Monthly archives: May, 2008

JIM DOOM: A few days ago, you left me a voicemail that said that “I just saw Iron Man, and not to spoil anything, but it’s my favorite movie of all time ever, and it’s the best thing that’s ever been created by mankind, even better than everything.”

Care to elaborate?

DOOM DELUISE: Certainly. Human beings, aka homo sapiens, evolved over many generations from monkeys. Since their development, they’ve come up with many amazing inventions, creations, works of art, etc. The wheel stands out as a good one, for example. The movie, “Iron Man,” starring Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark, is, to date, the greatest accomplishment humans have achieved.

JIM DOOM: By “elaborate,” I meant something more like “Can you offer examples or explanations of what makes you think it’s so great,” as opposed to “Can you just restate ‘the best thing ever in the history of humans’ with different words?”

DOOM DELUISE: Oh, my bad. In that case, I think the movie is probably one of the most, essentially, fun experiences one could possibly ask for from a two-hour movie-going experience. The writing, the acting, the effects, they all come together to form a tight, hilarious, exciting, thrilling movie that, in my opinion, is super solid.

JIM DOOM: I’ll take that.

How much have you read Iron Man comics?

DOOM DELUISE: I read about two dozen in the early 90s. I’ve only since read Iron Man when he’s been involved with big crossovers. No, he’s never been one of my regularly read titles, if that’s what you’re asking. How much have you read?

JIM DOOM: Very very little. I don’t think I bought a single Iron Man comic before it was relaunched in the past couple years. I wonder if being relatively unfamiliar with his history helped me enjoy it more, because I was completely open to whatever backstory they wanted to give him.

I don’t think this movie could’ve worked without the context of the military – industrial complex and war profiteers being so present in modern culture.

They managed to do a great job of making Iron Man a product of the story rather than creating some contrived situation to justify having a superhero fight bad guys.

And I think the absolute best thing about this movie, one of the biggest failings of most superhero movies, is that this film was not ashamed to be a superhero movie. There was no self-deprecatory, “Hey, we’re making a COMIC BOOK movie — isn’t this cute?” nudge-nudge wink-wink self-neutering that happens in so many comic book movies.

All of the humor came naturally through well-defined characters and never at the expense of the story.

I think that, more than anything, allowed this movie to work.

It gave the viewers permission to get emotionally invested in what was happening.

DOOM DELUISE: Most definitely. It also deftly was able to side-step another one of the biggest problems that has plagued previous comic book movies: It never took itself too seriously. When the chips were on the table, and the villain wanted Stark dead, we saw some emotions coming through, but, otherwise, you didn’t have very many scenes of Tony Stark brooding or staring off into the night sky while contemplating his place in the world.

Here, he’s a man of action, and when shit starts going down, he steps up his efforts to stop it.

JIM DOOM: I like that they not only got good actors for this, but they let them act. I think some of the best scenes in the movie were when Robert Downey Jr and Gwyneth Paltrow were just standing a few feet from each other and conversing.

DOOM DELUISE: I agree. And I think that Jeff Bridges owned his role as the Iron Monger.

That scene where his top scientist is telling him that they just don’t have the technology to create this gizmo, and he just screams, “Tony Stark built this in a cave using a bucket of scraps!” I was blown away.

JIM DOOM: Was there anything you didn’t like?

DOOM DELUISE: No.
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I hate when comics cost $3.99.

I especially hate when I buy a $3.99 comic and I feel like I have no choice (within the realm of relative comic reading autonomy). I picked up Giant-Size Avengers / Invaders #1 because I was in a hurry at the comic shop and I didn’t look closely and thought I was buying the first issue of the upcoming 12-part series.

WRONG! Had I looked closer, I would’ve realized I was buying a collection of reprinted Avengers and Invaders stories from the ’60s and ’70s!! And for the most part, I hate comic stories from the ’60s and ’70s, especially thanks to the past few years, in which comics creators have done their best to try to convince the readers that the ’60s and ’70s were something other than hokey crap that was suited only for the seven year olds that bought it!

But as mad as I was at myself for buying the stupid thing, I was even madder at this inanimate heap of centrally stapled 4-color nonsense, and I was not about to let it have victory over me. I was going to read every page, no matter how much I hated it.

