Comic Pants Podcast #51
“Loooovvve…. exciting and new….” That’s right, it’s a Love Boat reference… that’s just how we roll. Join Nick Budd, Dave Farabee, Dan Grendell and Randy Lander as we discuss the business of love. At least, as far as comics are concerned.
We’re not talking about romance comics… we’re talking about romance in comics. Specifically, romance in superhero comics, although we’ve got some love for the indies too.
Why married superheroes don’t seem to last, what are some of the best and worst relationships, and whether or not romance is a key component of superhero comics are just a few topics covered in this biggie-sized podcast.
Plus the latest Dave/Randy grudge match and, by popular demand, the introduction of Panteon Comics Audio Theater, featuring Spawn and All-Star Batman and Robin.
As always, commentary is welcomed and encouraged. Let us know what you thought of the podcast, and if you have suggestions for future podcast topics, leave us a comment or write in to the show!
Use the podcast feed buttons on the sidebar to subscribe, listen via the flash player below, or directly download the MP3 here:
I don’t have time to finish the entire podcast right now (I’m at minute 43). I just wanted to say that so far I love it.
Thanks for the dramatic reading of Spawn. Made my morning.
22 Mar 2008 at 8:38 am
QuoteThat Ms. Marvel and her son ‘relationship’ happend in Avengers #200, and was not written by Chris Claremont but by David Michellene (or however his last name is written).
Chris Claremont did however write the follow-up, sort of, in Avengers Annual #10, where Ms. Marvel returns and some stuff of Avengers #200 gets retconned, to make the position of the other Avengers a bit more plausable.
None the less, Avengers #200 is one of the worst issues of any Marvel series ever. Accept for the nice George Perez art, of course.
22 Mar 2008 at 9:32 am
QuoteHi guys, long time reader/listener but first time commentor purey because I was surpised that my personal favourite relationship in comics wasn’t mentioned and that is Wesley Dodds/Dian Belmont in Sandman Mystery Theatre, which I do belive was beautifully writen in that she really had problems accepting the fact he was the Sandman but in the end she did accept him with all her heart, it just feels real and right for those two to be together.
But excellent podcast as always guys!
22 Mar 2008 at 1:46 pm
QuoteI know he’s not the “real” Spider-man but what’s the Panteon’s take on the Spidey/Kitty Pryde relationship they did in Ultimate Spider-man? And now that regular Spider-man is single, would hooking him up with an established character from another series (either temporarily or long term) be a cool idea or a bad idea?
Also Wolverine was just briefly touched upon in relation to Jean/Cyclops. Do you guys think he works better as a swingin single type or would a recurring romantic interest be beneficial to the character? Or should they just avoid romance in Wolverine altogether? Personally I liked how Grant Morrison wrote him as sort of a player with various off camera flings (like with Domino in the annual).
22 Mar 2008 at 2:46 pm
Quotejust me? sounds like chipmunks…(though the web interface, haven’t downloaded it)
22 Mar 2008 at 3:28 pm
QuoteWait, is it possible you missed it? I’m sure that we mentioned them and I know several of us are HUGE fans of that run. Or did we somehow accidentally edit the mention out? Maybe that was when Nick went on his screed about the merits of extremist Rastafarianism.
22 Mar 2008 at 3:37 pm
QuoteI don’t know nuffin’ about the technical stuff, but D3’s posted about this before:
“The chipmunk speed comes from a bug in older versions of flash. Go to Adobe’s flash page to update to the latest version.”
22 Mar 2008 at 3:52 pm
QuoteSpider-man is unmarried becuse Joe wants him that way. No really it’s that simple. If it was an “oh my freaking god I can’t write somebody i can’t idenity with. Tony Stark, Batman, DR strange, the Watcher, Sabertooth. who IDENTIFIES with any of those guys?
22 Mar 2008 at 4:58 pm
QuotePS the Hulk betty sex ABSOLUTELY did happen. Check out the Hulk ground zero trade. Also the last story where he’s grey and turns “merged”
Also grey hulk goinked Marlo
22 Mar 2008 at 5:26 pm
QuoteYeah, but Peter Parker is supposed to be the guy you relate to. The guy who’s just an average schmoe on the bus next to you, going to a job he can’t stand to make rent on his crappy apartment. That’s really a big part of the character’s sell.
