordinary. His sheer disgust with people who have the gall not to like Man of Steel was next level. Other key points were a rabid apologist for grimdark DC movies complaining about too many jokes, Man of Steel's biggest supporter lamenting time "wasted" showing heroes actually rescuing people and the guy who gets morally offended by people saying that the Superman in MoS didn't act like Superman insisting hat AoE's Ultron wasn't Ultron.

Ryan, I hardly every agree with your opinions, but damn if you don't entertain me when you get worked up about them. You, sir, are a champion.

I saw the movie again last night in 2D, and I'll totally admit I liked it a lot more. I still think it's a bit too jokey, and there's some things that I still don't like as much, but I think the 3D really threw me off. I've got more to say about the movie, we'll probably talk more about it next episode.

That said, I had no less than 3 people turn to me after the movie last night and say "So, they're really trying to over-compensate and not get compared to Man of Steel with all the rescuing of people, huh?" It's painfully obvious that they knew the destruction level was as bad as MoS, and had to make it look like no one gets hurt, despite tens of thousands of people obviously dying.

[Vyria]

You realize you're complaining about super-heroes doing super-hero things and saving people. In a super-hero movie.
Don't blame Marvel, just because Man of Steel gave you such impossibly low expectations of super-hero conduct.

[CaptainMajor]

Hi,

I've been listening for a while, and after finally getting a chance to see Avengers 2 I got around to listening to the spoiler episode.

In reference to Ryan's conversation comparing Man of Steel to Avengers, I see a lot of others expressing similar sentiment, but I feel compelled to include my own opinion. Man of Steel wasn't a bad movie, it was just not a good Superman movie. Superman is a character that's about pure selflessness; he's the primary superhero of the DC universe because he is the golden child, who never does wrong, always thinks of others, always sacrifices for the greater good. In Man of Steel, Kal-El doesn't display these properties. He's raised by Pa Kent to hide in the shadows, to fight his impulses to do good and protect people,and is punished as a kid for doing so. When the Smallville fight begins, he doesn't even think about moving it literally a few seconds flight into a farm area, but stands his ground in downtown Smallville, letting the fight level most of the town. And yes, when the Metropolis fight begins, they don't show him or the military trying to evacuate anyone. You're right, Perry tells his workers to get out. In fact until the final fight, the only time I recall seeing Superman save anyone in the Metropolis battle is Lois. With virtually any other character, it would have been fine. But when you're dealing with the Dudliest of Doo-Rights, a character who in every other movie and television portrayal has been shown tirelessly making things harder on himself to keep the fights from spilling onto others, it was a disappointment. I could deal with Cyber-Pandora Krypton, with the fact it was basically a fully adult superboy story, with nearly complete ignoring of the Superman family characters and lack of development of any of them if we at least got Superman being selfless, but we didn't. So, Man of Steel did fall flat for me on the front, and obviously I'm in the camp that prefers to see heroes rescuing people in movies than just over the top destruction.

Anyway, keep up the fun!

[CrossXhunteR]

Liquid, Kenzo, please respond.

[LiQuid]

I just got done bangaranging the shit out of DarthEnder in the other thread, I don't feel like rehashing all of it again here. People are welcome to think MoS sucks for whatever dumb reason they can come up with. I personally think it's the best Superman movie ever made because it ignores all the stupid shit that makes Superman lame as fuck. No corny ass John Williams score while he flies around in spandex POW SOCK BAM'ing bad guys with a twinkly smile.

At the end of the day, it was an exciting movie that was great to look at. If you're so buttmad that it also features a little wanton destruction that you can't enjoy a bunch of rad sci fi nonsense and ridiculous Dragonball fights, then I feel kind of bad for you, because that kind of shit was in TOP FORM in MoS and that stuff blew the pants off anything ever seen in a Marvel superhero movie which are basically paint by numbers at this point.

