Black Superheroes: Ironheart

And lo, did the tears of a thousand fanboys flood the streets

Name: Riri Williams 

First Appearance:  Invincible Iron Man Vol. 3 #7 (2016) 

History: Riri Williams, a genius teenage MIT student, built a working suit of power armor based on Iron Man from stolen spare parts around her school just to see if she could. Upon completion she took it out into the world and ended up stopping two escaped convicts, but the still-not-quite right suit was destroyed in the process. The event caught the eye of Tony Stark himself, who personally came to Riri to offer guidance and support on her path to becoming a superhero. Some time later Stark is rendered comatose after the events of Civil War II, but apparently he saved his personality into an Artificial Intelligence housed in a holographic construct with the purpose of being shipped to Riri in the event of his death. Now directly working with an A.I. with the personality with intellect of the world famous Iron Man, Riri is able to fully complete her armor. On the A.I.’s suggestion she adopts the name “Ironheart” and sets forth to try to fill the gap that Iron Man left in his wake.

Beta Says: Riri Williams is something of a pariah amongst a certain percentage of the superhero comic fandom. As I understand it, some of it is backlash from her early stories not actually being very good considering how hard Marvel Comics was pushing her as this cool new superhero. However I’d argue a huge portion of it comes form a dark corner of modern comic fandom who rejected Ironheart not simply because of quality of stories but because she became their poster child for a then big mandate from Marvel to push diversity amongst their characters. In her case, Marvel probably unwisely had her temporary take over Invincible Iron Man. Replacing a high profile character with a very new character and telling everyone how cool they are is never the safest bet in the best of times but it becomes worse when that character is black and a portion of your fanbase have decided to be “Anti-Woke.” Oh yes, it’s one of these things. 

More on the “Ironheart Controversy” after the jump.

Nerd Rage #17: Beta vs. Marvel Studios

They've come a long way from being a bankrupt joke

A blog in November? What madness is this? As I suggested a while back I have decided not to participate in National Novel Writing Month this year, partly because of all my work with my book earlier this year but main due to having recently started a new job that would not allow the time to writing 50,000 words in a month and still have anything resembling a life (actually my new job doesn’t leave much time for any writing at all, to my great chagrin).

Anyway Marvel Studios formally announced their movie schedule through the year 2019 (and for some reason this is considered a fine move) and apparently it made everyone I know go insane with anticipation. Some of the films sound pretty cool and others one sound kind of “meh”. I thought it would be fun to briefly at all of Marvel’s upcoming flicks and judge mercilessly despite knowing almost nothing about any of them. And hey, maybe you don’t know much about the characters in the film and this may be a nice learning experience.

Of course supposedly a list of Marvel movies was leaked earlier this year and I distinctive recall many people on my Facebook feed losing their shit over it; taking it completely at face value. I recall being very skeptical about it, especially with World Word Hulk, Captain America: The Fallen Son, and Avengers: Civil War as none of them really made any thematic sense to me based on what had already been established. (Though, let’s face it, Marvel could have easily changed key details of their films after the word got out but we either way it’s hard to know of sure) In any case I didn’t even want to talk about those rumors until things were verified. Now that the official list of films have come out I thought I’d go through them (and since I had a few friends who asked my thoughts about it I get it all out of my system at once).

Congratulations, suckers; you f**king fell for it!

So today we’ll look at all of Marvel Studios’ upcoming films. This does not include the upcoming X-Men, Spider-Man or Fantastic Four flicks as they are produced by different studios (Fox and Sony respectively) nor will be looking at DC Comics' line-up partly because they probably deserve their own topic and partly because I don’t want to angrily ramble right now. I mean, I may still do that today but at least this way I’m not starting out already being annoyed and pissed off at the source material. (Doctor Doom is an angry hacker? Really?)

Marvel Studios’ future after the jump.

[WARNING: While most of my ramblings are just conjecture I may be spoiling plot points for future films simply by taking about the comics they're based on. Read at your own risk.]

300th Blog: Review of Civil War (Marvel Comic)

Ladies and gentlemen welcome to the 300th blog of Beta is Dead. Four years and countless hours of my life have been thrown into this blog and at 300 entries I’m fairly certain I have enough material for multiple novels. As I mentioned in the last blog today I’ll be celebrating this milestone by reviewing one of Marvel Comics' most important modern crossovers Civil War, which began publication in 2006 and ended in 2007. If there’s one huge problem with today’s comics, especially at Marvel, it’s the seemingly constant stream of big comic events and big status quo altering crossovers. Back in the day these types of things were more spread out and they didn’t always “change everything”. Nowadays there’s at least one big storyline a year (sometimes more!) and when it’s over it they’ve made major changes to the canon only to change everything again by the next one. X-Men: Schism is a fantastic example of this. Schism was supposed to be this HUGE deal, a storyline that divided the X-Men into two warring factions but just a year later all of that was tossed out of the window when Avengers vs. X-Men established a totally different dynamic. Why bother changing up the world if you’re going to just change it again before we get used to it?

Anyway Civil War really is the start of this in the 2000s. It was the next chapter of Marvel’s weird ass agenda of pumping out a bunch of events labeled as one big “epic” saga starting with Avengers Disassembled and ending with Siege. But it was Civil War that really got it rolling as it’s ending shattered the basic foundation of the Marvel Universe (of course most things went completely back to normal a few years later, meaning nothing here really mattered in the long term). For the record this book was written by Mark Millar with art by Steve McNiven.

The question is this: was Civil War a good story? It’s a famous story and a historically relevant and is actually pretty controversial but the quality of book itself isn’t guaranteed. Now the Civil War story was made up of seven issues but there were also numerous tie-ins and side story comics. Since I would have to spend a ton of money to buy all that crap we’re just going to stick with the main miniseries. After all the main book alone should have a complete and satisfying story, right? Right?

