The Marvel List - Why and How

Remember a time before half the journalism online was top ten lists of things that you didn't necessarily care about?

Guess who is about to contribute to the problem.

Yep, little old me.

Before we get into that. Who's your favourite superhero?

If you don't have one - you know what, this blog probably may not hold much interest for you. I won't be mad if you hit the Back button. A lot of everyone else probably thought of at least one specific superhero - and it is probably Batman or Spider-Man.

Mine's Cable.

Following that, of course - there's been a lot of movies released in the past... well, let's be honest, forty years... that have followed the antics of at least one superhero and their respective villain or foil. I can predict that, if you have a favourite superhero, you may well have a favourite superhero movie.

It might even be Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, like mine.

They are, after all, a billion-dollar business. Some of the biggest earning movies in decades - 7 of the top 20 grossing movies in the past ten years, all but one of which were Marvel movies. Even if you don't read comics or care about them much, you have to acknowledge their success.

I mean, they're successful enough that there is an entire personality sub-trait which is "sneering at superhero movies", because, you know. Why not.

So - those who are still on board - you have a favourite superhero movie. Probably you have several more, and if pressed, you could arrange them into a list of sorts. Right?

The List - the capitalisation is necessary - actually came about as I was trying to work out what movies one needed to watch before they went in to see Avengers: Endgame.

I've always been more of a Marvel fan than a DC fan. The selection just interests me more. In terms of comics, it isn't like the two companies are as vastly different as their movie releases have been. That's a real polarising agent, right there. The gulf is wide.

So The List started as the master list for Marvel movies that had to be seen before Endgame, which I was compiling in chronological order in-universe. It's not Star Wars - you don't need to skip around that order to find the best time to reveal certain things. You can just watch it as it happened in the timeline. 

Then when I had that list in front of me, I decided to do something different with it.

I decided to stick them in order of preference. Not order of quality, of objective film-making talent and skill, or anything like that - literally, in order of those that I would rather watch in an either-or situation.

So I shifted them around, I moved them into the places I felt comfortable with them being, and it was as I was looking at the top three that I realised there were films missing - and the only way to fix that, was to properly define what a Marvel movie is.

This is gonna get nerdy.

So technically speaking, Iron Man is the first movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe - movies pretty much made by Marvel Studios. Iron Man being the first one, it was in production for a long time before Marvel Studios bought the rights back in the mid-2000s. But we all know full well that Tony Stark is a Marvel character, right? Like, Kirby and Lee concocted him in the mid-sixties. (A grossly simplified history, I know.)

Except those movies officially released by Marvel Studios aren't the only Marvel movies, those being, movies featuring characters that are part of Marvel comics. That throws the doors wide open, which necessitates a bit of a restriction - when we say "movies", we mean anything with a cinematic release. Not straight-to-DVD, not a TV movie.

That means we not only get to include the Main 22 - everything from Iron Man in 2008 forwards to Avengers: Endgame - but also the unexpected smash Spider-Verse, which as I mentioned was my favourite. It means we include the Ang Lee Hulk movie put out in 2003. It means including the rest of the Sony Spider-Man movies - the three featuring Tobey Maguire, and the two featuring Andrew Garfield. It means including all three Fantastic Four movies, the two cheesy ones featuring a pre-Captain America Chris Evans and the new darker DC-like one.

It means the X-Men movies. All of them. From the first one, through the weird reboot of First Class and Days Of Future Past, through to Logan and Apocalypse (and the forthcoming Dark Phoenix). It means including Deadpool and its sequel. It means Daredevil and Elektra. It means all three Blade movies. It means Ghost Rider and Punisher, and their respective sequels.

It means Big Hero 6, which is a Disney movie, but based on Marvel characters. It means the really rather bad Captain America movie from 1990, starring JD Salinger's son (no, really). It means the Dolph Lundgren Punisher movie from 1989, which is as bad as you might expect.

It means Howard the Duck.

Further surprises come in the form of the Kingsman and Kick-Ass movies, both of which were published under Icon Comics, an imprint of Marvel that seems mostly dedicated to letting Mark Millar publish whatever he wants. It also includes Men In Black - originally published by Aircel, which was bought out by Malibu, which was bought out by Marvel.

