State of the Capes
I left last time on a slightly ominous note, so I’ll be upfront: this is the last post on Primary Color Horizons for the foreseeable future. I’m sure I’ll post here again, whether for special projects with friends ala Whowatch or professional purposes, but broadly speaking my public writing when I feel the urge is going to be on Patreon for the next good little while; I have a few asks in there by Sean Dillon, Justin Martin, and John Parrish I’ll get around to before long, and all my posts there will remain free and public even as I’ll put the little $1 subscriber fee on sending me questions.
There’s no single big dramatic reason. While I think I’ve substantially expanded the scope of what kind of art I’m taking in in the way I’d hoped at the start of this ‘project’, I’m rarely inclined to write about it; my critical work is mostly built on a foundation of a lifetime of context when it comes to superhero media and American comics (with a recent exception of some dashed-off thoughts on 1967’s Playtime), and so I don’t have as much to express about all this through that particular medium. On top of that eventually I’ve have to start paying here when I crossed a certain follower threshold, which I’d rather not unless again this became necessary professionally. And moreover I have a pair of much larger projects in mind over the next few years - one tentative nonfiction one, one pretty definite fiction one - that I want to devote my attention to rather than feeling like I’m cheating subscribers here unless I occasionally summon something up. Make no mistake though: I’ve appreciated you all so, so much, and I wanted to give you all one last newsletter I’ve had on my mind.
Alright, one last notable media catchup:
Comics: Return to Eden, Aquicorn Cove, Grease Bats, Future, BL First Love Anthology: Five Seconds Before We Fall in Love, hirayasumi Vol. 4-5, Even if There’s no Rainbow Tomorrow, Ranger Reject Vol. 12, #drcl midnight children Vol. 1-4, finally reread Once & Future since I watched Excalibur a few years back and know who these people are now, Hell’s Paradise: Jigokuraku Vol. 10-13, Ghostwriter, Teleportation and Other Luxuries, The Last Delivery, bad dream: A Dreamer Story, The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn’t a Guy at All Vol. 1-2, Suicide Squad: Dream Team, My Summer of You Vol. 1, The Way of the Househusband Vol. 12-13, The Boxer Vol. 9-10, Coffin Bound Vol. 1-2, Akane-banashi Vol. 10-13, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End Vol. 6-7, Fool Night Vol. 4-5, To Your Eternity Vol. 6-7, Superman: The Kansas Sighting, Superman: Where Is Thy Sting?, Supergirl: Wings, Tokyo Alien Bros Vol. 1-2, Dandadan Vol. 12-14, Green Lantern: Willworld, hi my name is sam and this is my petition to STOP HURTING MEG IN FAMILY GUY!!!!, Jimmy Olsen’s SuperCyclopedia, GLEEM, Goodnight Punpun Vol. 1, Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction Vol. 1, Batman: Justice Buster Vol. 4, Tamaki & Amane, Batman: Absolution, Superman: End of the Century, Paranoid Gardens, Black Panther by Christopher Priest The Complete Collection Vol. 1-4, Little Hollow Cafe, Mujina Into the Deep Vol. 1, DC Finest: Superman: Kryptonite Nevermore, Leviathan Vol. 1-2, Autistic? Me?, Superman Confidential #1-11, Superstar, Choujin X Vol. 9, Superman: The World, Orion by Walter Simonson Omnibus, Search and Destroy Vol. 2, Veil Vol. 1: Temperature of Orange, Failure to Launch: A Tour of Ill-Fated Futures, Marvel (the 2020-2021 Alex Ross-curated anthology), Area 10, Chromatic Fantasy: Fugue #1-5, Two-Fisted Science, The Great Big Book of Tomorrow: A Treasury of Cartoons, Best of 2000AD Volume 3: The essential gateway into the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic, Miguel O’Hara - Spider-Man: 2099/Annihilation 2099/Conquest 2099, Spider-Man: One More Day, Feynman, Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 5, I GOT A NEW JOB AS A MAGICAL GIRL’S CAT!!, Batman and Robin (2023) #14-24, Holy Lacrimony, Clementine: Book Three, The fables of Erlking wood, The Sickness Vol. 1, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The IDW Collection Vol. 1, Books of Doom, DC Comics: The Art of Darwyn Cooke, Numbercruncher
Movies: The Mask (2023), The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, Black Bag, RAP WORLD, Thunderbolts*, Super-Rabbit, Mission Impossible - The Final Reckoning, I Saw the TV Glow, The People’s Joker, Popeye “My Pop, My Pop”, Superman, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Mr. Monk’s Last Case: A Monk Movie, Playtime, Ponyo
