Marvel's Ultimates is Weird

The latest comic in my reread of my whole collection is the collected first storyline of the Ultimates, the Ultimate Marvel version of the Avengers, from 2002. I'm three issues in, but it's a weird book, in both good ways but perhaps more bad ways. It's one of very few Ultimate Marvel books I still have from back then, and I'm not sure I'll keep it after this read.

To start with, it's written by Mark Millar, whose work I don't particularly enjoy, apart from Superman: Red Son and a couple of issues of the Authority. It's drawn by Bryan Hitch, whose work I do enjoy, and who brings the same widescreen sensibility to the Ultimates that he evinced in his run on the Authority with Warren Ellis, and in his run on JLA with Mark Waid. Overall, the book looks gorgeous, with some beautiful splash pages and some good action - the first issue, where we see Captain America's last mission in WWII, is colored a bit oddly, so that it all looks muddy, but the rest looks amazing.

The team consists of Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, the Wasp and Giant Man, plus the Hulk in a support role (as Bruce Banner) and as an antagonist (when he inevitably hulks out). That provides one of several cognitive dissonances, because I'm reading this with the memory of the first MCU Avengers movie. There are definite overlaps between these versions of the characters and the movie versions, but they're not totally the same, which accounts for the whiplash. This book also has the version of Nick Fury that looks like Samuel L Jackson, which was brought to life in the actual movies.

Part of why I don't like Millar's writing is that everything is extreme and amped up. Iron Man is pretty recognizable from the movies (I'm not sure if he's meant to look like Robert Downey Jr, but there's at least one reference to the actor), in terms of his womanizing and partying. Giant Man is on prozac, because I guess Millar thought that would be modern or something? Thor is positioned as an environmental activist who's suspicious of Fury's motives, which I suppose allows Millar to claim he's putting his own politics into the book.

The portrayal I find least easy to enjoy is this book's version of Captain America. He's described as having "John Glenn's buzz-cut cool and John McCain's politics", which even back in 2002 was a red flag for me. There's a lot of comments where Cap calls people sissies or girls or whatever, and he's generally an asshole (cf that panel where they finally turn Hulk back into Banner and Cap kicks him in the face).

Obviously a guy from the 1940s who suddenly wakes up in 2002 (or 2012) wouldn't be a weekly guest on MSNBC or Air America, but this version has none of the vulnerability that Chris Evans brought to the character in the movies. Instead of the skinny nerd who became Cap because he hated bullies, this version feels like a bully himself.

I blame all this on Millar because he's that kind of self-proclaimed left-of-center person who uses that as a smokescreen to write a lot of gross stuff. Of course there's a difference between the art and the artist, but Millar always seems a little too pleased with himself when he's transgressing.

And more to the point, all this stuff dates the book horribly. In the third issue, SHIELD unveils the Ultimates and Cap in his new uniform, and there's an appearance from George W Bush. Hitch's drawings of Bush are weirdly stiff, because they're taken from photos, but even with all of Trump's outrages, just seeing Bush is off-putting. The regular Marvel Universe generally did a better job of not putting actual politicians into the books (the less said about that time Spider-Man hung out with Barack Obama, the better), and I wish Millar had done the same.

Anyway, it's a flawed book, but it's fascinating as a time capsule of what Marvel thought was cool in 2002, as well as an embryonic form of the Avengers we'd later see in the movies. It's also an attempt to make the Avengers cool, something that they definitely weren't in the regular Marvel Universe up until then. In fact, the best description of the 90s version of the team that I've heard is as a repository for characters whose books have been cancelled - that came from Max Carleton speaking on Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men, and it feels so right.

I lost touch with the Ultimate Universe not long after this, and I no longer have the Ultimate Spider-Man and Ultimate X-Men issues I bought when they came out. I'm given to understand that it was a weird time (apparently Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch were in an incestuous relationship, which was treated as "modern" by the characters at the time, rather than deeply fucked up. Blame Jeph Loeb, who was writing it by then), but on the positive side it gave us the Miles Morales version of Spidey, so I can't complain too much.

