What’s Your Geek Sacred Cow?
comic books, links/websites, personal, superheroes April 2nd, 2009My Scott and Jean: The Master List
It all started with a simple phrase: “That’s my Scott and Jean.”
Said phrase was uttered by friend-of-Alert-Nerd Dan Faust on that bastion of 140-character social networking, Twitter. And said phrase means, essentially, “That is my geek sacred cow, the one topic I cannot discuss rationally because it makes me too insane/angry/scary-eyed.”
We had a thought: why not challenge a bunch of nerdbloggers to reveal their Scott and Jeans/geek sacred cows for all the world to see? It will either be incredibly fun or result in a bunch of smashed laptops!
Why Scott and Jean as the term’s namesake? Well, given the history and drama behind their coupling, they seem to provoke a good degree of, ahem, passion in a lot of people. Including Sarah.
This is a brilliant idea! My thanks to EDP of ‘I Don’t Read My Blog Either’ for sending this my way.
I personally have two Geek Sacred Cows. Two topics that I cannot discuss rationally because it makes me too insane/angry/scary-eyed. Both are characters that came back to life that should have remained dead.
Barry Allen
.
and
Jason Todd
.
There you have it. Now move along. I can feel myself starting to spaz out. Seriously, you should run.
April 2nd, 2009 at 9:15 am
I’m not really sure. All of my most fav comics don’t have these things happen much…since they don’t drag out the same plot line for decades.
I guess I could say the whole Wolverine beating Lobo thing.
April 2nd, 2009 at 9:44 am
I’m with you on Jason Todd. I want him to stay dead, and I can feel myself getting angry just typing his name. He remains, um, dead to me.
April 2nd, 2009 at 10:51 am
Jason Todd is by far the worst one of these. Like, his death enriched the character of Batman, and that’s hard to do after 70 years of stories. It changed everyone’s psychology, and it led important character development with the new Robin. Beyond being an “event” it was a significant plot point.
Not everyone dead needs to stay dead, and it’s usually handled badly anyway. Like, the death of Superman was lame and, you knew he wouldn’t stay dead, and the stuff that came out of it was laaaaame. Like, maybe the Michael Bailies of the world like to defend Cyborg Supes and Steel and all that garbage, but none of it has captured the public imagination.
The Tim Drake Robin has. He’s the Robin anyone under 30 thinks of, and he’s the Robin everyone over 30 wanted.
I mean beyond the amateur-hour resurrection story (Superboy punch?), the very fact of his being back subtracts so much from what has been developed character-wise.
Like, I get the idea of having there be tension between Robins and their methods. Like, Nightwing is the honest first-born who, no matter how alike they are, can’t seem to get dad’s approval, and Jason is (now) the troubled middle child who gets all the attention for acting out, and Tim is the youngest who tries to learn from them all but also try to forge his own identity, and that’s a cool dynamic, but Jason was a much more important symbol and story element as a corpse.
They should have given someone else those character traits (Azrael?) and left Jason dead. It was handled very, very poorly, and for really no reason at all. I mean, he can’t have a single fan or contribute to sales in any way. It’s a total finger in the eye. DiDio is a plague.
April 2nd, 2009 at 10:51 am
The ridiculous amount of violence in superhero comics nowadays. I f**king hate comics fans who think having all kinds of gore and blood in comics makes them “edgy” and “adult.”
April 2nd, 2009 at 11:08 am
Boo hoo with the gore. They were worse in the ’50s. And what’s the big deal with Barry Allen’s return? Who cares. I mean your main arguments are:
1) It takes away from Crisis!
2) Barry is boring!
1A) Crisis was systematically destroyed and undone from Animal Man to Zero Hour to…everything. It hardly lasted at all, and now it’s gone completely. Like, the Anti-Monitor just shows up as another bad dude in that Green Lantern story, and it was no big deal. There’s lots of Earths. Supergirl is alive.
Barry’s return is hardly a betrayal of Crisis, since there’s nothing left to betray.
2A) Barry is “boring” because he wasn’t written with modern story techniques. He’s a product of that intentionally dumbed-down era. I mean what from the ’70s/early ’80s do you still like that hasn’t been revamped, improved, clarified, enhanced? There’s nothing boring about Barry, it’s just they developed better speed and story ideas with Wally.
I can get making the argument that Wally is defined by his trying to live up to the ghost of Barry, and you can say it’s almost like having the Waynes be found alive somewhere or a bunch of Kryptonians suddenly all over the place (oh, wait), but the Speed Force and time travel and whatever have already been built in to sort of make room for people to pop in and out of “reality,” so it’s not a crazy thing to bring him back.
Maybe they’ll even do a thing where he tries to learn from Wally and becomes Kid Flash himself. Like, Wally’s probably smarter about the Speed Force now.
So, you are only allowed to have one Scott and Jean, and yours is Jason Todd. You can’t have Barry without a better argument.
April 2nd, 2009 at 11:44 am
So Salmon, are you saying that Jason Todd is your “Scott and Jean”? Or were you simply discussing the point.
If not, then what is your “Scott and Jean”? And I’ve heard a rumor that you are only allowed one.