TV: The Bear, Invincible, Common Side Effects, Peacemaker, To Be Hero X, Doctor Who, Super Cube, Batman: The Brave and the Bold (the maybe one episode I hadn’t seen before, "Bold Beginnings!”, followed by a finale rewatch that yes made me tear up again), Creature Commandoes, Rick and Morty, The Wonderful Summer of Mickey Mouse, Hunter X Hunter
Games: Astro Bot, Gris
Longform writing: Gideon the Ninth (Act III, also I’m done now, this shit is ass, feeling deeply betrayed by the entire queer SFF community for having spent over a half decade hyping this, I crunched the numbers and each of those years of effusive near-universal praise bought 48 pages of slack from me), Doughnut Economics: Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist, My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, Voices From Krypton, Our Shared Storm: A Novel of Five Climate Futures, Exhalation: Stories, One Must Imagine Scott Free Happy, Cyber Shogun Revolution (I figured it’d probably be slop coasting on the goofy big hook, but then I saw Ken Liu recommended it so I grabbed it, unfortunately my initial impression was correct and I gave up after a single miserable chapter), Morpho by Philip Palmer
Shortform writing: The various newsletters I’m subscribed to, Dekar Druid and the Infinite Library, Pure of Heart, Instructions for Good Boys on the Interplanetary Expedition, Five Views of the Planet Tartarus, Donald Trump’s economic masterplan, different thinkpiece about the tariffs I immediately lost the link to because it was a link from an app so it wasn’t saved in my history but I remember frankly finding it more convincing than Varoufakis’s, The Greatest One-Star Restaurant in the Whole Quadrant, Charlotte Incorporated, Viet Thanh Nguyen: Most American Literature is the Literature of Empire, Reacher is a show about a very large man punching his way through crime – and it’s perfect, Meditations from the Event Horizon, When Must We Kill Them?, An Oral History of ‘Duck Dodgers,’ Cartoon Network’s Space-Age Looney Tunes Show, TALK: “The Siren Song of the Otherworld Goggles”, Rthing It Up: An Oral History, I’m Not Entirely Certain…But I Think I Might Hate Control?, Where Are They Now?, IT’S A SUPERMAN SUMMER, Can Warner’s DC Studios Rise From the Ashes With ‘Superman?’ | Analysis, Hostile Intelligence: Reflections from a Visit to the West Bank, The Rule of Idiots, Superman lights the way: How Hollywood's new Man of Steel shepherds the DC universe of tomorrow, ‘Superman’ Director James Gunn: ‘You Don’t Want Everyone to Root for You’, Multi-Spatial Apartment Complex Malfunction Results in Body Horror, DC's Man of Tomorrow: James Gunn on Superman, Gods and Monsters, and what's next (exclusive), My Mother, the Supervillain, "They're Hot for Each Other!": 'Superman's David Corenswet and Rachel Brosnahan Break Down Clark and Lois' Simmering On-Screen Tension, How James Gunn's Superman Reinvents the Look and Feel of Kal-El's World, Why Nicholas Hoult Lost Superman Role to David Corenswet: He’s a ‘More Controlled Actor’ and Had ‘Really Good’ Chemistry With Another Lois Lane, James Gunn: “People don’t trust a lot of the people in power; they want Superman to exist”, The Return Of Superman & John Williams, With New Heroes And DC Trinity In James Gunn’s Reboot Kickoff, Look, up in the sky: it’s a Superman who wants to be just like us, What Else, What Else, in the Joyous City?, ‘It’s destroyed me completely’: Kenyan moderators decry toll of training of AI models, High debts, high rents, and miscommunication: What happened to Silver Sprocket, Final Flash: An Announcement, A Dish Best Served Cold, Or, an Excerpt From the Cookbook Of the Gods, ‘Superman’ Secrets Revealed: The James Gunn Spoiler Interview, The Void Behind Nicolas Hoult’s Eyes, Finding Love in a Time Loop: A How-To Guide, Clayface Just Became the Most Important Superhero Film of 2026, One of Superman’s Craziest Action Sequences Needed Deodorant to Pull Off (Yes, Deodorant), ‘Superman’ and ‘Fantastic Four’: How Hollywood Finally Pulled Off Comic Book Camp, James Cameron: ‘I’ve Justified’ Only Making ‘Avatar’ Movies for the Last 20 Years on the Basis They ‘Can Do Some Good,’ Not Just Make Money, Why The CW's Urban Fantasy Comedy Reaper Was Canceled, Trade Rating: Jonathan Hickman and Esad Ribić’s ALIENS VS AVENGERS TP delves into the full legacy of Aliens, James Gunn Takes Rainn Wilson Inside His DC Cinematic Universe, The Dream Tourists, STABILIZING THE ORB, James Dobson, Godfather of Child Abuse, Finally Dies, Joe Casey’s Superman: Believe pitch and his scrapped plans for Kneel Before Zod #9-12, Lois Lane seems terrible at interviewing Superman, but is she playing a dangerous game?, The White Guilt of Superman, Hindsight, RFK Jr.’s damage to the CDC is ‘past the point of no return,’ Dr. Demetre Daskalakis warns, ‘Superman’ Cinematographer Henry Braham on Crafting a Wide Lens Look for the New Man of Steel, Beginning Before and After the End
