Is it just me, or do these scenes from DC's 52 Week 14 suggest that there is bad robotic mojo on the horizon?
It's hard to say which of them will take the gold in the Crazy Olympics, and which one will have to settle for the silver.
3 comments:
Anonymous
said...
I love these pages. First one is all buttoned-down and depressive, a child's idea of what grown-up life must be like. A world where it's easy to dismiss those stupid Metal Men as eccentric failures who could have been useful if not for their "annoying personalities." And besides which, said personalities are broken now, maybe beyond repair. Oh boo hoo, the ruined DCU.
Page two is all recognition and joy. What I remember from the original Metal Men arc was that it was all about that responsometer -- Magnus was special because he had stumbled on a way to give his robots something like a modern "soul," and his robots were special within the DCU because they were so wonderfully intractable and bizarre. These were robots with something like free will. Some would call them annoying, but they were our annoying.
And then at the end of course, Magnus and Mercury are basically reflecting each other's demented expression and you realize that Magnus' unnaturally large head (like a grown-up Captain Scarlet or Scott Thunderbird) might be that way in order to contain its precious solenoid. And that's okay. Pure Doom Patrol.
I just love the idea of the melding of different technologies: the (broken) Metal Men responsometer being reconstituted and improved through the addition of Morrow's Red Tornado soul code. Two great tastes that are going to wreak havoc together.
I'm surprised there haven't been more blended technologies across the DC lanscape: Cyborg's mechanicals running a Mother Box OS; Starman's Cosmic Rod being jury rigged to Martian stardrives; things like that.
Blended technologies ... I think one hurdle we'd have to leap is getting a better understanding of these platforms in themselves first, and then we'd maybe know a little better how they'd most interestingly combine. The problem of course is that a lot of things like the Cosmic Rod and Nth metal are deeply proprietary, so figuring out how they work would be an origin feat in itself.
Actually we could maybe argue that the 30th Century with all its technological marvels might originate in the slow cross-fertilization of the various super-science platforms of the 20th Century. The UP is the child of the superman or whatever -- plus the star man and amazon metal and whatever. I think if they made this explicit, they wouldn't feel so compelled to give RJ Brande a makeover every few years. Just leave him a syphilitic durlan or whatever he used to be.
I worry that Magnus has just thrown those "annoying" responsometers away. Still, I suppose having Red Tornado's throat speaker stuck in the mysterious Hornblower is an interesting development!
3 comments:
I love these pages. First one is all buttoned-down and depressive, a child's idea of what grown-up life must be like. A world where it's easy to dismiss those stupid Metal Men as eccentric failures who could have been useful if not for their "annoying personalities." And besides which, said personalities are broken now, maybe beyond repair. Oh boo hoo, the ruined DCU.
Page two is all recognition and joy. What I remember from the original Metal Men arc was that it was all about that responsometer -- Magnus was special because he had stumbled on a way to give his robots something like a modern "soul," and his robots were special within the DCU because they were so wonderfully intractable and bizarre. These were robots with something like free will. Some would call them annoying, but they were our annoying.
And then at the end of course, Magnus and Mercury are basically reflecting each other's demented expression and you realize that Magnus' unnaturally large head (like a grown-up Captain Scarlet or Scott Thunderbird) might be that way in order to contain its precious solenoid. And that's okay. Pure Doom Patrol.
I just love the idea of the melding of different technologies: the (broken) Metal Men responsometer being reconstituted and improved through the addition of Morrow's Red Tornado soul code. Two great tastes that are going to wreak havoc together.
I'm surprised there haven't been more blended technologies across the DC lanscape: Cyborg's mechanicals running a Mother Box OS; Starman's Cosmic Rod being jury rigged to Martian stardrives; things like that.
Blended technologies ... I think one hurdle we'd have to leap is getting a better understanding of these platforms in themselves first, and then we'd maybe know a little better how they'd most interestingly combine. The problem of course is that a lot of things like the Cosmic Rod and Nth metal are deeply proprietary, so figuring out how they work would be an origin feat in itself.
Actually we could maybe argue that the 30th Century with all its technological marvels might originate in the slow cross-fertilization of the various super-science platforms of the 20th Century. The UP is the child of the superman or whatever -- plus the star man and amazon metal and whatever. I think if they made this explicit, they wouldn't feel so compelled to give RJ Brande a makeover every few years. Just leave him a syphilitic durlan or whatever he used to be.
I worry that Magnus has just thrown those "annoying" responsometers away. Still, I suppose having Red Tornado's throat speaker stuck in the mysterious Hornblower is an interesting development!
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