"Bad Patterer." Or, "Burnt By Bendis –– Again."

Last night Aaron Sorkin was on Charlie Rose promoting his Steve Jobs film. He had a stammering fit. He actually had epilepsy I believe. He had a "special" meltdown. He had a hoedown in his mouth.

All the while Charlie and Danny Boyle were extolling his hyper-real signature style ( –– they thought it was a good thing for society), which was (they said) a heightened simulacrum of naturalism. "Dialogue as action scenes," Danny Boyle gushed. "We edit out all glottal pauses," Sorkin stuttered. "Our characters don't have time to breathe."

Then Charlie had to give him the Heimlich maneuver.

The perfect image of the state of the art of writing: inarticulate writers fantasizing the illusion of themselves as drawing room wits.

I was, meanwhile, lying on my back on the floor half-heartedly doing crunches, as I always do through Charlie Rose, and I said to my wife, "That's just what I was saying was the problem with these two new comics."

I referred to the reboots of IRON MAN and SPIDER-MAN (Slott and Bendis the culprits respectively). Perhaps my malaise with this sort of writing is generational and people born after me have a facile love of this superficial sort of Hollywood wisecracking.

Nothing happens in either book. They are each of them long, dull, conceited, badly-done masturbation before their last panels, so bombastic witticisms (which NB they are not) is all the "action" you get. 

In Iron Man Tony "Starks" goes on a date and tries to make his dinner date's flesh creep with the super-power of sheer smarm. His dinner date, it turns out, is not sickened by him. Being a creation of BENDIS ( –– I accidentally wrote "BENIS" ––) she is as much of a Mary Sue as he is.

You would think that after the upside-down fudge cone Bendis made of the "ongoing" Ultimate Universe Secret Wars book (which has mysteriously disappeared from our shelves in a flurry of unanimous bad reviews) Marvel would hesitate before giving him more prime property to rend a poor fist from.

Not the case. Somebody up there seems to like Benis.
There is a dwarf star up there shaped like Bendis. 

The new Doctor Strange comic reinvents the title character (who had a well–crafted aloofness in Lee and Ditko's early stories and then particularly in the Englehart/Colan phase) as Tony Stark in Greenwich Village. 

I can imagine the rationale: "They both have black hair and moustaches after all. And Iron Man is really popular now. At least his films are."

(They don't know whether to draw Iron Man to have him look like Robert Downey Junior or not. So you get what you always did, a vague man with a moustache.)

Poor trivialization of Doctor Strange. Maybe they decided that Hickman took the characters to their logical end when the 616 universe burnt to cinders in the last panels of Avengers #44, and henceforth they can be recast as tween-YA burlesques of themselves.

Mary Sues abound in Slott's Spider-Man too. Slott seems to have forgotten that comics are meant to have a plot, not to be one long dream-fulfilment phantasy. Stan Lee, peeved at society's mistreatment of himself, originally imagined Peter Parker as a downtrodden omega male who revenged himself through violence. (Like the Punisher.) Slott, writing in 2015, has fantasies of being a benevolent charity worker. His fixation with charitable organizations is quite extraordinary. Perhaps he has forgotten he is writing a comic book. Slott wants to show Peter Parker's benevolence and liberalism and piousness in as many scenarios as possible. It's like listening to a pledge drive. In one panel, Parker says, "I've capped my salary at middle management level. As long as my pracices are keeping profits down I just can't justify paying myself more than my junior execs. Next question?"

Next question: What does $5.99 for a comic book get you these days? I might as well have given it to NPR.

Stan Lee, it hardly need be said, embedded scores of flaws, not all pleasant to admit, into Peter Parker and made it into a great narrative. This generation of writers has lost sight of that, the beautiful flaws of mankind, and so these comics are wish-fulfilment fantasies by squat bald men. Apparently they dream of being popular and benevolent. Scott's Silver Surfer is the same: the title character sails across the known cosmos with a comic nerd's fantasy girlfriend on the end of his surfboard, spouting precious stuff. I'd be furious if I didn't fancy the character ("Dawn Greenwood") so much myself. 

