Some thoughts on some recent comics

[laughing_tree]

These are not reviews.









The Vision #11, by Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Walta. Remember how, a few issues back, the cover of this book had a quote from Brian K. Vaughan in which he glowingly praised it? Interesting, considering how just a few issues later Victor Mancha shows up in a less-than-glamorous portrayal, which even retroactively revises his earliest BKV-written stories to be more in line with its darker take. My theory would be that the creative team specifically sought out Vaughan's approval for what they'd do to his character. They'd then have sent him early issues of the series to give him the context. Which explains what Vaughan was doing reading the book and being in a place to give a quote in the first place. (Seriously, the guy ordinarily never talks about mainstream superhero comics; whenever he's talking comics, it's about more indy stuff.)





Karnak #5, by Warren Ellis and Roland Boschi. I wonder how much detail other writers who are working with Karnak (Ewing, Soule) knew about Ellis' plans? Their portrayal is certainly in keeping with the earlier issues of the mini-series. But as the plot progresses, we're starting to see new facets to the character (or, more precisely, Ellis' take on the character), ones which we don't really see hint of in the other writers' stuff...

Comments

[quatoria]

I stopped reading the scans and picked up the issue as soon as I saw it was out. Jesus, this book is tragic. I can't stop reading.

[cyberghostface]

Marvel sure is dead set on fucking over Brian K Vaughan at this point.

[leoboiko]

Details?

[cyberghostface]

Spoilers


Victor Mancha accidentally kills Vision's son and is arrested. Vision goes to kill him but his wife (to prevent a bad future I think) rips out his heart for him.

Edit: but if BKV likes it more power to him

[shadowpsykie]

Rips out Viktor's or Vison/s

[cyberghostface]

Victor's.

[shadowpsykie]

damnn

[cainofdreaming]

Doombot will bring him back. The bromance is forever.

[thehood]

BKV didn't mind and it's not like he didn't kill his share of characters.

Plus BKV doesn't work at Marvel anymore.

[cyberghostface]

It's still crap.

[aperturedreams]

Given that using Victor Mancha wasn't the original plan, I highly doubt they even knew what would happen when BKV looked at the issues. There's no way they actually deceived him like you're theorizing. And even if it isn't too kind to one particular character who has barely been used recently, this is still one of the best comics Marvel's put out in years...

[janegray]

who has barely been used recently

Why does that matter?

Seriously, why does the comic book industry and its fans act like anything that isn't immediately or very recently profitable is worthless and can be thrown away?

I hear that excuse all the time. "it's okay that [X] was killed because they haven't been featured in a story for some time." It's like the industry requires periodic sacrifices, it must meet its quota of dead characters every year. And people say bringing characters back from the dead makes death cheap, when that's just a symptom of the real problem.

If you think Victor's death is good for the plot and an acceptable price to pay for the sake of a great book, that's one thing. But then that would be the case even if Victor had been starring in a popular book until last month.

[coldfury]

I think it matters to a degree because of lost potential.

If D-Man bought it in the Sam Wilson book, would some people be upset? Sure, eveyr character has fans. But would there be a big uproar? Probably not. There' s not a lot of potential for great D-Man stories.

If Sam Wilson bought it, people would be upset. There'd be a big uproar. There'd be many reasons, but one is that there's a lot of mileage left in Sam Wilson. There's a lot of potential stories for the character.

To segueway to comics-adjacent territory, in the recent season of Arrow, a character died, and there was a significant blowback because there was a lot of potential for future stories for the character. The character in question had narrative ties to most characters in the show, had a lot of plot threads still running, and it was all cut short abruptly. Meanwhile, another character on the show has had most of their stories fold in and conclude, doesn't have a lot of ties to the remaining cast, and a lot of the fans are wondering why *that* wasn't the character that was killed off.

I think that's part of why people look at that when they evaluate deaths, a waste of potential is seen as a 'wasteful' death. I'm not a Runaway fan, so I can't really judge in this case. All I know is that having come in on the back half of the Vision book is that it is ****ed up and I'm on the edge of my seat every issue.

[janegray]

I do see where you are coming from. But the reason I personally can't agree with that argument is that I think "potential" goes beyond a single character's story, and it's rather made of the entire context of the characters in the universe. And when the context is "any character who does not immediately and permanently become profitable gets put in the woodchipper," that creates a general sense of apathy that prevents me from caring about any new character at all.

In other words: why should I invest love, time and money in a new character, when chances are like 90% that they'll be dead in 5 years?

I don't think of comics as just something you enjoy at the moment and then put aside, but rather as things with an esponential level of enjoyment. The more I care for a character, the more I enjoy their stories. Thus, previous issues are the foundation of my affection for the character which lets me enjoy current issues more.

When DC literally goes "oops, we created too many teen heroes. Welp, time to go on a killing spree to clear the space!" that tells me that I shouldn't invest in new characters anymore, because I won't be given the chance to keep my foundation and won't be able to enjoy the stories as much as I otherwise would have. THAT is what I call wasted potential.

And then of course there is the fact that potential is an extremely subjective thing. For example, people used to say that Bane sucked, and his death would most likely have not been seen as a waste of potential; then Gail Simone started writing him in Secret Six, and suddenly everybody loved him and wanted to see more of him and the very idea of killing him off was met with horror. Catman too, he is a massively beloved fan favourite today, do you think anybody would have shed a tear if they had killed him off 10 years ago?

