Superior Spider-Man #5 preview

[flint_marko]

 
From Newsarama:

Comments

[janegray]

Wait, is she a child genius or a very short woman? In comics it could be either, and the art doesn't make it clear.

[auggie18]

I think she's supposed to be a little person, but the art makes her look like a child. She probably has proportionate dwarfism, but it's pretty hard to tell from the art.

[cyberghostface]

She kind of looks like one here:

[his_spiffynesss]

Her eyes are a little big, that's giving her the child-like appearance.

She's kinda chibi-ish.

[mrstatham]

She flat-out tells him she's a 'little person', which to me, suggests that she's an adult, just short.

[janegray]

I read that, but to me, "little person" sounds like something a child genius would want to be called: technically accurate but not infantilizing.

But English is not my first language, and the replies I got seems to imply that "little person" is a pc term for a dwarf. I honestly have no idea, I think there may be something lost in translation to me.

[mrstatham]

It is one of those things, really. To be honest, there's that many terms that get used I'm not sure which ones are derogatory and which ones aren't, sometimes. But by and large, I think 'little person' is, as you say, a PC term for a dwarf. It's definitely a tricky one, especially as I'm not entirely up on the usage of such terms in America, which can be entirely different in terms of what's acceptable than the UK.

[darkknightjrk]

Yeah, that's the current PC term for someone with dwarfism--which I always thought was a little weird, because it implies that children aren't "people," but it is what it is.

[jlbarnett]

The Cleveland Show did a bit on that once

[nyadnar17]

She is a little person, but the artist needs to get things together before the romance starts or this comic is about to get reeaaall creepy, real quick.

[skjam]

Comic book artists have a long-standing tradition of drawing people with dwarfism identically to children, which is always creepy when I notice it.

[his_spiffynesss]

Some artists are better than others. Byrne made Puck look clearly adult.

[janegray]

Puck was bald and muscular, and IIRC he had a moustache too. It's much easier to make somebody like Puck look clearly adult than a pretty girl.

[his_spiffynesss]

That's quite true, and come to think of it, I can't recall seeing any female little person in comics before.

[chieflewal]

Exciting, right?!

[chieflewal]

Plus all that Wolverine-level body hair.

[crinos]

Considering what's been in this comic so far, I think we shot past creepy a while ago.

[protogarrett]

...I am surprisingly okay with this turn of events.

[lucky_gamble]

Dammit, I think I might just buy this issue.

[filthysize]

Reed Richards. What a dick.

[icon_uk]

Isn't Peter already famous as a scientist? What with Science Journal covers and his work at Horizon? Surely if she was this smart she'd know about him being a genius?

[stolisomancer]

Comic book time being what it is, his position at Horizon Labs hasn't lasted that long, and before that point he was a photographer and a high school teacher. It's possible she simply hasn't read the journals that announced his genius, since she's a professional student and thus busy.

[stillanerd]

Why do I get the feeling things are ultimately going to turn out to be very sad for SpOck's new tutor? After all, Doc Ock has demonstrated to show affection towards women who don't fit the typical standards of beauty, such as Aunt May and Stunner, and Anna Maria Marconi is already warming up to him but, of course, has no idea it really isn't Peter. Once Peter gets his body back, Anna here will likely suffer one huge emotional blow.

[stillanerd]

Okay for some bizarre reason, Newsarama has now removed the preview for Superior Spider-Man #5 and replaced it with Iron Man #7. Why they did this, I have no idea.

[stillanerd]

Okay, now the link is for BOTH Iron Man #7 and Superior Spider-Man #7. The preview for Superior Spider-Man begins on page 6, and one of the pages they originally showed is now missing.

http://www.newsarama.com/php/multimedia/album_view.php?gid=4896&page=6

[silicondream]

Ow, the Deepak Chopra-esque physics dialogue is terrible. Otto's rambling on unstable molecules should have confirmed Anna's belief that he's been paying no attention in class.

I mean, comic book science-speak is normally pretty silly, but at least it's less noticeable when it's being delivered by a ranting madman as things explode around him.

[fredneil.livejournal.com]

That can be a tricky question. How do you portray someone as a genius when you're not a genius yourself? Either you never have him discuss anything in his field or you try to bluff your way though and hope that the character is so strong that your audience doesn't notice the occasional bit of nonsense. And there will be nonsense. Probably the most successful fictional genius is Sherlock Holmes and he came up with a few moments of pure balderdash.

[silicondream]

Oh, definitely. Although someone like Holmes is particularly hard to write because he's supposed to be a genius about everyday events--the reader expects to be able to follow his reasoning once it's explained. It's a bit easier when you're writing an expert in some area where outsiders don't always even understand what's being discussed.

