Excuses

Comics tend to provide the weirdest excuses to justify a character’s actions, but if it works then it works.

The Hank Pym beats his wife story has been one side of Marvel that has always made me uncomfortable. Mainly, because it always seems like it’s important when they wanted it to be important, but then conveniently forgotten whenever it’s deemed necessary. If the wife beater angle wasn’t originally intentional, then I guess I could see why they would occasionally forget about it. At the same time, though, Marvel has never done anything to repair Pym’s image and occasionally embraced it, as in the case of The Ultimates. While Marvel has never condoned the behavior, I don’t feel they’ve ever properly addressed or condemned it either. The Ultimates felt the worst about this as the other heroes were very much “Dude, that’s not cool. You can’t be in our club anymore.” until they really need him, then they didn’t care what he did. There’s been talk for ages about an Ant Man movie. After thirty years of this being a defining characteristic of the character, I wonder if this character trait will get included or get swept under the rug.

Newsarama has an interview with Geoff Johns about his upcoming Aquaman book. It’s extremely short, but it’s another great example of Johns’ excitement for these heroes. Kris and I have talked in the past about how for Johns it’s very much about making these characters larger than life heroes. Johns finds a character that he really likes, but feels is being underutilized. He takes that character, rebuilds it into something awesome, and then releases that character back out into the DCU to be something great. Sometimes, like with Hal Jordan and Booster Gold, this works great. Other times, like with Hawkman and Blue Beetle, these characters are awesome for a short time and then languish back into obscurity. That is, of course, until Johns brings them back into the spotlight again. It was evident since Blackest Night’s focus on Mera that Johns was turning his sites on the “Aqua-family”. Brightest Day and this new Aquaman book proves that even more so. I can’t wait to see what he does with these great characters.

There’s talk now that Warner Brothers is starting to work on a Justice League movie. This has been attempted before, but nothing every really came of it. Hopefully they’ll pull everything together this time around because it’s something I’d definitely like to see. The most interesting point about this is the mention of “reinventing” the Batman franchise (again). I believe Nolan has always indicated that he was only interested in doing three Batman movies that would truly focus on Bruce Wayne becoming the Dark Knight. I doubt this reinvention is nothing more than jumping forward in the universe to a point where Batman has been around for several years and is greatly established as a crime fighter. This would allow them to start bringing in Robin and the rest of the Gotham rogues gallery. It’ll be interesting to see what they do with this.