Am I the only person in the world who has that “Marvel Weddings” trade paperback?
22 Mar 2008 at 5:30 pm
QuoteJust out of curiosity…why wasn’t comicpants represented at the wondercon podcast panel? Your podcast is way better then any of the other ones on their.
22 Mar 2008 at 5:34 pm
QuoteYeah but for ME (just me I know not many pepole feel this way) Peter Parker Married to a pretty girl he’s always liked was somthing a normal smoe might do but they blew normal smoe is shot straight to HELL by new Avengers. Yes I pathologicly hate New avengers and can’t deny it. (GRIN)
22 Mar 2008 at 5:47 pm
QuoteAre you talking about the chapter in Ground Zero where the Hulk and Betty have their bonding chat? I never interpreted any sex occurring there. Besides, at that point the Hulk was a completely different character from Banner. It would be the same as cheating.
22 Mar 2008 at 7:20 pm
Quoteoh well I did but Hulk REALLY really Did sex with Marlo right?
and for the record Bruce Banner’s wife having sex with Hulk can’t be cheating it can be REALLY icky!
I really CANNOT belive “Son’ O Hulk is getting a monthy. I remember Hulk having sex he may not have but unless I totally misread my fellow fans I don’t think anybody wants to think deeply about Hulk sex. As always I could be wrong.
22 Mar 2008 at 7:57 pm
QuoteHulk-sex reigns supreme in the talkbacks!
Right, so the issue I was remembering when I brought up Betty ‘n’ the Hulk in the previews was a late-era Peter David one. I believe Liam Sharp was the artist. In particular, I think there was a scene of Betty wrapped in a towel and just out of the shower. Hulk was with her and sporting a towel around the waist too, with heavy suggestions that they’d just gotten bi-ZAY. Now it’s possible I may be combining scenes in my memory here, so don’t bust me on all the specifics, but I’m sure it was clear she was having sex with the Hulk at some point in that era.
Dunno where Banner’s intellect figured into the whole thing. I’m pretty sure it was a merged Banner/Hulk, and Hulk was pretty smart.
22 Mar 2008 at 8:16 pm
QuoteBut did the Hulk accidentally kill any civilians while having sex?
22 Mar 2008 at 10:01 pm
QuoteListen, the Hulk I grew up with DOESN’T KILL WHILE HE’S HAVING SEX. Period.
When he’s knocking over buildings? Sure.
But never during sex.
23 Mar 2008 at 12:27 am
QuoteUnless I was distracted when they where mentioned (which is possible) I didn’t hear anything about them which did surpise me as I have noticed the love the series gets here.
23 Mar 2008 at 6:12 am
QuoteThat was me, you selfish bastards! I inspired this awful podcast!
There were a few “smart” girlfriends for Spidey. Gwen was retroactively turned into a smart character (hence her college professor falling for her). There was also Debra Whitman, another science-head, who was smart enough to figure out Peter’s secret identity. There were also several short-term ones.
Arkon the Imperion was another guy who tried to make Storm his queen. And he was bangin’ Thundra.
Could not agree more on the Milla/Daredevil thing. Why can’t Matt be happy for at least a while? It feels like such a quick waste. Oh well, at least it’s still possibly reversible - probably not by Brubaker, but maybe for the next writer.
On Superman/Lois…I really wish DC wouldn’t break them up, because then writers and editors would always have that to point to if people complain about relationships not lasting. “Superman/Lois broke up and you all accepted that, why shouldn’t we break up Luke Cage and Jessica Jones?”
For as much as I like Christos Gage, I think he’s the one to blame for making the Moondragon/Quasar relationship boring due to how he wrote it in the Quasar mini-series. Check back to Annihilation Conquest Prologue, written by Abnett and Lanning, where there’s a little more fun to it.
23 Mar 2008 at 9:49 am
QuoteOther couples I like, now that I’m done with the Podcast:
Usagi and the various girls of Usagi Yojimbo. Some really interesting relationships there. Mariko, the wife of his old rival, whom he has a son he cannot acknowledge with, clearly still has feelings for him. Tomoe, who definitely has feelings for him, but who is pulled away because of her duties. And Chizu, the ninja bad girl whom he’s swapped spit with a few times.
