I’ve got a What to Expect-related piece over at Slate, in case you’re interested. The comments section could be fun.

The great Walter Russell Mead has a short, kind, and very blurbable review of What to Expect in Foreign Affairs.

Ace of Spades sounds like he’s being drawn against his will into the Marvel Phase 2 project. He pokes fun at the new Thor: Into Darkness trailer and makes a crack about the villains being Dark Elves. Here, I’ll let him do the funny in his own words:

So here’s Thor 2, in which Thor teams up with Loki to stop… I don’t know, they’re called Dark Elves or something. I notice they don’t say “Dark Elves” in the trailer. Prudent of them. We have to preserve some sense of dignity. Going to a movie where we’re told right up front is about Dark Elves would deny us that figleaf of dignity.

This brings up a really interesting question: In a contest between WoW nerds and comic book nerds, who’s the winner (loser?) dignity wise? Having been on both sides of this contest at various points in my life, it seems like a pretty close call.

Ace then closes out with this great little hand-grenade:

Exit question: Aren’t these movies the Star Wars of the twenty-aughts and twenty-teens? It’s a fictional universe in which Guardians with Special Powers maintain Peace and Order in the Galaxy. Isn’t Captain America just a Jedi with a high-tech shield instead of a high-tech sword?

Isn’t Iron Man just Chaotic Good Boba Fett?

Isn’t Jarvis just disembodied C3PO?

And isn’t the Hulk just Gamma-Wookie?

He had me at “Chaotic Good Boba Fett.” Well played.

Meanwhile, Allahpundit is not amused.

Truth be told, I’m basically ready to buy in to Marvel Phase 2. Looking back on Phase 1, it’s interesting how uneven the Marvel films were in quality. I think we could classify Iron Man and Avengers as top-shelf productions–well-crafted with a real sense of what they were doing. And quite winning. Captain America was the next tier down–a great first and second act, and loads of promise, diminished only by the paint-by-numbers third act. Thor was a little less impressive still. And Iron Man 2 is a complete disaster.

As far as batting averages go, that’s certainly respectable, but it’s not like Marvel is working on a Pixar-like streak of quality.

This means that (1) We’re likely to get some more crap in Phase 2–and if Guardians of the Galaxy is anything better than Green Lantern with plushies, I’ll be surprised; and (2) It’s not like Phase 2 is trying to live up to some unattainable ideal from Phase 1. There’s room–lots of it–for improvement.

What’s interesting to me is that Marvel doesn’t seem to have a systematic approach to assembling their film projects. There doesn’t seem to be a “Marvel Method” for the film universe. Look at the directors they’ve chosen: Whedon, Branagh, Johnston, Favreau. You can try to find some common theme with them, but it’s pretty hard. Now look at the Phase 2 directors: James Gunn.  Alan Taylor. The Russo Bros. You might remember them from such classics as You, Me, & Dupree and Super. And lots (and lots) of TV work. The only stud in the bunch is Shane Black–who is awesome. But again, it’s interesting to think about the kind of managerial process which hands pieces of big, expensive, interrelated movies to Kenneth Branagh, Alan Taylor, and Shane Black. Maybe there’s a coherent worldview to that, but I can’t intuit it.

In fact, looking at the writing-directing teams from Phase 1 and now from Phase 2, I only see two likely conclusions. Either (1) Marvel has decided that it doesn’t care about a writer-director’s pedigree, they’re just hiring talent that has figured out a great way to tell their particular story. Or (2) Marvel has decided that writing-directing talent is secondary to the power of the characters and pre-existing story pieces which they’ve already generated through the comics. Why else move down from (mostly) proven feature-film directors to marginal film and TV directors for Phase 2?

Two other notes: First, Marvel now has their hands on Daredevil, which is great. There’s at least one awesome Daredevil movie to be made, and I nominate Joe Quesada’s Daredevil: Father arc which very artfully tells the Daredevil origin story (which any rebooted DD will have to do) but does it in an extended series of flashbacks while DD is solving a crime–and it does so in a way that makes the origin the payoff. It’s great and honestly it would be a little crazy not to start DD this way and then bring in the Kingpin or Bullseye or Elektra or some other classic Daredevil foe in the sequel. Not that I’ve thought about this or anything.