[LiQuid]

The fact that Avengers 2 knee jerked a bunch of shoehorned SAVE TEH CIVILLINZ! scenes into the movie after not giving half a fuuuuuuuuuuck in the first movie after all the fake outrage MoS received is hysterical to me.

[Vyria]

You guys are ridiculous. If the first Avengers had come out after MoS, you'd be complaining that Iron Man didn't just let the nuke blow up New York.

[kenzo]

I really don't care if people didn't like the movie, I don't care if they liked other versions of Superman better either. What gets me is the assertion that this is somehow the WRONG way, objectively, of how to do Superman. Superman is just an idea - an idea that's taken several different forms over the what, 75 years the character has been around? Superman's been a Commie-lapdog and a god damned Nazi before. He can be anything. My favorite version of Superman? The one from Secret Identity whose character is a million times more selfish and out of character than anything in MoS. You don't like this version of Superman? That's fine! Not everything can be for everyone. It's OK to say, "I don't like this, this wasn't for me." It's another thing to be like "This is the wrong way, and you're an idiot if you liked it."

[Vyria]

Superman's bedrock trait, the thing that makes him Superman, the idea that created him, is that his entire purpose is protecting people. You can make a story where Superman does the right thing, but can't save everyone. Hitman #34 may be the best Superman story ever written, and is about his remorse over fucking up. This the failed shuttle rescue does not immediately end with him making out with Lois Lane. If you want to tell that story, go ahead. That's not the story MoS wanted to tell. The centerpiece of that story was about two super powered guys full of rage leveling a city with no remorse. Superman gets upset because he has to break some moral code, but he doesn't give a fuuuuuuuck about leveling the city. If Garth Ennis of all people still gets that Superman is about protecting people and embodying goodness, then maybe you should be able to get it to.

Getting past all the butthurt over MoS, Avengers: AoU was good. Character motivations are weak, the romance sublot felt forced, and they probably needed like another 20 minutes to the runtime just to let the existing content breathe more. Aside from those issues I think it's a massive improvement over the first Avengers. We get more time getting to know each character, including that awesome party scene. Hawkeye actually has stuff to do. While I long ago wrote off movie Hawkeye being nothing like Fraction Hawkeye, his pep talk with Scarlet Witch and then talking to himself after Quicksilver zooms off really felt like nods to Fraction's style. I really dislike Whedon most of the time, which turned me off a bit for the first Avengers. Hearing people complain about Whedonisms in this movie is weird to me since I found them much more tolerable. I think because the Witty Whedon Quips only showed up in battle scenes, where as in the first Avengers (and everything else he touches) it's the only way people are able to talk to each other. AoU was also a slight improvement in cinematography on the first, but not by a lot. Whedon is just a really boring director. Hulk in the Quinnjet is the only remotely interesting shot I can remember and it's not even a complex or innovative one. It was just framed really well. I'm really glad to be done with Whedon, especially after he basically just ignored all the post Avengers character development just because it happened in movies he didn't direct.

I wasn't really sold on Spader as Ultron since he wasn't a scary robot, even though I love Spader. When they talked it the tanker scene and it finally clicked he was just supposed to be Evil Tony Stark, I realized the Spader casting was genius. Also, tons of really great fodder for all the Steve/Tony shippers on tumblr. I really hope Civil War is actually just the New Avengers so they can get some screen time before we inevitably go back to the main cast for Infinity War.

Finally, someone decided to change the lighting on that picture of the awful looking Suicide Squad cast so you can see them better.

This lets you see a lot more detail on these goobers. Deadshot looks neat with the mask so he's not just some paintball enthusiast. Flag and Slipknot look like generic PMC/Private Security, which is fine but boring. Everyone else looks pretty dumb. Pretty excited for these few vibrant colors to disappear again once the movie is out and gets a near monochrome color wash like MoS.

[LiQuid]

Superman's bedrock trait, the thing that makes him Superman, the idea that created him, is that his entire purpose is protecting people.