In his latest reboot Spider-Man sings with auto-tune as he flirts with Mockingbird, til you wish he would please stop. Compare to the ghastly scene of the female lesbian Captain America doing a dance and taking a selfie on the moon in the new Avengers #0.

Spider-Man next starts up a charitable institution.

He simpers benevolently at his own progressiveness at a same sex wedding.

I also have a sinking feeling that the artists have been expressly asked if they would make Peter Parker look like Timothy Olyphant.

You might wonder why I bought these comics, knowing as I do (and I learned it hard) the bad tendencies of both writers. Head in hands I reply that I had pathetically sought some insider dirt as to how Secret Wars ends, since Marvel has bollixed the release dates of Secret Wars and are this week publishing books that take place after Secret Wars in continuity. 

The answer is that nothing has happened. Marvel has summarily frittered away any narrative tension Secret Wars might have had. Without telling us how Secret Wars ends, Marvel has killed any dramatic uncertainty by emphasizing conclusively that after the excellent aberration of Hickman's last run on two Avengers titles, we are now resolutely back dead-center and neck deep in the Bendis-Slott-verse.

"Cable: Still Ill (Touch Me I'm Sick)."

I read another iteration of that thrice-doomed title X-Force, this one by Simon Spurrier. I had some hopes for it because his Legacy title was a surprise hit –– for me. Dunno how the hell it did in wider comixville.

This one's not so not-ungood. Partially it's because there is nothing left to be said with the mean, dried crusts and funeral meats left behind of that character Psylocke. In truth Betsy Braddock was pretty much used-up and burnt-out by the time Alan Moore had finished with her, but still in came Chris Claremont with a patent Mary-Sue hard-on for her and further exhausted the character. He had a Beckett-like grim tenacity. "Nothing left to do. Nothing to say. I can't go on. I'll go on." He made her Japanese for reasons presumably his own and psychosexual in nature.

What can you do with a girl like Psylocke? 

(I miswrote her name just then as "Paylock" ––  nearly "Paydirt" –– which I don't suppose is the least bit apt for this boring drain on our resources!) 

Rick Remender did a fair okay job with her on Uncanny X-Force, which was generally a high point in the recent years. That was the last good thing Betsy Braddock was going to do or say on this earthly plane. 

In the next series she did what a lot of boring people do to desperately garner attention. No, she didn't get lots of tattoos. Instead she became flamboyantly bisexual.

As for Cable, all I thought at the end of this first arc was, "Why is Cable always ill?"

"Am I still ill? Oh oh oh oh oh."

This character has been infected with a crippling virus, then he was in a coma, then he was killed, then he –– he has some auto-immune deficiency. He has lupus. In this version he generates a new clone of himself every day because his real ur-self is in a water tank dying day by day.

I'd say that Marvel needs to come up with a scenario where this man Cable is not dead on his feet. All the readerly energy is quite used-up in worrying about the poor guy's health. You read it and in the back of your head is a quiet, inexact anxiety about how much longer he has to live. That doesn't create narrative tension, it creates a dull gnawing tristesse.  Not what fanboys come to the table to have.

I'd say that Marvel needs to do that but what the deuce difference does it make when in a few months they're going to destroy the entire multiverse anyway. None of it matters. We're all going to die. Devil take Cable and his poor health. When the new golden multiverse comes, as it must, praise God inna Jerdan and hallelujah in the highest down to ole Beulah Canaan land, maybe they'll revisit the character with a clean bill of health.

Or at worst a headcold.

"Inter-Dimensional Overkill: A Review of the Recent Round of Marvel (Non–) Events."

A while ago, after around six years of fevered and uncritical abandon, around the time of the listless, baldly pointless, Marvel Comics come-all-ye known as Fear Itself, I quitted buying comics.

Induced by the sheer Bendisishness badness of the writing, I (who still consider the first Secret Wars a "high water mark of Western culture") had an out of body experience and saw myself, of a Wednesday, stood among the twit team irregulards at the comics racks, queueing up for my weekly dose of ampules.

