Capeshit

Comics, Thoughts on Invincible, MCU, DC

I began watching Invincible when it first came out, but I never watched the newer two seasons because I was mostly disappointed with Season 1. I can’t say my opinion of the show changed in the following seasons too much, it’s one of those shows that I think is worth keeping track of so I can record my thoughts on it. That being said, I’m going to talk about “Capeshit” in general in this post. I don’t think my feelings on the show can really be worth a full ‘stack without my thoughts on the genre in general, but a good portion of it will be dedicated to Invincible in particular.

Invincible is not the worst thing ever, but it is a lesson in the inferiority of Western animation. is gratuitously gory, too gory for a show that is otherwise lazily drawn and lazily animated. It’s like half the animation budget does to drawing the gory parts. The linework is blocky and angular, it feels very half-assed. I understand that they’re going for the “comic book style”, but it just doesn’t work when you’re half-assing it. It looks like early-stage concept art, all the time. Fights feel very low-FPS, and I’m not sure if this is due to a lack of frames. I think the illustrators just don’t effectively utilize the effects that other illustrators use to give the illusion of movement. Some of the more important fights look good, but only in the sense that they meet the “entertaining fight” benchmark. They’re not excellent in any capacity.

The villains are mostly uninteresting and boring, but for some reason they keep bringing them back and they continue to pose a problem for the heroes. The heroes are also mostly uninteresting, but they are extremely hesitant to kill any of them off. They always come super close to death and then survive, or we think they’re dead but they’re actually alive. It’s all just fluff to get us to the actual important stuff with the Viltrumites, but it completely ruins the powerscaling. When fighting with the Guardians of the Globe, Mark doesn’t really seem much stronger than the rest of them and even gets his ass beat sometimes, but at the same time the Immortal, and by proxy every other member of the Guardians of the Globe, is clearly much weaker than Mark.

The show is completely absent of any fanservice oriented at men, but I believe it actually does have female-oriented fanservice. Obviously all the men are going to be ripped, and yes they also have chisled jawlines and buttcheeks sticking out of their suits, it is capeshit after all. But it’s more the way they act that makes it fanservice for women. Pretty much every female character in the show is empowered, independent, and disagreeable, while the male characters are highly accommodating and supportive of everything they do but will still protect them. Mark is constantly forced to defend his world-saving actions to his swarthy girlfriend, and it’s not like the dynamic between Goku and Chi Chi where we it’s played for laughs. The romance in this show is very uninteresting for this reason. Nothing feels passionate, it all feels very “adult” in a bad way. Like, “I’m adulting today”, type adult. The lazy and angular artstyle only compliments this streamlined approach to character sexuality. Even if the illustrators were feeling like perverts, they would never have added jiggle physics because jiggle physics are hard to animate and they are lazy.

There is a moderate amount of wokeness in the show, for modern standards. His best friend is gay, which is true in the comics but only revealed far later. His girlfriend is turned black. Mark himself is retconned into being a Hapa, which means that Omni-Man’s penchant for bugwomen predates his arrival to Thraxa. Robert Kirkman blatantly stated in an interview that he was a “dumb white guy” when making the comic in the 2000s and intentionally added diversity to the show to atone for his sins. Otherwise, the show doesn’t really delve into much political themes.

I know I just shat on the show a lot, but I’d be lying if there weren’t some great scenes. If I had to choose a favorite, it would either be Omni-Man’s final conversation with Mark after defeating him, or it would be Conquest’s “I’m so lonely” speech. You know, being a fearsome crusty sigma myself I can relate to this speech…