What a load of horseshit fucking fanboy drivel. Superman was conceived as a villian and went thru many iterations before he became the intergalactic boyscout he's mostly known as today.

Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, then students at Cleveland's Glenville High School, first conceived Superman as a bald telepathic villain bent on world domination

Then he spent time as a liberal, social justice reformer.

An influence on early Superman stories is the context of the Great Depression. The left-leaning perspective of creators Shuster and Siegel is reflected in early storylines. Superman took on the role of social activist, fighting crooked businessmen and politicians and demolishing run-down tenements.

What a beacon of light!

It doesn't matter how this shit started. It has been iterated on and retold so many times that there's no limit to the amount of artistic license that can be taken in the telling of a Superman story, because he's literally just a martian that came to Earth and got superpowers. A Superman story isn't beholden to follow any specific set of ideals.

[Vyria]

You're being super disingenuous there. The character we now know as Superman had its genesis because Jerry Siegel's dad got shot in a robbery, and he imagined a bulletproof man that could have saved his father. You say "what a beacon of light!" sarcastically but corrupt politicians and business men were real life supervillains of the depression era and those comics are about protecting and saving the poor from oppression. Like I said, if Garth Ennis can get what Superman is about, anyone can. You're just being willfully ignorant of nearly eight decades of comics history.

[LiQuid]

That's all good and quaint. Man of Steel's superman saved me from the doldrums of samey, banal Marvel superhero movies, which are real life supervillains of the modern era. The movie saved me from boredom.

[DarthEnder]

Oh here it is.

I did listen to this weeks Comics Conspiracy and listened to Higgins claim that AoU was overcompensating for MoS's shortcomings and I couldn't disagree more. I think it's compensating the exact right amount. It shows the heroes actually being heroes, instead of just the guys that punch the villain.

That's all good and quaint. Man of Steel's superman saved me from the doldrums of samey, banal Marvel superhero movies, which are real life supervillains of the modern era. The movie saved me from boredom.

That's all well and good. But none of the things you liked about this movie are actually what Superman was about. So they could have just made this movie about some other similar superhero, pleased you just as well, and not pissed off Superman fans in the process.

I mean, shit, MoS could have been Hancock 2 and you would have loved it just as much.

[LiQuid]

How is that relevant? I wouldn't even have watched it if it was Hancock 2.

[Vyria]

The other part of that suggestion is that you would have watched the first Hancock if he was called and looked like Superman.

[DukeTogo]

I saw the movie again last night in 2D, and I'll totally admit I liked it a lot more. I still think it's a bit too jokey, and there's some things that I still don't like as much, but I think the 3D really threw me off. I've got more to say about the movie, we'll probably talk more about it next episode.

That said, I had no less than 3 people turn to me after the movie last night and say "So, they're really trying to over-compensate and not get compared to Man of Steel with all the rescuing of people, huh?" It's painfully obvious that they knew the destruction level was as bad as MoS, and had to make it look like no one gets hurt, despite tens of thousands of people obviously dying.

Are these people who have perhaps heard you rant a time or two about how dumb the people who level these complaints against Man of Steel are? I kid. I kid.

In any event, I really dug what they did in Age of Ulton. To me, saving the civilians presented a good example of what heroes should do, created moments for some of the lesser-powered guys to shine and avoided the monotony of dudes just punching each other for the entire third act.

I'm sure there were massive casualties during the final battle, which is fine. Things should have stakes. That said, they went out of their way to show that saving the lives of randoms (and not just named characters) was important to our heroes. They even had Cap arguing that blowing up the city to save the rest of the world wasn't a good enough solution. That, and the "Language" joke were perfect notes to play for Captain America.

For me, I guess it boils down to the Marvel movies seeming to be based on classic characterizations that I enjoy, while MoS was going for something different. I feel like you're predisposed to giving extra leeway to DC properties because of longstanding affection for the characters. I'd love to be on board for the DC movies, but I've yet to see anything that hooks me.