Online videos: Regular Some More News viewing along with the shortform folks I tune in for, bunch of Conner O’Malley I hadn’t watched before including the short films listed above, How It Feels scrolling through Netflix Top 10 and subsequently a ton of Almost Friday TV (how had I never heard of them before), Post-Credits Scenes Aren’t Fun Anymore, Half-Life in 2025 Hits Different (feat. SophieBaybey) + Half-Life in 2025 is Fighting Back (feat. Sophiebaybey), Something About Mario Kart ANIMATED, THE GASLIGHT DISTRICT: PILOT, The Most Important Movie Of The 21st Century, If Saitama become a Z fighter pts 1 & 2 and Dragon Ball Super - DARK ANGEL, The all-knowing lie detector, Media Literacy and the Superman trailer, Hostage Needs Audience to Sing Friends Theme, Superman's Nicholas Hoult & David Corenswet Play "Truth, Dare or Farkle" | Wonderland Magazine, A Dog Fight Animation (i mean dirty fight, maybe), Cinema’s Eternal Obsession With Flying, Dust Queen | Chapter 1 - Growing Pains, [What-If] Omni-Man VS Homelander | Sprite Animation., Every episode of Doctor Who (2005-2025) described by The Simpsons + DOCTOR WHO (2005-2025) DESCRIBED BY FAMILY GUY, We made Patrick McDonald watch The Phantom... and it’s UNBELIEVABLY bad, [What-If 20] Piccolo (Majin) VS Demon King Dabura., THE AMAZING DIGITAL CIRCUS 5 + 6, YAKUZA ESCAPE! Japan Parkour POV Chase, skibidi toilet 78 and 79 (part 1), and (part 2), I Missed VHS... So I Made My Own, The Greatest Hero Anime You've Never Heard Of, If Superman Was Realistic, book red flags and the Male Reading Crisis, Homemade Gatorade, Ratchet & Son (Practice Dub) | BTDubs - Episode 9, Super Guy - Funny Moments, Frieza, Cell vs Broly - [Sprite Animation] + Goku Super Saiyan 3 vs Broly Super Saiyan 3 - [Sprite Animation], Oops I Went To The Cannes Film Festival Again, We Made a Podcast with AI, Unedited Footage of a Bear, The Death Of The TCM Wine Club, Why Are Movies About Research So Addictive?, I’m Making a Batman Beyond Game!, How Superman Handles a Lois Lane Interview | Anatomy of a Scene, The Daniel Craig James Bond Era Is The Weirdest Franchise Ever, Superman | Lex Luthor: The Mind Of A Master Villain | Behind The Scenes | Warner Bros. Entertainment, Gohan vs Goku e Vegeta, POV: You are Spiderman in Real Life, Daima Goku vs GT Goku! [What-if MOVIE] + GT Goku vs Super Goku! [What-if], Superman | The Justice Gang | Behind the Scenes | Warner Bros. Entertainment, Beast Gohan vs Ultra Instinct Goku! [What-if], Things Employers Say in 2025, Honest Trailers | Superman (2025), Superman Vs Goku-Final Battle(Full animation), Superman | The Daily Planet Returns | Behind the Scenes | Warner Bros. Entertainment, Superman | Superman, Lois Lane, & Lex Luthor | Behind the Scenes | Warner Bros Entertainment, Sonic’s Last Life
Other: I attended a Music of John Williams concert and paid a visit to the Norman Rockwell Museum; I also started listening to Midnight Burger again.
To begin with by establishing a tidy visual contrast, a quick-and-dirty list of my favorite comics of 2024, divided into two categories:
Favorite cape comics
Absolute Batman
Aliens vs. Avengers
Batman: Justice Buster
The Boy Wonder
Choujin X
Detective Comics by Ram V
The Flash
Jupiter’s Legacy: Finale #2, a fact I am not proud of on multiple levels
Resurrection of Magneto
Superman vs. Meshi
Trinity (the two collections of Wonder Woman backups)
The Ultimates
Ultimate Spider-Man
Ultimate Universe: One Year In
(Batman: Dark Patterns and Metamorpho: The Element Man each only released one issue and couldn’t reasonably be considered eligible.)
Favorite non-cape comics of the year:
Akane-banashi
Alas,
Anzuelo
Blade of the Fane
Blue Period
Cam Marshall’s Patreon serials Ethernet Cable Girlfriend and Flying Saucer Video
chrysalis
CLUMP
Dandadan
The Deep Dark
#drcl midnight children
Dr. Limos Plays God
Fool Night
Get Fury (one could quibble on this, but I don’t think this qualifies as capes even if you count other Ennis Punisher comics)
The Gulf
The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn't a Guy at All
hausofdecline’s work, with particular note of Gary, The Modular Man, and The Serrated Knife
Home By The Rotting Sea
hirayasumi
IMPASTO
In Utero
Jessica Farm
The Last Delivery
Last Stop
Loving, Ohio
Ocultos
The One Hand
Pacific Dream
Rare Flavours
Return to Eden
Rewired
Tokyo These Days
Universe!
