Power Twins Comics

Fourteen Years and they Haven’t Aged a Minute (The Incredibles 2)

by D. on 24 June, 2018 at 14:16

The Incredibles was one of the best superhero movies ever made. It challenged conventions and clichés with complex characters, was easily understood by children and loved by adults. The sequel is the next part of the story and the next step forward.

In The Incredibles 2, the illegality of being a superhero is at the forefront of the plot. Instead of playing on heroes’ hopes of reliving past glory to further their schemes, a wealthy benefactor (Saul Goodman) hopes to reverse the laws that forced the heroes into hiding. Somewhat reluctantly, Elastigirl takes over the role of prime hero from Mr. Incredible (apparently role reversal is a thing in Pixar sequels). Despite being set in the mid 1960s, the villainous “Screenslaver” strikes at a decidedly modern societal problem: over use of screen technology.

I’m not dark and angsty – ooh a new Elasticycle!

On the subject of modern social problems, it seems everyone just noticed Elastigirl’s curviness – apparently there can’t be a female lead character without talking about how she looks. The thing is it’s not new. In fact, of all the characters in the franchise, Elastigirl is the one who changes the least.

Why?

Because Elastigirl is a strong female character. She was never just a stretchy ex-superheroine mom berating her husband with some snappy one-liners. Look at her in the first movie, and you see she had the brains, powers, and (prior military) training to compete with – and even out-do – her male peers.

Conversely, Mr. Incredible is reduced to a caricature of the stay-at-home dad, complete with all the typical tropes. He struggles with being sidelined, his children’s problems, and exacerbating every situation he tries to solve. He has a complete breakdown because he’s in a situation that he’s never encountered before – his own family. It’s a lazy sort of portrayal in a cast that is otherwise so fully developed and interesting.

Except that is the point.

Mr. Incredible is a cliché. He is a glorious demonstration of everything typical of and wrong with superheroes. The film opens exactly where the original finished – with Underminer bursting from beneath the city to do bad things. In attempting to stop Underminer, Mr. Incredible causes several million dollars worth of collateral damage – and Underminer still gets away. He – his method – is why supers are illegal.

There are a few jarring continuity errors. Violet has a date on Friday, but the kids are back in school the next day. With the film’s record long runtime, we’re guessing that scenes depicting the intervening weekend were cut so that Jack-Jack fighting a raccoon could go the full ten rounds.

It seems odd that everyone is surprised that Jack Jack has powers, since it was crucial to the resolution of the first film. Mom and dad didn’t see what made Syndrome drop Demon Baby, but it was so obvious to the audience that it makes them come off as oblivious.

It’s not the Fantastic Four sequel we think we deserve. It’s the Fantastic Four sequel we need, guest starring Iceman. See The Incredibles 2.

└ Tags: Movies, Reviews

Join Other Player? (Ready Player One)

by D. on 29 March, 2018 at 12:57

In a dystopian future, the whole of humanity apparently lives within about ten miles of each other and jump into a video game so they don’t have to look at each other. It’s not unlike the real world, except amplified.

2045 is a waking nightmare of abject poverty, corporate dependence, and debtors’ prisons. Respite comes by plugging into the largest, most diverse, and immersive video game/social network/escapism device ever devised, “The Oasis.” To make matters even more driving, the late inventor of The Oasis has hidden three keys (literal keys) within its many worlds. The first finder of all three of these keys can open a door and win the whole chocolate factory.

Aimed at young adults, Ready Player One is not a terribly complex story. Aided by friends who are more skilled than he, a low-class hero uses his true belief in the game’s purpose and devotion to its creator to take on the big corporate giant trying to monetize The Oasis. That simplicity gives this movie room to be an exciting, with genuine feel good action moments. It balances the two realities—the real world and the game world—well, giving the sense of imminent danger and elation in ultimate triumph. The real world threats are the typical evil corporation type. They lock people up (in online labor camps); they send assassin drones after the hero, et cetera. Death in-game, however, has the horrible consequence of losing all your stuff, forcing a player to start over from zero—and that online currency has replaced actual money.

Ready Player One is full of references and tributes to pop culture, with special deference given to the 1980s. The film is nearly hyperactive at times shotgunning fan services in action sequences reminiscent of “survival mode” levels—resulting in a gamer nerdgasm. Other than the characters and a little world building, the screen has almost no original content. This isn’t a problem. It gives the audience a stream of feel good pills, which might be analyzed as a device to make statements about the addictive nature of game environments.

The biggest tribute/reference is the bad guy. Whether intended or accidental, the villain is straight out of a John Hughes film. He is a powerful authority figure, with unlimited resources, and yet he is completely undone by a collection of five “teenagers” (technically one of them is only eleven) and his own base level incompetence when fixated on a goal of questionable value.

The main characters shine though and are good strong characters. They are each two characters: their avatar and their real person. This duality of online life is reinforced throughout. The underlying societal message is clear: “Escapism is dangerous, and online life is explicitly designed to draw you in and keep you.” It is resolved in a YA reader kind of way, but that’s okay. This is a movie where you should feel good when everyone bands together for that moment when they do.

Take the time to enjoy Ready Player One.

└ Tags: Movies, Reviews

The First Order Strikes the Penultimate Jedi

by D. on 15 December, 2017 at 23:39

I thoroughly enjoyed Star Wars: The Last Jedi. It is worth seeing in the theatre, sooner than later.

I’d avoid spoilers, but the truth is there aren’t many spoilers to be had because there isn’t much in the movie that is truly unexpected. Instead of big reveals and progression of story, Episode VIII is a full-on explosive nerdgasm of Star Wars fan service.

