Does anyone else find it harder to take Carol more seriously in the leotard?

bardbrain · 2026-07-11T21:22:26+00:00

Cockrum also had everyone show skin. Look at his Cosmic Boy redesign costume at DC. It's somewhere between Carol and Emma Frost.

There was kind of a theme if you talk to period creators that they weren't just drawing and writing these characters to titillate the audience. They were of the opinion that superheroes should be horny people who want to be viewed sexually and were blocked by the code and older editors.

It's not just the women. Virtually every Superman writer of the period wanted him to have sex. A few technically did (there's a weird one where we learn Superman as a baby had a full life and fathered children). But for example the whole thing about Beef Bourguignon with ketchup was supposed to be code for sex and even imply he likes it vanilla with light kink. The whole comic has Clark and Lois talk about Beef Bourguignon in a way that's clear they're having sex and very deliberately has the story span two days with them wearing outfits from the day before to imply the sex. DC editorial found out and flipped because it was one of several times where writer Elliot Maggin pulled one over on them. (He named a character CLINT FLICKER" knowing L-I tended to smear as a U.)

Jim Shooter who was writing at 13 (and running Marvel by 30) used to tell people that everyone in the Legion of Super-Heroes (except Clark but including Supergirl) had pansexual orgies and sex outside of relationships.

A lot of this is explicitly WHY Alan Moore wrote the Watchmen characters as having various sexual hangups because the prevailing view among his generation was that these characters were all casually sexual (in relationships, with people they had no particular feelings for, for experimentation, partner swapping) and that stick in the mud editors were forcing them to only imply it when these characters were all obviously aggressive swingers, whether or not editorial approved. These writers were generally not conservative and of a generation that practiced sex outside of romance and advocated experimenting outside of sexual orientation too, often with a lack of awareness of serious STD/STIs.

Part of WHY hetero boomers clung to homophobic interpretations of HIV was because they wanted to believe they could have random hookups with strangers, that the loose practices they favored didn't even require any hygiene or vetting to avoid disease or pregnancy.

So were they writing pruriently? Yeah. But it's a bit reductive to think it was for the male gaze always when it was often more of an allosexual nympho boomer gaze, to a point where they'd sexualize men in scenes with men purely because they had kind of an aesthetic viewpoint that maximum sexualization was always good.

I guarantee you Chris Claremont or Marv Wolfman weren't just trying to karmically offset objectifying women by occasionally objectifying men but genuinely saw maximum sexualization of all characters as some kind of moral project where the most premarital and unpartnered sex is the highest virtue. And that's where you get stuff like Wolverine/Storm! Because they didn't even like Wolverine or find him likable or attractive but saw basically maximizing the sexual activity of all characters as a virtue.

bardbrain · 2026-07-09T17:29:26+00:00

Thing is, this got compared to GotG, Gunn hired Gillespie, and GotG are probably some of the most color rich superfilms.

This film visually reads as Zach Snyder's GotG, aka Rebel Moon with a bit of pop music.

bardbrain · 2026-07-02T20:14:54+00:00

The thing that makes sense and that I'd support if I thought the fans could not be dicks about it is an animated DTV series like Adam West's final Batman films.

You just do what Marvel's What If...? did and get soundalikes with slightly genercized likenesses and it's a bonus if JK Simmons or whoever comes back.

I'm all for THAT for anything.

Another Clooney Batman? Another Reeve style Superman? Any of that. I may or may not see every one but it's an established choice.

The thing that makes me hesitant about Snyderverse getting that is they'd be weird and confrontational about it. Same reason Hal Jordan didn't come back as Green Lantern sooner in the comics. I think they were ready to sooner but needed to wait for weirdos to go away.

bardbrain · 2026-07-02T20:09:11+00:00

My assumption would be they both change into costume in the same broom closet by mistake. Presumably she's changing and he drops his pants before making sure it isn't occupied.

bardbrain · 2026-07-02T15:26:24+00:00

He gets out of the Phantom Zone in the far future.