So what I have is a list of Marvel movies, sixty-one of them thus far, and they have been arranged in order from 1 to 61 - in order of which I would rather watch. That is as technical as the listing got, simple but effective, and utterly lacking in any kind of real objectivity. And still, at times, the fight between movies in consecutive spaces has been a little...

Acrimonious.

There's several I haven't seen yet. I am working on fixing that. What this list has given me is an appreciation for the Marvel movies which are actually well-made - you really don't have a true love for the superb fight choreography in Captain America: The Winter Soldier until you've had to watch Dolph Lundgren trying to be Frank Castle. You forget just how good a Spider-Man Tom Holland is until you watch Andrew Garfield. I mean, bless him, he tried, but. It's just no comparison.

I haven't seen Logan yet. Which is a sin, I know - but I intend on fixing that this weekend. It won't go on the list until I have seen it but I predict it will go in pretty high. I also haven't seen X-Men Apocalypse (ugh) or the sequel to Ghost Rider (UGH) but, again, I will fix that. I don't predict them being quite as high on the list as Logan.

I will spare you the entire list - though if anyone wants to see it, I will put it together and publish it in a comment here. What I will share with you, though, is a couple of the salient points. Remember, this is just my opinion.

• The top five are Spider-Verse, Homecoming, Black Panther, Captain Marvel and Thor: Ragnarok. There's not much I'd rather watch than Carole Danvers beating the piss out of literally anything, and those few things are mostly Spider-Man related.
• Infinity War comes in at 17 out of 61 - Endgame got in at 9. They were both better movies than I thought they were going to be, even if they have their structural problems.
• Only three actual MCU movies sit in the bottom third of the list. That bottom third is mostly composed of bad Fox movies.
• I really, really am not a fan of the X-Men or the Fantastic Four.

So... why does this list even get maintained? What's the point? Why do book-keeping on stuff which is meant to be fun and enjoyable escapism?

Because it has given me new eyes to look at media that had previously been taken for granted. It gave me a framework to enjoy this new batch of movies in. It reminded me of where we've come from, of places we can go. If you look at the sheer amount of improvement in actual film-making standards in between the 90s Captain America and Chris Evans' performance, it's like a whole different world. It's also a great excuse to go back and watch some old favourites that I haven't seen in a while.

And because - frankly - it gives us something to talk about.

...of course, that means that at some point, I'm going to need to do a DC list...

...but maybe I'll save that for a rainy month.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Who Could Be The Bat

If you aren't familiar with Movies With Mikey, you ought to fix that, but relevant to this specific post is this video right here, in which he addresses The Batman Question.

That question is: Who's your dream casting of Batman? No restrictions - could be anyone.

Well, that's inspired a bunch of thinking and a lot of conversation, around these parts.

We all have our ideas as to who Batman is. Mostly informed by our favourite Caped Crusaders in the past. Speaking personally, while I think the best media he's presented in is Dark Knight, the best Batman to ever exist is voiced by Kevin Conroy and looks like this:

Right, there's all my folks who grew up in the 90s.

Here's the thing. My dream casting of Batman relies on several other bits of information, first, as there's been so many different types of Batman. So are we talking Dark Knight Returns? Are we talking his appearance in Superman: Red Son? Are we taking an entirely new rebooted approach? A campy sixties movie? A Heat-style Batman/Joker crime thriller? Justice League satellite action? Each one of these, I think, deserves a different batman.

None of which necessarily need to be white, and none of which necessarily need to be male.

I am gonna catch some shit for that, I am sure, but hear me out.

Batman was conceived in 1939. A LOT of the current popular crop of superheroes were conceived way back when. Superman came the year before, The Phantom two years before that - and if you don't know about the Phantom, know that there would BE no Batman without the Phantom, cringey Billy Zane movie adaptation notwithstanding. Flash, Captain America, Wonder Woman, Aquaman - all conceived during the Second World War.

I'm pretty sure you're aware of this, but - back then, it wasn't terribly popular in the West to have a non-white central protagonist. It took until the sixties for Black Panther to make an appearance - and even then, his first showing is to invite the Fantastic Four (ugh) to Wakanda and try and beat them all up to prove himself.

I like to think we've moved on a little since then.

