Thinkwank/Yearlust 2018 and 2019 Catchup

[razorsmile]

Forgot my password for a couple of years there. Oops.

2018: Black Panther (and really the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole) Avengers: Endgame in 2019 may have been the ultimate love-letter to the fans who watched every single one of these movies since 2008 but Infinity War was a better movie, in the sense of assembled better from the sum of

Comments

[__marcelo]

(Hi! Welcome back!)

A Hidden History of Marvel Ass-kicking would be fascinating.

I wonder if it might not go in parallel with the idea that HYDRA is really thousands of years old and has been working on super-duper-serum the whole time (I vaguely remember a mini about that, but I don't recall its canonical status). If one of the hidden threads of history is a lets call it alchemical quest for superhumanity, perhaps there's another one based on the use of body-mind techniques (two pseudo-mechanisms could be: the right training causes epigenetic changes that put together a biochemical analogue of the meta-gene, and/or a high-rank martial artist is, without knowing it, doing magic - the mental part is similar, and they use his nervous and muscular systems, ultimately, as ritual props, hence the achievement of supernatural results). Maybe there's a common origin point for both threads, or at least for either separately. (Hickman's longue duree Shield/Spear a third one?)

Point being, perhaps the main hidden drivers of human history are multiple parallel proto-transhumanist crypto meta-civilziations driven by some shared species trauma (although I wouldn't go with Celestial stuff, it's an awful mess).

[razorsmile]

Love the ancient proto-transhumanist civilizations notion (K'un Lun and the other Heavenly Cities fit into this framework especially well. See also, the Savage Land. Heck, that pit that empowered the Folding Circle could be a leftover from one such polity gone extinct etc.)

Even The Hand works with it (the earliest Snakeroot cultists could easily have been swayed by promises of superhuman might from the Beast.)

However, just personally and subjectively, I am very much a fan of Zelazny's "champions of different persuasions" and that's one of the things that draws me inexorably back to comics -- no matter how incestuously meta-referential they get* -- the bottomless kitchen-sink of power possibilities.

Which is my long-winded way of saying that I prefer when chi and magic are distinctly separate arts with at best notable Venn overlaps (blood sacrifice rituals definitely involve burning up the life energy of the victims to fuel mystical effects and so forth)

* well, if we're being honest, incestuous meta-referentiality is probably is the draw in and of itself for most people's inner Simpson's Comic Book Guy😅)

[__marcelo]

Both are definitely strong structurally attractive features; I'm not immune either to the charms of multiple unrelated sources of weirdness interacting in non-linear ways (e.g. my annoyance with that Superman/Batman issue where it turns out that Jor-El talked with Thomas Wayne, which led to the former choosing later to send Kal-El to Earth, and Thomas Wayne using kryptonian technology to grow Wayne Enterprises into the behemoth that Bruce would inherit without having to make ethical or legal compromises... and this was meant to be canon, although I don't know if it has remained so).