There’s new walkers, cute creatures, an R2D2 and Luke reunion, BB8 acting like a badass, Anakin’s lightsaber hilt (inexplicably called a “laser sword” by Luke), and the Millennium Falcon saves the day. If you’re surprised, you probably haven’t watched 9 other Star Wars movies, 3 TV series, and a Holiday Special. If you don’t enjoy it anyway, then why did you watch 9 other movies, etc.?

Major character deaths were expected to the point where you’re sort of just waiting to see how they die. Leia’s thirty-five separate “omigosh they killed her” scenes were completely trumped for emotional impact by a single goodbye credit to Carrie Fisher.

Like The Force Awakens, the filmmakers made a point stuffing the ranks of the rebellion with female and ethnically diverse uniform fillers. Flashing to a cockpit to show that a craft is piloted by a black woman is only “progress” by Hollywood standards, because she moves a switch and is never shown again. Now, The Last Jedi does a better job because some of these—short lived—characters are minor heroes struggling for their last moment to give hope to the larger story.

Unlike The Force Awakens, Episode VIII is not just a retread of an earlier film. Though it has the same general theme as Empire—the rebels are perpetually on the run while trying to get Luke to be a Jedi—there is story progression which is unique to the series. They are definitely trying to establish a new path and conflict for new stories and characters. Kylo even goes so far as actually saying that Rey has to let all the old ways die for the new order to be good for the universe. I’m not sure if that was supposed to be written in the dialog or the script notes.

On the topic of new characters, Rose Tico (played by Kelly Marie Tran) is another janitor turned hero (like Finn) that really grasps the “epic seen by characters in the lowliest stations” that was the original film, and Benicio Del Toro’s “DJ” reminds us that scoundrels are still a part of Star Wars.

Modernization of dialog bothered me in Force Awakens. In The Last Jedi, I got over it and really enjoyed the throwing of shade and general nose-thumbing at the stuffier elements. Bathos prevails throughout the film. While that detracts from deep meanings about the force, balance, and the Jedi religion; Star Wars isn’t a story of deep lessons about humanity. It is the American myth about heroic triumph against impossibly overwhelming oppression—and jumping into an X-Wing and blowing things up.

└ Tags: Han Shot First, Movies, Reviews

FPS – Explosive Runes

by D. on 5 October, 2017 at 03:42

It happens to all of us. You write or say something short, sweet and to the point. Then, someone doesn’t get it — or you think they won’t understand it — and you write another two paragraphs explaining that one sentence fragment.

Mister Stein calls out, “Bow! Raise to two thirds, and back full.”

8 words — of technobabble. Simple, meaningless language to fill space, and have one character tell another character to do something specific within his technical profession. The audience doesn’t really have to know what it means — as long as the characters do.

You might start seeing a trend here.

Striving to make Flying Pirate Ships! as internally consistent as possible means the technobabble has to sound meaningful. In turn, that means it has to be applied the same sort of way every time it is used.

Mister Stein’s job is the giving of commands for how to move the Britannia’s “sails” to achieve a desired effect. So we didn’t have to explain that command — we had to explain every possible variation of all commands to the people who actually move the sails. Well, not really. We just needed to know what information would be conveyed and in what format.

We wrote a script (tiny computer program) to figure out the timing of travel using completely fictional technology. To explain those 8 words, we wrote a 758 word article on the issuing of sail commands and crew hand signals, along with examples.

Then we wrote 248 words to tell you about it.

└ Tags: Flying Pirate Ships!

FPS – Cast of Hundreds

by D. on 27 September, 2017 at 03:41

In a summary, a single sentence can radically alter the length of a story. In writing comics, length is a tightly controlled commodity, so we redraft the story as an outline. The outline dictates the story beats, which scenes will appear in which order, and how many pages we have to accomplish that scene. Despite the principal purpose being control, our outlines tend to be a loose shorthand.

“Page 20 -21: Sewing circle for Abby, parlor game, learn of transport on White river, Abby as spy.”

This line dictates one left and one right page for a scene where Abby and a few friends gossip during a typical 19th century social gathering, a piece of information critical to the plot is passed along, and we discover that Abby is a spy. Seems like a lot for two pages, but it’s really not. Page 20 will set the stage for conversation, and all the story points are single lines of dialog on page 21.

The words “sewing circle for Abby” seem innocuous, but Abby didn’t exist before this line. She’s the wife of a central character, so of course she needed to exist, but she had never been mentioned directly, never given anything to do in the story; she didn’t even have a name. One line of sentence fragments and she’s a spy with critical impact on events surrounding the development of flying boats.

At every stage of writing a script, we maintain a cast sheet, listing all of the characters who will appear in the final story. Our cast sheet for a single issue of a comic included about 15 named characters on average. For each, we list: the shorthand name used in the script; the full name or description; and some identifying characteristics like build, costume, hair, complete origin story, or facial features.

“Sewing circle” two words that mean five more characters added to the “Master Cast Sheet” for Flying Pirate Ships! They could have been nameless women chattering about. But, in the moments since her spontaneous existence, Abby has known them for years. She knows their names — she would use their names. Which means we have to know their names, too.

Every one of these people has a name, and years of story before this moment, and something they did right after it.

As daunting as it is to suddenly create five women, Flying Pirate Ships! is a big story spanning two planets full of people. Obviously we’re not going to bother with knowing the name of every person on two planets — we’re crazy, not insane — but Britannia has a crew — 50 men who work together to run the ship.

50 Men we’re going to see a lot of. 50 men who know each others names.

From the Master Cast Sheet: “The hero ship, Britannia, is crewed by fifty named characters. … [T]here are no faceless/nameless/red shirts on Britannia. …”

They might not all get speaking roles, but they all have first and last names. They each have a job assignment on the ship.

We’re two outlines in, and the Master Cast Sheet currently has 120 named characters.