I think you could basically run the exact same story with Batman, with very few modifications, if he was played by Michael Fassbender, Idris Elba, Ruby Rose (see what I did there) or Janelle Monae. I mean, what's a better way of concealing the fact that Miss Wayne is a vigilante superhero than to convince the world that the vigilante is a man? After all, as Batman: The Brave And The Bold taught us...

The thing is, though. The thing is. I don't want to just... recast Batman.

I used to love Batman as a hero. Who wouldn't? Then you get to the kind of age where you start asking awkward questions, like - why is Arkham Asylum so easy to escape from, and could maybe a multimillionaire who can afford to fund a satellite for his super-friends to hang out in perhaps afford to help make it more secure? You know. Things like that.

It's after that stage that you get a little bit bored of it. Dude going around punching crime until it stops criming, until it inevitably starts to crime again. The brooding, the anguish. He's so cool. He's a ninja. He's the goddamn Batman.

Yawn.

So let me instead introduce to you a different way that Batman can go. A different breed of Bat, let's say.

We go back to his origin story (and oh my god am I sick of having to see his origin story but that's another thing altogether), wherein we see the Wayne family leaving a cinema. They're happy, laughing. They were invited along because it was through the arts foundation funding provided by Thomas Wayne that the movie was made at all. They decide to cut through the alleyway to where they are parked - Thomas, his wife Martha, and their daughter, Bruce.

Yes, Bruce. It's a great name.

They are intercepted, as always, by a dude with a gun - classically a chap named Joe Chill. Except. this time, it runs a little bit differently. You see, the Wayne family are different, now. Thomas in particular. So when he sees the gunman - who is twitching, sweaty, eyes huge and wide - he doesn't immediately get on the aggro defensive. Instead, he calmly tells the man he'll give him all the cash he has. As long as he gets help. And he means it, too.

Bruce, however, isn't having it. Bruce gets shouty and aggressive, puts herself between her dad and the gunman. Joe Chill starts getting twitchy. Martha tries to calm her daughter down. It doesn't work. In the end the nerves get too much for Joe, and he pulls the trigger.

In the ensuing carnage, Bruce gets hit in the back. Her parents both get shot pretty bad - Martha midway through going for Joe at the time. The last thing that Bruce remembers of that night is her dad leaning over her, telling her that the police are coming, and her telling him she can't move her legs.

The funeral. The husband and wife being lowered into their family plot together. Bruce in a wheelchair, with her uncle Albert stood beside her, holding an umbrella over her head.

After the funeral. Bruce asking Albert how this happened. Why this thing happened. Why people do the things they do. Learning fast, learning early, the state of play of the world.

Bruce deciding to do something about it.

Of course, Bruce's first thought isn't to go off and become a badass ninja. No. Bruce has just come into a huge fortune, and that is her current and primary weapon.

No time to brood. Time to work.

Maybe I'll go into the further adventures of this particular Batman in another blog. I just think it would be a refreshing take on the standard lantern-jawed punch-man. And - yeah, this Bruce would definitely be played by Janelle Monae.

Either way.

Who do YOU think should play Batman?

Best Of The Bad Bunch

Having just come back from Nine Worlds - and there will probably be a blog about that - I am absolutely shattered, having socialled myself into a coma. What this means is that the blog will not be some kind of epic sojourn into perfected academic understanding of any particular topic.

So I am, instead, going with a suggestion provided by my lovely significant other, inspired by a brilliant panel featuring several brilliant authors:

Who are your seven favourite villains?

Well, alright then. Hold onto your britches. In no particular order.

Carter Burke

YOU KNEW IT WAS COMING.

Okay so Carter Burke, right? If you haven't seen the 1986 action science fiction horror movie Aliens, you haven't lived - especially the special edition, look for the sentry guns and the scenes in the colony before the marines show up. It is my literal favourite movie ever made, if the last blog didn't clue you in on that fact. If you haven't read it, it's about Bishop, go read it. Now. Yeah, now. Then come back here.

You back? Good. Okay.

Carter Burke. The man who made the xenomorph look reasonably honourable. The greasiest rat-fuck son of a bitch to ever become dogmeat. When he bites the dust, you feel the most deep sense of "yeah fuck you" satisfaction, because you hate him. You hate his slick smarmy attitude, you hate his duplicity, you hate his lying fucking face, you hate the way he makes these empty hand gestures and gapes like a dying fish. You hate him. You hate him so thoroughly and so completely.

