Black Widow: Deadly Origin/And the Marvel Girls

Marvel recently hit us with not one but two Black widow minis, initially I thought this foolhardy, surely they should save this stuff for the release of Iron man 2which will feature Black Widow, however I now think I know the reasoning. There will probably be more black widow minis in the pipeline (or in fact a ongoing i believe) so it will be handy to have a couple of 4 part stories in Trade form for IM2's release.

Anyway, the two stories were pretty different, and arguably varied in quality. I'll start with the better one first.

Black Widow: Deadly Origin

Paul Cornell writes this adventure where Natalia investigates the death of her old mentor and combats the mysterious Icepick protocols which seem to be killing off all the men in her life.

This met with mixed reviews but i really liked it. For the most part its primary job was to clean up Black Widow's sometimes contradictory continuity. They do this with a rather nice retcon, first Natalia has taken a similar serum to the Infinity formulae that has allowed SHIELD agents Nick Fury and Dum-Dum Duggan to live on long past their WWII origins without looking like men in their 80s. This has also set her past right back into WWII and expands upon her initial meetings with the Winter Soldier. Due to her long life, plus many deep cover missions and brainwashing she is now as confused about her pasta s the average reader of her entry in the official handbook of the marvel universe. The comic itself tells of Black Widow's past using flashbacks and the neat technique of using different artists for the flashbacks to differentiate them form the main story. Overall I thought it was pretty good, entertaining and useful for setting up her character for a more involved future in the MU. Cornell writes her as a super-agent, using stealth and skill to best opponents in a far superior power class. A nice touch was also building on her reputation, when facing an Imperial Dynamo (Probably a match for Iron Man) the dynamo already knows he is beaten before the fight starts and tells widow how honoured he is to be beaten by the legendary black widow. Similarly Cornell writes her with a sense of humour, always good as other authors occasionally play up the "Hard Bitten agent" grimness too much.

Yes it was a cleaning up excercise, but a very readable one.

Second we have Black Widow and the Marvel girls, this was a series of standalone stories where Black Widow teams up with another woman of the Marvel Universe. I could seethe idea, accessible adventures which allow you to see widow's place within the MU. My problem was that the accessibility made it pretty insubstantial stuff, not always a bad thing but it just lead to forgettable stories in my opinion. Its lack of continuity focus was also a niggling point to me, but presumably not so much an issue to the new readers it seems to be aimed at. That may be its point, basically a sales pitch to new readers, Hey you liked black widow in Iron Man 2? How about these other females, any of them interest you? Inthe end that didn't do to much for me.

Overall I think Deadly Origin is the better of the two, and what I'd recommend to anyone who had been interested from teh movie, as it gives background on her comic counterpart, effectively its a pilot for the ongoing, and in teh end getting someone on an ongoing is a worthy goal.

Speed Cameras

I have, in the past on occasion drifted ever so slightly over the speed limit, never out of control or recklessly, but I have done it, so it may seem odd that I’m coming out in support of speed cameras, both normal and average.

There is always criticism of these things, “They’re a stealth tax” “they cause more accidents than they prevent” “speeding doesn’t cause as many accidents as bad driving” are just some of the arguments people use as to why an automatic system that fines lawbreakers is a bad idea. Let’s take a look at these arguments.

Bad Driving

Its true, careless driving does cause more accidents than speeding. However speed is a factor that can make the difference between a bump and a disaster, for every 10mph in speed there is an exponential rise in the severity of any accident. This is why I am more careful in particular to stick to the limit at the lower speeds, the 30 and 40 limits, because if the speed has been reduced it has been done for a reason. Yes, plodding through a 30 is dull, but as the ads say, its 30 for a reason, bad sighting, residential areas are just a few of the reasons why the speed can be reduced. When you look at survivability statistics and how they increase as speed reduces it is sobering reading.

Cause more accidents than they prevent.

