What happens at WonderCon stays at WonderCon ...

Hawkeye and Thor went to WonderCon once. It was terrible.

I went to WonderCon!

No, don’t recheck old blog entries. I didn’t announce it. I deliberately didn’t announce it, because it was a last-minute decision to accompany a few friends and I wanted to just go as a fan this time. Well, a fan and an interior decorator.

You see, now that I’m settling into the new place, I’m noticing how bare the walls are. Sure, my wonderfully nerdy flatmate has gleefully participated in hanging Captain America’s shield (hers) up in our coat closet and a giant Hobbit poster (mine) on one wall, but my own personal space in the apartment has nothing hanging up but a whiteboard with my to-do list (essential if I’m going to keep to a writing schedule) and a little enamel figure of a fairy holding a typewriter. I’m not used to decorating, as I did most of my growing up in a room where the major blank wall was covered by decorative wood paneling. Now I suddenly want things on the walls, and because I’m me they must be geeky things, so to WonderCon I went, off to see the Artists Alley.

Oh, and that photo? I went with a gang of my friends, temporarily dubbed the Casual Saturday Avengers. That’s Hawkeye and Thor up there with Grumpy Cat. I was Loki. You can tell I was Loki because I’m not in the photo. Tricky that way, aren’t I?

Anyway, major discoveries at WonderCon include …

Cats as absolutely everything (the artist here is the wonderful Jenny Parks, and I particularly recommend her Lokitty and her Doctor Mew images):

Sorry for the low quality on Captain Amerikitty--
had to use a cheapo camera because my good one's on loan.

 A Moriarty comic series from Image that somehow completely flew under my radar:

I did buy a copy of this, but the photo didn't come out.

And Jessica Cathryn Feinberg’s Artlair, also known as the booth where I spent ALL THE MONIES. I walked away with two prints to use as wall hangings—a gorgeous watercolor of a dragon reading a book and a fascinating clockwork coyote. She’s also put out a terrific book called The Clockwork Menagerie that I suspect will be very, very useful in creating Street of Bakers art because it breaks down the process of drawing steampunk clockwork to the reading level of an eight-year-old. Which, as you might have noticed, is about my level of artistic understanding.

You heard it here first—if I ever get a deal for Bakers and am allowed to recommend an illustrator, she is the top of my list. Actually, right now she’s the whole list.

I mean, come on—a clockwork unicorn!

I never thought I’d like Hawkeye better than Captain America. Wtf, Joss?

Yeah, I know, a week after the rest of the country, I finally saw The Movie. I’ve been sleep-deprived, okay? And I wanted to actually enjoy seeing The Avengers.

The short review? I liked it … mostly. And I’m not sure which part of that statement surprises me more.

Joss Whedon, maker of things I like. Canceled things.

I’ve been a fan of Joss Whedon’s since the second episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (I didn’t see the pilot.) As soon as I read the words “spontaneously combusting cheerleaders” in the TV listings, I was in. I loved Buffy. I loved Angel. I loved the two minutes of Firefly I got to see while it was actually on the air (I was living in a place that banned television—yes, really) and all of it that I got to see in reruns and on DVD. I adored Serenity and Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. I even gave Dollhouse the old college try. I’m not what you’d call a hardcore Joss fan—I don’t read the message boards, or cosplay, or even stalk him on Twitter—but you slap his name on something and you will have my fannish attention. You slap his name on a comic-book movie the size of The Avengers …

And I will get seriously, seriously worried.

Really, Joss? You’re gonna go there? I mean sure, you write some great superhero comics—you wrote the only X-Men comics I truly enjoyed, and your run on Runaways wasn’t quite as good as Brian K. Vaughan’s, but you did include that bit where an eleven-year-old slugged the Punisher, and that was brilliant. But your stuff is very meta, and The Avengers is very … not.

So I walked into The Avengers prepared to be just a bit bored, and disappointed.

I wasn’t.

Honestly, I was surprised at how much it didn’t suck. I expected to be at least somewhat bored—by the Iron Man sequences in particular, because I’m probably the only person in America who doesn’t find Robert Downey, Jr. funny. And the Hulk? Nobody’s done the Hulk right since the Bixby/Ferrigno days. And the Black Widow in Iron Man 2 was just dull, so why should I expect more from this outing?