A lot of the issues with capeshit come from the battles being purely material in nature. Every fight in Dragon Ball, and most of the superpowers, are derived from Dragon Ball being a fundamentally idealist universe with Confucian metaphysics. The fights don’t have to be physically realistic because they transcend the physical plane in a sense. But when it comes to superhero stuff, you’ll usually have to write some awful copout justification for why a hero has physically impossible powers. This leads into the second sin of Capeshit, which is extremely uncoordinated worldbuilding. Because you have all of these different characters with different authors in the same universe, you end up with one guy who is basically a wizard and another guy who is a science experiment and another guy who is a god and another guy who has a mummy curse or whatever. It’s all over the place. I don’t really like franchises where “canon” is determined by a company and not by a single author or at the very least a continuous lineage of single authors. It’s extremely common in America. It’s the same way with Star Wars Legends, a million different authors who all have conflicting goals. Capeshit really tries to fix this by going with the “Multiverse” schtick, but it’s so played out at this point that I groaned when I saw them doing it in Invincible. It was probably somewhat original in the 2000s, but today it’s overdone. It makes stories feel very small and irrelevant. DC addressed how stupid this was themselves with the Owlman stuff. It also gets really annoying having different authors constantly change the artstyle and character models.

Also, the Comic Book industry has always been extremely Jewish and somewhat pozzed. Early Capeshit might actually be the most disproportionately Jewish field of them all. There were some keyed White gentiles in the Pulp industry, and some of them created some famous superheroes, but most of the big names were made at least partially by Jews. DC was owned by two Jews. Superman was created by two Jews, and is full of Jewish messianic elements. Kal-El is Hebrew etymologically. Batman and the Green Lantern were created by two completely different Jews. Aquaman was written by a Jew, but designed by a gentile. Martian Manhunter was created by a Jew. Only two members of the Justice League, The Flash and Wonder Woman, were not created by Jews.

On the Marvel side of things, Stan Lee (Lieber) and his brother Larry are Jewish, as was Jack Kirby (Kurtzberg). Joe Simon was Jewish. Martin Goodman, the founder of Marvel, was Jewish. The only major non-Jewish member of the early Marvel team was Steve Ditko, who was a Rusyn Catholic. Ditko was also a “Randian Aristotelian” and wanted Peter Parker to be really right-wing, which I find hilarious. I’m not gonna bother listing characters, because with just these people you’d have an easier time asking which characters they didn’t have a hand in creating.

Early comic books were used as propaganda against the Nazis, before America had gotten involved in the war. According to Joe Simon, Captain America was supposed to encourage Americans to be less non-interventionist about the conflict during 1940. Obviously, he had his own ethnic interests in Europe that he wanted to frame as American interests. Captain America, in a sense, was a literary shabbos goy. If Captain America was Jewish, people would catch on. There are a few Jewish superheroes, and some have been retconned into being Jewish or part-Jewish in newer comics, but superheroes are much less Jewish than their creators demographically speaking. For the time, comics were pretty “woke”. A lot of the heroes were from immigrant backgrounds, albeit European ones. This Superman poster from 1950 is all over the internet, but doesn’t represent the public opinion of most Americans in 1950:

And then you have the Wakanda and Black Panther stuff, which is honestly some of the corniest shit I think the comic industry has ever produced that is still taken seriously. So you have this guy, Black Panther, who is only coincidentally sharing the name with the Afro-Marxist terrorist organization which spawned several months later. He is the king of a tiny closed off ethnostate in the heart of Africa, which Black Americans are supposed to feel close to for some reason. This is supposed to be what Africa would be like if da white man didn’t steal all his natural resources with tricknology, I guess. At least, that’s the vibes I got from the movie. Maybe Black Panther isn’t quite as politically coded in the comics. Wakanda comes off as “Kwanzaa: The Country” to me. If it was a little more unique, owing to its thousands of years of isolation, I might actually quite like it in the same way I like the Redguards. I think it really speaks to the sort of proto-wokism of the 1960s, it’s stuff that is woke-meaning but today would be considered very shallow and almost burlesque. Marvel is probably more woke than DC, as they have this, the Cap stuff, and the X-Men who are just blatantly supposed to represent “le marginalized peepulz”. Illustration is a very left-tilted profession so comics were always gonna go woke, but is it really any surprise?