I saw you queueing at the Gates of Hell
On that day – what were you doing?!

Not long after that, I did the inevitable elementary calculations in my head and realized that I was scheißing away the paltry few nickels and dimes I had, not to mention the second-best years of my life, on what was largely advertising. 


The stacked wads of comics in our railroad apartment were taking over the place, had become a fire hazard. Longboxes accrued, looked like coffins for pre-teens laid out jenga-style. Our "library" had come to look a little like the necropolises of New Orleans or the Mediterranean. I calculated, in my dawning recoil, that a good few hundred feet of that living-space-annihilation was composed of bad advertising.  

I stopped buying comics soon after. Followed an equally fanatical project to replace as many of those comics as possible with the bound collections (preferably the deluxe hardback edition) of the comics, i.e. sans the ads. I shall not speak of that folly, principally because I am still in the middle of it, intoxicated by the heady wine of the moment. 

(I remember reading on the fanboy message boards, one aspirant who was delighted with the hardback omnibus reprints of old comics runs, especially because the reprints included the original letters pages and Bullpen Bulletins. He only wished that in future editions Marvel would reprint the advertisements.)

Enough dull prefacing. Suffice it to say, I no longer buy the comics, I only buy collections. 

Hardly a superior pose, but it saves me a fortune. I have no particular concern about being six months or so "behind" my former brethren, the Wednesday morning clownshoe-wearers. Still, it remains that by not reading individual issues one might (one can) (one does) buy a clunker or two along the way without realising it until too late. I am right glad that I didn't buy the fathomless checklist of individual issues of the Avengers Versus X-Men fiasco, because the cost would have run into the thousands. I am less glad that I forked out even fifty dollars on the large hardcover of this trenchant torrent of tofu-flavoured fudge. "Forewarned is forearmed."

That X-Men farce seemed the last wheeze of the old-style Marvel BYOB–and-won't-ye-stand-in-a-circle epics, though. With their overhaul and reboot ("Marvel Now"), the company seems to be trying to intellectualize their fluffernutter – to sprinkle on some pink rock salt or artisanal red peppercorns.

In Infinity, I noticed with wry, urbane amusement that Wolverine was dispatched early and in a relative instant. A refreshing turn. Throw him out for the general embarrassment he is. I was reminded of that "sublime moment in the literature" (Bakhtin, I believe) when Deathstroke the Terminator floored Wolverine with debonair ease using only a glorified cattle prod (the X-Men/Teen Titans one-shot). Hickman, the author of Infinity, seems to be trying to minimise the recurrence of old tropes (i.e., the ubiquity of Wolverine, Spider-Man). 

This may however be at the cost of some valuable (Mark Gruenwald-era) continuity. For an example, I give you the unexplained panel of Iron Man and the Watcher standing over a catatonic or dead form of the Living Tribunal on the moon – or the whole debacle with resituating the so-called "New Universe" within the Marvel Universe after Gruenwald had done a most serviceable job of it (involving the aforementioned Tribunal) in Quasar in the 1990s.

Poor Mark Gruenwald's Quasar did so much for Marvel's cosmic pantheon, the body of which is now systematically ignored by the new wave of middling writers. 

They must return to their OHOTMUs. 

Further adding the tincture of a scorched earth DC reboot to the proceedings was the remoteness of the villain "Thanos" from his many earlier (often tedious) fracases with the Marvel superheroes. The poor fellow seemed like he'd never met, let alone tangled with, these people before. Thanos of old seemed to have an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of the arcana of the Marvel Universe. But for Hickman to achieve the requisite level of seriousness (rather dry and humourless) it is necessary to conveniently forget all the knock-down drag-out scrums and skirmishes Thanos gamely participated in over the last twenty-three years. Does Thanos have no recollection of his feud with the Pet Avengers? (He lost.) 