But Iron Man was actually kind of funny—mostly when he shared the screen with Thor, but still. I liked the very Whedonesque take on how Banner is controlling his Hulk side now. And the Black Widow got a personality transplant courtesy of her complicated relationship with Hawkeye, who is probably the last character in the movie I expected to like, but holy cow, I like him now. I’m very glad that Trevor’s going to be using a bow in an upcoming Masks story, because Hawkeye has officially made it cool again. I never thought I’d say this, but I’d buy a ticket to a Hawkeye movie. (Well, a Hawkeye/Black Widow movie.) More on Hawkeye in a minute.

See? Told you it was a silly hat.

For those who’ve read all the way through this blog post without any idea what I’m talking about, the basic plot of The Avengers is that Loki, Thor’s evil-ish half-brother from Thor, has teamed up with some generic aliens called the Chitauri (who are sort of like Skrulls, but less challenging) to use the tesseract from Thor and Captain America to take over the wooooorrrrld, all while wearing an impressively silly hat. Standing in Loki’s way is superspy Nick Fury, who has assembled a motley band of heroes to stop Loki—a group including Iron Man, Captain America, the Black Widow, and the freaking Hulk. Thor and Hawkeye come along a little bit later, because Thor’s working his own angle and Hawkeye’s busy at first being mind-controlled by Loki. Cue about an hour of infighting and various members of the team getting trashed because they can’t or won’t play nice together; then a key character gets jossed and they mostly pull together to kick the crap out of Loki and company.

[Side note for non-Whedonites: “to joss” means “to build up a beloved character and then unexpectedly kill him/her off somewhere in the last third of the story.” Yes, it’s a verb now.  Yes, you should be worried about that.]

Cap is okay in this part. Also: Hey. Thor.

99 percent of this movie is amazing. The plot, the characters, the action sequences, the snarky dialogue—all a lovely melding of good popcorn fare and vintage Joss. In fact, there was really only one part of the movie I didn’t like: its portrayal of Captain America. Because this movie picks up shortly after Cap comes out of the iceberg and happens while he’s adjusting to the modern world, it has to deal with what fans have come to call the “man out of time” element. This has been done about a billion different ways—everything from watching him visit a dead girlfriend’s grave to seeing him struggle to operate a cell phone. Joss didn’t have a huge amount of screen time to devote to it, so he mostly just had Cap suck it up and be all about the job. Joss also needed someone to call Iron Man out for being a smartass and an egomaniac, and Cap usually gets that duty in any story, so that was no surprise.

Not shown: Many, many Steve-and-Tony snits.

But I was a bit disappointed in how it was all handled. There were a few Luddite jokes at Cap’s expense, and otherwise he spent about half the story acting like a military grunt from Buffy, storming around barking at people who weren’t doing things his way. Yes, Joss, we understand that this is a guy dealing with loss by not dealing with it. Yes, Joss, we understand that you don’t get to play with a lot of Cap’s arc because that’s presumably being saved for his own sequel. But … I just wanted a little bit more. Making the military guy look stupid is part of your oeuvre. So is making a fool of the jock. But you’re at your best when you surprise us, and there was nothing surprising about this.

Mostly, though I think I’m just mildly annoyed that Joss Whedon got me to like Hawkeye—Hawkeye, for God’s sake, the lesser clone of Green Arrow—and didn’t give Cap a moment. And I think it only bothers me because the rest of the movie was so damn good. Loki was more fun in The Avengers than he was in Thor, and that’s saying a lot. The Black Widow did more than show off her butt, and yet didn’t take over the whole movie as powerful women tend to do in Joss’s work. We saw more of Bruce Banner than we did of the Hulk, and Banner was a genuinely interesting guy to watch. Iron Man made me smirk with some of his one-liners. Thor made me laugh and cheer. And the inevitable property destruction was actually entertaining, even though I usually find my mind wandering during fight scenes.

I really haven’t said enough about how much I liked this movie, and I think I can sum it up by explaining the Hawkeye thing.

Do you see a boxing glove? I don't.

Hawkeye is pretty much Marvel Comics’ version of DC’s Green Arrow—a non-superpowered guy whose superhero thing is that he’s a freakishly good shot with a bow and arrow. Don’t ask me how Movie Hawkeye developed that particular skillset—in the comics, he’s a former circus performer, but I doubt that’s the case here. Anyway, Hawkeye’s main job in the Avengers comics is to be a hothead, to mouth off to Captain America, and to unexpectedly make the perfect shot when it’s most needed and remind everyone that you don’t need powers to be a hero, blah blah blah. Not that interesting, although I don’t think he’s ever sunk to Green Arrow’s level and used an arrow with a giant boxing glove on the end. However, he tends to wear strangely designed purple costumes, which is just wrong.

