Yeah, like to think someone at SOE reads this site, but I should be so lucky for them to actually tease out some info to Europeans because of me.

While you won’t be able to play Superman or Wonder Woman, you may fight alongside them — or against them — as you create your own superhero or supervillain. Metropolis and Gotham City will be the two large shared environments.

In other words, ur doing it rong. There’s already City of Heroes for generic superheroing, and cluttering the streets of Metropolis or Gotham City with characters that aren’t supposed to be there isn’t going to make it seem like Metropolis or Gotham City. “EQ with Superman” is not going to sell.

Oh well.

I read comic books a lot. Not strictly superhero stuff, though I can’t count myself among the most savvy in the world on what else is out there beyond the Big Two Publishers, DC Comics and Marvel. But some news has come up in the past couple weeks that might be relevant to some of the other circles I frequent.

Continue reading Unfunny books (Sloppy consistency)…

Saw two movies yesterday in Austin. One was a packed house in the evening, one I had all to myself.

One was Bigger, Stronger, Faster, a very thorough documentary by first-time director Chris Bell about America’s substance culture and how it affects our hero worship, self-identity, laws and culture itself; the other was The Incredible Hulk, the reboot of Marvel Comics’ classic anti-hero monster who gets angry and smashes stuff.

Guess which one was which.

Granted, I saw the matinee of BSF on a Wednesday, and it’s a limited-release film that’s only at the limited-release theater in Austin. But it definitely deserves more than that. What Super Size Me was to fast food, BSF is to performance enhancers. BSF definitely deserves more attention than it’s getting.

Bell starts off with his own family, the middle child of three brothers, all self-described “gym rats” who have taken steroids, though Chris is the only one of the three who felt guilty about it and didn’t try them a second time.

In BSF, Bell pulls back the hero worship of pro wrestlers like Hulk Hogan and 80s action heroes like Stallone and Schwarzenegger, revealing the layered ambiguity about just how we regard such people, all of whom have admitted to using steroids or other substances to enhance the way they look or perform. Narrated by Bell himself as he travels around meeting his sources, BSF becomes quite the thorough analysis, raising all the right questions and revealing that there are no easy answers.

Consider: George Bush the Elder started the initiative to outlaw anabolic steroids back in the 1990s, not long after Lyle Alzado died a very public death of cancer he blamed on his steroid use. But not long after the initiative was made, Schwarzenegger was named head of the president’s Fitness Council — though I’m not sure his past steroid use had been made too terribly public at the time.

Consider also: George W. Bush made the dangers of steroids a subject of his 2004 State of the Union address some time after the scandal involving a supplier of steroids and its long list of professional athletes whom they called customers. Around the same time, Jose Canseco wrote a book about how “juiced” many pro baseball players are, himself included, and said in interviews that the managers and owners of the teams he played for certainly knew what he and other players were up to. Canseco played for the Texas Rangers for a while, and George W. Bush owned the Rangers for some of that while.

Bell doesn’t stop at steroids, though. He points out how Adderall is getting popular among students who want to focus on studying and finishing papers, and visits some professional musicians who take beta blockers to ward off performance anxiety. These are obviously performance-enhancing substances, but is it considered “cheating” to use them? And is our society just geared toward achievement by any means available? One of the closing images of BSF is of Bell’s younger brother, the confessed steroid user, bench-pressing 705 pounds in front of his parents, both of whom had previously decried his steroid use, but who both stand up and cheer just the same.

Then we have Hulk, which is pretty much all about using strange substances to transform Ed Norton and Tim Roth into huge monsters. After having seen BSF, I recalled an interview that Hulk director Louis Leterrier gave to Newsarama:

“The Hulk is beyond perfect so there is zero grams of fat, all chiseled, and his muscle and strength defines this creature so he’s like a tank. Sometimes I would say ‘I want bodybuilders who want to get buff to show this to their trainers. I want the Hulk to be a bodybuilder’s wet dream.’”

The struggle continues. Both are great movies. You might have to work to see BSF, but you know, no pain no gain.

Gee, wish I’d known about this site back when I did the what to do during AGDC besides be at AGDC post. Posting now just so I remember when the time comes. Won’t be much longer, really.

No, I don’t really have much else to write about right now. Sorry.