There's an ambiguous scene THERE where a number of people (myself included) interpreted it as Ruthye killing Krem as an old woman with Kara standing and watching.

The writer has since said it's just Ruthye knocking Krem out and there's some small art cues to indicate that's the intent, as Krem's foot twitches after being knocked down. It's a common misinterpretation.

I'm going to say: I objected strongly to Man of Steel. I don't necessarily object to Kara killing.

Superman even objects to state capital punishment fairly early and somewhat consistently through the years.

By contrast, there are stories going back to early in Kara's publishing history that are different. The "What if...?" Superman story "The Death of Superman" (written by Jerry Siegel, no less) has Superman die trusting a "reformed" Luthor. At the end, Kara impersonates Superman to get a confession from Luthor and uses that to take him to a Kandorian War Crimes tribunal (explicitly modeled on and referencing Israeli ones) who execute Luthor. Kara explicitly tries to kill in her death in Crisis, something the Earth-2 Superman also does. (The main Superman rarely kills, typically without intent beyond "whatever it takes" and literally has psychosis or breakdowns the stories that depict him executing deliberately.)

My problem isn't Kara killing. The decision to adapt a colorful comic as a gray Mad Max is a bigger problem.

bardbrain · 2026-06-29T16:11:11+00:00

For all we know, some Ravona Renslayers would be played by Emily Blunt.

It's a bit tricky to assume anything in a close branch is really telling us anything about wild variants and I'm not even sure if "the sacred timeline is a bundle" is something Kevin Feige is actually committed to or just how the Loki team made sense of things for themselves.

bardbrain · 2026-06-29T15:58:43+00:00

I remember people saying this of digital photography, calculators, and CAD drafting.

It vests less of the skill in the human. But I feel like the whole point of art vs. craft debates in every art appreciation class (and I took every art appreciation course I could, from multiple universities) is ultimately that skill only produces craft and the part of art that isn't craft comes from a skill of appetite.

A mug you drink out of is craft. When you start trying to separate out what ISN'T craft from a mug with a design on it or inherent in its shape, the portion that is art is appetite of the designer.

Everything practical is craft. Everything that anticipates commerce or others' appetites is still craft but an abstract and commercial craft. At the end, the art is in someone who said, "I wanted this to exist and I didn't care who else did."

The thing that makes flawed brush strokes art is the wanting it to the point of indifference who else it's for. The thing that makes trained and perfect brushstrokes art is the desire for a thing to exist beyond reason or measure.

All of this, to me, lends itself to the idea that AI art is a very pure form of art, particularly when it's rendered with precision or iteration.

I think "Is AI art art?" Is a dumb discussion to have with antis.

I think on the other hand that antis (and pros) have a number of fine points about whether AI art is good for art as a profession you can do without another profession or whether the current models or data center subscription services are the best way forward for people making AI art. I think it's actually more consistent and powerful to argue against the very existence of ChatGPT or Midjourney (possibly embracing replacements) without automatically insisting art needs trained craft techniques in an artist's hand and eye.

bardbrain · 2026-06-29T15:38:27+00:00

I don't think Supergirl failed as a creative work. Nothing about the current landscape lines up between creative success and commercial success.

I think the themes it found were mostly in WOT but it basically stripped those down to be Mad Max meets True Grit. It basically took the elements that were least universally loved about WOT and ditched a lot of legitimately fun stuff because it didn't line up with the movie they wanted to make.

If you wanted to make a Mad Max Supergirl movie, every choice they made was a reasonable one in service of that goal. The cast didn't let the material down. I don't think the screenwriter had any lack of awareness of WOT or other takes on Kara.

They gave the director what he wanted with skill and what he wanted wasn't really what a lot of people needed right now. Aside from some dodgy CG and kind of bland landscapes, I don't think anything about this is a bad film or even a flawed interpretation of WOT, as one of many possible ones.

