Manhattan Projects #7

[superboyprime]

Yep, that's the Franklin D. Roosevelt A.I. that the Manhattan Projects team created by scanning his mind before his death, and it looks like it's going to go rogue...

Comments

[mrosa]

Hey look, a Cold War parable twenty years after anyone stopped giving a shit! Ah these visionary comics writers, always ahead of the curve.

[outlawpoet]

don't worry, it'll be dark, gritty, and cartoonishly grotesque too. they're innovating!

stay tuned for more 'ironic' namechecks of famous people with for shock value.

[captainbellman]

Because that shtick didn't already get utterly tiresome through the whole of "S.H.I.E.L.D."

[outlawpoet]

ugh, please don't remind me of that series. Fast and loose playing mythology is all well and good, but devaluing iconic antagonists for almost no payoff is just sloppy work.

I mean really, did we have to have Celestials and Galactus take falls to sell our 'western historical figures were secretly superscientist heroes/villains' schtick?

[captainbellman]

Preaching to the choir, kiddo. Never mind portraying the mentally ill Isaac Newton as a cartoonish super villain, "selfish" and stooping to having creepy sex with one of the Deviants from the old 'Eternals' series. Completely tasteless.

[mrosa]

Newton was a nasty piece of work; the story behind his alleged moment of humility - 'standing on the shoulders of giants' - was really an elegant jab at a rival scientist. But I also think his portrayal in that series was ridiculous.

Hickman seems to love this formula of picking up an era and then just turn its great men of into morons. I admit I can't wait for the day he turns his ugly gaze at Ancient Greece - Archimedes ducking it out with Zeno, Pythagoras using mathematics to save the world from Diogenes' philosophy of cynicism, a Plato haunted by visions of Socrates's ghost (we all know in the Hickmanverse, Plato secretly kills Socrates - but why? Why?!), Aristotles as a self-obsessed fool who plays second fiddle to Plato, like Feynman to Einstein.

[captainbellman]

Heck, Grigori Rasputin was a nasty piece of work, and I'd spare him the indignity of gettin' freaky with an abomination of bad genetics. Plus, I have a mild suspicion that Newton's terrible social abilities might have been due to sociopathy and that the experiments with Mercury didn't exactly help.

I wouldn't be too surprised at that. Hell, how about mixing up Thales in the whole thing and have him repel the Roman Empire with a magnificent lodestone machine? After all, wacky hijinks always trumps actual science and historical evidence!

[captainbellman]

By the by, I recommend Ned Beauman's prose novel "The Teleportation Machine" highly to anyone fatigued with this 'Spot The Historical Celebrity' style of writing. Apart from all the other glorious madness that goes on in that book, Beauman cleverly subverts the style by having the main characters name dropping historical figures - Hitler, Einstein, Lovecraft, etc. - but never actually meeting them. Or in one case, only *claiming* to have met them in order to con innocent tourists. Which isn't unlike what Hickman's doing here, what?

[espanolbot]

"Hickman seems to love this formula of picking up an era and then just turn its great men of into morons."

Kind of a blanket statement this, within SHIELD the scientists, philosophers etc. that appeared to have some kind of utopian view for the future or positive view of humanity were given better protrayals than the ones who were kind of unpleasant.

Tesla generally came off pretty well, as did Nostradamus and Leonardo da Vinci.

I'd have liked to have seen Babbage and Ada Lovelace (cause she's awesome) in there somewhere, but the subgenre of science fiction involving huge celebrity conspiracies is kind of huge already.

[mrosa]

Kind of a blanket statement this, within SHIELD the scientists, philosophers etc. that appeared to have some kind of utopian view for the future or positive view of humanity were given better protrayals than the ones who were kind of unpleasant.

Wait, scientists and philosophers who didn't have have a utopian view of the future or a positive view of humanity don't deserve to be treated fairly and like complex people?

[espanolbot]

Depends, if you stick to what characters are like historically then some are more inclined to not appear sympathetic due to what they were line in-person. So sometimes writers emphasise or underemphasise aspects of the characters to make them fit the role they have within the context of the story. If that makes sense?

Edison, for example, was kind of a terrible person. But there are more stories (at least until Tesla became a thing within the last fifteen years or so) where Edison was protrayed as a kind of grumpy genius, who came up with all of his inventions by himself, for example his appearance in the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.

Tesla, meanwhile, was a thoroughly decent human being for the most part, but due to his mental illnesses and scientific research it was more likely to find him in a villainous role until recently. DC had a book where PT Barnum and his circus are hired by the US government to stop Tesla from taking over the world, for example.

People are complex, but when telling stories sometimes it's necessary to make them less so, depending, of course, upon the context of their appearance within the story.

As long as it has a trace of the historical figure and it makes sense within the context of the story it should be fine, for example most of the Doctor Who historical cameoes, but if history is distorted JUST because the writer has an agenda of some sort and the characters become the real versions in name only (for example, the recent anti-Shakespeare film Anonymous) that is the point it actually becomes offensive.

Newton being protrayed as a man who believes he's doing the right thing by metaphorically placing the universe within a box of his own careful design, which runs on rules that he understands is less offensive than, say, claiming that Shakespeare didn't write any of his plays due to him coming from a middle class background and that only a nobleman could have such a fine grasp of the English language (which is one of the many, MANY offensive things Anonymous claimed).

[turtlefu]

I remember when it first came out, and the critics were going wild about how mind blowing it was.