Continuity seems adrift. Babies –– bathwater. What, after all, does Hickman replace the old order with? Chiefly chaff; post-Bendis Mary Sues. Hickman isn't exactly Stan Lee ( – let alone Mark Gruenwald –– ) when it comes to portraying the quotidian existence of the superheroes. Captain America and Thor devolved into ciphers when the films started coming out. The Gruenwald and DeFalco iterations of these  two had individual foibles, replete with both the drama and the humour that comes with such flaws. 

Hickman had a celebrated run on Fantastic Four a few years back, a comic that had previously been a poor earner for the company with the mainstream of hard junk ingesters. To accommodate the droves (never a good move) Hickman and Marvel chose to emphasise family and the sciences. You can imagine the conversation in a meeting. "What's Reed Richards got that the other characters don't?" 
"A one-thousand yard dingaling."
 "Apart from that."
"A wife and kids and a jerk brother-in-law. Plus the Thing." 
"So let's emphasise the kids Christ sake. All the putzes reading comics now are balding family men –– at least they are, if they aren't balding derelicts living in a twilight pocket universe of their own making in their mother's basement. And bald family men like nothing better than to drone on boringly after their kids. Let's appease them with talk about kids and how special and wonderful they are and can be." 
"Kids are great. And these are special kids! These are gifted kids with unusual attributes!"
"Adzactly."
"And when there's a lull in the proceedings we can bring in either Galactus or Doctor Doom. One or the other. The rest writes itself."
"Got it."
"Hickman, you can toddle right along now and write your little funny-book and let the big boys talk."

The sum of the recent Age of Ultron hootenanny, the punchline, was that it was all a prologue to another epic, which would amount to Galactus eating the Ultimate Universe. 

"No, by my troth, not so much as will serve to
Prologue to an egg and butter."

When this non-event happened it was tediously pointed out that the heroes of the Marvel Universe had ruptured the substance of time and space by all their exhaustive and really quite irresponsible rambling through the highways and byways of parallel dimensions. (Have you read the complete run of Exiles comic?) 

This could be taken (by a contemptible cynic) as an analogy for how worn and frayed the patience of the readers has become with the habitual sallying through time as the go-to escape route for the bankrupt writer. 

It is good for us to remember that when DC had its first fully-fledged Crisis of Confidence, they pointedly decided – back in 1985 –– that such inter-dimensional horse-flaying was played out, and they tidily consolidated all their earths into one, like the estimable Arab folding up his pup tent. 

The Science Police banned time-travel henceforth and Brainiac 5 was awful sore. DC has since routinely reneged on this (blame Booster Gold) but it was a noble ideal. 

Marvel seems to have taken another thirty years to deduce the opposite. They reason that the infinite splintering of possible futures is where the money is at. Bendis must have his way with the Silver Age X-Men and who at Marvel could possibly want to stand in the way of the march of Bendis. 

After all phantasies of time travel are fun and idyllic.  Old girlfriends can be returned to us all ship-shape and prelapsarian. Best of all, we can return to a world that predates cellphones and the Internet again––! A world before tedious comics web-logs about time-travel in the entertainment industry. 

What If... I Never Wrote This Article?

I too have enjoyed the time-travel alt-universe trope when it is done well (the aforementioned Booster Gold, Zero Hour, Legion of Super-Heroes passim, Steve Englehart's classic time-travel "arc" in West Coast Avengers, Avengers Forever, Universe X). However a trend is emerging and for better or for ill it would be a desertion of my duty as a citizen not to at least document the trend. 

I thought that the express realpolitik military-industrial corporate argument against such incessant  tampering – the infinite versions of Cable and X-Man, Doctors Richards and Von Doom, Cyclops and Wolverine et al. – was that they alienated the "lay reader" and watered-down the core brand. ("Mother, why is Reed Richards now a bald black man?") Has Marvel abandoned wholly the idea of a "lay reader"? Must we all now have bloated crania like Uatu, the man in the moon, to comprehend these multitudes?  