But one of the pleasures of reading old comics is seeing how they fit into their cultural milieu, and the first arc of the Ultimates definitely transports me back to the early days of the War on Terror. Your mileage may vary as to whether you want to be transported back to then.

A Day at the Renaissance Faire

A thing I've always aspired to is taking advantage of all the cultural stuff I have nearby, wherever I live. Admittedly it's a little easier to do when I live in a big city like London than when I live in a suburb like Palo Alto. But suburban places mean cars, and cars means getting out to places that aren't well-served by public transportation. And today that meant visiting the Northern California Renaissance Faire, in Hollister, which is one of those towns to which you're probably never going to get a train connection or bus depot.

(BTW, I have a number of thoughts about urbanization and suburbs vs urban places, but I'll address that in another blog post sometime)

I knew about the RenFaire because I saw the edge of it once when driving back from Southern California. It's always hosted right next to Casa de Fruta, which has become one of my perennial stops whenever I drive down, and this year I'd seen billboards for it, so I decided to check it out. I got a few friends out, driving down with one and meeting the others there.

I also had a bit of an idea about Renaissance Faires, because of a sort of jokey tone about them in popular culture. You're led to expect a lot of nerds with neckbeards and cod-English accents, playing dress-up and waving swords around. And there was some of that! But also, everyone seemed super nice and happy to be enjoying a day out. There was food and drink - not much of it too medieval, unless they had poke and root beer floats back then - but also stalls selling trinkets, from D&D dice sets to carved wooden mugs and drinking vessels. You could even pay to shoot arrows, fire crossbows and throw knives, shuriken or axes at wooden targets.

I took advantage of the archery booth (because I always play a ranger in D&D, of course), and despite never having picked up a bow before, a nice lady working the booth coached me on how to nock the arrow, draw the string and release. I may have hit the target only once, but thanks to her most of the rest of my shots still flew straight. Though the less said about my attempts at flinging throwing stars, the better.

We caught a little bit of the joust, but the sun and crowd got to me and we went exploring again. There was also commedia dell'arte, sword-fighting, and all kinds of foolishness. I was sorely tempted by a massage, but opted against.

But if I seemed dismissive about the nerds and the cod-medieval accents, I don't intend for that. Sure, I heard some guy holding forth to his friend about publishing in BiOS, but what do you expect a) in the Silicon Valley and b) at a RenFaire in general? Sometimes it's nice to be surrounded by nerds just openly enjoying themselves.

The other nice thing about it, I have to admit, is the large number of attractive women all over, most of them wearing costumes. There were faeries, as well as fairies, elves and pirates and assassins. As I left the grounds I even saw a woman dressed up as a knight, which was quite cool. I've probably still internalized a lot of the messaging I got when I was young, that women wouldn't be interested in nerd-stuff, so I was glad to see, once again, that this isn't true. And maybe one time I would like to go and chat some of these ladies up...

The main thing is that my friends all seemed quite pleased to have done this thing, and that I'd pushed for us to do it, even if it's a bit of a drive and a hassle to get into the grounds. It's easy to fall into the routine of going to bars or coffee shops or movies, or even of just not doing those things as a group, so at least we had a nice day out together. And now I want to go learn archery for real.

A Mid-Term Report on X-Men Evolution

My usual rule is not to write about a show that I'm watching until I've finished it, but there are extenuating circumstances this time around. I'm only halfway through X-Men: Evolution, the second animated show about Marvel's mutant flagship, but given that I'm probably going to let my Disney Plus subscription lapse next week, I figured I'd write down my thoughts so far.

I think I've gone on record as not having been the biggest fan of the original animated series from 1992 (hereafter to be called X92). Whereas Batman: The Animated Series had a bold new design for the characters and a visual aesthetic borrowed from the Tim Burton movies, X92's visual language was a bit more nondescript - the character designs were the then-current looks that Jim Lee came up with for his and Chris Claremont's 1991 relaunch, but the animation style was pretty generic 90s Saturday morning. At least for the first four seasons: season 5 featured a notable decline in animation quality, as 10 new episodes were ordered and animated by a cut-rate animation house.