This is a really tenuous one, for the fixed cameras, normally used outside schools, black spots etc the argument is that the sharp deceleration on approach causes accidents. Really? But there aren’t always at the start of a 30, usually a fair way in, if you’d been obeying the speed limit you’d have no need to sharply decelerate for a camera, and if you weren’t sitting so close to the car in front that you can see my speedometer you may have a chance of not rear ending it when it slows down. For average this argument was pitched by the ever so reasonable Jeremy Clarkson, that he would be so focused on his speedometer that he’s more likely to hit something because he won’t be watching the road. If that is your argument you are unsafe to drive. Yes, you should check your speedo, but not at the expense of watching the road, you might as well argue that you hit something because you were really worried about your fuel and were watching the gauge like a hawk.

Stealth Tax

Many people better than me have taken this on, for starters, I’ve never seen anything stealthy painted yellow, or have warning signs alerting you to its presence. And as a tax, how good is that, a tax which you can avoid by driving at the posted speed limit, in short a tax that only affects those breaking the law. If only we could automatically penalise other minor offences. Also that there were taxes to easy to avoid. Hey, I can avoid this “Stealth Tax” by driving at the posted speed limit, how easy is that.

There is a strange correlation I’ve noticed in those who complain about speed cameras also often are the ones who complain that sentencing is too lenient and that only with the threat of harsh punishments will people obey the law. This strangely doesn’t stretch to speeding however, where they seem to think that they should be able to choose the speed at which it is safe to drive, indeed you often see statements like “I know how fast I can safely drive, I’m not driving dangerously” which may be true (Although studies show people often overestimate their own abilities) but I’m sure that’s the same litany of many a person caught driving dangerously, and regardless of your own opinion of your driving, the law states that you obey the posted speed limit. I may as well try and claim that I know my car is safe to drive and have no need of an MOT, (Obviously a stealth tax and secret conspiracy by an all powerful cartel of motor mechanics, or a way to make sure every road vehicle complies with a basic state or road worthiness) In short you may not like the law, and I fully support anyone who campaigns for change based on evidence, but you don’t get to ignore it in the meantime.

I enjoy driving fast (Although I find more pleasure skilfully taking corners on a windy road at 30-40 than I do going for straight line velocity) and I’d love a shot at the Autobahn, indeed I’d love the autobahn to be evidence that we should have unlimited speed some of our motorways. However Germany is currently adding speed limits rather than removing them so the evidence doesn’t seem to support this as a safe course of action.

The New Heroic Age

What, no Dark Reign sum up? No Siege speculation. Have you seen how out of date my blogging has got these days, my only chance is to blog about things before they happen.

In all seriousness I might comment on Siege post event, but I’m interested at the moment on how the universe is going to unfold post-Siege. Marvel have been releasing various things regarding the new shape of the MU and it looks brighter, sunnier and happier. Some have said this could be a response to the Disney takeover but I reckon that with a probable Avengers movie coming out marvel want the universe back on a more approachable tack.

So, what do we know about this new age, lets look at the team books that have been revealed so far.

Avengers

Marvel has released the line-up of this new team in the wake of Siege. Line-up Includes Iron Man, Captain America (Bucky Barnes Version), Spider Woman, Wolverine, Spider-Man, Thor and Hawkeye (Clint Barton). Its kind of a half and half, half Bendis’s new avengers, half traditional Avengers. I’m in two minds about this, on one hand it will be nice to see a more traditional Avengers Team, I’m very happy that we’re not loosing Bucky cap just yet and that Barton is back to being Hawkeye. On the other hand I’ve never been thrilled with Bendis writing Avengers, his work on Mighty wasn’t bad but I think there are better avengers writers out there. It does leave at least one question; Barton is taking back his “Hawkeye” identity, what will happen to the Young Avengers Hawkeye?

Secret Avengers

This has been secretive, unsurprisingly. We know its written by Ed Brubraker which is exciting enough, we know what the team members look like as silhouettes, we don’t know what the team is about, what their purpose is or indeed the identity of any members, although speculation includes Steve Rogers, War Machine, Moon Knight and Black panther. Either way this will be one to watch.

Atlas

Another go at agents of atlas, I really enjoyed the previous Agents of Atlas series and like the commitment to keep trying to get them ingrained into the Marvel Universe, and I’m also keen to see the New 3D man meet the team. Again another good sign.

Thunderbolts.