Full review after the jump.

[WARNING: There are spoilers freely written throughout this review but seeing as this is an eight year old comic you should probably get over it]

Review (Rant): Iron Man 3

Despite having started writing them in the past I’ve obviously never reviewed the first two Iron Man movies. Let’s do that right now.

Iron Man: It was funny action packed, featured a smartly written lead character that was well acted. While the villain wasn’t super memorable in the grand scheme of things it’s was okay because the rest of the movie was so strong.

Panda Score: 4/5

Iron Man 2: Robert Downey Jr. is great as Tony Stark, as is Sam Rockwell as Justin Hammer and Don Cheadle as War Machine, but the villain was pretty weak and uninteresting and the whole film felt unnecessarily bloated due to tie-ins with upcoming non-Iron Man films. It was fine but it was a letdown from the first one.

Panda Score: 3/5

Okay. So Shane Black, writer of Lethal Weapon and director of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (which helped revitalize Downey’s career) takes over for Jon Favreau as director. This will be the first post-Avengers Marvel Studio film which means that “Phase Two” officially begins now. It’s a tall order but we’re expecting this film to be both a sequel to the previous Iron Man movies as well as a follow-up to one of the biggest films in history. Does it succeed? Can it possibly succeed?

Full review after the jump.

[WARNING: This review is not only extremely spoiler filled but it also contains one of the most frothy nerd rants I’ve ever done. DO NOT continue reading if you are planning to see this film and/or if you’re not a jaded, bitter nerd like I am]

Summer Movie Preview '13

[UPDATE: Wow, I totally forgot Man of Steel. Because I am dumb. Oh I totally wrote it but I forgot to actually put it up. It’s fixed now.]

It looks like I’m doing another Summer Movie Preview, just like last year. Though I missed out on seeing a few of the films last summer, and others I simply didn’t review, the whole thing was fun and I enjoyed doing it. As I’ve said before I think that the Summer movie experience begins in May, which means I’m really cutting this close. But hey, it’s technically still April. As I said last year these are not reviews; it’s just me talking about movies coming out this summer that appeal to my nerdy side. There might be some films I missed that should go on this list but for now this will do. Notice that the Fantastic Four reboot still isn’t around. When is that happening, Fox?

Click below for more.

Nerd Rage #6a: Road to One More Day

It's Finally Time...

Look, we all knew this was coming sooner or later.  All those snide remarks about Spider-Man and his (lack of) marriage for the past year; I was going to talk about Spider-Man: One More Day eventually and since it’s such a hot topic even today I figured why not do so when the blog reaches 100 posts.  Of course this isn’t anything new as practically everyone with internet access has voiced an opinion about the comic since it hit stands in 2007 but even so if I went on a rant about Cassandra Cain and no one screamed at me one would think I’d be okay here.  We’ll see.  So later this week (Hopefully) I’ll be posting a review of the graphic novel that collects the infamous four issue storyline.  I can’t claim I won’t be biased , of course, but I’ll at least try to give the book a fair shake .

But there’s a problem.  Superhero comic books are tricky in that non-fans who may be interested in checking them out are often confused by the content due to the fact that there’s decades’ worth of continuity to them.  So what’s common knowledge for me and my buddies won’t necessarily be common knowledge for, let’s say, an anime fan who usually just comes to the blog for anime reviews.  So before we can talk about One More Day we need to talk about what led to it and why it happened.  And, because I know that the review is going to be long as hell, I decided to “pre-blog” here so that you won’t have to read a giant novel worth of text next time.  We’re swimming in pretty nerdy waters, folks, and I wouldn’t blame you if you decided to avoid the site for the next week.

More after the jump, if you dare.

Black Superheroes: War Machine

No, he doesn't need two back mounted cannons
But damn if he ain't about to use 'em

Name: James “Rhodey” Rhodes

First Appearance: Iron Man #118(As Rhodes, 1979), Iron Man #170 (As Iron Man II, 1983), Iron Man #282 (As War Machine, 1992)

History: A pilot in the US Marine Corps James Rhodes met Iron Man while stationed in Southeast Asia.  Impressed with his skills Iron Man’s “employer” Tony Stark (Actually Iron Man himself) offered Rhodes a position as his personal pilot.  Since then the two became best friends but when Stark fell into alcoholism during Obadiah Stane’s attack on his company he passed on the mantle of Iron Man to Rhodes.  However it later turned out that the suit wasn’t compatible with his brainwaves and Rhodes became dangerously paranoid and aggressive and suffered from severe headaches.  This combined with injuries forced him to vacate the superhero identity for the most part.  However one day, during a crisis, Rhodes again was forced to become Iron Man, donning Stark’s latest designs the “Variable Threat Response Battle Suit, Model XVI, Mark I”, a suit built for all out-combat.  Afterwards he decided to keep the armor and continued to fight the forces of evil as War Machine.

Beta Says: Created by David Michelinie and Bob Layton James Rhodes, better known as “War Machine”, is probably one of Marvel’s most successful African American superheroes.  He’s one of the company's few black heroes, along with Blade and Storm, to be featured in a major motion picture (Performed by Terrence Howard and then later by Don Cheadle as War Machine proper) meaning that he may be among the most high profile minority characters in comic books today.  That all said Rhodey has had the unfortunate luck of being known as “Tony Stark’s Black Friend” since day one.  Despite what they originally had planned for him his long association with Iron Man as a supporting character has likely locked him in that position.  Never mind he’s had several solo titles or that he was a founding member of the West Coast Avengers.  With rumors of a possible War Machine spin-off film it is possible that this might change.  But I doubt it.  In fact I’d bet money that it wouldn’t.

More thoughts on War Machine after the jump.