X-Men Evolution was meant to be a complete reimagining: instead of a team of adults, the core team (Cyclops, Jean Grey, Nightcrawler, Shadowcat, Rogue and new character Spyke) would be kids learning how to use their powers and navigate teenage life. Storm and Wolverine were teachers at the Xavier Institute, which was also a nice touch, and they'd be joined by Beast later in the second season. A new set of younger characters, mostly based on the New Mutants, would also join in Season 2.

The bad guys, or antagonists, were a group of mutant misfits drawn from the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants (just the Brotherhood here), led first by Mystique and then by Magneto. But they weren't "evil mutants", because characters would switch between the X-Men and the Brotherhood, and there were themes like Shadowcat's kinda relationship with Avalanche that meant the relationship wasn't just trying to kill one another.

The big thing I like from this show, at least so far, is how it treats Cyclops and Jean. Cyclops is the victim of character assassination in the movies and X92 - if someone hates him, it's a good bet that they first encountered him in the original animated series. Here he gets more personality, kind of a dork, kind of a regular kid who likes cars and is in love with his best friend, but he's not the authority figure and killjoy from X92. Jean, meanwhile, is the popular girl who's also cool, but who's still prone to making mistakes and getting jealous (like when her friend Taryn moves in on Cyclops - meow). This version of Jean is quite a bit better than the X92 version who just yells "Scott!" and faints whenever she uses her powers.

I can't deny it: the development of their feelings for one another is my favorite plot thread in Season 2 of Evolution, and I can't wait to see how it plays out in the third and fourth seasons.

The other thing I like is the theme of the characters choosing whether to be X-Men or Brotherhood members. Avalanche tries to join the X-Men once, Boom-Boom joins the Brotherhood (and then leaves), and the two teams have to work together a couple of times. That question of how to be, and how to use their powers, is central to the X-theme in a way that X92 never really managed, as far as I could tell.

Now, I don't want to over-romanticize this show. It's clearly a kids show from the early 2000s, with sometimes dodgy animation, character designs and writing. Boom-Boom looks off-model most of the time, there are times when the movement looks cheap, and some of the plots make little sense.

But if you can get beyond those issues, it's a good reimagining of the concept that highlights the themes well. And it introduces one of my favorite characters, X-23, although not until Season 3. I'm looking forward to seeing if the subsequent seasons are as fun, as well as the 2009 follow-up, Wolverine and the X-Men. I have to do something while I wait for season 2 of X97, but as I got to the midpoint of Evolution, I couldn't help thinking that this show would also be ripe for a reboot. 

Anyone at Marvel want to take that on?

Left Wing Intolerance, or the Great Big Double Standard Against Progressives

Now, right-wing bad faith isn't anything new, but I've been thinking about this lately, so I figured I'd noodle on it for a bit. The thing I've had on my mind quite a bit recently is the accusation leveled at progressive people by conservatives that we're actually the intolerant ones. Their proof, other than the specter of campus illiberalism, is how surveys repeatedly find that we don't want to date conservatives.

But it's also vice versa, as this survey suggests. Anecdotally, I've also noticed a couple of instances recently on dating apps where I saw a conservative woman's profile, in which she said something about not wanting to date liberals, or needing to be aligned on politics. Or in the case of one I saw today, who didn't want to date anyone vaccinated because of "shedding".

Leaving aside that plainly insane person, these profiles are notable because they're so rare - I happen to live in an area where, if you're conservative, you need to highlight that you're different from the majority of the daters around you. But it's not just here of course, as progressive daters in conservative areas have to do the same thing.

The couple in the article I linked to may be outliers, but you have to wonder how they manage it, when the two sides in this country are so plainly on different planets; less "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" as one side is living on Planet Zenu or something (I'm sorry, but how else to describe the most recent foolishness surrounding Tylenol?).

The simple fact is, leaving aside agreements not to talk about politics, I find it hard to imagine being aligned on most things with someone who'd vote for Trump. I'm not saying all Republicans or Trump voters are necessarily racists, homophobes, transphobes or anti-Semites, but, well... there is a reason that guy from the KKK endorsed Trump in 2016. These aren't just things to have gentlemanly disagreements about: someone who genuinely believes Black people or Asians are genetically inferior to white people just can't be a good person, no matter how personable they are.