Samaritan and Winged Victory from Astro City. Just one issue, but a great issue that examined how difficult it really would be for two major superheroes to get together, whether due to conflicting schedules or conflicting viewpoints.
Lucifer and Mazikeen. I think the reason I like this one so much is that when Neil Gaiman introduced it in Sandman, Maz was no more than Lucifer’s whore. In the Lucifer series, Carey threw a wrench by having them go against each other, and Maz actually grew into a real, independent character, without punking out Lucifer, and that made their relationship actually meaningful when they got back together. The ending to that relationship was appropriately bittersweet, too.
23 Mar 2008 at 10:27 am
QuoteWe definitely mentioned the Dodds/Belmont relationship, I know because I was the one who mentioned it. It’s one of my favorite relationships in comics of all time.
I actually really liked the Ultimate Spidey/Kitty relationship. It’s a good example of something that worked perfectly in Ultimate continuity but couldn’t work in regular continuity (due to the age discrepancy).
I like the idea of Spidey dating another heroine for a short-time… not sure which one, but I’m sure there are a few out there. Maybe Storm could have a little somethin’-somethin’ on the side with Spidey, leading to Mephisto annulling the Black Panther marriage too.
I dug the Domino fling in New X-Men too. In general, I liked Wolverine’s relationship with Mariko, liked his interactions with Jean Grey, liked his fling with Yukio, didn’t much care about Silver Fox. I like the idea of Wolverine having a number of relationships with different types of girls, to go along with the different aspects of his personality. Yukio and Mariko both fulfill very different needs.
Update your Adobe Flash player and it’ll all be copacetic.
Thanks for the compliment, although I don’t know who the other podcasters were, I’m not maligning anybody by accepting it I hope.
As for why we weren’t on the panel, none of us were anywhere near San Francisco that weekend, so it would’ve been pretty tricky. I’ll be in San Diego, but I don’t know that I’ll be asked to participate in any panels there either. We may just be beneath the radar, or (more likely) I don’t really go out of my way to volunteer, so nobody knows I’d be willing.
Awesome.
“Hello thou Nubian princess… be thou into bodybuilders? And threesomes?”
I like all the relationships you named as well, especially the Usagi ones. Usagi’s a very tragic character in a lot of ways. His devotion to duty and the death of his lord have cost him any sort of normal happiness, and yet he’s a somewhat optimistic and pleasant character. He’s like an anti-Brubaker character.
23 Mar 2008 at 3:09 pm
QuoteI liked Spider-man married but can see the other point and frankly they beat my love of Spider-man out of me years AGO
Reed and Sue, Clark kent and Lois and Ben grim and Alica Masters Stay togather becuse REALLY what else are you going to do?
DareDEVIL? um I’v never cared about him but if leads to more black Window I Like them to hang out
Hulk and Betty Ross. Uh betty your dad has a point
Cycolps dont care in general but find the idea of him sleeping with Emma painfully stupid.
here’s one from the past I Always thought it would be neat if Johny storm stayed married to the Skrull
Wolverine Logan dates floozies. Why becuse i’m tried of him pinning for Jean or died in 1947 true or mutant chick that needs more backstory
23 Mar 2008 at 3:24 pm
QuoteNow that I’ve heard about 60 minutes I’ll comment on some of this.
I think you guys are right about Milla, but I thought Bendis underdeveloped her to the point that I don’t really care.
Your comments on sex being a bit weird in the superhero world were accurate, I thought. But it does work sometimes. I don’t mind the casual sex as much you guys do. In a way it makes a lot more sense for these guys and girls to have casual sex rather than striving for a meaningful relationship. Along those lines, kudos for not mentioning Chuck Austen. I still have that She-Hulk/Juggernaut panel frozen in my mind and I didn’t even read the book.
I always thought Peter Parker’s love life was basically fanservice. Maybe even years before the concept of fanservice in comics was given that name. MJ’s character consisted mainly of getting her into tight jeans and nice lingerie. And then there’s the girl in the skin-tight cat suit.