The Way of the Househusband
we live here too
(Honorable mentions to The Boxer and Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, the former having already been serialized in English online, the latter being the English-language release of a comic that ended nearly 20 years ago rather than relatively contemporary material. I’d say Jessica Farm above counts, despite being a collection of material from 2000-2023 while the story is still ongoing, since Josh Simmons has this collected so as to provide a breaking point in the narrative that lets it feel like a complete OGN.)
Plenty of both! Lot more of one than the other though! Yes that’s in part because I’ve become the kind of person who spends too much on yearly Shortbox sales, but it’s also in part because superheroes are on such a visible cultural decline that Scott Snyder’s pitch for DC’s latest linewide initiative was an unashamed public “nuh-UH!” Things are winding down in general: My Hero Academia concluded and the anime adaptation will soon follow suit, The Boys is approaching its final season, the decade-plus Jupiter series reached its ignominious end (I subject I’ll address further in one of those Patreon asks), and not only did the CW era of superhero television end with Superman and Lois in one of the most deranged series finales I’ve ever witnessed, but as his final producer credit, so too does the Geoff Johns era of DC Comics. And yeah, there’ll pretty much always be SOMETHING worthwhile coming out of the genre as a sheer matter of volume. But the question remains as a bunch of the big contemporary anchors fall away; is the space broadly still worth paying any real attention to? If anything I’m kinda glad I put this off so long spent so much time catching up on material for this, because the longer I took, the more hats were thrown in the ring…
MUST WE
So we’re still doing that MCU thing, aren’t we. It’s a prospect so deeply unappealing that unexpectedly liking the last two movies not only does nothing to shift my feelings on this, but drags my enjoyment of those down the slightest iota.
Sure, Thunderbolts* somehow yielded up possibly the best third act in this whole franchise and made me care about Robert Reynolds aka The Sentry the Man With the Power of a Million Exploding Suns, but they’re gonna have Robert Downey Jr. Doctor Doom kill him and it’ll be the wrong kind of bummer (though tbf for once I cannot blame Kevin Feige, totally understandable to not anticipate people caring about The Sentry). Fantastic Four: First Steps was a shocking delight - even if I thought it kinda beefed Galactus himself - that whet the appetite for more now that we know good Fantastic Four movies are possible, and Spider-Man: Brand New Day’s set photos are as promising as anyone could reasonably hope for, but they’re still fresh slates happening before the announced reboot being dropped on us by Ryan Reynolds like a cartoon anvil after he personally ensured last year no lessons would be learned here.
Every good thing that escapes the maw is tainted by the knowledge that Kevin’s gonna go back and actively make it worse at this point, because that’s the promise of da shared universe baybeeee, and we put that in da moooviiiieeeeeees. Idk, do you, the kind of folks who subscribe to a newsletter like this, really need me to elaborate on the collective disillusionment with the MCU?
At least we have a physically and emotionally broken Hugh Jackman standing right alongside us under that ominously growing shadow from earlier.
All-In and From The Ashes are pretty much the official ‘nothing to see here, folks!’ moments for DC and Marvel’s mainlines. Marvel got handed their biggest victory in decades on a silver platter with the post-HoXPoX X-line - most of those didn’t even have to be very good in practice! People were there anyway! - and went out of their way to ditch the grand plan in favor of uncompromised across-the-board public disdain; DC actively marketed their regular titles as the old and busted opposite Absolute’s new hotness as everybody chases after evil Darkseid portals or somesuch, and they won’t even keep their couple stabs at legitimacy like The New Gods and <sob!> Metamporpho: The Element Man <choke!> going.
Now granted DC got Fraction back - probably something to do with that rumored Jimmy Olsen show - to fix up Batman, Marvel’s giving North a turn at center stage with One World Under Doom, and there’ll always be specialty projects and the Black Label side of things and freak incidents like Nightwing suddenly being good to justify the existence of us lifers, but things are. Whoof. Things are not broadly great on that mainline side of things folks. Which would be a perfectly familiar development, if not that neither company seems particularly invested in turning that around, or generally aware that any of this constitutes a problem.
A couple months back I happened across a short by the once universally-despised and feared J.T. Krul from roundabouts 2009: what I couldn’t help but be morbidly struck by was that this guy was exhibiting more polished standards of basic craft than the vast majority of the biggest and most beloved current names. The critical and curatorial bottom has fallen out as editors are talking in interviews about their main job being to make sure everyone stays their standards of in-character, and they’ve evidently finally cultivated the exact audience they’ve always wanted of readers who solely judge by those standards, for whatever short distance that’ll take ‘em.
