InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "get my rocks off"

mxlm (mxlm) wrote in scans_daily,
@ 2009-06-12 00:21:00

Entry tags:

char: wolverine/logan/james howlett, creator: garth ennis, series: one perfect moment week

One Perfect Moment: Wolverine and the Punisher

I seem to be unable to get tags to function (or at least they don't show up when I hit preview). No idea why. Additionally, there doesn't appear to be a tag for the Punisher. EDIT: okay, so the tags work fine. But I've no idea how to do cuts/jumps, and the FAQ doesn't seem to be much help. Anyone?

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	proteus_lives 2009-06-12 02:34 am UTC (link)
	You need to put this under a cut. Put a before the scans. And yes, this scene is very funny. (Reply to this)

	icon_uk 2009-06-12 02:37 am UTC (link)
	The FAQ explains exactly what to do At the start of the cut [div class="ljcut" text="this is the text of the cut"] At the end put [/div] Replacing [ ] with < > in each case And the tags shouldn't need all the + signs throughout. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	mxlm 2009-06-12 02:40 am UTC (link)
	Victory! By which I mean, thanks. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	neuhallidae 2009-06-12 02:52 am UTC (link)
	How does he yell that coherently without lips? (Reply to this) (Thread)

	sianmink 2009-06-12 04:15 am UTC (link)
	He's the best there is at what he does. alternately lots of practice (Reply to this) (Parent)

	sir_razorback 2009-06-12 09:10 am UTC (link)
	You'd be suprised what you can get out without lips. =p A few years back I posted a few pages out of Spawn that was lipless like this. I decided to hold my lips back and say the same lines, and it came out mostly ok. A few sounds come out scrambled, but you can definately understand it. (Reply to this) (Parent)

jlroberson
2009-06-12 04:35 am UTC (link)

I loved, loved, loved this. But only Ennis could have ever made me like the Punisher even slightly. Even though I have never liked Darick Robertson's art much, I was in helpless giggles all through this appearance, because I dislike the X-Men and, even more, REALLY hate Wolverine. And so does Ennis. So between reader and writer, that there's a plan.

Sure, Marvel, I'll give you your Wolverine guest shot. And first thing? I'll blow off his face. I can just see Ennis laughing now.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

	jlbarnett 2009-06-12 06:12 am UTC (link)
	all it did was guarentee that someone else would humiliate Frank, which they did. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	Heh jlroberson 2009-06-12 07:45 am UTC (link)
	Here's the thing: I don't care all that much for Frank either, so fine. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	ex_stig213 2009-06-12 05:52 am UTC (link)
	If there is one thing that Garth Ennis loves, it is people without their faces on. Preacher, This, that Boys mini-story with Wonder Woman... (Reply to this)

kitty_tc_69
2009-06-12 06:18 am UTC (link)

No offense to anyone who likes this, but it's utterly ridiculous. For one, there's nothing I can think of that would so cleanly remove the flesh from the front of a skull while simultaneously leaving the eyes intact. Moreover, without facial muscles, the jaw would hang limp and speech would be utterly impossible.

Not only that, but a steamroller wouldn't have the desired effect on Logan. After all, adamantium cannot crush. Thus, what you'd get would be severe flesh trauma from compression, but beyond that little real damage. It would be very painful, and possibly incapacitating temporarily, but nothing even classic Wolverine's limited healing factor couldn't handle. You could not squish him flat, either the floor / ground would give or the steamroller would ride up and over Logan.

That also doesn't explain why, instead of trying to crawl away, he didn't roll to his side. It's rather like how cartoon characters run from boulders instead of dodging to the side... it's amusing, but not very smart.

So, while I may like seeing Wolvergod knocked down a peg or two myself, that doesn't justify bad writing.