On the other hand, per the "Ultimates Universe" and the "Heroes Reborn" interregnum (and per DC) Marvel is also not above trying out a reboot of its well-trod myths for a new readership. As we know, these never work and we return eventually to the original continuity. Isn't that what Grant Morrison is supposedly planning, even now, over at DC? A meta-narrative that absorbs all the reboots & makes sense of them? 

And then he shall unravel the Gordian Knot––

Time–travel is fun and nostalgic, but we must be careful not to blunder into the path of our past-selves and cause a rupture. Also, imagine seeing your past self up close, you who hate to hear your voice played back on answer-phone message! 

Imagine if you saw yourself, crudely flirting with the girls. Gulping cider at the bar. 

Last year Laurence Remila and I returned, like old time-travellers returning to the scenes of our best skirmishing. We went to Camden –– visited the Mixer, the Dublin Castle and wound up in the Spread Eagle. It was like walking through a sunken ghost-ship. And we too were revenants, unremarkable to the few revelers who still walked there. Of course, Laurence lives in Paris and I live in New York so we were woefully out of date, but this must be rather how time-travel could be. We ended up drinking a last, strange pint in Kensington –– a pub on Church Street we never once drank ins. It was the only pub still open past midnight. 

What happened to that idea that London pubs were going to be open around the clock?

"Hoarders Are Weird."

My wife was telling me a story about somebody who was a chronic hoarder, as I was going through a pile of comics bags and boards separating them into two piles. All the while she was talking about hoarding, I was coolly making these two piles. One pile was of bags and boards where the bags were wide enough that you could fit an average-sized trade paperback inside it. The other pile was for bags and boards that were too narrow to hold a trade paperback and could only hold a single issue of a comicbook (or as the fanboys now term them, a "pamphlet"). When I had finished I put the first pile into a cardboard box so they would be neat and easily available. The other pile, for which I had less time and esteem, I thought I didn't want to waste a box on so I decided in a flash of artistic inspiration to put these bags and boards inside a Trader Joe paper bag. I was influenced in this not so much by the art world as by the Chinese shoe repair people down the street who keep all the shoes they are fixing in brown bags. They can never find your shoes. It's a sort of trademark they have. We will almost certainly lose your shoes. This our personal promise to you.

When my wife had finished her interesting story I took a pause from my industry, as I said putting these bags and boards into two piles according to size, prelude to placing the piles in respectively a box and a paper bag, and as I said I paused from my work to remark:

"Yes. Hoarders are peculiar."

"Boring Comics Are Here Again."

Boring Comics. Anything with the Savage Land or the Shi'Ar in it. That is to say, the X-Men. When Sauron (half-man, half-pteranosaur) flies into the shot it is time for us to retire discreetly to our separate rooms. When the Starjammers come running dynamically into a room pointing their ray-guns (as they invariably do) it is time to respectfully retire from that same room –– by a different door –– methinks.

I was re-reading some old issues of Uncanny X-Men from about 1990 and you could almost see, as if  in "real time," the collapse and utter demise of Chris Claremont's writing style into incoherence. It's shocking to behold. He developed this sort of be-bopping free-association stream-of-consciousness that was alarming to the sensitive reader. By the end of his run, when I presume he was forcibly removed from the Marvel offices, he was writing sheer gibberish, talking in tongues. Like Pound with the so-called "China Cantos."

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  

Also boring, the Wolverine story, "Weapon X." What actually happens in this story? It's a protracted surgical procedure with, so far as I can tell, bickering staff. I'd as lief watch Grey's Anatomy.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  

Last night, on Person of Interest, John Rees dispatched the perp by driving his car into the guy's SUV and knocking it into him.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  

On Jeopardy, the two new contestants were named Walkenhorst and Lowmaster. Both females. The blonde woman who had dominated for the last week was toppled from her throne without dignity. There wasn't anything offensive about her per se, but I was greatly relieved when she was deposed. She seemed to get cockier every day in her little interviews with Alex, after the first break. She was getting to sort of like being on the television. She was kind of adapting horribly to it. She was clucking with her tongue. Alex, of course, hates it when the contestants try to outshine him and he jealously, peevishly squashes their repartee when it sprouts. He tries to kill their jokes in the very act of birth. It's in his professional interest for the contestants to be stammering dullards with nothing worth saying. Usually they are. So he was happy to see the blonde go too I think.