Hold the line Al Ewing: at this rate, you’re the only shot the direct market as we know it has at ending with a modicum of dignity.
(I am a little excited for those stupid crossovers though, so sue me.)
People liked that X-Men '97 show but the X-Men are for nerds so I didn’t watch that.
I did peep the opening credits and saw the one big change was they replaced a shot of Wolverine doing sick Wolverine stuff with a Lore Tease, immediately knew this was juiceless/sauceless/hopeless.
Weird that they seem to be trying to do serious business stories now but everyone still talks like that.
The Power Fantasy is one of the two big comics coming out right now - I’ll touch on the other later - with just a little too much greasy Wildstorm DNA in the recipe for me to hate it outright, but that are plain and simple not good comics, which is unfortunate for the genre when both are at the vanguard for making a continuing case for capes as tentpole attractions in print.
I mean, Caspar Wijngaard is good. He’s always good, even if the wide empty beautiful spaces around his beautiful people unconsciously amplify the core issue here. Kieron Gillen can sleepwalk through the mechanics of this kind of thing. I dig the goofy timelines and graphs and such even if I don’t for a second buy the alt-history turning out this similarly, or that that conceit matters much at all beyond that there had to be a recognizable historical space for these people to work their bullshit out across the face of.
The problem is the stakes cannot alter themselves; they can’t even really wobble. The characters need to be intelligent and emotionally well-regulated enough to have not destroyed the world in the preceding thirty years, just tetchy enough for it to nominally still be a concern even when we know they’re not gonna do it because there are still issues coming up. It’d be one thing if we were getting an outside view - one where these distant godlings gathering ominously or killing presidents or blowing up countries were real shocks - but we’re on the inside of this weightless detente. All the big heartbreakers and debates already happened to these people a long time ago before they settled into the necessary status quo, and reading them it turns out then as now they were exhaustedly mouthing off at one another about the logistics of their superpowers and their clever-clever schemes and philosophies from a melancholy distance in nothing so much as the world’s classiest Mark Millar joint.
(Ritesh Babu pulled out the Millar comparison awhile back; we discussed it and came to that conclusion at about the same time, and I’ve been storing my version of that take in the chamber fearing it’d be passe by now, though in practice no one else seems to have taken this up.)
Classy Mark Millar does admittedly bend towards my tastes. But that’s what it is!
FORWARD FROM HERE
Before the more significant stuff: I watched Ultraman: Rising and that was pretty ok, I’d maybe watch a followup and it proves Spider-Verseing these is a viable strategy. Choujin X is a lot of gnarly fun, crept up on me slowly that this was a superhero comic until it hit its crossover event chapter, and it does the alt-history gimmick with significantly more weight than TPF. Apparently it’ll cap at around 20 volumes and I’m game, maybe I’ll go back and check out Tokyo Ghoul someday.
I’m either gonna write a couple hundred words about Superman or twenty thousand so for the time being: loved it, they finally made the good one (BVS: UE notwithstanding). They would never legally permit you to make a Superman movie this cool or willing to treat him as a real character unless you’re also running the studio. Fortunately!
Only real outstanding gripe after two views and a couple months sitting with it is that the Jimmy plotline sucks, even as the basic conceit of ‘Jimmy Olsen has the most overwhelmingly powerful rizz of anyone on the planet, and he is nothing but baffled and frustrated by this’ is quality.
(Also that despite the laundry list of people’s pet issues with it and how it’s problematic for violating the sacred takes, Superman and his other American hero buddies doing some inspiring international white savior escapades has been near-universally received as Surprisingly Leftist. But let’s be real, relative to most of the genre it still is; take that as you will.)
As for the larger DCU in the making: Peacemaker very good, Creature Commandoes quite bad, Supergirl I’m certainly curious, Clayface I probably won’t watch but I’m glad it exists, Lanterns stands to be an all-timer, Man of Tomorrow inject it into me/give Corenswet + Brosnahan + Hoult a million of these. I like that this is a world cracked enough that Lex Luthor building a pocket universe prison staffed by his own genetically engineered Charon monster is received as a ‘oh, that wily Luthor!’ rather than a ‘…so is he God?’, but at the same time just tactile enough that Superman can only hold up a building for a few seconds before it collapses under its own weight. I like that instead of a handwave to bring in the JSA chumps the premise of this as a world with history seems to be the real deal, and that you get a sense of how run down and empty the whole endeavor has become by this point until Superman semi-accidentally gives the whole thing a kick in the ass to get moving again. They know they’re marketing to nerds at this point with the shared universe component, and I imagine the nerds are going to be feasting. As long as the projects they greenlight in that framework continue to seem like they could be interesting, a-ok in my book; throwing mid-to-sizable budgets at interesting filmmakers to do genre spins against the backdrop of Gunn’s fanfic epic probably is the best case scenario for _CU’s at this stage.
