I'll see you your "But then, that doesn't mean it'll be any good." and raise you a "yeah, it's totally going to suck." Because it is. This was total hasty pudding,
Funny you should use that phrasing. I had hasty pudding for breakfast. Then I read Ultimates 3, and now there's a puddle of regurgitated Wild Irish Rose and hasty pudding all over my floor.
Willverine said:
taking a classic Marvel character (and the first MAJOR black superhero) and having his costume occupied by Captain f-ing America, who has never really needed to hide his identity with that of another hero before in any storyline. Yes, Steve Rogers was at one point Nomad and at one point "The Captain" but that's because of various bureaucracies taking his title away from him. So, really, why the hell would Steve Rogers need to hide his identity for any reason? There was no real reason for this, and as far as I'm concerned, there IS no real reason for it other than Jeph Loeb not having a good enough idea why this would happen or why Black Panther wouldn't just be T'Challa. What a f-ing trainwreck. Even IF Loeb has a plan for this, the plan is going to suck and that's how it will remain unless Loeb is just some kind of miracle worker... and he's not so let's just go ahead and stop wishing.
Even if he does have a solution, that doesn't make any of this right. If you have to tell terrible stories in order for good stories to be told, then you aren't doing it right.
Willverine said:
Until now, her character has been a sexy, powerless kickboxer who has meetings with a D-list at best Defenders team and a major crush on Captain America. All of a sudden and without explanation, she's a Norse goddess. I guess it's because Thor fell in love with her and wanted to bestow upon her some awesome Norse goddess powers. However, I've read enough Norse mythology to know that Thor bedded plenty of mortal women and never gave them the same courtesy. So what's the big difference between all those mortal women and this one? The fact that she looks good in a thong and an ensemble of dinner plates held together with string? I DON'T BUY IT!
See, here I agree with the sentiment but not necessarily the logic. Don't get me wrong, the six-*** Valkyrie costume was hilarious, but the character was basically a throwaway. If a writer can find a way to revamp (or entirely redo) Vaklyrie and make her interesting, more power to them. But the character's just terrible. The sentiment that editorial seems to be throwing around is "Give Loeb a chance to show why these changes have occurred". He hasn't, and the characters still aren't interesting. Instead, we're treated to relatively misogynistic cheesecake with no logic.
As for it not fitting the "mythological Thor", well that's not an issue. This isn't the mythological Thor. Ultimate Thor is a very different beast. The problem is, nothing I've seen seems to match the logic of our Ultimate Thor. That said, I think it's pretty obvious that Thor wasn't the one who gave her the powers. Someone else did. Someone stupid, I'm sure. My money's on Ultimate Big Wheel, who in the Ultimate Universe will turn out to be Lee Majors with cerebral palsy.
Willverine said:
I hate to be a dick, but I think the powers that be at Marvel Comics have just been giving Loeb free reign on whatever he wants to do because his son died. There, I said it, as heartless as it may seem. Yes, I feel bad for him because losing a child is one of the hardest things anyone could ever do... but really. A bad story is a bad story, and you can't be an editor and let a writer suck this bad in good conscience unless there's some other reason for doing so. I honestly can't think of any other reason that an editor would let a writer get away with sinking to the depths of Suck Ocean this bad and not put the kibosh on it.
I think it's simpler than that. Marvel lets Loeb write whatever he wants because people still keep buying his books. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And fiscally, it ain't broke.
Willverine said:
Honestly, I think Loeb went with the old standard "let's throw our **** against the wall and see what sticks." From the looks of it, he was eating a lot of oatmeal because EVERYTHING STUCK and he used it. A hastily-formed Brotherhood... evil Bill and Ted robot usses... both of Magneto's kids (who were AWESOMELY portrayed during Milalr's run) dead and a really crappy version of Ultimate Hawkeye (undoubtedly one of the best characters from Millar's Ultimates runs). All of it stuck to the wall. What a crock of ****.
This has always been Loeb's policy.
Bass said:
I don't think the fact that Captain America is WHITE is a problem with him being Black Panther. Firstly, Nick Fury is now black. They've done a mini-series which says the first Cap was black. If they can go one way, they can go the other. The problem is NOT that Panther is white. It's that Panther, an interesting, LEGITIMATE character in his own right who has not been ultimized yet gets ultimized sans Wakanda and any personal history as an ALTERNATE costume for Captain America. Which is ****ing weak. That's like ultimizing Doctor Doom as another get up for Magneto.
Gotta disagree with you here. This isn't about affirmative action. You can't just palette swap characters in an attempt to make your universe more diverse. Being black is essential to the character of Black Panther. Everything that radiates from the character comes from the premise that he's a hero who speaks to the black experience. That is the character. It's the character's concept, at the core. If you make him a white guy, then the only part of the character you're retaining is the costume.
As for Nick Fury being black. So what? It's not like "being white" is essential to Nick Fury's character. He's a super spy. He could be white, asian, native american, whatever, and it wouldn't make a lick of difference. Hell, 616 Nick Fury could be a black guy, and nothing about his stories would fundamentally change. It seems a little silly that he's so tightly modeled on Samuel L. Jackson though. It's like the joke in Hollywood Shuffle about looking for an "Eddie Murphy type". It's like, it's okay to be a black guy in the Ultimate Universe, just as long as you tightly resemble one of a half dozen universally accepted "types" of black guy. It would be immensely more progressive to have a black revamp of a white character that is actually a character in his own right, rather than being Nick Mother-****ing Fury. Incidentally, I have something of an issue with the first "Captain America" being black. The core idea is fundamentally sound, and was, in fact, done far better in the mainstream Marvel U. The problem is that part of Nick Fury's resonance as a character, in any universe, is that he's a grade A badass despite not having any powers. He's a character capable of enacting immense change on an international scale without powers. And it would be refreshing to have a black character who has that sort of power based on his own merits, rather than because he's been injected with some sort of super-steroid. Making him the first Captain America just weakens the empowerment of the character. Hell, if you want to make "the first Captain America" black then.... well.... Why not just make Ultimate Captain America black? Now that would be refreshing. Imagine that opening to Ultimates (which was great in its own right). We open with snippets of news reels that show a mock-up of a white Captain America in the field of battle to make it more palatable to the audience of the time, and then cut to the Arctic Circle, where S.H.I.E.L.D. is excavating the body of the lost hero, and when they pull the glacier out of the water, it's a strong, iconic African-American in the red, white, and blue. Imagine the culture shock from
that revelation, both from the perspective of Cap, who died far before the Civil Rights Movement kicked into gear, and to the general American public, who was raised on this image of an Aryan-American superman.
But back to Black Panther. No. He can't be white. It fundamentally betrays who the character is. There's tons of useless characters at Marvel, tons of characters that can be co-opted for the sake of story twists. Why, for ****'s sake, do you need to take one of the few characters that resonates on a specifically cultural and racial level and turn them into a cheap storyline ploy? It's not just bad storytelling. It's irresponsible, destructive storytelling.