Lowmaster won. How her reign shall be remembered by future generations, we cannot say.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  

On Life After Top Chef Mike Isabella shows up each week even though he is not one of the four featured chefs. Even though he is not even invited by the show's producers. I presume he was "put out" that he wasn't invited to be one of the featured chefs, so he furiously contrives to turn up at the filming of every episode as if by happenstance, and "naturally" wanders into shot.

This week he happened to turn up at Spike Mendelsohn's place on his moped while the cameras were there. 

"Oh, are you filming?" he says, all innocent. "I'll come back. I can go. You want me to stay? Okay I'll stay."

By the way, the title to this show must be ironic, because the overriding message behind this show is that there is no life after Top Chef. These glorified cooks are just diddling about while life goes past!

One day they'll be dead!

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  

Idea for TV Show. Colicchio Versus Colameco: Who Wudd Win.

The pitch: "Who'd win in the crude, ugly slugfest that would obviously ensue when these two eminent chefs met."

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  

Incidentally, did I not make the point several months ago that Mitt Romney looks like Don Draper? "Katty Kay" made the same point, belatedly, on Charlie Rose the other night, after the debate. I wish you could copyright little super–facial–recognitions like that. There must be a way to make money out of super–recognition but I haven't figured it out yet if there is.

“Jor–El: What’s Wrong With a Prison?”

   It’s very easy to become bored –– disheartened –– actually depressed –– when you are reading about the planet Krypton before it blew up. It’s such dull stuff. And at the crux of this energetic maelstrom of dishwater, the eye of this vortex of banality, is none other than Jor–El, the father of Superman.

     Partially it is because we have read the origin story of Superman so many times that we would as lief eat a pincushion as read it once more. We wish these superficial marionettes conjured up before us like so much trivial vapour would vanish. And this is, indeed, what generation after generation of writers has been striving – and failing – to accomplish, and will continue to do so from now ’til time immemorial – until, no doubt, the Earth itself blows up in a manner very like the  one that did for planet Krypton. In World of Krypton all of Jor–El’s many well-trod scientific endeavours and breakthroughs are explored in tedious detail – the Phantom Zone, anti-gravity thrusters, etc.  Nothing too dull or trivial it seems. 

     One of his more eccentric “brainwaves” is in the field of, shall we say, criminal rehabilitation. It doesn’t make sense to me. Jor–El recommends that criminals should henceforth be placed in suspended animation and launched in bubbles into orbit in the planet Krypton’s immediate atmosphere. There they can float above the planet until they have served out their sentences.

     I fail to see the advantage in this. How exactly does it profit the polis, sage Socrates? It seems downright perverse to me – contrary – unwholesome. Need I point out what is obvious to the followers of one FRANK CASTLE’s many adventures, that the essence of capital punishment is that it is punishing – even if it is not always capital. If the malfeasant miscreants are in suspended animation (being brainwashed by rehabilitating subliminal mind-control tapes, incidentally – but I shan’t even pursue that rather boring course of leftist critique here) then they are not actually awake to appreciate the wrong that they have done. What's the significance of time passing if you're asleep? It makes of the prisoners mere Rip Van Winkles. They’re put in the bubbles and then they wake up and come out of the bubbles. It’s like having your wisdom teeth extracted.

    Also, floating about unconscious in solitary bubbles above Krypton’s surface they are under no threat whatsoever from grisly prison rape, which is –– I naively thought –– the cornerstone of Western civilization’s deterrents against lawbreaking. The threat of prison rape is, in fact, the single greatest deterrent against wrongdoing in existence. Without it, the world  would be in inchoate, antediluvian anarchy. 