Ennis actually wrote some fairly interesting and flawed guy/guy relationships in the second arc in the Boys.
I don’t know if you mentioned this in the last 30 minutes, but the best romance comic is easily Blankets. I’d have a hard time thinking of anything that trumps it.
23 Mar 2008 at 4:59 pm
Quoteon Spider-man
it is fair to note that nerdy Peter paker dated a lot
but I really did like Mary Jane as the one he married. Gewn became deeper in death but in comics where she was alive there was no sense she the love of his life
Black cat bugged me becuse SHE WAS CATWOMAN!
23 Mar 2008 at 5:41 pm
QuoteI can’t believe that you guys claimed at the beginning of this podcast that romance comics are dead. Aren’t about 15-20% of all Manga purely romance comics? If you would have said that American romance comics are dead, I would have agreed. Alas, you didn’t and so I have to claim that romance comics are alive and well and selling, even in the United States, as I’m sure Randy knows.
23 Mar 2008 at 7:54 pm
QuoteWell, to clarify, we were talking about real comics.
23 Mar 2008 at 10:23 pm
QuoteBlankets is in fact awesome. But I think that it, like True Story Swear to God, is an autobiographical tale centered on a romance, rather than a romance comic.
Oh dear lord, I sound like D3 with my hair-splitting genre conventions.
You know, manga romance may be the closest thing there is to the old school EC romance “surprises and twists” school.
Which probably explains why I’m not big into manga romance.
I also can’t believe we got through an entire podcast without me mentioning Jamie S. Rich and J. Torres, both of whom have written some *fantastic* romance comics over at Oni that basically help define the genre in modern comics terms. Or Christine Norrie’s Cheat. Oni definitely has the lions’ share of the non-manga romance market these days.
23 Mar 2008 at 11:49 pm
QuoteI’ll certainly cop to the fact that we didn’t address manga. I take issue with 15-20% of manga being purely romance, though. In fact, there are very few manga that I have found that are purely romance, of the type that we were speaking of when we brought up “romance comics” (and clarified that we meant the style produced by American publishers from the 40s through the 70s). Many manga include a romance element, often a heavy one, but rarely is that the end-all be-all of the story like it was in those old American romance comics. There is usually at least one other plot element that is focused on, so you get mystery romances which are just as much mystery as romance, humor romances, etc.
My point isn’t that these manga don’t tell romance stories, but that they aren’t the same kind of romance that we were referring to as dead. They are a more sophisticated, evolved story, with hooks for readers of other genres, and more to offer than just wish fulfillment (though they have that too). This is romance for the modern reader, and I don’t think of it as the same beast as what came before at all.
24 Mar 2008 at 12:00 am
QuoteWhat I like about The Brain & Monsieur Mallah is that their romance is their villainous motivation, often times. For example, i forget if it was in the OYL Outsiders or Titans or both, but they were trying to create a body for The Brain. They just want to love each other, and the fact that they are a brain in a jar and a talking monkey makes it all the more endearing yet hilarious at the same time.
24 Mar 2008 at 5:10 am
QuoteHi Pantsers, really enjoying the podcast so far. You guys mention TV relationships/marriages and I think one of the most realistic and best relationships is on Friday Night Lights between Coach Taylor and Mrs. Coach. It’s realistic: they have problems but they aren’t over the top, they have a teenage daughter and show all the problems that raising a child can be, they have money problems, have job related stress and fight, but at the end of the day, you know that they love each other. It’s not melodramatic, it’s not sappy, it’s… normal.
I was thinking that it shouldn’t be so hard to have that type of relationship in comics. Why couldn’t (to pick a popular example) Peter Parker and Mary Jane have the same type of relationship that the Taylors have? Then it hit me that you can’t because marriage is about an evolving relationship. Two people deciding to spend their lives together and (usually) having kids. If done well, like in FNL, it’s not boring at all and makes for good TV. But in comics, everything is static. Nothing changes (or hardly anything). How many years have Peter and MJ been married? Why haven’t they had kids? What would happen?