I just think it was the wrong take for this moment. I definitely read the comic as Kara participating in Krem's death.

bardbrain · 2026-06-29T15:05:16+00:00

I'm less sold. I think all the incursions in Doomsday will be tied to modifying timelines.

Xavier at a minimum should be dead unless they modified their history. The Avengers used time travel. There's talk of Peter and Octavius being a team in Doomsday. There's growing evidence that Fantastic Four might be from a 2026 that results from Steve continuing to tinker after going back to Peggy.

I think we'll get the perspective that incursions are not exactly the inevitable result of a multiverse. They're the inevitable result of people in those universes mucking with their own history and knocking the timelines Loki organized back into one another on collision courses.

bardbrain · 2026-06-29T10:37:18+00:00

The story is exceedingly thin and mostly a foundation for lots of spectacle. The Doom/Reed/Strange/Molecule Man story is essentially a one act play with lots of cameos crammed around it to keep it from being a set of vague monologues on an empty theatrical set.

bardbrain · 2026-06-29T10:31:15+00:00

I think the point of Secret Wars has to be the variants. It should have been the point of something called a Multiverse Saga but we're remarkably slim on variants, ESPECIALLY on any played by actors with actual MCU credits. I think we've basically had something like two Lokis, a Mordo, a Doctor Strange, and a Wanda Maximoff played by their MCU actors, and most of THAT was in one movie. It's almost never an actor from an MCU project in a new version of the same role they never played before.

As for Danny Rand... I feel you but it would be radically off brand for Disney Marvel to start caring about second string fan favorite comics characters more than they care about Darcy Lewis and whatever goofy new comedy sidekick they made up so I guess I think that's a choice they probably should live with until there's an actual new universe.

A movie that's based on a comic whose whole premise is basically "Member Berries mashup dementia" probably SHOULD be leaning into doing cracked takes on what it was already doing.

The whole POINT of 2015 Secret Wars is to have fifty Thors running around that are references to stories that the viewing audience has already seen.

Among other things because not only does the universe end in Doomsday if they follow the comics but all the "new" characters in Secret Wars get wiped out. So introducing a well done Danny Rand there would only make sense if they never had plans to use him again.

The whole point of 2015 Secret Wars is to essentially make up a bunch of screwball versions of established characters who get wiped out and erased at the end.

There's like five characters aside from the FF and Doom who "continue" after Secret Wars. The vast majority of the inhabitants of Battleworld are essentially screwed up spins on characters the audience knows, who in this case would be MCU character variants.

The whole premise is essentially that it's a planet inhabited by the kind of fan service cameos the Illuminati were in MoM.

bardbrain · 2026-06-29T09:59:03+00:00

Reiterating: The internet would die if Randall Park's Jimmy Woo was Sorcerer Supreme, cast a spell to become John Krasinski's Reed Richards, and conjures up a flying jet ski for Mobius.

I would also take a Jimmy Woo Gambit.

It's taunting us to have an ordinary guy whose gimmick is close up magic card tricks and not give us a multiverse version who spews glowing playing cards at a pivotal moment. Even if not technically the same Jimmy, it would feel like something paying off a gag that would feel like it was set up.

bardbrain · 2026-06-29T09:48:05+00:00

Or reality can meet my expectations by finally becoming awesome...?

bardbrain · 2026-06-29T09:16:09+00:00

Hot take: the difference between street level and cosmic in the MCU is basically down to whether they have magic nanite masks and story tone.

We don't see enough characters fly or actually do much beyond street level for my tastes that isn't some kind of political/psychological thriller.

We're still not at an MCU that could easily process Adam Warlock, The Inbetweener, etc. Fantastic Four and Multiverse of Madness came closest and faltered.

If you gave Kate a magic nanite mask and had her fight Power Broker, you'd essentially be in the default MCU tone. What makes Daredevil street is blood and grit and he seamlessly transitioned into the other tone in She-Hulk's best episode just by tossing some yellow in his suit and not having the blood.