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	angelophile 2009-06-12 06:42 am UTC (link)
	I think the point is it's meant to be ridiculous. It was basically an issue of Garth Ennis making Wolverine into Wile E. Coyote. It's just a very silly interlude. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	jlroberson 2009-06-12 07:52 am UTC (link)
	This is quite normal Ennis hilarious overviolence that is not meant to resemble anything that really happens to mutants with adamantium skeletons in the real world. I think the degree to which Robertson renders it might make the joke hard for some. This is really more John McCrea territory. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	(Anonymous) 2009-06-12 06:53 am UTC (link)
	If I remember correctly, it would be very incapacitating - Frank leaves the steamroller parked directly on top of Wolverine, meaning he would have been trapped underneath until someone moved it. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	dimesfornickels.wordpress.com 2009-06-12 07:30 am UTC (link)
	The MST3K mantra (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MST3KMantra) applies to comic books too. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	midnightvoyager 2009-06-12 11:01 am UTC (link)
	...relaxed or not, it didn't even get a "ha" from me. But I am not an Ennis fan. I gotta agree with Daningram on this one. "Ha ha I am taking tough guy down a peg! Now to go write a bunch of them..." (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

jlroberson
2009-06-12 09:21 pm UTC (link)

Actually, Ennis' approach with tough guys has always been "Good, they can endure much, much more punishment."

And what he does to superheroes follows directly in the tradition of Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neill. Thing is, I suspect writers over there may not take superheroes all that seriously. It's possible.

For me, even reading superhero comics is all about moments like this. Because I don't either.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

foxhack
2009-06-12 10:21 am UTC (link)

Maybe the eyes grew back.

Also, he has adamantium bones, but not adamantium cartilage or ligaments. So while you may not be able to crush his bones, you CAN spread or separate them with intense pressure, and besides, try to move with all that weight on top of you.

And finally, it's Garth Ennis! The whole series was nothing but one big fat joke on powered heroes!

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	khamelea 2009-06-12 03:32 pm UTC (link)
	I think the problem with this joke is that it's not funny. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	espanolbot 2009-06-12 05:52 pm UTC (link)
	...yes it is. It depends how it's done. The Kyle Rayner parts of the Hitman/JLA crossover were good for example. He can also write a good Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman when he chooses too, as well. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

khamelea
2009-06-12 06:47 pm UTC (link)

"...yes it is. It depends how it's done."

Well, no. See, I meant THIS joke: the steamroller bit. It's done one way, and it's not funny.

What it does depend on is personal taste. Personally, for example, I've yet to read something by Ennis that I found funny. Maybe I just haven't read enough of Ennis' work to hit the good bits, but I don't really care to find out that much.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

	kitty_tc_69 2009-06-12 04:24 pm UTC (link)
	And finally, it's Garth Ennis! The whole series was nothing but one big fat joke on powered heroes! That's why I don't think Ennis has any business writing mainstream comic books. His arrogant disgust for the genre shows through all too clearly. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	foxhack 2009-06-12 04:43 pm UTC (link)
	As opposed to someone who purportedly loves the genre but can be much, much worse than Ennis? I'm looking at YOU, LOEB. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	espanolbot 2009-06-12 05:54 pm UTC (link)
	He doesn't hate superheroes, he just thinks that they're kind of silly. That's why his better comics don't have any superheroes in them. Like Punisher Max, Dan Dare, Nick Fury: Peacemaker etc. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	daningram 2009-06-12 08:31 am UTC (link)
	Honestly, what I find so amusing is that what Ennis seems to hate about Wolverine, the whole unbeatable tough guy act, is virtually all Ennis has written with his characters of late, especially with Punisher. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	taggerung301 2009-06-12 08:51 am UTC (link)
	yeah, it is rather ironic . . . (Reply to this) (Parent)

	espanolbot 2009-06-12 06:00 pm UTC (link)
	It's more him making fun of how cliched the writing of the character had become: a catchphrase-spouting, violence short guy who is hairy and drinks a lot. The character is ridiculous, Ennis' protrayal is just more upfront about it than most. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	okkult3000 2009-06-13 02:22 am UTC (link)
	Yes, Wolverine is certainly more ridiculous than The Boys. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

espanolbot
2009-06-13 02:30 pm UTC (link)

Although you're being sarcastic, yes, yes he is.

The Boys is what you get when superheroes are stripped of the standard upbringing (no Ma and Pa Kent or Uncle Ben here) and are bought up as weapons in gaudy costumes with none of the morality or limits imposed by said supporting cast.

Both can be very silly at times.