Another interesting looking title, going back to the concept of criminal rehabilitation that existed throughout Thunderbolts but in particular in “The Initiative” period. Luke Cage leads a team based on the Raft, Currently looks like the team will include Moonstone, Crossbones, Ghost, Juggernaut and Man Thing with the theme of criminals doing heroic acts as part of their rehabilitation.

There is also an interesting looking title called Heroic Age, not sure if it’s just a one shot or a series but it’s more of an anthology book and will see the return of Captain Britain and MI13 in a short story. Solo title wise Iron Man has new armour and solicits show that it will feature Jim Rhodes, possibly as War Machine. And Captain America, at least for the next story will continue to show the adventures of Bucky Barnes which is good as I can still see mileage in that concept.

What are we loosing; to my mind so far it looks like we’ll loose two significant titles. The first is confirmed axed, that is Ms Marvel. It’s a real shame because this title has been holding on and with a bit more promotion she could have been Marvel’s Wonder Woman. Marvel are doing a comic featuring female heroes, but I preferred a female solo book (and with She-Hulk gone as well I struggle to think of any Marvel female solo book).

Second is Avengers: The Initiative, and while I wasn’t enamoured by the “Disassembled” story it’s been consistently good. I like the concept (Hero boot camp) and I liked the often personal approach to stories they took. It was an interesting book, so far no announcements of what will become of the initiative but I hope it will survive in some shape or form as it’s really been too good an idea to drop.

Doom Revisited

I recently found the shareware version of Doom as a flash app. This in itself is mind boggling as I’m old enough to remember when Doom was “it” and required a decent computer and all that jazz, hells I remember playing the SNES version and being slightly disgusted by how pared back it had to be. Now I can have it in a window while running something else, a fabulous modern age indeed.

Anyway, in its day Doom was groundbreaking which is odd, it wasn’t the first FPS, it had no look up or down and only managed a true 3D environment (compared to Wolfenstein’s flat rooms) in a graphics trick (It looked like there was an up and down but the effect was purely visual compared with later games such as Dark Forces and Duke Nukem 3D. What Doom had was atmosphere, first the setting, initially a rather standard “Abandoned base” SF setting slowly descends into a full on gothic hell. However this was only part of the atmosphere. Doom used darkness and light to great effect. Areas would be in near total darkness, or with flickering lights and often enemies would appear seemingly out of nowhere as the lights flicker on for a brief moment. This was helped by the extra trick of hiding enemies in secret rooms, often triggered by certain switches or passing over a specific area of floor, this meant that an area previously cleared may still be dangerous later on. Finally doom would also on occasion jump you with a small onslaught of enemies which gave a nice balance between a near survival horror experience of the one enemy in the dark and the full forces of the unread walking into your chain gun.

It’s odd to think, but Doom even had an effect on FPS weapons, it was one of the first to include the shotgun, groundbreaking at the time, hard to imagine these days not switching between machine gun and shotgun depending on the closeness of combat.

Doom was a massive success, which is odd. Not because it wasn’t that good, it was excellent, but because I never knew anyone who had bought a copy of Doom, Seriously pirate copies were swapped in every school playground but I never saw, heard of or even heard a rumour about anyone who actually purchased a copy. It must of happened, where did all the pirate versions come from, but I can’t fathom how it managed to be such a success with this level of illegal redistribution (Unless piracy isn’t as bad a thing as the companies selling games would have you believe eh?)

Now, this is the modern age, games are undoubtedly better looking, more cinematic and more complex, so how well does an old warhorse like doom fare in this age of motion captured 3D and near photo-realistic graphics. It fares very well, even in a small window you quickly get sucked in and soon forget that the foes on your screen are dumb (oh, very dumb, no intelligence at all) 2D sprites occupying a 3D world, no soon you are jumping as one of these sprites appears from the dark. Yes, you don’t need the spiffy graphics with a game as atmospheric as doom; in fact I think this is where many modern games are going wrong. Many games seem to lead with spiffy visuals and often gameplay suffers, developers may want to consider if the game would still be fun if it looked like Doom.

So, this has wetted my appetite for more old FPSs. Once I have my games out of boxes I may well look to playing Duke Nukem or Dark Forces under emulation, as well as hunting down Doom, hell I may even pay for it this time.