Anyway, I scratched my head for the better part of a day over the fact that Joss got me to like this guy. It helped that Movie Hawkeye wasn’t the annoying loudmouth that Comics Hawkeye is—in fact, he was so closemouthed I was tempted to nickname him Captain Laconic—but he also spent half the movie as Loki’s sock puppet, so what’s to like? How does a sock puppet come across as simultaneously sympathetic and badass?

Yes, I'm showing the loner with his bestie. Shaddap.

Well, Hawkeye’s established early on as an interesting guy—he’s supposed to be watching a group of scientists work with the tesseract, but he does so from a ridiculously high catwalk above them because he prefers being high up and “sees more” from up there. He makes an observation about the artifact that everyone else seems to have missed, too. This character is clearly a solitary kind of guy by nature, unusual in big government organizations, and yet unlike most movie loners, he still works all right with others and is fairly perceptive. He’s also the first of the people Loki fights that he doesn’t kill—apparently Loki sees something interesting in Hawkeye, too, which is why he zaps him with the mind-control whammy. It’s always nice when a charismatic villain confirms our impression of a character!

Hawkeye doesn’t come across too well for a while after that, though, because he’s basically a sock puppet. So from there, the work of making Hawkeye cool falls to the Black Widow, a kickass super-spy who breaks off a pretty funny interrogation scene (she’s tied to a chair and yet getting the bad guy to tell her everything) because she hears that Hawkeye is in trouble. After one of the most impressive fight scenes of the movie, she’s off to join the good guys and rescue her friend. And throughout the flick, even when she’s playing manipulative mind games with Loki, it’s fairly clear that she respects Hawkeye more than just about anyone else on earth. There’s a bond and a history between these two characters that isn’t discussed too much, but is clearly the engine of their relationship.

Big friendship reunion. With shooting and a third wheel.

And because this is Joss Whedon, this relationship never involves Black Widow going all melty at the sight of Hawkeye or needing him to rescue her. She does her job, she kicks butt—and she’s simply going to drop Loki out of an airplane if she doesn’t get her friend back. Do you have any idea how hard it is to balance a strong female character with her own arc against an interesting male character who can’t talk? I do; I’ve tried it. It’s incredibly hard not to succumb to rom-com clichés, or action-movie clichés. Joss pulled it off. He made me like Hawkeye, and he made me like the Hawkeye/Black Widow combo even more. By the time Hawkeye gets his personality back (after a fight with the Widow, of course), we’re all rooting for them to work out whatever it is that they’ve got going on. And they don’t get a big kissing moment or anything like that—they just go back to work, and they’re uniquely fantastic together. That’s maybe a fifth of the movie right there, and it’s completely satisfying both on its own and as a part of the whole film.

This. This is how you do superhero movies. Especially team movies. Everybody gets an arc, everyone gets a storyline, everyone gets a moment, but no one takes over. The pacing was strong, the characters were solid, and it was a great ride all the way through. I’m actually getting excited about writing Volume 2 of Masks, which has a lot of team dynamics now that the kids are really working together. I’m getting some good ideas.

Not bad, Joss. But next time give Cap a moment, okay?

Superhero trailer park

I remember one of Stan Lee’s Soapbox columns from the late 1990s where a reader wrote in to ask which Marvel Comics properties, if any, were being developed as movies. The list old Stan reeled off was truly staggering—everything from big-name properties like the X-Men and the Hulk to relatively small potatoes like the Black Panther and the Sub-Mariner. For those of you not old enough to remember the bad old days, let me provide a little perspective. I used to get together with a couple of friends in junior high school and do weekend superhero-movie marathons—and a good half of the bill was made-for-TV specials of indifferent quality. I grew up pretty much liking the 1990 version of Captain America because it was still a cut above things like Nick Fury: Agent of Shield starring (ugh!) David Hasselhoff.

Now, of course, it’s a whole new world.