They do have to make that The Authority movie though. Almost surely a terrible idea on multiple levels, I totally get why what they did with Superman would supersede it anyway, but you made your public commitment to that wacko prospect and now you are honor-bound to follow through.
Caught up on Invincible seasons 2 and 3, and by golly they brought it just about sufficiently for the Conquest fight, which is the main thing I was asking for. Otherwise though, I’ll just share the (slightly-paraphrased for clarity) thoughts I spitballed at friends on Discord:
It has major high points, but I feel like I can see the wiring of the whole thing as a hitmaker way too easily to get attached to much of it. Its hamburger shonen nature allows it to fold in the maximum amount of appealing superhero components frictionlessly - a guy with a big arm blaster who robs banks can show up and you'll go "oh shit! Like in the cartoons I watched as a kid!" and it doesn't have to devote time and effort to establishing his deal or schemes, he can just be there for a pew-pew fight. On the opposite end the Viltrumites don't have to be a big capital-c Commentary on the Superman archetype, they're the ones who are there to have season finale fights with compared to the rank-and-file. And encompassing both extremes within its cast with any degree of cohesion or direction will involve doing Bronze Age style super-soap across a relatively sizable cast of a kind these shows generally do not, so that becomes a novelty itself. It's all the most mechanically useful elements of longform superhero storytelling in a blender and that plus the voice cast feels like it's papering over a lot.
Mark for instance doesn't have to be especially interesting or distinct if there'll always be something more engaging happening around him for Steven Yeun to do a spectacular vocal performance of sheer agony at, which if anything serves the story engine - he's both all-powerful and unambitious, kind of a schmuck but intensely driven, such that you can plausibly throw him into any Genre Situation. He’s a Big Dumb Guy, which really does track; he's a teenager and the only model of moral conduct he was ever raised with was his dad pretending to be a generic-model superhero, and so he regularly goes completely apeshit and vacillates dangerously back-and-forth in relation to whatever his latest cartoonishly over-the-top trauma was. Even after he's dramatically pivoted on his moral code the third or fourth time and helped blow up a planet, he can still deal with an animal-themed guy carrying a big $ bag and it won't seem too weird.
The lead has a specific enough core dilemma to be a long-term narrative driver, but a generic enough mandate and outlook between those high points that you can endlessly throw him into Situations, and those Situations can encompass any tonal point in the genre because the resolution is always going to be a DBZ fight. It doesn't actually have to go all that hard most of the time because it's so ruthlessly functional and capable of playing on just about any flavor of preexisting affection for this type of material. It all makes an incredibly watchable show that I basically do not think about at all the moment it's done.
(Very slight caveat: Mark is grabbing me more in the show than the comic, and much of that analysis above was influenced by knowing the truly berserk directions his ‘character arc’ takes him in the source material. Remains to be seen just how much of a red pen this extended second draft is going to take to it.)
The joint powerplay at getting folks consistently back onboard not just for monthly ongoings but superhero shared universes (the, uh, checks notes Massiveverse aside) has been going a good hot minute by now; when this was starting out, it seemed like Marvel had its eyes on the ball with its choices, while DC was going to be thoroughly embarrassing itself on pretty much every level. How goes it?
Well, Ultimate’s shown its hard limits: 'let’s make Wildstorm happen again!’, noble a dream as it may be, was only ever going to go so far in this day and age, especially when some of the creative choices by editorial play like they still kinda think of this as just another imprint instead of their real new main thing. But by and large it’s managed to maintain its dignity as it heads into putting a bow on things thus far: Ultimate Black Panther has been lousy since day one (inexplicably so given the creative team involved) and Ultimate Wolverine makes a big fat nothing of what could’ve been one of the stronger setups of the line, but Ultimate X-Men’s succeeding where it counterpart fails in being stylish and mysterious enough to get me liking an X-Men comic in 2025. I can’t imagine Ultimate Spider-Man having wound up what anyone expected or wanted at first, but it’s still a darn good book and #12-14 are about as quality as Spidey gets. And if Marvel landed on ‘new guy, toss him whoever’ rather than ‘this is our main book, we have to budget appropriately’ in putting the perfectly adequate Juan Frigeri on The Ultimates, Deniz Camp’s still been doing his best to revive the high concept pizza comic one-off with flourish, brains, and enthusiasm. The whole affair doesn’t have that white hot heat of the genre’s next step on it anymore, but Alex Paknadel is doing some kind of space take on Ultimate Daredevil and hell, I’ll get that. Cool/hilarious Camp’s doing a for-real event comic. Thinking about it, I guess I had most of what I have to say about these last year, at least spiritually speaking in terms of how it relates to the mainline.
