Tag: comics

Thoughts on Black Panther

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When mythical gf and I got to the theater and took our seats, they happened to be like in the third row and way off to the left.  Granted, theaters have come a long way to where it’s not nearly as bad closer up front than it used to be, and we had seats angled to face the screen that also reclined, so it could easily have been way worse, but there was a brief moment where I thought that it might’ve been preferable had we waited just a little bit and gotten more direct facing seats.

However, the following morning, I kept hearing from every interested movie goer that they couldn’t find a single theater that had any available tickets left for any reasonable showtime of Black Panther.  Showings were being shown as sold out just about everywhere across the Metro Atlanta area, and suddenly getting to see the movie when we saw the movie didn’t seem like such a bad thing after all.

Anyway, I have a lot of thoughts about Black Panther, and to cut to the chase, none of them are at all bad.  Full disclosure, I’ve never really been a fan of the comic book, and I’ve always held Black Panther on the tier of Marvel superheroes like Thor and Daredevil but still above shit like Iron Fist or Quasar, as properties that I knew existed, I knew their place in the Marvel Universe, but I just didn’t really give a shit about.  I liked X-Men the most, enjoyed singular properties like Iron Man and Spider-Man, and I’d been on and off with properties like the Avengers and the Fantastic Four. 

Needless to say, the prospect of a Black Panther film wasn’t something that excited me much when I heard about it, but the Marvel Cinematic Universe had made me capable of enjoying properties I was lukewarm about like Thor and Ant-Man, so it was also safe to be optimistic about a stand-alone Black Panther, especially with the exciting manner in which he was introduced in Captain America: Civil War.

I think it goes without saying that no single Marvel film has had the magnitude of hype that Black Panther has had, and there’s very obvious reasons of why such was the case, given the tumultuous social climate we live in today in the 2010s.  One of the challenges that I had during the hype, arrival, viewing and post-thinking of the film was creating separation between the film itself and everything that the film stood for in modern society.

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Exposing convenient revisionist history

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

With Marvel Studio’s Black Panther on the horizon, spouting all sorts of racial rhetoric about it being historic and things other than a comic book movie, Washington Post contributor Sonny Bunch drops Mjolnir on the truth of the matter: before Black Panther, there was Blade.

Obviously, Blade happened way before the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and long before there was an odd existence of Marvel movies between FOX, Sony, and whomever produced the turds of Ben Affleck’s Daredevil, Nicolas Cage’s Ghost Rider, and the poor Jessica Alba Fantastic Fours that I’m too lazy to expend the few seconds to Google.

But for all intents and purposes, Blade is still a Marvel property, and therefore seeing as how the title of the film is named after him, makes him the first ever Marvel production starring a black person in the titular role.  As much as the internet and the rest of the world really want to claim Black Panther is this evolutionary revolutionary, in the grand spectrum of comic book films, it’s really not.  It’s just another addition to a library that’s way bigger than lots of people want to believe, for the sake of pushing a very expensive agenda in order to expedite the recouping of a gargantuan budget.

I love this article because Bunch does a great job of anticipating arguments to his article, and stomps them out before they can even be made, like pointing out all the other films, as small and as obscure as they may have been, being made in ages prior to the current internet, that have long beaten Black Panther to the punch as far as identifying black directors, black soundtracks, and other black things that are especially under the microscope now that we’ve traversed into February, the vaunted Black History Month. 

I hope he dropped a mic after this piece went to publish.

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In Netflix, Marvel trusts

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

One of the good things about getting snowed in for most of the weekend was that it gave me the opportunity to sit on my ass and do nothing but watch television that I’d started to fall behind on.  But who am I really kidding, snow or no snow, sitting on my ass and doing nothing but watching television was already kind of on my agenda regardless of the weather outside, but it does sound like the snow was a convenient excuse to do such.

Anyway, I took the opportunity to start and finish the entire Punisher series on Netflix.  And much like several of the Marvel properties that preceded it, I have to say that Netflix has once again managed to take a fairly one-dimensional character, and make a watchable and fairly compelling season of television out of it.

I’m not going to pretend like I was a huge Punisher fan, really.  I always thought he was kind of an outlier in the Marvel Universe, since he wasn’t a superhero in the sense of having any powers or abilities, but instead more like an extremely well-armed vigilante with a death wish that actually killed people on a regular basis.  He was loosely separated by only a few degrees from bigger players, with associations to Nick Fury, Matt Murdock and the Kingpin, which puts him in remotely the same neighborhood as Spider-Man and the Avengers, but at the same time, Frank Castle wasn’t the kind of guy we’d expect to see in any major events or crossovers.

Seriously, what would Frank Castle contribute during the Infinity Crusades?  Weapons?  Tony Stark among others has that covered.  Micro’s hacking expertise?  Reed Richards and Ant Man, as well as again Tony Stark, probably have computers way better than Micro’s cache of 486s, much less his downfall when the wifi is unplugged.  I’m pretty sure Thanos with his power over, everything, wouldn’t even notice a trigger-happy psychopath with a glock when Thor and Hulk are trying to flank him.

However, the Punisher beat-em-up arcade game Capcom released in 1993, that used the same old Final Fight engine that 20 other games used was still pretty fun.

The point is, the Punisher was always a property that I thought was really out of place in the Marvel Universe, but he still existed so that storylines of New York-based superheroes could get dark and broody from time to time.