Less toilet humour with Wolverine (most of the time) though.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

	Overheard seriousfic 2009-06-12 09:57 am UTC (link)
	Ennis: Alright, that was a fun diversion. Now to make it my entire career! (Reply to this)

halloweenjack
2009-06-12 12:07 pm UTC (link)

The sad thing about this isn't just that Wolverine couldn't talk without a face, or been able to make more than a few unintelligible sounds (and, you know, you'd think that the writer who'd created Arseface would have been the first guy to pick up on that), or that his relentless monologuing is wildly out of character, or that Wolverine would have to have had the idiot ball surgically attached to him with adamantium staples in order to lose a fight to someone, even Frank Castle, who was using conventional weapons, something that any writer but Ennis, with his diamond-cutter boner for war comics and an equally-priapric hate-on for superheroes, could easily grasp.

No, the really, really sad thing about this is that Ennis is just recycling a very similar plot from the Hitman/Lobo one-shot, and in that book it was actually funny. (It helps that I don't like Lobo, and also that that comic featured Bueno Excelente in a wedding dress.) This issue is one of the stories that convinced me that Ennis was deliberately turning in scripts that were either warmed-over crap or abject gross-outs (i.e. the serial killer who liked to sleep under an enormous pile of rotting corpses) to have Punisher moved over to Max, so that he could kick loose of the mainstream MU.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

kitty_tc_69
2009-06-12 04:47 pm UTC (link)

I agree with you... the sad part though is the whole "Wolverine cannot be defeated by conventional weapons" thing. That's pretty much in a nutshell why Wolverine is fundamentally broken as a character these days. It wasn't always like that.

Until the 90s hyper-exaggeration of all the "badass" characters kicked in, Wolverine could be defeated by conventional weapons. He might not be killed, but he could be injured badly enough he could be incapacitated, or forced to withdraw and heal for a while. He wasn't a tank, he wasn't a Terminator, and he couldn't just walk through gunfire. He had to rely on his speed and skill and animalistic fighting style to be hit as little as possible in combat, and rely on his healing factor and adrenaline-fueled determination to keep him going in spite of those he couldn't avoid. And he was cooler that way. It kept his stories interesting, as he had to work for his victories even against normal criminals. Under bad writer after bad writer, he lost that and became a parody of himself.

If I were in charge, one of the first things I'd do is mandate a storyline where Wolverine's healing factor goes out of control, at first becoming cancerlike, then warping him more and more until he becomes something akin to the deformed blob of ever-growing flesh from Akira. The solution would be to hit him with Forge's neutralizer gun... which because his power is so out of control, doesn't remove his powers entirely, only reduces them. From then on, Wolverine's healing would be reset back to classic levels, and any story that exaggerates it again would be vetoed.

It's really the only way to make the character readable again.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	halloweenjack 2009-06-12 06:36 pm UTC (link)
	We are in agreement on this. I was thinking more that Logan should have a little more parity with Frank tactically, both in terms of dealing with someone fighting with conventional weapons in general and having dealt with Castle in the past in particular. Ennis wrote him as some bozo with claws who just sort of waded in and got his ass kicked. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	lencannon 2009-06-12 03:10 pm UTC (link)
	I realized recently that I can sum up my Ennis reading experience very succinctly: It's all good, ridiculous fun until one thing goes over the line and then you realized that everything you were enjoying was just as awful and you feel like a bad person. (Reply to this) (Thread)

halloweenjack
2009-06-12 06:23 pm UTC (link)

Well, some things age better than others. Hitman is almost the reverse of your summation above: it's a guilty pleasure, until you realize that Tommy and most of the people that he knows will end up paying very dearly for it in the end. (Well, OK, I feel a little guilty for laughing at Bueno Excelente, once I figured out what he was really doing.) Preacher, on the other hand, doesn't hold up very well at all.

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lonewolf23k
2009-06-12 04:48 pm UTC (link)

And then, the author working on the Wolverine comic responded by having Logan beat up the Punisher, and leave him in a heap with a bunch of male nudie magazines he found in Frank's back "For Research".

A not-so subtle dig at Ennis' obsession with male companionships and anal sex, really.

And recently, as of Marvel Tales, Logan and Punisher are once again on speaking terms, teaming up against Hydra.

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	espanolbot 2009-06-12 06:02 pm UTC (link)
	Ohhh, that's what it was. I thought that it was Tieri responding to Ennis' commentary of the character by saying "Yeah, well Garth your character's gay!" in a homphobic way. (Reply to this) (Parent)