And then he gets his head fucking eaten.

Delicious.

-

Rick Deckard

TW-TW-TWIIIIIST

You see, Blade Runner is a noir flick; this means that the morality is all higgledy-piggledy. So you need to look deeper than the surface when you look for who is right and who is wrong, and in a previous blog, I talked all about why Roy Batty wasn't wrong.

So we have Rick Deckard. He used to be a Blade Runner - he still is one - and a Blade Runner is a person who, in this setting at least, hunts down Replicants and retires them. Given that Replicants need a very specific test to even tell them apart from humans, what that basically means is that Deckard hunts down people and kills them. The only crime those people commit is to not do what the company that makes them tells them to, such as wanting to live for more than four years.

Rachel doesn't know she's a Replicant. Roy does, and wants to live. Deckard wonders at one point if he might be. (He isn't, by the way. I will die on that hill.) Both the original and 2049 really serve to erase the difference between Replicants and people. So - yeah, Deckard's a professional murderer cleaning up corporate messes, who would retire himself if they told him to. He forces himself on vulnerable girl, and gets piss drunk because he can't deal with his job but keeps doing it anyway.

Sure, the greater villains of the piece are Tyrell and Bryant - the corporate overlord and the demanding police chief - but Deckard, being presented as the protagonist while actually being an assassin for hire, surely takes the cake there.

-

Megatron

"I would have waited an eternity for this. It's over, Prime."

Sure, there are a great many different Megatrons in different Transformers timelines - but all of them are awesome, let's face it.

I am particularly fond of the gladiatorial pit-fighter of Kaon presented in Transformers Prime. He just oozes hostility and nastiness. When presented with perhaps certain death, at the mercy of a human controlling an industrial drill, Megatron tells him simply:

"Kill me now, boy. Or you will never get another chance."

Jack doesn't, obviously.

In another episode he has to fight a super-powered Insecticon bare-handed, does so, wins, then turns on the Autobots and dares them to have a crack at him too.

He then falls the fuck over, because he's near death himself.

Bad. Ass.

-

The Tessier-Ashpool Family

You know what Cyberpunk is - I already talked about Blade Runner - now meet the real villains of the novel that pretty much started it all, Neuromancer.

The Neuromancer in the title is an AI. As is Wintermute, who gave their name to my Starfinder character. They are both created as a way for an insanely wealthy family to keep maintaining their fortune and their legacy, a family that hated the earth enough to build a literal space arcology - the Villa Straylight - and that hated being in space so much that they just stayed there, in their baroque nightmare, being frothing mad and wealthy beyond understanding.

We encounter this place in the third act of the novel, a novel which begins in the murky underworld of Chiba City in Japan. Chiba is a place profoundly ruled by poverty and crime. Case - the main character - rents a plastic gun early on, just in case something bad happens. He rents a plastic gun. That's just a thing he does. Imagine the kind of world that creates that demand. Now imagine the kind of people who have more money than ACTUAL sense, like literally, who hang in orbit up above that world.

If you need more evidence as to their literal evil, one of them - the patriarch - has sex with and consequently murders a clone of his own daughter.

So fuck these people and everything they stand for.

-

Carnage

In terms of Marvel villains, there's few I like more than Carnage.

I mean... he's pretty great, isn't he? When you think about it. Like Venom is cool, but Carnage is like cool but injected with maniac juice. Venom is a dangerous foe to Spider-Man, who defeats his spider-sense and can catch him totally unaware. Carnage is all that, plus, if he wants to, he can turn his hand into an axe and eviscerate you with it. Something he is very willing to do, because he loves eviscerating people.

There's just something so much more dangerous about the Carnage symbiote than most other bad guys in the Marvel universe. He sits between the huge deific threats (Apocalypse, Galactus, Thanos) and the powerful-but -mortal bad guys (Omega Red, Doctor Octopus, The Mandarin). It took one of the literal most powerful heroes in the Marvel universe to actually put him down, via flying him up into orbit and ripping him in half.

See?

He's scary. He's violent. He's hard to defeat in a way that is morally sound. You can slap around a mugger, you can web up a thug, but Carnage? Carnage demands that you run, or fight. Just to survive, let alone to win.