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The Dragon*Con post, 2017

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As some might recall, I skipped Dragon*Con in 2016, citing that I felt like I needed a break from the event as a whole, cold turkey full stop.  Mythical gf and I deliberately scheduled an out-of-country cruise vacation on that very same period of time so that we could eliminate all doubts and remove all temptations to participate in anything, and I have zero regrets for doing what we did then.

However, I would be lying to myself if I didn’t feel a little bit melancholy about the notion of deviating from what was something of a yearly tradition, where large chunks of my friends gather, and it’s a pretty comprehensive experience of catching up with people, taking a ton of pictures and imbibing in a whole lot of alcohol.  As much as I relished in the opportunity to take a break, I kind of knew that I would be back the following year; I accomplished my goal of wanting to feel like I missed out, which renewed my sense of wanting to go back.

Life works in interesting ways sometimes, and we don’t always get to have a say in what happens when.  And as much as I was actually back to looking forward to Dragon*Con again this year, some things I’m not going to get into happened at a fairly conflicting time, and really derailed the experience as a whole.  Needless to say, not only was Dragon*Con something that got pushed into the backseat, I’ll admit that it was something that was practically impossible for me to enjoy throughout the weekend.

I’ll often say that writing is an efficient form of therapy for me, and sometimes it takes seeing thoughts formed into words and slapped onto a word processor for me to gain some clarity, but such is very true as far as my overall feelings of the con itself.  I’m trying my best to remain as objective as possible without letting my personal life overlap with anything else, but the reality is that everything is relative, and life doesn’t take a backseat just because something is planned, and life doesn’t stop when it comes to day-to-day living them out. 

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Photos: Dragon*Con 2017

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

[2020 note]: Among many of the things random visitors might be remotely interested in seeing, would be convention pictures from years past.  And of the several cons where I took my camera with me to take photos, Dragon*Con 2017 would be one of them.

I’ll be honest, this was a particularly trying D*C for me, and there was a lot going on in my personal life that was justifiably distracting me from having any semblance of genuine enjoyment during the weekend, and it was pretty evident as far as I was concerned.  But it wasn’t to say I didn’t enjoy the company of many friends that I did get to see.

However, the fact that there’s literally only a singular gallery from the convention itself should say enough about where my head really was, but there’s still some good stuff amongst the photo dump.

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The Defenders: entertaining, good but not great

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Because I’m an individual who likes to not live on the internet and let the actions of others and the ensuing social media shit storms dictate my life and emotional well-being, I found myself in a fortuitous situation where I had all weekend to watch the just-released Netflix’s The Defenders; all of it.  It’s not often that I’m at the forefront of freshly dropped television, and I’ve made no secret that I’ve been high on all of the Netflix Marvel Hell’s Kitchen Universe, so this was a tremendous delight in getting to shotgun the series from start to finish pretty immediately.

If I had any genuine gripes, it would probably have to be the fact that the series as a whole is but just eight episodes, instead of the 12-episode standard that all of the comprising characters’ individual shows had.  I mean, as I’ve aged, I haven’t had a problem with stories getting to the point and finding resolution in an expedient manner, but the mark of good television is when the viewers are wishing there was more of it; more time for characters and their relationships to develop and hash out more.  The Defenders was definitely not in the camp of being too long and drawn out, but quite the contrary, I simply wished there was more time and more interaction between the stars of the show, instead of just so constantly rapid-fire progressing the story.

In fact, the best imagery of the entire series occurred in one of the rare downtime moments of the show, when, and this spoils nothing, the foursome of the Defenders are all at a Chinese restaurant, some eating more reluctantly than others, but they’re just kind of hanging out and getting to know about each other before they really start working together.  It’s reflective of my favorite imagery in comic books, when super-powered characters are simply existing in the same real world as us readers, doing mundane things, like gathering with peers and eating Chinese food together.

Anyway, as a whole, I will say that The Defenders was a good and entertaining series.  Not mind-blowingly good, but not at all terrible.  Whereas Iron Fist was kind of mediocre but better than expected, Jessica Jones was a little too long and repetitive and Luke Cage lost some steam late in the series, The Defenders’ short series made a lot of those shortcomings impossible to have.  Instead, the show feels kind of like a really fast-paced whirlwind, where the plot exists in just a few days and almost never stops once the show gets moving.

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This Hulk-Wolverine combination can’t be real, can it?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a long way from the days when I used to really, really follow comic books.  When I’m bored at the desk, I’ll often times wander over to Wikipedia and catch up on how absurd comic storylines are getting, and more often than not, I’m disappointed in the direction of where things have gone throughout the years.  The separation of Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson.  The killing of the Joker.  The killing of Batman.  Jubilee as a vampire. 

Needless to say, there aren’t any storylines that are making it remotely compelling to start seeking out comic books these days, and there’s pretty much nothing I can’t use Wikipedia or the rest of the internet to catch back up with.  Television and movies might be bringing a ton of attention to the parent properties, but there’s so much of it, that that’s all that I think people wait for exclusively.

But if there’s one current storyline that I think will be safe from adaptation, it’s this one that I saw recently pop up on a social media discussion: a Hulk-Wolverine Hybrid character.

Why?  Because it sounds absolutely stupid as shit.

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