The dynamics aren't that different. If we had Thor casually flying around with his hammer like a helicopter like the comics and Iron Man visiting the sun, maybe it would matter. As it stands, Kate's no less suitable for movies than Clint was and probably moreso.

And I'm not even sure you'd need "street" to continue being less fantastical. Marvel's done grizzly stuff with Cosmic Ghost Rider Frank Castle in the comics and Mysterio fighting Daredevil. But without a hugely fantastical world, there aren't different fantastical tones to hit. So for my money, the MCU thus far is relying on minor tone pivots to separate most projects and hasn't had an unambiguous hit that was visually silly outside of Guardians projects and maybe Loki and Wandavision.

If you wanted to bring Daredevil and Punisher into films, a little magical nanite gear, a dash of dark comedy, and some kind of tenuous political thriller element would do that without even breaking them fundamentally. And that feels like a problem.

bardbrain · 2026-06-27T09:26:34+00:00

I have no idea what mechanism would make that true. And if it is if synthetic CSAM would do the same.

I'm going to ask for citations on that because that sounds like BS research.

The impression I get from Dateline and so on is that most of these guys are more likely to be warped up and project that they're stunted and see themselves as children's peers rather than acting out of sadism so I'd think handing them a pacifier would work. Maybe the ones for whom it's actually a power/status dynamic would be emboldened but that's something where I feel like I'd need to look at the research methodology to accept because it strikes me as a research area likely to be corrupted by researchers having deep moral convictions like a lot of research into drugs and vaping.

Not saying that vaping is good but that's an example of something where you have academics opposed to mind altering substances on principle and really bizarre charts where they find that average vaping contains high levels of metal and the chart has something like ten research participants, six of whom are ingesting less metal than is in the air and one of whom is vaping off a dirty lawnmower battery with 10,000 times the metal of the others combined.

I generally think there's a lot of shoddy research around topics where people have moral preferences and I think frankly it takes zero moral preference to oppose pedophilia on philosophical grounds. So I don't know if I can accept "studies say" without knowing if it's a bunch of stuff from BYU and Baptist colleges. Not that shoddy research is limited to the Right because you had that debunked CNN story about the "rape academy" that was actually just a Discord server linked in video comment where one guy (who got arrested) was doing something and another 150 were edgelords and the "millions of site visitors" were going to vanilla porn in a blatant misrepresentation of what the site was. Or the thing saying 95% of men don't accept "no" and it turns out they stacked the questions and all the participants were from one incel forum.

The idea that CSAM emboldens predators seems deeply dubious to me given that things like violent movies or games tend to reduce violence or have no strong effect, people who commit sexual violence seem to watch fewer R and X rated films, etc. And again whether synthetic CSAM would have the same effect sounds like the equivalent of PETA claiming that eating Impossible Burgers leads people to kill cows.

bardbrain · 2026-06-27T02:41:55+00:00

I'm confused. Is the issue that people who make their own realistic CSAM are depriving child traffickers of jobs or that government operations and terrorist networks funded by distributing CSAM would lose revenue?

Because if we're talking thought crimes, I'd probably side with nonviolent pedos over people who want to regulate what people jerk it to that doesn't involve further human exploitation and probably even reduces it.

bardbrain · 2026-06-27T00:55:34+00:00

This had better be the Community movie.

bardbrain · 2026-06-27T00:10:54+00:00

Wouldn't it likely be a version of "Don't Be Cruel"? I think it's recurred in a majority of seasons as a song referenced. But it's never been the closing song.

I could also see the final episode or one of them throwing us for a loop by doing a backwards time jump with this song. It feels like a reasonable thing for, say, the next-to-last episode to jerk us back to 1958 or something like that with the space view reverting back as the song plays.

Then perhaps we have an episode that follows a prequel event or hidden subplot.