And when Hickman broke through with mainstream comics, he was so acclaimed, but now a lot of people are hopping off the Hickman train.

I think he's becoming the M. Night Shyamalan of comics: all twists, no substance.

[mrstatham]

The Shyamalan parallel is actually a pretty good one, although I don't think Hickman (personally) has ever had something as good as say, a Sixth Sense or an Unbreakable. Secret Warriors comes close. Sure, he had a good FF run, but then... So have lots of people lately.

But yeah, it's not a bad parallel. I'd just say his equivalent to Shyamalan's 'twists' are the 'secret histories' and 'alternative characterisations' of known historical figures. There's substance - certainly in Secret Warriors - but there's not that much otherwise, really.

[espanolbot]

I enjoyed SHIELD, though I think it would have worked better as a self-contained series seperate from the regular Marvel universe, and if it had a definate ending.

[captainbellman]

Sweet Mithras, some of this art is static. The "That We Have Won?" panel looks like a badly-photoshopped character design sheet. Where's the motion, the expression?

[icon_uk]

The same place the novelty and the entertainment value went?

[mrosa]

I know I repeat myself a lot, but I'll repeat myself again: motion fucking lines! Pencillers today just don't fucking know how to draw comics, they don't even know the basics of comic book storytelling. You'd think someone was asking Pitaro to draw something complicated, you know Mobius strips like Williams did in Promethea; no, just draw motion lines, it's not hard at all. Joe Shuster knew how to use them; so did Jack Cole; and Will Eisner and Jack Kirby and Carl Barks. I know Golden Age comics were crap and comics are so much better nowadays, but they're fucking not! Comics would be so much better if our red-hot prima donnas actualy took the time to study old comics and learn from the masters.

God, how I love to rant about this!

[bewareofgeek]

The Hickman Equation:

Historical Figures + Secret Conspiracy + Fancy Flowchart + Extraneous Side Plots + Out Of Nowhere Ending - Heroic smart people.

[mrosa]

Even the Anti-Life Equation looks better than that.

[espanolbot]

SHIELD had heroic smart people. :( Tesla and Leonardi da Vinci where excellent in it, particularly since the idea behind the series as a whole was the idea of improving humanity through control versus improving it through enlightenment.

Both could be seen to be right, though Newton went to the dark side in his pursuit of a Brighter Future.

[mrosa]

Tesla and Leonardi da Vinci where excellent in it, particularly since the idea behind the series as a whole was the idea of improving humanity through control

That almost sounds like eugenics.

[espanolbot]

In a way, Newton's lot were the ones who wanted to get a brighter future through controlling mankind's development BUT they saw humanity's future as finite and with a definite end. Tesla and Da Vinci want to improve humanity through freedom, mental enlightenment and the like and believe that just because the world is prophecised to end, the betterment of mankind should be towards making us survive it.

[mrosa]

Tesla and Da Vinci want to improve humanity through freedom, mental enlightenment and the like and believe that just because the world is prophecised to end, the betterment of mankind should be towards making us survive it.

I find that remarkably disturbing, a cadre of talent but secretive men trying to 'improve' the world, but it's in line with the fascist vibe I've gotten from Hickman's work, no matter how much he tries to mask it behind nice concepts like utopianism, improvement, progress, science, etc.

[espanolbot]

To be fair the concept of people trying to improve the world in some manner isn't exactly a new one, with it also coming up in the Authority back in the Ellis days (though he said then that they were well-intentioned supervillains as opposed to standard superheroes) before they just became an outlet for whatever the current writer needed catharis about.

SHIELD under Newton is overtly fascistic though, while the Tesla/Da Vinci section is depicted more as making the world better through free energy, universal healthcare and sufferage etc.

[mrstatham]

So this throws up another big problem I have with Hickman's work, here; Not only are his characters in this completely disrespectful cliches and caricatures that merely play with a handful of established things about the actual person, but he employs such a light touch when it comes to concepts like communism that I actually have to question if he did any more work than say, reading a wiki page. Honestly, for all the faults of a communism - and for all the faults of capitalism now laid bare - the best a character can come up with as to why he can't investigate something else is 'the immediate threat of western capitalism'? Why not throw in some 'corrupt decadence' while you're at it?

The damn thing reads like Hickman is trying out some Doctor Strangelove black comedy, but failed to miss exactly why Strangelove WORKED.

[mrosa]

That line made sense to me, though; if he's fully committed to the Soviet ideology, if he's been totally brainwashed that he's one of those officials that never doubts the party line, never wavers in his loyalty, and simply swallows the anti-American propaganda without reflecting about, it I can believe in his not being too worried about an alien invasion. The Soviets did strange things to people's minds.

[maseiken]

"Yes! To hell with our governments and their absurd macho posturing!
Now is the time for even MORE absurd Macho posturing!"

[glprime]

Yeah, seeing that image in the Oval Office, that's the kinda thing that would have me giving the keys to the next invading aliens to obliterate us all and start over while I duck out back for one last cup of coffee.

[darkknightjrk]

I find it odd that it seems like Hickman's doing this treatment to Truman, since it seems like, from how I've read/interpreted history, Truman was one of if not the last President that understood the horrors that the power that he and his ilk held, or at least was the last one to actually say it out loud.

[mrosa]

The truth is not as entertaining or interesting as Hickman's childish games, allegedly. I still prefer a good non-fiction book to any of his crappy comics.