And when you consider that the symbiote can infect other people... like, say, Wolverine... or Juggernaut...

...or Multiple Man...

Yeah, just thinking about that makes me sweaty.

-

Donnie Darko

I'm gonna have to explain this one...but also I kind of don't want to.

See, the entire trick to the movie Donnie Darko involves watching it, understanding it, and then interpreting it properly. If you do all these things, then I daresay you will agree with me insofar as that, in terms of the bad guy - Donnie is that guy.

Sure, there are worse people.

I mean, Kitty. Kitty is the most horrible, awful individual I can imagine. She's like that pink flowery shithole woman from Harry Potter but actually real. We all know someone like Kitty.

And Patrick Swayze... like, (SPOILERS) when you find out some wealthy pseudo-Christian self-help guru has a bunch of child porn stashed in his closet, you're probably not surprised. He's still an asshole, and he still needs punishing.

I am not going to go into the core of the plot. What I am going to do is tell you to go and watch this movie, and then understand this:

Donnie looked at what Donnie had done, and decided that what Donnie had done was the wrong thing to do.

Villains often think they are heroes of their own story. It's rare that they can witness evidence to the contrary and realise the fact.

He does.

-

The last villain is one that may surprise you, and herein I will present all the choices I went through before settling on one:

The Human Race
SPACE!
Stalin
War
Yourself
Film Production Companies
Internalised Homophobia
Religious Extremism
That Guy On The Bus That Always Wants To Talk To You Before 8am
My Grandmother
George Lucas
Whoever Threw Out The Whedon Script For Alien 4
Nazis
Whoever Didn't Throw Out The Script For AvP Requiem
Rocky Balboa
Stalin
Impressionist Painters
Lists
Wasps
Buzzfeed
Calorific Content
Empty Carbs
That Weird Feeling You Get When You Drink A Cold Beverage Too Quickly Like Not Brain Freeze But Like A Chill In Your Throat That Is Just Super Uncomfortable
Superman
Yourself
Batman
Magneto
Professor Xavier
Nazis
Yoko Ono
Tyler Durden
Scott Pilgrim
Toxic Masculinity
When They Change The Recipe Of That Thing You Like And It Just Tastes Kind Of Wrong Now Like Not Super Different But Different Enough That You Don't Like It Much Any More And You Can't Explain Why
That d20 You Used The Last Time You Failed A Save
Lists
Yourself

No, really. Yourself. From Enter The Gungeon.

So to clarify.

Enter The Gungeon is a super-fun twin-stick bullet hell game with an amazing soundtrack, superb pacing, graphics to die for, replayability out the ass - it's just great, I can't recommend it enough. If you don't believe me, go watch a review or LP. Try Dunkey, his one is pretty much on point.

You see those crosshairs?

You, as the player, are entering the Gungeon in order to take - from its depths - a gun that shoots into the past, to kill your own mistakes. That is your end goal, the reason why you decide to enter this mad labyrinth filled with bullets that shoot you with smaller bullets, and enemies that are puns on firearm terms. This is why you bullet hell. This is why you have to live.

And when you lose all your health, where in most games you would be killed by the thing that killed you - in Enter The Gungeon, you get shot by the time gun.

You are literally shooting yourself from the future.

The thing is, THAT is what kills you. That is the thing that stops you. Not the bullet that the cute little shotgun shell just shot at you. It's the bullet YOU shoot.

One of our greatest enemies is ourselves. Our doubt, our internalised hatreds and fears, our damage, our dissonance. Of course, we have a lot more enemies than that - systems that are rigged against us, people that hate us for being us, people that casually harvest their fortunes while damning the rest of us to a forever up-hill climb. One of the things we can definitely work on changing is ourselves.

And a thing we should definitely stop doing is shooting ourselves before we have a chance to fail.

...huh.

Well done, John.

So yeah. There you go. My seven favourite villains.

Normal service resumes on Sunday.

World Of Words

The world is a scary place.

If I gave a list of the ways in which it was scary at the moment, the things that were being done not just on UK and US soil but far wider, then I would have to come back and update this blog every few hours - just as each new and toxic thing emerges, like an iceberg being hauled out of the ocean, or a thriller determined to deliver a shock every three pages.