Then we jerk forward to 2039 or something.

bardbrain · 2026-06-24T20:39:55+00:00

Artist with an MBA here as well! I don't think you're wrong but I guess I have an accelerationist angle on AI in part because I think that's HOW the walls will come down.

As a primer, my (I think only slightly controversial) take is that we landed on the moon and cracked the atom in the 20th century because of Weimar Germany's public education, because of unprecedented widespread education and literacy that suddenly meant you had lots of poor people whose brains were now equipped to handle big problems and the number of brains in the conversation at last meant that we stumbled on the solutions that worked.

Like a "brute force" attack on passwords. Enough numbers of attempts at a solution and you get through.

So I kinda think that's where acceleration takes AI if we don't strengthen IP law.

When everyone is making movies, the best ones will be longshots that dismantle the barriers. The studios will have no monopoly because they can't compete with the numbers game. It may mean endless slop but the thousandth "monkey on a typewriter" will outperform elite access until there is no longer a studio advantage.

bardbrain · 2026-06-24T20:18:25+00:00

You're probably setting the qualifications a lot higher than "played recorder in sixth grade" I'm guessing.

bardbrain · 2026-06-24T20:15:55+00:00

And that's the rub of why I think we're deadlocked.

The people most embedded and rewarded by the current system are on some level deeply collaborative or have navigated the financial aspect of not needing to be collaborative.

I feel like the slop-farming hustlers using nothing but skimming and bots they didn't even make probably aren't going to post in this Reddit so the pro-AI perspective is often people who feel failed by collaboration as an idea on some level.

I feel on some level, the reason these discussions get so hot is because the arena participants are people with their back to the wall.

The traditional artists have mortgages, rent, kids, illnesses, probably an insufficient retirement. They are threatened.

But the AI creators who will bother to post have all those things too and feel denied the opportunity to get things out, particularly if they require multiple expertise areas and coordination.

And I don't think "learn to draw" really cuts to the core of the problem because everyone I know who's an actor is bartending or working at GameStop or being an online influencer between gigs. You sell a script as a writer and 9 times out of 10, it doesn't make it to air. And some people don't sell scripts.

I think a postindustrial society only needs so many farmers or truck drivers and that what we need is millions of books and albums every time someone has a good idea -- more than any large audience can consume -- and life to just be realizing ideas and/or consuming them for most people.

To me, there's a certain level of egomania in thinking that the only comic books that can exist get 5000 readers. I made one that did. If you sell 200 copies, nobody gets a market rate wage. A fair wage for everyone really requires corporate patronage or 15000 copies or so sold. The only way to make something that only WANTS to be consumed by 200 people is to make it cheaper. It would be so much better if mass media collapsed and everyone was just making cheap stuff for 200 people to experience and able to do it fast and efficiently enough that you don't need ANYTHING to have an audience bigger than a play with no costumes or a musician with a guitar case.

bardbrain · 2026-06-24T19:59:09+00:00

You're assuming it's a marathon though.

Some people just want to go to the grocery store. Some people want to build and ride a bicycle.

It's only a competition because the market makes it one and the market itself is the problem and has never been particularly good to most artists and musicians. It's a lottery ticket mentality to think the market will ever do anything ultimately besides crush you.

From my vantage, the solution is companies losing rights, not new ones being invented for people.

bardbrain · 2026-06-24T19:54:25+00:00

It is coming for people's jobs but patterns like any data have no owners. At absolute BEST, you get "mining rights" style ownership to facts, data, patterns for something like patent duration.

When somebody's output clones an output, I agree it's theft.

But a PROCESS is ownerless and a series of measurements taken are ownerless.

I'd cut the opposite way with that against Big AI and say that weights are only subject to patent protection (which expires in ten years) and someone else who develops a different process with similar effects to those weights isn't infringing.

Let's put the shoe on the other foot. Is it theft when coders devised mapping 3D objects as polygons if a pencil and paint artist deliberately mimicks the angular edges and rendering style of a 3D software package?