Rage Against Cowell

Well, we did it, Xmas no1 of 1009 was “Killing in the Name of” by Rage against the machine and not “the Climb” by…. Come on, what’s his name, you know, hingmy off of that thing.

That is a little cruel, but hells, we’ve earned it. Year after year of dreary X-Factor winners, or pop idol etc, and finally, a good song. I’m tempted to get all choked up and start talking us all up, how we did the impossible and that makes us mighty, or indeed point out that governments should take heed, because there are more bright independent people out there, we just rarely move like a herd, but I’ll leave it for the moment.

Naturally, there have been naysayers, smart alecs talking about how its funny that a whole load of people bought a song with the chorus “I won’t do what you tell me” because they were told to, and of course that both songs are on labels owned by Sony, so whatever wins Sony makes a big heap of money (And some said by that reasoning Cowell)

To address the second first, yes, it may well have been a marketing stunt by Sony, possibly off the back of cowell’s clever move last year of releasing a weak and lifeless cover of “Hallelujah” prompting online campaigns to get one of several alternative versions to No1, the advantage, he has a stake in the rights to Hallelujah so probably got a fair chunk of money from that. However someone likened him getting money from RATM sales to JD sports getting money from M&S sales because they share the same shopping centre.

The First, well, I’d disagree, yes we all bought the song on a specific week for the purpose of getting it to No1, but I’m betting if you asked 50 people you’d get at least 20 different reasons. Me, I like the song and don’t own it, plus I really liked the idea of every pointless light pop TV and radio station having to play Killing in the name of, and indeed have enjoyed seeing the gritted teeth approach most of them have to playing a storming rebellious hit. In fact one criticism is that many pop stations have since carried on regardless, in a review of 2009 one station played an excerpt from Killing, only to play the whole of the climb. Great, so here’s a clip of the winner, and here’s the whole of No2.

My other reason is a stupid one. See, I have a small confession, up until my late teens, music didn’t really interest me. In fact most of my CD collection was film soundtracks. Thing is I blame a lot of that on opportunity. When I was younger most of the people I hung around liked “What was in the charts” basically through primary school I was around people who were content to be told what they liked. I just couldn’t bring myself to agree, so I generally accepted that, aside from the odd flash of something I liked that chart music wasn’t for me. As I grew up obviously my horizons expanded. This is the crux of the matter. While my rock taste was developing if I hadn’t been to rock clubs and talking to rock fans then many bands wouldn’t register. I often think that if a good rock song could get up the charts and get the radio play then more people would realise how awesome rock is. Its stupid but there we are. And that’s my final reason. If one person who has been content to listen to the manufactured drivel gets inspired to Rock from this, then it’s been a success.

XMas TV

Yes, all these posts will be behind schedule, but I reckoned Xmas TV was worth mentioning this year, why? Because it was a mess.

Now Xmas TV isn’t what it once was. In previous years (read, when I were a lad) the Xmas schedule was mainly about big film premiers. This was the tent pole to every channel’s schedule and I’m sure many of us remember sitting around marking off films in the radio times arranging who got to see what. The prevalence of Sky Movies and cheap DVDs now means that people are more likely to have seen the big films at home before a normal channel gets them; this takes a lot of the power out of these films. The thing is Xmas TV is hard. For close to two weeks you have to act as if everyone now wants to watch TV all day, not just between 6pm-11. People are on holiday after all, you can’t get away with Diagnosis Murder here. A good few premiers fill up hours of schedule, but now a film premier is less of a ratings guarantee the main terrestrial stations have been a bit confused.