There are TONS of interesting stories that could be told about this but it’s impossible because in Comics Time, nothing has changed. The characters have to stay the same. Spiderman can’t have kids and the kids can’t get older because then Spiderman would have to get older and that just throws everything off. (As an aside, out of all the married couples in comics, how many have kids that are a regular part of the story? Franklin Richards?)
In comics, there really isn’t a fundamental difference between marriage and dating besides the fact that you’re in a long-term relationship with the same person. In fact, in comics marriage can get BORING because it’s the same person and nothing ever really happens. With dating, you at least have the illusion of change in that the main character is dating different women, even if nothing really changes there either.
The very nature of the Marvel and DC Universes make marriage boring because they’re stuck in time.
I haven’t finished the podcast yet so I don’t know if you mention them, but one of my favorite couples is Black Bolt and Medusa from the Inhumans. I wish more (good) comics using the Inhumans were out there. Besides the Paul Jenkins/Jae Lee maxi-series, I can’t think of any really good Inhumans stories.
24 Mar 2008 at 12:21 pm
Quotethe most popular romance manga in Japan is Nana. i’ve been reading that series and it is addictive.
24 Mar 2008 at 1:11 pm
Quotei’m still listening to the podcast and i have to say-i don’t care if Lois and Clark break up as long as they stay a couple.
also i believe Silver St. Cloud was the woman for Batman.
24 Mar 2008 at 1:50 pm
QuoteThat is a great relationship, and I think you’ve hit upon one of the main reasons that it couldn’t work in comics, and maybe why there’s such a general problem with romance in comics.
Also, and I think this is one of the reason that TV writers don’t always translate as well to comics as you’d imagine, a big part of what makes the Coach/Tami Taylor relationship work is the actors. What might seem cliched or familiar on the page has a fresher life when the actors bring their personalities to it.
24 Mar 2008 at 2:51 pm
Quote–start rant–
As a European I have to object: Manga are just as real as French or Belgian comics which dominated what I grew up with in Germany. In fact one of my biggest gripes with U.S. comics is that they are utterly dominated by superheroes. And I’m someone whose 25,000+ comic collection is probably 90% superhero comics. IOW, I love superhero comics, but I also love variety and amongst my top 20 series are probably as many non-superhero series (Fables, Y The Last Man, B.P.R.D., The Walking Dead etc.) as well as superhero series like Invincible, Dynamo 5, Godland, Annihilation Conquest + Nova etc.) I know you weren’t serious but, what is wrong with you guys? How many superhero series come even close to what guys like Ed Brubaker, Brian Bendis, Greg Rucka and others were doing before they started writing mainstream superhero comics? Also fantastic comics like The Killer are nothing unusual in France or Belgium while they are certainly unusual compared to the quality of U.S. superhero comics which, IMNSHO, have, on average, greatly improved since the 1960’s. Manga, OTOH, while offering plenty of shallow shlock, are full of gems that greatly surpass the average DC and Marvel superhero offering, which I know, you know.
–end rant–
24 Mar 2008 at 5:24 pm
QuoteWow. Since I don’t disagree with you at all, I suppose my only question is, are you aware that we recommend manga all the time? I have a monthly manga column, even, which is more than superhero comics get.
Was that just a general rant, or were you chewing us out in particular? Because, you know, Dave was making a joke that he assumed our regular readers would know was such. It’s like calling a bald guy ‘Curly’- of course manga are real comics. It’s such an obvious statement that saying they aren’t isn’t anything but a joke, to us. It’s more an ironic statement of disbelief that people actually do say dumb things like that. And to think, all that was encapsulated in one little smiley!
24 Mar 2008 at 6:30 pm
QuoteDan speaks the Gospel truth.
I even used to write a manga column at Ain’t It Cool News, as did Dan, so that should tell you we’re both passionate on the subject. But not everyone knows that and sometimes the internet’s pretty crap at conveying context, so for the record, yeah, I was goofin’. My li’l winky smiley was meant to be in good fun, not a “ha ha, suck it, Japan!” kind of thing.
24 Mar 2008 at 8:23 pm
QuoteI think I heard the entire thing, and I am not sure… but did you guys not even mention Cerebus and Jaka? Kind of a huge oversight.