But this is all part of the big double standard that keeps operating in this country (and other parts of the Anglo-Saxon world, I'd say): somehow it's worse for me as a progressive to take a stand about wanting someone with abhorrent beliefs in my life, than it is for someone to have those abhorrent beliefs.

A really good example of this double standard is California's Proposition 50, which is aimed at redrawing congressional maps in the state until 2030. This is being presented as a way to combat Texas's own mooted gerrymander, which Trump has asked for to ensure that Democrats don't take the House in next year's midterm elections. California's districts are drawn by an independent commission, so that incumbents aren't guaranteed to win every cycle.

The reason we have that independent commission drawing our congressional districts is because Charles Munger Jr (yeah, the son of that Charlie Munger) poured his millions into ensuring that it wouldn't be politicians drawing those districts. His efforts are admirable, but he's now bankrolling the campaign against Prop 50, to which I have to ask: if he's so worried about rigged elections and gerrymandering, why isn't he doing anything about Texas or any of the other Republican states that have extremely partisan gerrymanders?

This is the problem: when Republicans do something shitty, nobody bats an eye, but when Democrats respond with something less than or equally shitty to the thing Republicans did, then suddenly it's a big deal. So this Munger guy gets his knickers in a twist about California doing something that Texas is doing, but doesn't seem to mind that Texas is doing it.

The Prop 50 campaign has been running ads saying that Munger's a MAGA Republican, which seems not to be the case, but at the same time, if Munger's so anti-Trump, why does he seem happy for Trump to enact his full agenda without scrutiny or pushback? There's a simple answer, which is that he benefits from Trump's agenda, even if he himself maybe doesn't subscribe to the culture-war aspects of it. But if you're happy to let abuses like Alligator Alcatraz or CECOT pass unremarked, because the rest of the agenda is good for your stock portfolio, that doesn't read like principle to me...

Fantastic Four: First (Tentative) Steps

It's over a week now since I saw the Fantastic Four movie, at the same Vue Cinema on Finchley Road where I saw Iron Man and Black Panther. I'd just arrived in London from Italy, and was enjoying some free time and mobility (living out in the country has its advantages, but the drawbacks are needing a car to get anywhere), so I took an afternoon to finally catch the movie.

There's two ways I can discuss it: first off, I can (and will) discuss it on its own, and then I'll talk about how it fits into the MCU. There are some spoilers, as usual, so read on carefully after the jump.

A Tangent on Rule of Law and Property Rights in Byzantium

This two-month trip to Europe has allowed me to finish a couple of books that have been sitting on my TBR pile for too long, among which is John Julius Norwich's Short History of Byzantium. Lord Norwich is perhaps not my favorite historian, but I appreciate his ability to put together a coherent narrative for the thousand-year history of the Byzantine Empire, even if he himself didn't add any new scholarship to the subject. He also had a nice and catty turn of phrase, which livened up the books of his that I've read.

One of these bons mots came when Lord Norwich suggested that a Byzantine emperor nationalizing a certain industry amounted to socialism, avant la lettre. He was being cheeky, given that he was no fan of socialists or communists, but his joke points to something relevant beyond his target, which is the role of property rights in the concept of rule of law.

Lord Norwich's joke was that this emperor was nationalizing the means of production by taking over this industry. I take it as a fair point, although a government doesn't have to be socialist to ignore property rights - it just has to assume that every item of property in the country belongs to the government, which in this case can be a single monarch or junta.

It got me thinking about a concept I've been turning over in my head for a while (which I acknowledge is probably old hat to scholars who study this stuff professionally), which is that you can't have rule of law without well-defined property rights. In this case, I define rule of law as the idea that the law applies equally to everyone, whether that's the king, the president or the ruling council. Property rights, for my purposes, consist of the idea that certain items or intangibles don't belong to the government.

To put it another way, if there are no property rights, then effectively everything in a country belongs to the government, and you as a citizen (or subject, I suppose), legally own nothing. The government can take your house, your car or your laptop whenever it wants and there's nothing you can do about it. This means there's also no rule of law, because if the government owns everything then the law is whatever it says it is at that time. This is indeed a pretty good definition of the legal status in autocratic empires such as Rome and Byzantium, but probably also France under the absolute rule of Louis XIV or China under its Communist Party.