In the vacuum caused by this state of affairs, the BBC has definitely done the best. This is despite the tabloids normal BBC bashing announcement about the number of repeats on over Xmas; this is despite calling ITVs higher number of repeats “Classics”. The BBC has risen to the challenge with a variety of Xmas specials. In fact, on Xmas day it was BBC1 all evening. The mainstay is of course now the Dr Who Xmas special, which brought me out in fanboy delight this year, because such a big deal was made of it. David tenant was in everything and the Beebs Xmas idents were Dr Who themed. This year Dr who was Xmas. We also had specials from programmes for all tastes, a Catherine Tate special, more Gavin & Stacey, strictly come dancing, plus on other days we had Xmas specials of QI, Russell Howards good news, a 2 part mini-series of Day of the Triffids and the Top Gear South America special. In fact the BBC should be praised. They filled a hole normally occupied by films, new or repeats, with new, self made programming. So what did they do wrong? Well, on the run up quite a few shows got mucked about in the schedules, specifically for me Defying gravity and James May’s Toy Stories. Second, there were some very odd repeats, such as the Top gear special being on two consecutive days. Finally there was a missed opportunity, the big film this year was Pirates of the Caribbean 3, shown on Boxing Day. However, later that week they showed Pirates of the Caribbean 2, when they could have shown 1&2 on the run up to Boxing Day making 3 a bit more of an event.

Still, like I said, the BBC was odd, but overall good, if still messy. ITV, C5 and C4 were worse. ITV and C5 just outright failed to have anything worth watching at all neither did Sky 1 or Virgin 1, the former showing the two Discworld minis on a loop (not a bad thing but not great for anyone not wanting to watch Hogfather twice in one day) and the latter just not changing its schedule at all. In fact only C4 had anything, mainly the Big fat quiz of the year, along with all quizzes from yesteryears repeated. C4 however was rather confusing as they had 2 films that could have been big over Xmas, The Simpsons movie and Slumdog Millionaire, however bizarrely they chose to show these after the Xmas period.

Overall other stations could learn a lot from the BBC on this one.

Defying Gravity & Virtuality

In my preview of this years TV I may have mentioned Defying Gravity as a show I was interested in seeing, well its been and gone and I’ve managed to catch it thanks to BBC’s IPlayer and no thanks to BBC’s bizarre roaming schedule.

Defying gravity was made as an international co-production, loosely based on a BBC Drama doc about a more realistically themed tour of the solar system. Defying gravity ditches some of the hyper realism of its documentary predecessor, a technobabble nanotech idea explains gravity in most parts of the ship (Although they are very consistent in showing the “Gravity Suits” under clothing) and eventually uncovers a mystery surrounding what is in Pod 4, however for the most part the Antares is a realistic ship, its slow and low tech. This meant that the series would mainly focus on the crew interaction and the dangers inherent to space travel. This is added to with some focus on mission control and the politics there, and with flashbacks to the training and selection process.

I really warmed to the characters, both in their training and on the mission. This I think was the show’s strength or weakness; basically if you don’t click with the characters you won’t enjoy the show as a lot of it is people in a tin can naval gazing.

I will agree with the critics on one thing, the Final episode was fantastic, the show’s critics say this is how it should be. I say it showed what something like Defying gravity could do where other SF would have a space battle. They really highlighted the risk of landing on Venus, a very hostile place and still managed to advance several plot threads in the process.

Perhaps DG was a little slow, but then so is the Antares on her grand tour of the universe. Shame we won’t see the rest of the solar system, however for those who want to know where it’s going an interview with the creator exists here.

A quick aside, It may have been a couple of years ago, Ronald D Moore made his attempt at a similar idea. He even also lumbered it with a duff title, Virtuality. It never made it beyond pilot, and I won’t say how I saw that.

Virtuality follows the crew of the Phaeton, an international mission to find a habitable planet outside of the solar system. The reason, because Earth is dying. However, in order to keep funding the mission is also a giant Reality TV show, with cameras on the ship recording the crew’s conflicts. In fact two of the crew serve as director/producer and presenter. This leads to some nice asides, like some of the food supplies being donated by a ready meal company, the crew having to wear different clothes, depending on that day’s sponsor.

The virtual bit comes from the way the crew get to escape from their tin box. Each crewmember has access to a VR module, however, there is a ghost in the machine and he seems to be intent on doing cruel and nasty things to the crew while they’re in VR. However the twist at the end of the pilot could reveal something more.

Overall Virtuality is grittier and less sanitised than Defying Gravity, and many thought more interesting. I can’t judge, Defying gravity had many hours for me to bond with its crew while virtuality had a pilot, still it’s a shame it never got commissioned.