25 Mar 2008 at 1:10 am
QuoteI think we talked about Cerebus briefly before the podcast (maybe during?) and came to the irrevocable conclusion that none of us had read Cerebus. S’true. Bits and pieces, I think, but not much beyond that.
On the other hand, while breadth of knowledge is always to be sought after, I can’t quite call the exclusion of Cerebus/Jaka an oversight given our approach. Our podcasts have always been pretty off the cuff, very much just four (sometimes five) guys talking about what we do know. That’s why we invite Talkback responses - to cover the gaps in our knowledge.
So howsabout giving us the skinny on Cerebus and Jaka? What makes them stand out for you?
25 Mar 2008 at 2:47 am
Quotestorm is a skrull so don’t worry about that black panther marriage!
i can’t wait for the sitcom ‘everybody loves galactus’ to get syndicated
25 Mar 2008 at 4:48 am
Quoteoh, and not that the podcast wasn’t still cool, but D3 is sorely missed…
25 Mar 2008 at 4:49 am
QuoteIt was just a general rant.
25 Mar 2008 at 9:14 am
QuoteI realize I’m in the minority here, and perhaps I should be. But I honestly think it would add more to the character of Peter Parker if his marriage with MJ developed to the point where he had a child.
I think it’s perfectly fine for a superhero to have kids. The way Grant Morrison wrote Animal Man is - at least in part - one of the good, fun ways to write an adult Peter Parker (just without the vegetarianism
). And Animal Man had two kids, and they didn’t hinder him at all. They brought out interesting parts of his personality.
At the same time, Animal Man didn’t feel unrelatable for having two kids. He still felt like an everyman, even more an everyman in some ways than Peter Parker without kids was being written at the time.
As for the last problem - aging - the sliding timescale of comics really takes care of that. Since it’s never clearly defined, you can pretty much shift what age you interpret Peter to be on your whim. If he’s supposed to be twenty-seven or something now, you could say that he’d only be about thirty-two after his first kid grows past infancy. Considering how much people shift character ages in comics, I really don’t think it should be a problem.
But that is just me
I think a superhero romance can bring forth kids and still be mostly problem-free, just so long as it’s done well.
25 Mar 2008 at 11:11 am
QuoteOne of my favorites has to be Swamp Thing and Abby. The most unusual and trippy romance only fit for the comics medium.
25 Mar 2008 at 1:09 pm
QuoteWasn’t there a comic about Hulk wanting to get it on with She-Hulk and she says, “We can’t; we are cousins.” And then Hulk tries to beat the crap out of her? Or am I imagining this?
My take on the casual sex explosion in superhero comics over the past few years comes from the writers equating heroes with contemporary celebrity culture of the Entertainment Tonight/Perez Hilton ilk.
I’m not sure if the whole superhero casual sex genie should have been taken out of the bottle just because it leads to so many other things that I don’t want to even think about… like super-hero… self-love.
Ew.
25 Mar 2008 at 1:40 pm
Quotethere really WERE at least two comics in the 50s where superman says he’d marry supergirl if they were not cosuins
25 Mar 2008 at 1:52 pm
QuoteGotcha. I’ve certainly had that same rant myself.
25 Mar 2008 at 3:13 pm
QuoteWhy are white people so afraid/mad at
Black relationships. It’s okay for Storm - supposedly from Africa, to date anything but an African - even if the whole thing never makes sense. (Forge was NOT organic. They met and were suddenly in love in four issues. That’s not “organic” that’s forced.” ) It’s okay for Luke to have on as long as the women are hyper stereotype, but once he’s with the white girl, he’s perfect. It’s okay for a Harlem street cop to be dating a white millionaire even if there was never any developement, never any build up - it was just done, period and they have NOTHING in common. It’s okay for Black Panther to also have stereotype relationships with silly looking so-called Black woman.
Storm, by the way, was never really a Black character until recently. She was Black only in so-called background and color of the ink. She had no family, no real friends, no ties to her background (unlike every single other X-Man). But when a Black guy writes it and decides maybe she should have such ties, suddenly all the white boys are up in arms and bitching about it. That most certainly proves we’ve moved far away from the attitudes from the 1800’s.