So Absolute Universe: good?? Quite good, even??? The entire affair sounded so dopey and half-assed and nakedly reactive, but in practice it turns out Scott Snyder just needed MORE freedom to go nuts, and tbh I feel comfortable a year in in saying Snyder/Dragotta »»» Snyder/Capullo as a creative unit. Absolute Batman is I suspect going to be the characters’ default longform rec pretty much forever with its consistently maintained energy and quality, and how legitimately inspired it is as a remix and refurbishing of the narrative engine; as far as I’m concerned, it singlehandedly makes the case for ongoing serialized Batman adventures as a viable prospect next to The Batman by succeeding at the most extreme opposite end of the spectrum. Absolute Wonder Woman is going to be the default Wonder Woman rec period (even if I think that’s because being graded against the average Wonder Woman book is a hell of a curve, though it still has some substantial virtues), and if Absolute Flash reads more like a disinterested screenwriter’s movie pitch for the character circa 2003, Absolute Green Lantern more than makes up for that. Absolute Martian Manhunter of course is pretty insulting to describe as ‘going to be the go-to Martian Manhunter recommendation’, rather than ‘going to be one of DC’s big perennials’ or ‘this is what that character is going to be forever now’.
But then there is that other one. I publicly stated multiple times that I thought Absolute Superman was going to shockingly turn out to be one of the better books of the line. We all take our turns being Boo-Boo the Fool, and this is another case where I gotta make myself be brief or else it’ll be the whole piece, but in short: not only is it limp and craftless and goofy as hell, not only do its stabs at Wildstorm grody sci-fi political commentary mostly just highlight its inadequacies, not only does #6 have to engage in cartoonish backpedaling to pretend any of this lines up with the rest of the line,* but the concept of Lois Lane: Agent of Hydra is one so toxic to the collective foundations it basically kills the notion of the entire universe as a truly long-running prospect ala the original Ultimate. Downplayed though she may be, she’s still more publicly recognizable than 99.99% of the other characters, and you can’t kick ‘she used to knowingly work at the racism factory’ under the rug. My 12 year old self demands I see where the real life Ultimate Superman is going, but while I can rationalize almost every individual step that led to this book creatively, I wouldn’t have guessed that the final outcome could best be described as Superman: Grounded if he looked like he should, in theory, be having aura and hype moments.
(* Initially I was disappointed there wasn’t a collective worldbuilding hook to Absolute the way there was to Ultimate, even on the level of the original’s Superhuman Test Ban Treaty. Given the Peacemaker nonsense here offered the closest thing to an option, I’m happy to ‘well, DC’s all about letting the individual concepts go where they will…’ that complaint aside.)
Whole thing plays like an inverse of the New 52. Every big new idea is kinda terrible, except for the refurbished Superman who is generationally perfect aside from his stupid armor costume, vs. every swing turns out to be a home run, except its Superman who kinda sucks aside from his cool armor costume. They sucked up all the shonen juice out of t-shirt and jeans man to give to Batman and Wonder Woman, and this dork was what was left.
IT’S LIKE BREATHING THE ELECTRIC AIR OF THE FUTURE
THE REAL ULTIMATE SUPERMAN AND ULTIMATE BATMAN. Cards on the table: if the Superman and Batman of the 20th century were epitomized in Superman ‘78 and the Nolan trilogy, and spiritually wrapped up by Grant Morrison over about 7 years apiece,* My Adventures With Superman and The Batman Epic Crime Saga hit me as the real starting points of the 21st century takes.
(* All-Star Superman #1-Final Crisis: Superman Beyond #2 was about 3 years and change of continuous work, and Action Comics #1-18 was about a year and a half, let’s say the remainder is covered by The Multiversity/Sideways Annual #1/Green Lantern: Blackstars/Superman and The Authority as a block to match the Batman run.)
The comprehensive rethinks of the characters and their casts and personas, their worlds and how their component parts relate to one another (friend and I did a bit of a call-and-response on the nature of Reeves and LeFranc’s Gotham underworld that was the culmination of conversations we’ve had for a couple years now), how you navigate their flavors of fantasy without devolving into weepy apologetics and refurbish their genre appeal - both are managing hit after hit after hit after hit after hit, regularly yielding the best versions of concepts over half a century old and often making it look easy. And if their biggest complicating swings in imperial Krypton and a compromised Wayne family aren’t technically new, what is is how those aren’t background wrinkles setting up individual storylines or threats, but the foundations of these new versions of the narratives from which everything else flows. Every single facet of how these withdrawn men are forced to engage with the world is defined by the realizations of the sins that gave them their power, and that made their homes ongoing apocalypses that could only be saved by the likes of them and their allies.
And with The Penguin deservedly rocking the world while we await The Batman - Part II and My Adventures With Green Lantern swooping in at some point in the not too distant future alongside MAWS season 3, we’re getting plenty more of sci-fi shonen blushy romance lead Superman and his pals turning his once-cursed powers Kamen Rider-style against the empires of both the Earth and the stars, and weirdo MCR Batman viciously fighting his way through his neo-pulp world of John Wick freaks to both avenge his family and redeem its sins. I’m curious what the DCU is doing with all these people contemporaneously on an ostensibly larger scale, but there’s no question in my mind that these are the Superman and Batman who matter going forward; the rest is gravy.