On the other hand, if there's a mechanism for a private citizen to obtain legal redress from the government for property being taken away, then that means the government's powers are limited, and rule of law becomes possible. More than that, there should then also be a well-defined legal basis for resolving disputes between individual citizens. I don't know anything about Roman or Byzantine law, but despite the voluminous legal codices put together by emperors such as Justinian I, I assume there wasn't any concept of individual rights as we understand it today. This is probably also how Napoleonic France approached things, despite having sprung out of the Revolution: I suspect that Napoleon was okay with liberty, fraternity and equality as long as he got to run everything - and take whatever he wanted from whoever he wanted.

Lord Norwich's joke may have been aimed at well-heeled Trotskyites of his acquaintance, but you can also argue that English history has been a slow crawl along that continuum from absolute power wielded by the strong, whose monopoly on state violence meant that if they really wanted your land, they could take it. Documents like the Magna Carta were the first steps toward the other end of the continuum, where the monarch and the state could be held accountable for injuries to individuals, even if the individuals they had in mind in 1215 were landowning nobles and other potentates.

It's not a long distance from these concepts to our modern understanding of what governments can do with their own citizens. Prior to the Second World War and the Holocaust, international law essentially suggested that a government could do whatever it wanted with its own citizens, whether they owed allegiance to the head of state or a duly elected government. When the Nazi government decided to massacre millions of its own Jewish, Roma, LGBTQ and disabled citizens, among others, the world community essentially decided that this state of affairs couldn't stand, and built mechanisms to hold accountable leaders (if not nations) who tried to do the same.

The success of these measure is debatable, but it's notable that the debate exists at all. Apparently, when an Armenian survivor of the 1915 genocide killed one of his Turkish oppressors, there was no legal framework to mitigate the charges against the Armenian, who was tried for murder. Now it seems logical to us that a crime like the Armenian Genocide or the Holocaust should be prosecutable - even if international law scholars would point out that there's still a lot more nuance than how lay people understand this question.

Anyway, this is how my brain works - John Julius Norwich makes a cheeky comment about socialist Byzantine Emperors, and I find my way straight through to absolutist monarchies, rule of law and crimes against humanity. All of which, it must be said, are questions that run straight through Byzantine history anyway, if in different contexts to our own. At any rate, all things being equal, I'd rather live in a society where the government can't just jack my shit with impunity, because that also means the government can't just shoot me and toss me in a ditch whenever it wants.

At any rate, if a government did that to me now, one hopes there would be some debate about whether it was justified. It's a big question, and one we've been trying to solve throughout human history.

The Great European Roadtrip

On this large portion of my trip, where I've been in Italy for over a month, I've had time to consider two points: one, that driving long distances here in Italy is actually not too unpleasant, and two, that there doesn't seem to be enough travel literature that looks into that.

Listen, I'm just as obsessed with trains as the next travel nerd. I've reread Paul Theroux's Great Railway Bazaar more times than I can remember, and I've reread most of his other travel books too. Same with Bill Bryson and any number of travel writers. One year I treated myself to the Eurostar and the TGV as a way to get from London to Turin, and it remains one of my favorite travel experiences ever.

At the same time, I've recently become disillusioned with all the urbanists that I come across on social media and YouTube. This is a source of deep cognitive dissonance for me: I live in the Bay Area, where you have to drive pretty much everywhere and where it's unpleasant to do so. If Caltrain ran more regularly from my nearest station than once per hour, it'd make it more fun to go out drinking in San Francisco or San Jose - but at the same time, having a car means I can go to either city whenever I want, and can also go to a bunch of places that aren't covered by public transportation.

When I lived in London, I found it difficult to get out of the bounds of the city, in part because it meant getting on a train and figuring out the schedule and all of that. But not having my own set of wheels meant that certain parts of the country just weren't available to me: I'm sure you can visit the Lake District without a car, but it might be a lot more of a faff, or more expensive, if you're taking taxis everywhere.

