All Men Must (And Probably Will) Die

Okay, guys...so, this post is mainly about the first episode of Game of Thrones. I have a feeling I'll be writing a LOT about Thrones considering that I have an unhealthy obsession with this show and these last two seasons are going to be pivotal. Anyway, there are HUGE spoilers after the jump. Just so you know. Big spoilers after the jump. That's twice I warned you about spoilers after the jump. Three times, now.

Whole squad decked out in that Maleficent spring line.

The New Game of Thrones Trolling Experience

So, Game of Thrones happened in the past couple of weeks. I was going to do a post about it after the season premiere but I wanted to wait until two episodes had passed because GoT has a habit dedicating one episode purely to set-up for what's to come. And that's basically what happened.

For those of you keeping score, that's that kid's uncle. He's also
that kid's father AND he fucked the boy's mom in that same spot.

I'm glad I waited until after the second episode to form an opinion because it's plainly obvious now that the format has changed. Obviously (except for the Iron Islands stuff), the showrunners have run out of book material to follow and honestly, it's the best goddamned thing to happen to this show in the past two seasons. See, there was a time when the showrunners made an attempt at a 1:1 representation of the source material as established by George R. R. Martin and before anything else, Martin is an extinction level troll. He loves that people lose their collective shit when someone who may or may not have deserved it gets killed off. That said, the source material can be long and torturous to its characters. So, "staying faithful" to it means we would have had to sit through half a season of Roose Bolton telling Ramsey to get his shit together after he does something unforgivably evil and macabre or no less than six episodes of Tyrion Lannister realizing that he is the smartest person in the room and STILL has to be the one to do the legwork nobody else wants to do in the service of saving the day. But now that the ship is set on "sail", the showrunners get to advance the plot at their leisure. So, now, Arya only has to go through a couple episodes of Daredevil training before we see some payoff. Just two episodes before Ramsey finally gets sick of his father's shit and does the thing we all knew he should have done a season ago (Jesus Christ, he had his JUST BORN baby brother fed to dogs on sight before even washing his father's blood off the dagger). As the writer of a comic whose first issue is primarily set-up, I appreciate the time it takes to create a universe and lay groundwork, but I feel like we're at a point where the training wheels can be taken off and viewers can all have an experience together without being divided by people who are on the edge of their seat and people who've read the books and are just waiting for one shoe or another to drop. We can all be trolled together and that's a good thing....unless they start with that rape shit again.

My comic review for the week on Invincible Iron Man is up and available on Black Nerd Problems for your viewing enjoyment. Feel free to like, share or comment at your own discretion

The Week In Geek 6/17/15

So...Game of Thrones. Since a lot of you are super spoiler sensitive, we'll be talking about the season finale after the jump.

Something I Loved About Watchers On The Wall

So, last week's Game of Thrones was particularly awesome. It might be one of the most well made episodes of the show. I would put it as a close second to Blackwater. I mean, this is evidence of why any one episode of this show stands toe to toe with virtually any feature length film of its genre.

Spoilers after the jump....

The Thing About Internet Spoilers

I've been meaning to talk about this for a while now, but didn't really have a good example to springboard the topic. The best example in the past few weeks I can think of is probably the "Royal Wedding" on Game of Thrones. People lost their shit about the ending and set Twitter on FIRE. It's a pretty well known fact that Twitter knows no chill even on its slow days, but this was an especially HILARIOUS night to bear witness to.

In fact, this is such a special spoiler, I'm not even going to talk about it until after the jump.

Crowd Participation or Happy Free Comic Book Day

Craig "BBC" Long from Houston, TX wanted to hear my thoughts after reading the Walking Dead comics since I saw Seasons 1 and 2 first.

Well, Craig, I can say that the comic delivers better than I could have hoped. With the direction Swamp Thing and I Vampire went in, The Walking Dead is definitely one of the ONLY mainstream titles in comics that can truly lay claim to being a horror comic. One thing that is well preserved in its own way is the dichotomy of Rick and Shane. Not only do they define each other, they define the theme of the series as a whole. In the moments when it's not an epic zombie saga (easily one of the best of all time), it's essentially a morality play that constantly questions whether or not humanity is a biological or ideological state of being. Rick and Shane seem to be constantly at odds with themselves as well as each other standing on respective sides of the argument. I see where some fans take issue with the things altered in the the tv adaptation, but I think it's the aesthetically reasonable compromise network television could probably muster. No matter how iconic a comic is or how powerful a panel is, the sad truth is that there are just some things that look good in a comic that won't translate as well on television or on screen. That's why I like that geeks are actually being consulted about geek culture. Robert Kirkman works very closely alongside the production team on Walking Dead, George R. R. Martin is reportedly consulted often on the direction of Game of Thrones and Joss Whedon has more than enough nerd credit in the bank at this point to be trusted with The Avengers. At some point Hollywood decided that instead of being satisfied with the receipt for the intellectual property they bought as a stamp of approval, it might be better to actually ask the creator what they think about their work. I stand behind the "for nerds, by nerds" approach.

Johnathan Marroquin writes via Facebook: I need an honest opinion on the Amalgam universe circa 96-98. Potential or not?

For those of you who have no idea what he's talking about, in the late 90s, DC and Marvel were real fiends for cross pollinating their titles because...let's face it...nerds will never stop arguing about who would win in a fight between Superman and the Hulk ("...and then Superman threw the big green monkey into the sun and went back to work. The End."). So, they finally had a Marvel vs. DC miniseries where the best...at the time...of each company had a big slugfest because of some patchwork excuse like "the universes are colliding" (a writer's way of saying "for no good goddamned reason"). Anyway, somehow after the heroes kept the universes from colliding by beating the shit out of each other, the universes collided anyway. The result was a universe full of mashup characters. Sometimes, they made sense like how the "Challengers of the Fantastic" was a combination of the Fantastic Four and the Challengers of the Unknown....both Jack Kirby creations. Most of them, however, were shitty like putting Batman and Man-Thing together to get Bat-Thing. This was indicative of what the mid to late 90s was in the land of comics: a reason to sell cool covers instead of cool books. Assuming Johnathan's question is asking whether or not this same imprint would be a viable venture now, it's enough that DC treats their own artists like the mail room interns you steal ideas from without their knowing. It's enough that Marvel would hold their writers at gunpoint beneath a vat of battery acid and force them to write a "You Got Served" comic if they thought there was money in it. I shudder to think what the Big Two would do to each other.

Batman: No, Logan, I never would have guessed it was you under there.