April 2nd, 2009 at 11:50 am
It used to be Jason Todd, but now it’s people who have either lame Scott and Jeans or more than one Scott and Jean.
So, my new Scott and Jean is Scott and Jean-related (but not to poor Scott or poor Jean).
April 2nd, 2009 at 11:50 am
Variant Covers – Especially variant covers that look like F*&$*!! crap compared to the regular cover. Fine give me an Alex Ross cover now and then, maybe something a little edgy like the B&W Noir series covers Marvel is doing. But now we have themed cover months. We had Ape one month, zombies another and coming up this month…Wolverine themed covers. What does Wolverine have to do with Amazing Spider-Man #590. NOTHING, but there are 5 Wolverines on the front playing poker. No Spidey anywhere!!
April 2nd, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Origin. Why did they have to pull that trigger? Wolverines past should have always remained a mystery if you ask me. That was one the most appealing parts of his character. Let me just say…JAMES HOWLETT?!?!…ah forget it… Never should have been done.
April 2nd, 2009 at 1:33 pm
I love the idea of having a geek sacred cow, but if I do, I haven’t hit it yet. It would probably be something related to “Star Trek.”
April 2nd, 2009 at 1:50 pm
Salmon, I couldn’t have said it better myself. That’s a great breakdown of the impact Jason Todd’s death had.
April 2nd, 2009 at 11:20 pm
Boo hoo with the gore. They were worse in the ’50s.
Oh, really? Please point to a 1950s SUPERHERO comic that had the level of gore Flash: Rebirth had.
April 2nd, 2009 at 11:40 pm
Boo Hoo Rob! wrote <>
Well, beyond the Spectre (who dispatched folks pretty gruesomely as far back as the ’40s), there were the following massively violent characters:
The Gay Guillotine (no snickering, it had a different meaning in the ’50s)
The Rack (whose original art pages are highly sought-after by “Good Girl” collectors)
and my favorite:
The Purple Hermit, who would mutilate bank robbers in ways that mirrored the “passion” of saints. He would shoot them with arrows or tie them to wheels, etc.
So, if anything, Flash: Rebirth is a tame homage to the gore of yesteryear. Ah, nostalgia.
April 3rd, 2009 at 12:16 am
The Gay Guillotine? The Purple Hermit? Ah yes, I remember when those books sold in the millions.
Maybe I’m wrong, and superhero comics were that violent at times. I still think streams of gushing blood don’t belong anywhere in a Flash comic.
Bah, give me those beautiful Carmine Infantino Flash pages, with the gleaming Central City backgrounds, anyday.
April 3rd, 2009 at 9:59 pm
‘Scott & Jean’… is that a mixed drink? Oh, it’s something that should have been left alone but wasn’t. I can do that.
How about Frank Herbert? He died before finishing his Dune storyline, but his son Brian found a plot outline for the final unwritten story and wrote a sequel so boring it needed two volumes to tell its tale.
I think Frank is a genius, but not only is Brian’s writing crap, Brian doesn’t try at all to write like his father. He’s trying to ’speak with his own voice’. Oh! Why not let Douglas Coupland write the sequels? Because if you aren’t trying to write like Frank Herbert, does it matter who writes the stories?
Kinda destroys the rationale for Brian writing the 6 prequel novels before getting around to the 2 sequels. Sure, it’s good to get a feel for writing the Dune universe before tackling the sequel to the series of the best-selling sci-fi novel of all time. But, since his sequel was crap, the prequels instead come across as a pre-emptive cash-in.
Having finished those prequels and sequels, Brian is busy at work writing another 3 Dune prequels. The first of those three (Paul of Dune) actually isn’t bad. Huh.
The exact opposite is true for Christopher Tolkien. He published The Children of Hurin (a real novel at last!), based stringently on the assorted drafts that JRR Tolkien set forth, without any invention of Christoper’s own making, and that novel ROCKED! And while we might wish he would give permission for others to do the same, so that more novels could be constructed out of the conflicting versions of tales JRR left unfinished, Christopher will not allow it.
As for his own pre-emptive cash-in, you could say that the 12-book ‘History of Middle Earth’ he compiled qualified, though it was a good way of prepping for ‘Children of Hurin’. I sure hope he does more to make single, definitive works like ‘Children of Hurin’, instead of leaving us with concentrated boredom like ‘The Simarillion’ or the poetic but archaic ‘Book of Lost Tales’ 1 and 2. But it won’t be long before he’s dead, and if it wasn’t for the total surprise of ‘Children…’, I wouldn’t have expected any more writing on JRR’s legacy to surface.
Or is ‘Scott and Jean’ supposed to refer to dead characters who were supposed to stay dead?
In that case, more than any other character ever, I’d have to say Dark Phoenix. Was her original storyline even any good to begin with? And then blessed Chris Claremont, who can tickle the fancy from time to time, does what he does best, and pilfers from himself to bring Dark Phoenix back? Better not do it again for X-Men Forever, fool! (or whatever it’s called) Yeah, I know that every series he wrote since X-Men has the same dialogue, along with some ‘Wolverine’-type character in it. That’s the ‘Chris Claremont’-style!
April 5th, 2009 at 12:32 am
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