I've also come around to this way of thinking in the last couple of years because I've finally felt financially secure enough to start renting cars when I'm in Italy. My family house is out in the countryside, away from rail networks and up a big hill (with a dirt road to get up to it, no less), so even buses aren't a great option - and those only come around once per hour, if you're lucky.

My dad's tried to get me to learn to drive manual transmission, which I can broadly do, but I'm way more comfortable driving automatic. This is mostly because the roads are narrow and winding and I'd rather focus on getting around than on being in the right gear. Renting cars with automatic transmissions  means I can trade off driving duties with my dad for long drives up to the mountains, or just take off on my own for an afternoon.

Coming back to my earlier point about driving in Italy, I've now had the chance to drive the autostrade, and I find that it's harder and harder to go back to freeway driving in California. The main thing is that European freeways only allow passing in the left lanes, which means you get way fewer of these cases where some jerk goes almost all the way to the left and then cruises along at 50mph. I know that if I get in the left lane, I should step on it and pass whoever I'm passing, because otherwise I'll end up with a Mercedes riding my exhaust and flashing his lights from here to Taranto.

But then there's the more actively pleasant part, which is the rest areas. Not every rest stop on the Italian autostrade is like this, but the vast majority are owned by the Autogrill chain, which means a certain consistency in architecture, facilities and food service. Stopping for lunch on our drive down to Pisa last week, I had the fried chicken sandwich with fries: instead of a soggy chicken burger and a plate of chips that had just come from under a heat lamp, the man behind the counter assembled a fresh bun, condiments and fixings on top, then lovingly placed a freshly cooked fried chicken escalope on it. He then provided a perfectly crispy portion of fries that outdid anything from McDonald's.

While it's important not to over-romanticize a meal at a highway rest stop, it's notable that in Italy, you can get decent quality food that isn't just from a large fast-food chain (at this same lunch my dad got a plate of chicken curry with rice and fresh roasted vegetables).

It's worth noting that you don't really get this quality of food on European trains anymore. I still remember a train trip with my dad in 1990, from Padua to Turin, where there was still a dining car with tablecloths and silverware on the tables. I was super impressed to be fed a cotoletta milanese and a Coke by a waiter in a white jacket, and my dad still reminds me of this wide-eyed wonderment. But if you think you're eating like this on the TGV or the ICE or the Frecciarossa, I'm sorry to report it ain't necessarily so (although business and first class on the Eurostar do feature some excellent dining).

Are trains better for the environment than a million cars on the road? Of course they are. And it's one of life's great pleasures to sit on a train and either read your book or listen to a podcast, enjoying the changing scenery and the knowledge that someone else is doing the driving. Bonus points if the scenery is great, as it frequently is when you're crossing the Alps.

But the pleasures of tooling along in your own car, listening to your own music or podcasts or chatting with your passenger in peace, are not to be discounted either. You can stop for a snack or a bathroom break whenever you want, without losing your seat or worrying about someone stealing your stuff, and when you arrive at your destination, you're right there (although you do have to find some parking, of course). And again, the car lets you get to places that the trains don't go - not only places off the beaten path or in the countryside, but you can also stop off somewhere on a whim. When you're on the train, you can see some unexpected spots from the window, but most of the time you can't get off and explore without losing your reserved seat or missing your onward connection.

Again, I'm not saying everyone should stop using the trains to get around. I'd love to see a robust public transit network in the Bay Area, if not the whole of California. If California could finally get around to building a train network that takes you from downtown SF to downtown LA, I'd adore that - and it wouldn't even need to be high-speed (although, you know, yes please to doing it in three hours rather than eight).

But also again, sometimes the car lets you have experiences that the train doesn't. Just because we're over invested in car infrastructure doesn't mean we should correct that by over-investing in rail. We should have multiple ways to get around that don't excessively prioritize dangerous and dirty modes of transportation.

If anything, what I'd really like to see is a good-quality equivalent to the Autogrill, but along American highways. Imagine stopping off for a good, not too expensive meal with access to clean bathrooms while driving down the 5 from SF to LA - it may not be as good as a three-hour high-speed train, but it sounds pretty great to me.