Second, I wonder if Marvel is ever going to give one of their house comics writers a shot at writing one of the movies. Though I suppose you could count Whedon in this, since he only wrote the best X-Men run in the history of the book.

Does someone you love suffer from the “soap-opera effect”?

Do you?

If so, you don’t need to endure strange and off-putting image enhancement ever again. Nerds are here to help.

As the kids say, for this headline:

“David Sirota should be happy: You can’t get much more Caucasian than Chechens!”

With the new trailer I’m in on Man of Steel. All in. Here’s my $20 for the IMAX Digital-Oral 4D experience. Take it in advance.

A pretty deep essay about the cosmological nature of the fight:

Too many of them think that same-sex marriage is merely a question of sexual ethics. They fail to see that gay marriage, and the concomitant collapse of marriage among poor and working-class heterosexuals, makes perfect sense given the autonomous individualism sacralized by modernity and embraced by contemporary culture—indeed, by many who call themselves Christians. They don’t grasp that Christianity, properly understood, is not a moralistic therapeutic adjunct to bourgeois individualism—a common response among American Christians, one denounced by Rieff in 2005 as “simply pathetic”—but is radically opposed to the cultural order (or disorder) that reigns today.

They are fighting the culture war moralistically, not cosmologically. They have not only lost the culture, but unless they understand the nature of the fight and change their strategy to fight cosmologically, within a few generations they may also lose their religion.

If it feels like I’m always talking about how craven and awful and truly, truly stupid the New DC is, well, that’s because I am.

But wait–there’s more!

Worried that it’s been months since the New York Times paid them any attention, DC has decided to roll out a transgender character. Isn’t that shocking! Isn’t that daring! Oh sure, they’re going to take fire from all sides because the mainstream world just can’t handle the raw truth and outlaw spirit of the comic book industry. But do they care? Hell no. They’re going to épater the heck out of la bourgeoisie, consequences be damned. Because comic books aren’t just superheroes running around in tights–they’re nuclear bombs of subversive social commentary. They’re relevant. And if you’re not down with that, they got just two words for you . . .

As always, it’s not just the cloying, transparent, desperate yearning for attention on the part of DC. It’s how totally artless the attempts are. Here’s the big transgender reveal in Batgirl:

Gail Simone, who wrote this thing, sounds like someone in a hostage video, talking about how she’s met “so many trans readers over the years” and how “there’s a large LGBTQ readership in comics.”

Really? I mean, really? The top 300 comics combine to sell about 6.72 million copies a month. Let’s assume–just for giggles–that every one of those sales represents a single reader. (Which is obviously a gross over-count.) This UCLA professor pegs the transgender rate at 0.3 percent of the population, which seems a little high to me, but it’s on the internet, so let’s take his word for it. That puts the total number of transgender comic book readers in this little experiment at something like 20,000. But hey, maybe Gail Simone has met all of them. And besides, if all 20,000 of them hop onto Batgirl it’ll be a big deal, since the title only sells 51,000 copies a month.

But again, this isn’t really about whether transgender folks “deserve” representation because they do (or do not) make up a big enough portion of the readership. Superficially silly justifications like Simone’s aside, we’re not gerrymandering congressional districts here. We’re talking about art. Comic book art, yes. But still, art.

And the transgendered Batgirl “reveal” is just Exhibit #727 of how artistically bankrupt DC comics is right now. They have no stories to tell; only stunts to pull.

Whether or not they understand it, DC’s corporate mission isn’t to get mainstream attention for its publicity stunts–or even to sell comic books. It’s to create characters and stories which can be mined by Warner Bros. for film product. The publisher has, thus far, failed spectacularly at this task. The big question about DC is why their parent company continues to tolerate their failure.