So of course, the world of fiction is a very attractive one.

No reason why that is wrong, of course. It's not. Whatever form of escapism floats your boat, as long as it doesn't stop you getting in the way of getting shit done. I blogged about that once before. I also blogged about why people tend to like taking part in activities that are defined and precise - because there's no room for uncertainty.

Sometimes we read about things that parallel scarily with what is going on in real life. Anyone who has actually read Nineteen Eighty-Four will see the uncomfortable similarities with the way modern life and modern living seems to be going. Sometimes we go back to reading the things we've read a thousand times before, such as myself with H.G. Wells' The War Of The Worlds - I read it something like once a month.

The thing with fiction - with video games, with movies, with anything like that - is that we can put it down whenever we want. Our thoughts and feelings remain with us, but whatever stress and tension is created by the media itself goes away when we will it so.

The bad guys are more believable, too.

I mean, having read the first six volumes of The Expanse, I find myself understanding why the folks that end up as the series antagonists do what they do. Sometimes it is a shitty and selfish reason, but that doesn't mean I don't understand it. Sometimes it is misguided or ill-conceived, but I still grasp why the person in question would do that dumb thing, because we all do dumb things at times.

I don't understand a lot of decisions being made today that directly affect my life.

Like some of them are obvious, yeah? Cutting business tax, using public funds to cover business costs, reducing government outlay to the general public, reducing culpability - all of that is pure greed manifest in political language. That's wealthy folk looking after other wealthy folk.

A lot of their decisions seem to be just...nasty. Just plain hostile for no good reason, much like my last blog detailed.

So why wouldn't we go back to fiction? Why wouldn't we read about heroes triumping over villains, or threats far greater than just base humanity being defeated by courage and honour?

And even if the bad guy wins, it's a fictional world that he has triumped over. It's not us. It's not you and me. It's not our friends.

...and contrary to what a lot of folks might have you believe, indulging in the world of fiction is not mutually exclusive to engaging in the world of the here and now. Immersion in either is a terribly dangerous thing, and can lead to burnout and fatigue - at the least.

So pick up a book, folks. Watch a flick. Dig into some old comic books.

Ain't no shame in it.

Running The Asylum

 Quick, name five Batman villains.

Okay. Good.

Think about the folks you named. Like, imagine each of them. I would have a few guesses but honestly, I want y'all to do the mental footwork here. It's been a day of it, and I am running a couple cylinders short.

Hold the images of those five Batman villains in your head.

How many of them suffer from mental illness?

You'll note my choice of words, there. I didn't ask how many of them were crazy, or how many of them were lunatics or whatever. I asked how many of them suffer from mental illness.

My guess is that out of the five you guessed, we're looking at...MINIMUM two. Probably more. Maybe all five. It's certainly easy enough to go for all five.

It's not just Batman that has a significant quantity of this going on. I mean as best I can recall he has the MOST going on, but if we look at a cross section of everything - not just comic books but novels, movies, television - time and again we find that the bad guys have profound mental health complications.

I mean, just look at Split.

We are entering a dark time, right now. As I write this, the newly inaugurated 45th President of the United States is beginning his... let's call it an escapade, through the rights and wrongs of the nation. People are feeling under threat, and rightly so - the rhetoric of the man himself and his followers is inimic to justice, nobility and equality.

And in this environment of hostility and toxicity, a forthcoming movie - admittedly one directed by a man whose spectacular fall from respect in Hollywood circles is legendary - will tell people who know no better about how dangerous those who are mentally ill can be.

I have mental health problems. I know plenty of people who do, also.

We're not fucking comic book villains. We're not just waiting for our moment to strike. We don't lurk in the shadows and wear special costumes and plot our revenge against society.

See, this is part of why this shit is taboo. Because when the protagonist has a mental health issue, it's so often something that gets presented as fucking comedy. Monk, anyone? In fact, every shade of being neuroatypical is used as either the marker of villainry or something to laugh at every now and then.

Why is it considered a daring or risky thing when a MAIN character experiences something that one in FOUR of us will experience each YEAR? It's more likely that a character will experience mental health problems than them being a white male (~8% of the world's population, but classically overrepresented literally EVERYWHERE).

Just a thought.