One thing to do is make sure you've got the jargon down. If Otto was blathering about gauge symmetries and axions and resonances and uncountably infinite families of solutions…okay, it still wouldn't actually make sense to an expert (which isn't me, btw), but it would sound physicsy. "Building blocks of the universe" and "a small facet of their infinite potential" are pop-science-philosophy phrases; you wouldn't expect to hear them from physicists talking technically, or even from physics students discussing something they expect to get graded on.

Plus, even if you have no scientific training, it's not that hard to get a vague idea of how scientists establish their genius credentials. Why is Einstein worshipped? Well, because he came up with some awesome theory that explained/predicted a lot of stuff about the world, and came up with clever ways you could test it, and he wrote papers about it, and people read them and found them elegant and facutally and mathematically accurate, and then they went and did the experiments and they worked. That's a lengthy process. Saying a few pithy sentences and dashing off an equation or two (I hope that's what Otto's doing on the iPad, instead of just pointing at stuff) wouldn't convince anyone of anything. We need to at least see him proving some sort of awesome theorem or something, or pulling up one of Peter's research results, and then Anna can take twenty minutes to pore over it and then comprehend its elegance and be properly amazed.

What Otto's doing here...it's like you wanted to demonstrate that a character was the smartest football coach of all time, so you have him write a really moving haiku about field goals.

Morrison, Robinson, Waid and Ellis are all pretty good at writing science-dialogue that doesn't ring horribly false, IMO. It's not about being an expert in the field, it's about mimicking the speech styles of people who are experts.

[captainbellman]

"As Depak Chopra once said, science tells us that anything can happen at any time for no reason! Also, eat plenty of oatmeal, and animals never had a war! Who's the REAL animals?"

[leoboiko]

I liked the part where they keep pointing to blank screens as if they're full of science mysteries. I mean "liked".

[ensiform]

I don't understand your objection. They live in the Marvel Universe. Their physics is not the same as ours. There actually are unstable molecules, and that's only one of many things that are different in the MU. Including phasing, super-strength, mass creation and destruction, and flight for humans. I didn't find it terrible at all, given what the MU is.

[silicondream]

I have no problem with them talking about unstable molecules; the problem is that the things Otto's saying are either meaningless or obviously wrong even in the Marvel Universe.

It's silly to say that unstable molecules are "fundamental building blocks of the universe." They're molecules. By definition--and more importantly, by 616 canon--they're made of smaller atoms, which are themselves made of subatomic particles. People assemble and disassemble them, render them temporarily "inert", "unlock" them so that they chain-react with other matter, and muck around with them in all kinds of ways; there's nothing fundamental about them. Nor are they building blocks of much of anything, other than a few exotic technologies (and Skrulls, I guess.)

And what does it mean to say that Lamaze is wrong about unstable molecules changing or mimicking other stuff, because actually they just reveal a new facet of their potential? From a physics PoV, what's the difference between the two claims? I don't have a problem with the idea that there could be a subtle and physically meaningful difference, but Otto's making no attempt to define one here; it sounds like he's just quibbling over language.

It just comes off like a late-night philosophy discussion between stoned 616 undergrads, rather than a demonstration of keen scientific insight.

[ensiform]

Okay, I see what you mean. Yes. It's hard to write dialogue between geniuses without making it sound made up. Especially when it comes to physics.

Comics get so much wrong - how guns work, how language works, etc - that often I just gloss over it.

[thanekos]

Yeah, but whatever he scribed up on her pad probably compensated for his " first few lines of a popular science article " babble.

[jlroberson]

You know, I really am surprised at how good this book has turned out to be. To be honest, I'm finding Otto pretending to be Peter more interesting than Peter himself. It's fascinating to see what Otto is like once he has to go THIS route.

[thanekos]

Say what you will about SpOck, but the things he's doing and the way he's acting, I really want this to turn out to be " Peter who thinks he's Ock pretending to be Peter, because the spiderbot mindswap didn't work out exactly as planned ".

Mostly cause you wouldn't be able to sweep all this away as " Oh that was someone else doing it. "

[sianmink]

yisss.
Peter permanently being a little bit Doc Ock would be great.
Sadly this sort of thing never happens in comics.

[silicondream]

Has someone pointed out the physics pun in her name yet? AM Marconi. Ho ho ho.

[ensiform]

Flint,

WHERE is your awesome icon of Spidey kicking Logan's butt from, and WHERE can I see it in scan form??

[chieflewal]

OH MY GOD YES! This is fantastic! Please god let this happen!