Capeshit General

i absolutely adored the new superman movie. i saw both it and the FF movie and i have not thought about the FF movie once since leaving the theatre but i CANNOT stop thinking about superman. its good. its supergood even. i do absolutely have criticisms with it i think a lot of the editing and camerawork was wack as fuck but it was overall Good Superman Movie in my opinion

in terms of comics ive been reading through the justice league international run by keith giffen for the first time and its a pretty solidly fun adventure. i get why people like this run so much

fuck you beck. haha just kidding this is my friend guys hes grumpy but sometimes hes not. anyways i saw the new fantastic four recently ! adored the visuals. wasnt a fan of pedro pascal.

i'm more of an alt comix guy... but i recently got my hands on some sgt rock issues and it's so good. nothing beats reading back issues

re: fantastic four
hi kelly! i am grumpy sometimes but only when you invoke my grumpiness. we already talked about this earlier but yeah, i really didn't like pascal as reed. he felt too nervous and on edge the whole time. excellent visual effects but i think this felt more like a concept for a movie than an actual movie.

re: fantastic four

i agree w/ u ^ i think a lot of the criticisms i have w/ the movie stem from the fact that it is like. wholly a setup movie. in that it is a movie that exists solely to introduce the ff to a wider audience so they can use them and dr. doom in the next avengers film. i feel it had a lot of fun moments in itself but the mcu is like mcdonalds to me in that even their best burgers are just okay.

i've been reading grant morrison's doom patrol. you guys think the tv series is worth the watch?

i dug it! it doesn't really hold a candle to morrison's run, so the contrast would probably make it feel worse. but i enjoyed the first season a lot.

seconding the new superman film being really good. even if it really likes focusing on superman's face as he's flying around. superman as a "kindness is the real punk rock" guy is such a good take on the character. (also it's got colors in it! and it isn't embarrassed about being a superhero movie! what a breath of fresh air.)

re: Superman 2025

watching people really fall in love with Superman as a character after this movie has been so insanely gratifying as someone who loved Superman growing up, and then had to live through the Dark Ages (the last 15 years) of people thinking Superman is lame and boring because he's either (a) not Goku or (b) not a mean edgelord.

all of the hopecore/"real punk" posting gets kinda corny after a while but the day i start complaining about people being Too Corny about Superman being hopeful and cool is the day i have been body-snatchers'd

also the fact that we finally have a mainstream Kara Zor-El that's not just genderbent Clark has me fucking GIDDY. i will personally arrive to James Gunn's house and kiss him soft and tender on the lips if we get a Red Daughter of Krypton in this DCU, even though i Know that'd never happen.

i actually really enjoyed the superman movie but i feel like it lacked some oomph for some of the fight scenes. mr terrific was my [FRIEND] though. fantastic four was. oooooook. felt like i watched half a movie, actors were fine but GODDAMN was that script lacking.

re: superman 2025

it's cool that a lot of people enjoyed it! even i walked out of the theater feeling totally struck by it and i think i might've been crying. i've been re-watching it on cam rip for the past few days and my appreciation for the incredible cgi has gone way up, but i'm starting to realize how messy the story actually is. ouch

i think the message is good. the takeaway being less specifically about the good that superman does, and more that the good that he does inspires others to be good, but the way they deliver it is completely botched. comics like 'all star superman' and 'superman: for all seasons' were constantly cited as huge inspirations for this movie but i never got that impression both visually and narratively. it's much more reminiscent of john byrne's 'man of steel' from 1986, with superman sort of dismissing his kryptonian heritage and embracing human values as his inspiration to do good, and it almost comes off as specifically american values. i think the movie tries to circumvent this with the dialogue in the farm scene where pa kent telling clark that his job as a parent isn't to tell him to act a certain way or who they're supposed to be but rather to give him the tools to help him discover himself who he was supposed to be himself. it just feels very inconsistent.

anyways my consensus is that it was a good enough start to a dc cinematic universe. i pray that through some rube goldberg sequence of events the sequel is filmed by a different director.