Also, the claim that Marvel movies are "samey" is straight up bullshit. They're not auteur pieces by any means, but each has its unique flourishes, themes and tones. To claim this is akin to saying, "All DC movies are joyless slogs that are embarrassed of their superhero main characters."

[DarthEnder]

Yeah, I really enjoy the jokey-ness of the Marvel movies. And it's absence is one of the only things I didn't like about Daredevil.

But then, I've always been a huge fan of Joss Whedon's dialog and humor.

[meDotJS]

The fact that Avengers 2 knee jerked a bunch of shoehorned SAVE TEH CIVILLINZ! scenes into the movie after not giving half a fuuuuuuuuuuck in the first movie after all the fake outrage MoS received is hysterical to me.

Okay, I'm fine with MoS, but this is bullshit. The only time they really had in the first Avengers movie to show off the Avengers being all hero-like was during the battle over NYC, at which point they did do shit like have Black Widow and Hawkeye get people off a bus or Captain America save some hostages in a bank. Most of the other action though was either in the middle of nowhere or on a SHIELD base/ship. Well there was the Germany stuff but that wasn't really a good opportunity because nothing really happened there.

[CrossXhunteR]

The fights were similar in destruction, but not in content. One was a fight between two unstoppable superhumans. The other was a team of guys against an arguably weak army.

[jw_6179]

The only "jokey" thing from Age of Ultron that bugged me too much -- and it's a minor quibble, but it stood out like a sore thumb -- was when Black Widow was riding her motorcycle through a crowded area, and was saying little quips that felt like badly integrated ADR. She tells people on the sidewalk "Beep beep". You know what else you can go "beep beep" with on a motorcycle, and people would actually hear as you plow through them at 35 MPH? The fucking horn.

It's a nit-pick but that just made me groan. The ADR made it stand out more (While technically flawlessly integrated, I am sure, the way she spoke it was pretty clear that she was in a sound studio and not riding a motorcycle.)

[Master Higgins]

LISTEN TO THE LATEST EPISODE: The Comic Conspiracy — Episode 208 (2015-05-05)
This week, we discuss our new opinions on Avengers: Age of Ultron, Gotham Season One finale, Batman #40, Superman #40, Justice League #40, remembering to turn on Toby's microphone, Suicide Squad cast reveal, Free Comic Book Day, and Secret Wars #1 thoughts. Starring Ryan Higgins, Brock Sager, and Toby Sidler.
Running Time: 1h 15m 49s

[LiQuid]

Hope the Avengers talk is short. Why the fuck can't nerds just go see movies in the theaters one time and then call it a fucking day? You idiots really need to rewatch a movie a day after seeing it for the first time? Such stupid consumerism.

[Toby]

What the heck, I was actually looking forward to the Avenger re-talk. Thought we didn't get to it, little did I know Higgins pulled a fast one on me!

There probably be even more Avenger talk once Bryce is back. Sorry Liquid. =)

[LiQuid]

I mean at least there'd be Bryce...

[Vyria]

Thanks for using my question!

I stopped reading Hickman's Avengers a few issues in because I thought it was boring. From that exposure I thought everyone was just willfully refusing to understand what was going on.

Reading Secret Wars #1, I now know I was wrong. That was an incomprehensible pile of nonsense. I understand the basic premise of universes colliding, but how is launching a conventional military attack on each other supposed to stop that? It cuts back and forth between all three sides without making any effort to establish differentiating sense of place for any of them. The action scenes are terribly scripted and illustrated in a way that you can't actually tell what, if anything, is going on aside from people floating around and things exploding. What a mess.

On the other hand, Unbeatable Squirrel Girl continues to be the best comic currently being published. I picked up Guardians Team Up #5 since 4 was cute and I like the pet Avengers. The interior art was neat, but nothing actually happens in that comic aside from Rocket talking about beer and it was pretty boring.

I also picked up Justice League #40 at Ryan's behest and that was as good as advertised, but I'm a sucker for anything New Gods related.