Special shoutout to both Vera Drew and companies’ The People’s Joker and Elliot S! Maggin’s Lexcorp!
Tbh, while I liked both a whole bunch, in a vacuum they’d probably have wound up in the FORWARD FROM HERE section. That might be unfair to The People’s Joker, which had the unfortunate double-whammy of being watched by me right after I finally checked out I Saw The TV Glow - a circumstance that would be favorable to few movies, if any - and what with me being one of the few to have already seen a number of extremely similar techniques applied to the genre in The Guardians of Justice (Will Save You!) Still a really good movie though!
Meanwhile, getting a third (or fourth if you count the Kingdom Come novelization) Superman book of sorts out of Maggin was mana from Heaven, and it didn’t disappoint as a delightful effort at making the businessman spin on the greatest bald bastard of all work as a sort of hybrid Doc Savage/James Bond/Uncle Scrooge “reformed” arch-villain turned mover, shaker, and part-time adventurer, whose petty self-aggrandizement and lust for challenge is as likely to steer him towards making the world a wildly better place as acts of rank criminal amorality depending on whatever’s the option at the moment that most seems to benefit him according to his oblique value system. But wonderful as it is that it even exists, the facts are one of its biggest threads goes conspicuously nowhere, and the ending is hard to describe as anything but a kind of embarrassing lib-out.
But they both make it to the top for one simple reason: they’re both a priceless look at what this stuff might look like once it all hits the public domain and anyone can do anything they want. In the most literal sense of all, they are the future.
What can I even say about To Be Hero X? Not without spoiling the whole beautiful thing all to hell?
“In a world of brilliant heroes, it's the trust of their fans that makes them into superheroes. If the people believe that a man can fly, he will fly. If a hero loses the people's trust, he loses his special abilities. Trust Value is collected and quantified and used to determine a hero's ranking. Every two years, a tournament is held to choose the top heroes. Their performance in the tournament determines their new Trust Values and their rankings. The absolute hero with the highest ranking... His name is X.”
I’m not gonna scream from the rafters that it’s the next Watchmen - that position’s occupied for the time being by 20th Century Men - but with one episode left in the first season/half of the story, I’m more than confident calling it at the very least the definitive Superhero Epic of the 2020s in the making the way Hickman’s collective Marvel saga was for the 2010s.
As a structural achievement within the genre it can stand tall next to Seven Soldiers of Victory and The Multiversity; as a reworking of the archetypes and conventions into a new populist storytelling framework, it deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as as The Authority or Tom Strong. Presentationally? Fuhgeddaboudit, the 3D/multiple styles of 2D mix alone would casually put it over the top of anything this side of Spider-Verse and that’s when it isn’t going for broke with [REDACTED] or [THAT ONE THING], not to mention [HOT DAMN], or the raft of perfect character designs, or that I’ve had the OST on loop for coming up on half a year and how those wildly different character themes shift radically in vibe as the narrative builds up context.
There’s really no great way of hyping it without turning into an insufferable evangelical freak, like an AI grifter or your friend who’s caught up on One Piece. I can say it’s made me gasp and crumble and cheer and scream! That it’s a haunting portrait of capitalism’s grip on our dreams and ideas of ourselves where that dog has a hat because he’s really tough! That while a couple of the projects above take advantage of the creative possibilities of massive and/or shared superhero universes when properly curated, this goes so, so far above and beyond - threading a needle that countless others have jabbed themselves with of fantastical surrealism inviting endless possibilities meeting brutally grounded logistical screwiness with room for a million corners and scales, building a world of coherent factions and ideologies and trends and grievances - even while winding it all tight around a single deeply interconnected narrative! God I sound like an asshole!
But it’s true! Nothing else is doing it like this! Nothing is going this hard on every single front at once!
Nothing, I tell you!
As animation goes My Adventures With Superman is my beloved child. I would cancel most everything else on the list for that and The Batman Epic Crime Saga to get their creators’ full intended runs without interference.
But make no mistake: even if they stand at the top, those are what’s next for those two guys specifically. This is what’s next for the genre, period.
If there is a single art object to make the case to be that yes, the answer to my question at the start is there is still a reason to pay attention to this space, To Be Hero X is it.
Well, a few nice moments aside, don’t think this blog much lived to whatever generational dreams I first nebulously harbored, and I still couldn’t be much happier with how it worked out. Thanks so much to everyone who popped in here over the last few years to contribute, especially Whowatch ringleader Sean Dillon, and all the thanks in the world to every single one of you who subscribed or just popped in now and again. I don’t know that I have as big a farewell in my as I did with Tumblr in me given how much of a direct back-and-forth I had going with folks there, so let’s keep it simple: onto bigger and better for one and all.