But if we have Black relationships that make sense, that bad.
In slavery the major thing was to constantly break up Black families. It seems that attitude persists in so-called liberal thinking of comic fans.
I know this will get your defesiveness up and make you proclaim how many Black friends you have and how I’m the wrong one for observing a constant attitude amongst people who swear to me it’s a new day, a new time. This is my honest opinion on your ‘take” on such things. Can’t say I’m particularly surprised either. The more things change the more they stay the same.
Peace
Dafixer
(aka Umar)
25 Mar 2008 at 4:03 pm
QuoteI had something to say while I was listening, but I didn’t write it down and it slipped from memory when the netcast was finished. But I just thot of something else!
Jesse Custer and Tulip O’Hare. I haven’t read Preacher in a long while, so I am not going to remember plot particulars.. but I am remembering feelings. The culmination of that story.. and the tear and the riding into the sunset. Man.. that was love.
(and wh00t! “Monster” is in the blog background)
25 Mar 2008 at 4:46 pm
QuoteThat’s a pretty broad statement - is it in response to something specific in the podcast beyond us saying we weren’t into the Storm/Black Panther marriage? Because that’s just one specific relationship, y’know? Honestly I can’t remember exactly what we said, but I know my issues with the Storm/Black Panther thing are that it came out of nowhere, required retcons to make it work, and generally seems boring. These are both regal characters, and two regal characters don’t exactly make for great romantic sparks.
Did we say we didn’t like it because they were both black or something? I don’t recall that unless it was some off the cuff thing.
A few reasons I think that’s not overly forced:
*People can fall in love that fast
*I don’t know if Storm was officially created by Claremont, but he’d certainly become her caretaker by that time, and if he said she was in love, it carried some serious weight.
*Forge and Storm fell in love quickly, but they also fell out of love quite fast. If I’m not mistaken, all their early passion was troubled. Certainly they didn’t rush off and get married in an event storyline. In fact, I think I liked that they were always a couple on the cusp of commitment but never able to make it. I don’t particularly want Storm married to anyone.
Wow, I think you’re reading a lot into things.
It was a change in a beloved character. I don’t think racial issues had a ton to do with fan outcry - readers just don’t usually like backstories being amended at all.
I do wonder, though… you’re right that Storm’s backstory, while it’s got plenty of history, has always been a bit removed from the character. To some degree, I think that allowed readers to map whatever personality they wanted on her. The more generic, the easier it is to idealize. I wonder if part of the outcry against the various retcons simply came from the specificity of them.
Mostly, though, I think readers just weren’t feeling Hudlin’s writing and saw the whole marriage as being an orchestrated event overseen by a newbie comic writer. That’s not gonna instill confidence in any relationship.
25 Mar 2008 at 4:59 pm
QuoteWith a little help from the Bendis board, I have the answer: The Incredible Hulk Annual from 2000.
Now I read this issue at the time, and it WAS freaky as hell, but context is mildly mitigating. If memory serves, Hulk was just doing one of his rampage thing and somehow She-Hulk discerned that it was related to a mating drive. Maybe the deal was that everyone was so obviously, er, incompatible with him? That that’s why he was enraged? I remember for sure that she put herself in the line of fire, figuring that’d stop him from rampaging. At some point he charges her, but stops right before impact, I guess proving that, yeah, he wasn’t after destruction - just booty.
What happens next I only vaguely remember, but I think She-Hulk basically talks to Hulk, calms him down, somehow turns off his sex drive (naked pics of Rosie O’Donnell? Can’t recall). There was never a point sex was even considered - She-Hulk just knew that Hulk would be drawn to her because he was in heat.
And yes, that’s still super-creepy and should never have been written about. I think she did mention the cousin thing when she was “talking him down”, but it wasn’t like she was planning to bone him if they hadn’t been cousins.
I think…
25 Mar 2008 at 5:42 pm
Quote“Hulk in Heat” would be a great name for a band. Please share that with your Austin musician friends.
“Thank you Austin! We are… Hulk in Heat!”
Thanks for doing the research. I read this long ago and only remember it vaguely.
25 Mar 2008 at 6:45 pm