    The reason why Jor–El's crackpot scheme prevails is because of the alternative that is even more outre.  The solution offered by Jor–El's competitor, one “Tron–Et” (his real name apparently), is the ingenious “Matter-Dissolver”. This –– as you might imagine –– succinctly “eliminates the problem of the criminal.” If Frank Castle was a denizen of Krypton (– idea for a Marvel/DC crossover event ––) he would surely be a keen subscriber to Tron–Et’s peculiar philosophical tenets.

  Or not: unfortunately this canny device is discredited in the end when it turns out that “Tron–Et” is himself a master criminal who wants to annihilate all the criminal lackeys who worked for him before they can be put in Jor–El’s rehabilitator-capsules. 

     Tron–Et is frightened – “reasonably” enough – that these erstwhile henchmen might emerge from Jor–El’s bubbles older, wiser and reformed. His “sensible” fear is that on clambering, like newborns a-birthing, from the bubbles and after only a rudimentary snack, the former lackeys would go directly to the criminal courts and tell the judge that Tron–Et was a criminal kingpin.

     You can see how a thing like that might happen.

     Hence the “Matter-Dissolver.”

     Hence the success of Jor–El’s prison-capsules.

   I see that I have taken up quite enough of your time. And I can see from your faces, having read this far, that you agree with me entirely – Krypton and Jor–El are very boring.

AFTERTHOUGHT

     [This afterthought is really only for you comics jagoffs out there in the wide, disappointing world. It occurs to me now, as I write this, that the origin story of Superman has some resemblances to the origin story of Galactus. Superman is the last survivor of a dying planet –– for Galactus it is a dying multiverse –– but the “core myth” (and pardon the dreadful pun) is the same. It’d be like that story where it was intimated that the Phantom Stranger is actually the future son of Superman and Wonder Woman cast back through time.

     As I said, dull stuff in the dry diggings, which I very much regret having to say, but sometimes – as an academic – or as a lapsed academic I should say! – I have to “publish” my findings, desiccated and loathsome as they are, to add them to that infinitely expanding, pulsing pool of knowledge we call HUMAN CIVILIZATION. This pool of knowledge is, as Jor-El would no doubt attest, our only hope for the endurance of a sensitive society.

     That and the vile spectre of the ever-present threat of prison rape.]

“Boring Comics: Narratological Point.”

     It is a commonplace in Marvel comic books, particularly ones of a certain era, to waste several pages of the narrative at the beginning with empty scenes showing the super heroes’ battle abilities and finesse in generic battle scenes. The locus classicus is the Danger Room scene in The X-Men.
     The splash page customarily begins with the X-Men seemingly spiritedly fighting one of their most notorious foes. After numerous pages (which we, the comic's humble buyers, have plainly invested and wasted whole cents in) the scene is revealed to be an exercise and an illusion. These were mere phantasms - robotic simulacra created by the Shiiar technology of the Danger Room. Cut to a panel of Kitty Pryde at the Danger Room controls. Eating a slice of pizza, stuck in the mid-Eighties, talking her usual glib “Mary-Sue” patter – beloved of exactly nobody.

     This generic scene purportedly establishes the powers and peccadilloes of the characters for new, first-time “casual” readers. A similar scene is the opener of literally millions of comics: Spider-Man webspinning through New York and breezily espying a mugging in a back alley.
     Must we be forced to behold this sight once again? Must we live it out anew, night after night? Spider-Man capturing the muggers, grinding them down with vapid one-liners that everybody (everybody) is weary of. He webs them up and further lightly humiliates them, then turns to their victims who recoil from him and call him a “nasty hooligan” or some similar synonym.
     Cut to a scene of J. Jonah Jameson droning on about the “web-spinning menace”; or a Daily Bugle front page editorializing against the infamous Spinner of Webs.

     Marvel Comics are boring aren’t they!!! I certainly wish they had never invented the Danger Room.
     Add Danger Room scenes to my list of boring comics.
     Also boring: “Pantheon” storylines that deal with characters from classical mythology.