I've been reading the original Claremont X-Men run and it's been really enjoyable!! There's some issues that are... bad (i.e. all the Savage Land stuff, a lot of the Phoenix saga with the weird Glup Shitto aliens) but overall it's a very solid run so far.

i finished reading batgirl 2024 which is only 9 issues as of now.

i got spoiled about cass having a secret brother and i thought "oh this trope again really?" as i really didn't like respawn and damian. but first impressions of tenji i actually liked how he was introduced? and i do think he actually serves a purpose than just being there for a shock value secret sibling reveal. it'd be good for cass to have family outside of gotham amd force her out of a comfort zone, and just broadening her connections. from how i see it this can give her closure to shiva even after death. with the fact tenji seems clueless to the true nature of their mother hailing her as a hero, i wonder how cass would approach this, it'd open to more exploration of cass' relationship with shiva and this could be a 'second chance' without forgiving her directly.

tenji looks like he can stand as his own character as well (assuming they don't just throw him out right after this) being a legacy character of the bronze tiger. now i do not know much about the bronze tiger, vixen, alot of characters i only know about by names. but it's good he has actual untapped history outside of being cassandra's brother randomly introduced for a plot device. and he wasn't unbearable to read in the 1 issue and a half (preview of issue #10) he was pretty fun dialogue and i didn't cringe at the slang (the "oh word?"). i see their dynamic already cass being silent vs him being the yapper basically. tldr he wasn't annoying so there's that. overall just alot of potential.

there's alot of people complaining about this trope while i do agree i just don't think it's gonna be done poorly here. and i've seen alot of people say that cass having random biological family undermines her relationship with the bats (which is ridiculous like it's not affirmed she's batmans daughter every 7 panels). i don't know how genuinely anyone sees this as a bad thing, i dont want cass to be just limited to gotham and the batfamily so i'm excited her exploring her roots from lady shiva.

re: superman 2025

quoting @capn_cooks: 'comics like 'all star superman' and 'superman: for all seasons' were constantly cited as huge inspirations for this movie but i never got that impression both visually and narratively'

that was one of the things that bothered me the more i thought about the movie and how it was pitched/promoted to be honest. i love All-Star and For All Seasons (because who doesn't), and neither of them really felt like actual inspirations outside of "these are the books that people recognize are really good so we're going to namedrop them in the promos".

All-Star in particular feels really misused as an "inspiration". i'd say the thematic core of that book is wrestling with one's own mortality, and trying to be at peace with yourself and your place in the world before you die, and that's just... entirely not what the movie is remotely about. i guess i could kind of see the inspiration in how "episodic" it is? but even then, that's just any multi-issue arc collected into one story.

i was skimming thru all-star superman last night (a pretty regular ritual for me since i renewed my interest in big blue during the lead-up to his new movie) and i was caught off-guard by superman's line when he lands that final blow on luthor: "Brain beats brawn every time!"

in the context of all-star, it makes perfect sense; superman used his uncanny mind to think himself out of a tough spot and defeat his arch-foe (through classic comic book pseudoscience). in james gunn's superman, the same line is used when superman... remembers he can summon his dog to tear shit up? maybe that's a cynical reading of the scene on my part, but it speaks to how gunn would rather engage with the surface level 'weirdness' of all-star (and silver-age superman comics), rather than trying to figure out what actually made those stories work.

it's extra insulting when you remember the final issue of all-star began with a heart-to-heart conversation between superman and his birth father, and the treatment gunn gave to jor-el and lara in the film. zack snyder actually incorporated some of jor-el's lines into man of steel ('they will join you in the sun'), to greater effect than whatever gunn was doing. i'm not a big snyder guy, or a big man of steel guy, but i can appreciate that snyder was trying to portray superman as mythic, larger than life, etc.

basically i guess what i'm saying is i did not like the movie! i thought it was a big stinker! though i still enjoyed watching it in the theater, if that makes sense at all. anyways, on a more positive note, check out this awesome article by Austin English about the puzzle box logic that governed those silver-age superman tales: https://www.tcj.com/mort-weisingers-puzzle-comics/

really wanna give the Grant Morrison Animal Man run a try. anybody here familiar with it? seems pretty good.. but i'd like to hear opinions on it first

All my friends are reading those "Absolute" DC comics. I'm kind of a hipster and also a normie, so I don't really read capeshit (i watch the cartoons!!!) but I like this comic called Scare Tactics from the 90s. The covers, with all their silly monster characters, reminded me of Mort the Dead Teenager

I liked Gunn's Superman but I do feel like it misses in a lot of areas that Beck and Deacon covered with their posts, I'm excited for the universe in general though with what it showed of the other heroes.

Anyone read Spider-Man vs the Sinister Sixteen? I thought it was a fun oneshot. I haven't been keeping up with non-ultimate Spidey in a while but I've been seeing some posts about the newest issues that interest me in checking it out again.