Man, it was awesome. The first story, “Endgame!” was from Avengers #71. In that issue, Kang the Conqueror and The Grand-Master are having some kind of 41st century battle by proxy. If Kang wins, he receives mastery over life and death; if The Grand-Master wins, he gets Earth. So Kang somewhat unwittingly plays the role of Earth’s protector, as it’s up to him to choose wisely and ensure victory for himself and the planet.

This issue is included because Kang chooses The Avengers and The Grand-Master chooses the Invaders, setting up what was probably the first clash between the two teams. Most of the action and all of the dialog in this issue is cheesy, but what makes that work is that this battle ends up being the delivery for a moral, as Kang becomes a tragic character who ends up giving up everything he wants in attempt at revenge. The unrealistically larger-than-life behavior of the characters ends up being more than tolerable because of the fact that this is little more than a fable, and you can totally see how a pre-teen would’ve been blown away by this issue and likely read it over and over.
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Ultimate X-Men
Read from #1 (2001) to #93 (2008)

It’s been a long time since Ultimate X-Men has been good. Since Robert Kirkman took over from Brian K. Vaughan a few years ago, the quality of the book has greatly suffered. And that’s coming from a Kirkman-apologist.

Kirkman had a few things going against him, though. He was originally just supposed to fill in while Bryan Singer got his shit together and wrote his Ultimate X-Men story. When Singer crapped out and Kirkman was given “ongoing” status, he was saddled with art teams that changed nearly every issue. See, I told you I was an apologist.

Ultimate X-Men by Robert Kirkman has not been very good, but I kept buying out of a love for Kirkman’s other work and because Ultimate X-Men was just one of those comics I’d always buy out of habit.

Now Kirkman is leaving the title. He’s being replaced by one of the writers from Heroes, a show whose quality has never been discussed on doomkopf.com as far as I can remember. Last fall before the writer’s strike, I realized that I didn’t like Heroes and was watching it out of habit and out of a loyalty to the genre. Sort of like how I don’t like Ultimate X-Men and only buy it out of habit and loyalty to Kirkman. Funny how that worked out, huh?

Dropping Ultimate X-Men also means that I’m probably not ever going to buy another Ultimate comic. I couldn’t stand Ultimate Spider-Man past the first issue. Ultimate Fantastic Four got really boring when Mike Carey took over. And Jeph Loeb and Joe Madureira ruined The Ultimates. I bought Ultimate Six, Ultimate War, Ultimate X4, and the Ultimate Galactus trilogy. But Marvel’s never going to get another Ultimate dollar out of me.

Weird…I’ve never dropped an entire universe before.

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Wow, what a follow-up to last week.

In New Avengers #40, we learn about the Skrull invasion from the Skrull side. Although Princess Veranke loudly criticizes King Dorrek for ignoring the prophecies, he’s quite content, as the Skrull scientists have gathered the genetic information from the kidnapped Illuminati (from the mission depicted in New Avengers: Illuminati #1). Dorrek has Veranke and her followers exiled, as the scientists explain that the biological codes taken from Mr. Fantastic, Blackbolt, Dr. Strange, Namor, Tony Stark and Professor X can be reverse engineered. Veranke awakens on some distant planet and kisses the ground, saying “He loves me,” as the Skrull agents said in Secret Invasion #1.

We then see Reed Richards waking up, surrounded by the Fantastic Four in a hospital room. They tell Reed about a battle with Galactus, which he clearly doesn’t remember, in an effort to gather his recall about Galactus. A nurse gets bored and shoots him, revealing that this is just a Skrull test of their new cloning abilities.

Years later, Galactus is devouring the Skrull Throneworld. Some Skrulls travel to find the exiled princess, now Queen, as seen in the opening pages of SI #1. The Queen assumes her throne and announces the plan to take over Earth as the new Skrull Throneworld, explaining why the Skrulls wish to kill off all the humans — they need to keep Earth intact and inhabitable.

Later, a Skrull scientist explains to the Queen that the DNA samples from the captured Illuminati has allowed their researchers to learn things about humanity, mutant genes and human evolution that not even the humans know, resulting in the creation of a new Super Skrull. “Any human or mutant who we can strip a DNA sample of, we can now completely duplicate their abilities,” he says.
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