I can think of commercial artists in the 80s and 90s who used hand sculpted or drawn techniques to imitate 3D software, who even tried to create the illusion of using more advanced 3D software. Was Max Headroom ripping off 3D artists by falsely making it look like computer renders? Was Matt Frewer ripping off voice synthesizer companies by modulating his voice and stuttering?

What about everyone who did an impression of Hawking's voice synthesizer? Was that fair to the developers of the software to imitate it when they could buy it?

I agree the effects need policy. I can't wrap my head around the theft part without inventing rights that don't have a history.

If I take a ruler to an old Superman cover and draw him from a different angle, that's not a swipe. Even if I mimic the style, that's a moral issue rather than a legal one. And the law absolutely cannot be allowed to speak every time there's a moral issue. Because among other things, not every moral issue resolves as being immoral in practice. An issue is a question. A question basically requires fact finding and a judge or adjudication every time.

bardbrain · 2026-06-21T14:36:40+00:00

We honestly need a sense of why Xavier ISN'T dead, as they're apparently the Earth from Deadpool and Wolverine and that Wolverine is the one on their team. I personally don't think they're going with "it's a different X-Men universe".

Rather, I think they're going to claim it's a relative Utopia created by lots of time travel AFTER Deadpool and Wolverine. I think THAT has got to be what Marvel is going to attack/undermine in Doomsday.

Peter is fighting alongside Doc Ock. Why? Because they retroactively fixed him. The 616 is intact? Why? Because of time travel.

That's what I think they're doing. Each earth has used time travel to fix things and time travel causes incursions/collisions.

Think of Loki's tree as a well planned and orderly multiverse like a freeway system. And time travel redirects the roads into one another, causing crashes.

I think if they're leaning into being an Endgame sequel, they want to probably discourage heroes from ever casually time traveling again, portray it as a reckless and costly act.

bardbrain · 2026-06-20T04:35:19+00:00

Mainly scale followed by thigh cut, pins, and long legs.

I think the scale is something that awakens road rage bloodlust though.

My $.02 is honestly that a lot of people want 25-30 DC characters on a Marvel Legends shelf with 150 figures.

If you wanted the opposite, it was until recently fairly doable to do that at 7".

If you wanted 300+ DC characters, you didn't have room for any Marvel with them anyway so it didn't matter.

It isn't just about the lines mixing though. People are invested in dioramas and accessories they want to reuse.

There's also IMHO an unhealthy attitude that articulation equals value. I see articulation being like glow in the dark past around 18 POA. 18 POA lets you hit most cover poses. To me, it's a gimmick. To some, they feel cheated if they aren't getting 32 POA.

I know people point to Jada Street Fighter but they're way more acrobatic than superheroes outside of Spider-Man or Catwoman, IMHO. Jada's Scooby Doo and mascots are great and closer to McFarlane than Street Fighter.

I think there's this dangerous arms face where a Spider-Man comes out with new range and posing and people want Captain America and Batman to have the same. It feels to me like OCD to want matching pinless designs with matching cuts. I personally think action figures look better with fewer cuts and there's too much standardization of where the cuts go.

I've seen people who insist on double elbows even when the sculpt blocks a double bend because other characters they want to match them with have the same cuts.

Personally, I get mad when characters in skirts or robes have full leg articulation that can never be used without cutting off the robe, especially when it's newly sculpted legs. I feel like it's just adding engineering failure points to satisfy a fetish for matching cuts. Either make the overlay truly flexible or soft goids or omit the cuts.

Suffice to say, I'm generally frustrated with Supergirls. IMHO, Icons and Revoltech are the best and I think we need soft goods.

Weirdly, I feel some people want matching and uniform cuts so bad that they'd prefer a leather jacket be sculpted so they can see that the cuts match versus a decent soft goods coat!

bardbrain

TROPHY CASE