I still can’t get over the fact that they made a Daredevil movie (and I’ll never get over how badly it sucked—Mark Steven Johnson, you’re on my list). Seeing X-Men on the big screen made me like the character of Wolverine for the first time in … well, ever. Ye gods, they finally untangled the rights to Spider-Man and made three movies, only one of which stank, and they’re making yet another. And DC Comics hasn’t fared too badly—Superman Returns bombed and The Spirit is the only movie I’ve ever walked out of (and I refunded my companion’s ticket by way of apology), but even the snoozefest that was Watchmen can’t eclipse Christopher Nolan’s Bat-extravaganzas.

This is a long way from a weekend movie binge where top billing was split between The Shadow and The Phantom (although I still like that last one enough that if I can write a role for Billy Zane into Masks, I will).

And now we’re facing what seems like an interminable summer of yet more superhero flicks. So I thought I’d weigh in on what looks good and what I’ll be sitting out. I rate superhero movies on the basis of overall story quality (plot, characterization, etc.), overall movie quality (caliber of writing, direction, etc.), and comic-book correspondence (whether and how the movie is faithful to the comic-book original, and whether that was a good idea). For comparison purposes, Batman Begins is an A+; Jonah Hex is an F.

1. Thor (May 6): Okay, I’ll be the first to admit I’m not a huge fan of the character. Basically, the only Thor comics I’ve read with any relish were written by J. Michael Straczynski, and even those are uneven. But this big-budget Norse mythological extravaganza, about the prince of Asgard being banished to Earth and ending up in the New Mexico desert, looks a bit promising. Chris Hemsworth seems to have real presence even in the face of hokey dialogue, Anthony Hopkins is chewing the scenery for all he’s worth, there’s a lot of wacko hat action going on, and I can’t see anything particularly stupid that director Kenneth Branagh has done with the concept or the script. Bonus points for pretty cinematography and the line in the trailer: “Oh, no. This is Earth, isn’t it?” Projected grade: A-

2. X-Men: First Class (June 3): The trailer they’ve released so far has played things pretty close to the vest, but this movie seems to have wandered a long way from the comics that inspired it. Following the early years of the Magneto-Professor X relationship from X-Men seems like a solid story—the conflict between their philosophies was always central to what made the comic work—but putting kiddie X-Men in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis a) screws up the timeline of the later films (Cyclops has only aged, what, ten years by the time the supposedly  near-future X-Men rolls around?) and b) doesn’t seem to add much in the way of character or weight. Projected grade: B-

3. Green Lantern (June 17): I’m calling it now—bad, bad, bad. Ryan Reynolds may be trying to invent himself as the superhero movie guy, but I haven’t yet seen him pull it off. His Deadpool in Wolverine was more irritating than amusing, his Hannibal King in Blade: Trinity just would not shut up, and I don’t see him improving in the role of a test pilot recruited into an alien police force. Judging by the trailer, this movie has a serious problem balancing goofy Ryan Reynolds comedy with kickass cosmic adventure, and the adventure is losing. And is anybody else creeped out by the fact that he transforms into Green Lantern with a pose reminiscent of a subway flasher? Projected grade: C

4. Captain America: The First Avenger (July 22): I am so, so torn about this. On the one hand, I want to smack whoever cast Chris Evans as the World War II wimp turned super-soldier. I saw Fantastic Four, guys—he showed all the acting ability of a plank, and his personality seemed to be set permanently on “lech.” I do not want to see this guy carrying the shield, period. That said, Joss Whedon apparently did a script polish on this one, and the man knows his superheroes, and I’ve heard good things about Hugo Weaving’s sinister Red Skull and generally good things about Sebastian Stan, who plays Cap’s sidekick Bucky (and you’ve all heard me go on about him). So this one gets my dollars, at least at a matinee price, though I may live to regret it. Projected grade: B+

5. Cowboys and Aliens (July 29): Yes, this is based on a comic book. Shut up. On the plus side, they’ve got Harrison Ford in a movie whose whole concept is wrapped up in its title. The trailer looks decently creepy and well-balanced, with an intriguing main character in the desperado (Daniel Craig) who survives an alien abduction. And there’s director Jon Favreau of Iron Man fame. On the minus side … cowboys and aliens? Really? There had better be one hell of a story here. Projected grade: B-

6. Conan the Barbarian (August 19): Not technically a comic-book movie (Conan was a pulp hero first), but close enough. And no, I don’t see this going anywhere good. They’re remaking an Arnold Schwarzenegger flick with Jason Momoa of Stargate Atlantis, and the release date’s been pushed back to August, well-known as the month where summer movies go to die. Projected grade: D