Almost any character has the potential to be awesome, it's just that most times that potential goes undiscovered.

[cyberghostface]

My issues with it are the following:

1. It didn't need to be Victor. All that was required for the story to progress was that Vision's son is accidentally killed and Vision in effect goes after the Avengers and whoever killed him. It wasn't even Victor in the original draft of the story to get an idea of how replaceable he was. In that context, it's a waste as it's less of a meaningful ending to a character's arc and more of a plot device in someone else's.

2. The story turns Victor into a drug addict (I think? IDK what they were going for with the vibranimum) who kills a kid. So it's one of those things that permanently taints his character in such a fashion even if he were to return short of a complete retcon.

[dustbunny105]

Victor being subbed in makes what happened to him even worse. Who was he meant to be originally?

[cyberghostface]

Wonder Man I think?

[laughing_tree]

The original android Human Torch.

[practicalcat]

Also, Victor's Latino, so that brings a whole bunch of issues with race and representation in media into this.

[dewinged]

And, also, a dead kid character. Even if he was a synthezoid. Why is no one else really bothered by that?

[laughing_tree]

I'd argue the way Victor was used tied into the themes of the series in a way pretty much nobody else could have. "I will not be Victorious." A line packed with so much resonance and meaning, and basically impossible with any other character.

I also don't see why not being in the original outline means much. The whole point of a rough draft of anything is to be altered for the better. Sometimes those alterations end up being very drastic. A number of works even have completely different *endings* than their original outlines. Victor might have been a late edition, but that doesn't mean the story wasn't tailored and molded to fit his presence once he was added.

[aperturedreams]

Sorry, maybe I shouldn't have said that; you have a good point there, and I didn't mean to imply that I at all enjoyed the real problem of the way character death is treated in the industry, especially in light of Civil War II. Still, I think his death serves a logical and an important point in the plot. It doesn't come out of nowhere, and it doesn't exist just to move the plot along like Hulk or War Machine's deaths did. I think I just thought it was more a little ridiculous to think Marvel would actively deceive BKV just to get a byline.

[janegray]

Thank you for the clarification.

In retrospect, I may have been too brusque in my reply to you... The casual killing off of characters is a huge pet peeve of mine, and *THE* reason I dropped Marvel and DC for many years (with the exception of the occasional self-contained one-writer Elseworld), so it gets me heated up quick. But I didn't mean to come across as antagonistic to a fellow poster :/

[laughing_tree]

Deceive him? Um, that's not what I theorized. Just the opposite, in fact. I said, "My theory would be that the creative team specifically sought out Vaughan's approval for what they'd do to his character."

[aperturedreams]

Apologies, I must have gotten confused somewhere down the line.

[captainbellman]

Oh, leave Karnak alone, Jeremy Corbyn. You've got a party to kinda-sorta-run.

[scorntx]

Would that be before or after the Beeb blames Corbyn for every kitten stuck in a tree?

[cainofdreaming]

Well then he should stop sneaking around during the night with catnip and a step ladder, shouldn't he? ;)

[scorntx]

I just... don't get the buzz about the Vision series.
Yeah, okay, a handful of scans are not really the best metric to judge a series, but from the looks of it... it's just bleak.
Okay, yes, that's the point, but... the constant "AND THEN SOMETHING EVEN MORE HORRIBLE HAPPENS" and the narration promising more doom'n'gloom and Vision trying to murder someone (even if for understandable reasons)...
Just don't get it...

[philippos42]

It's a very odd project for one of the Avengers, and one in the movies at that.

Bad enough they gave Vizh this treatment, but I'm very unhappy that they dragged Victor into it.

[halloweenjack]

Back in the early issues scans, one of the interview tidbits from Tom King ran thus:

'My great fear for Vision is that people will hear the premise, see some images, and think I’m writing a TV series from 1987: “An Avenger creates a robot family and moves to the suburbs; wackiness and life lessons are sure to follow! Tonight at 8, 7 central!” Honestly, if I wasn’t writing the book, it’s what I would think. It really sounds like something we’ve seen before, a first season Star Trek: The Next Generation story where Data has to discover the meaning of family and the word “it’s.” But what I’m trying to do with this story is quite different than that.'

Actually, it was Star Trek: Voyager, and it was the Emergency Medical Hologram. And it was quite a bit less violent; I don't think that any of the neighbors died. But I don't know that this is different enough to justify rehashing the plot.

[thanekos]

I love that scene in the theater- Vision's looking at Omega the Unknown, played by Simon Williams.

He's looking in a mirror twice over.

[icon_uk]

I recognised it as Omega the Unknown from the costume but had no idea that it was Simon Williams playing him.

[jmacq1]

A background/landscape detail, but it's on the movie poster/billboard in one of the earlier panels. :)

[zylly]

On the plus side, if they were going to kill someone, Victor is ridiculously easy to bring back. I can think of several off the top of my head, ranging from "that was only a semi-essential part and my systems needed a few weeks to reboot around it" to "Apoarently Ultron built me to download into a back-up copy in the unlikely event I was ever killed"

[tigerkaya]

Never cared for Victor or the Runaways in general. BKV should have wrote them in Image.