People make fun of Neopagans for “worshipping a marvel character”, which is usually unfounded, but I will say that Thor seems like one of the more pulp-y characters Marvel has produced. A little more morally ambiguous. This continues even into modernity. I think when Thor got the Power Cosmic he gets referred to as a “god of genocide”, but I think the funniest instance of this is when Thor became the protector of Hitler and killed Joseph Stalin:

Comic Books have been declining in popularity for a long time now. Very few young people read them, they prefer Anime and Manga. Comic books got hit hard by the “Gamergate Bottleneck” in my opinion. A lot of loyal fans who tolerated some of the minor wokisms of pre-2010s comics got fed up with it during the Gamergate controversies and left to go read Manga. American media companies doubled down. It wasn’t just the HR mammies who hated the fans, it was the writers and illustrators too. The reason that American media companies don’t listen to their fans is because they rely on extremely left-wing hires. There are plenty of right-wing artists, but the people who go to school for art, animation, and cinema, the people who have something to put on their resume, are among the most left-wing demographics in college. These people began to staff major vidya firms as the gaming industry grew. Video games were now being marketed as something people of all ages could shamelessly enjoy, so they had to be marketed as an “art” and not just games. So a lot of the people who got their degrees in artsy-fartsy shit were in charge of storywriting now. The programmers designing the game had less and less influence on the impression of the game.

Japanese Manga, Anime, and Video Games are probably somewhat more left-wing than the general population, but it isn’t overwhelmingly left-wing like in the West. There is a great Xitter thread about the many right-wing statements of famous Japanese Mangakas and game designers. I don’t recommend that people go to school for media creation, because I think it is usually not worth the money you put into it. But I do hope nonetheless that people on the right who are truly passionate about art get into that area. Most right-wing artists I know are either not based in America, or they make money from doing solo work and commissions. It’s not a bad gig, but these people don’t have the time or individual resources to draw (let alone animate) entire stories in a timely manner. It’s not so much that we need a “conservative comic book”, it’s just that we need media that isn’t political and doesn’t care about being “politically correct”. Probably most importantly is that we need media that isn’t afraid of caring about aesthetics, including physiognomy. It’s a very important part of creating a story, because you don’t really get to spend that much time with these characters. You always see them from a fixed perspective. Their appearance has to do some heavy-lifting for creating the “vibe” of their character.

I think Japan makes better animation and comics than America, but I also think that some people are anti-Capeshit to a fault. Everyone loves to hate on the MCU now, but when you actually press them on it most people will admit that there were some good Marvel movies. Iron Man is a great movie. Guardians of the Galaxy I and II are both very good as standalone movies. Infinity War was really fun when it came out, but it was only good before Endgame came out. In the theater, my expectations were subverted, but when I left and I found out there was a sequel planned, I realized it was just a stupid cliffhanger and the next one would magically reverse everything and the day would be saved. And lo and behold, I was right. Endgame is an incredibly boring movie, and it’s much worse watching it a second time because you realize just how stupid a lot of the Marvelisms were. When I think of it I think of that stupid scene where Tony Stark is fucking around with the CGI hologram, messing around with surfaces, and then he’s like “Welp, I just invented Time Travel!”. Like, that is so fucking dumb. And what is up with the Thanos stuff? I’m sure one of the 6 billion comics has done it, but you can’t use the stones to destroy the stones. They’re reference objects for everything else in the universe. Like the Triforce in Zelda. I guess the logic is that he just “reduced them to atoms” but they still exist, which begs the question of how much stone you need to operate the Infinity Gauntlet. Also, the Infinity Stones canonically don’t work in other universes, and according to the movie an alternate universe is created every time they time travel.

The deaths in Endgame were already spoiled by the very public end of certain big actors’ contracts, and that really killed the MCU. Also, nobody cared about it anymore. They found the blockbuster formula and exploited it so hard that people don’t fall for it anymore. But I don’t think this is a good thing. Instead of returning to a pre-Avengers movie state, movies have gotten profoundly worse in the post-marvel era. There aren’t really any big flashy CGI-heavy movies anymore, but SFX are expensive so they don’t do those either. Instead, movies are all about character interaction now. This probably also appeals to an aging audience, which no longer sees itself in the young stars of action and adventure movies. When CGI is used, it’s often worse than it was a decade ago. All of the good actors are old, and all of the young actors are ugly theatre kids and DEI hires. I sometimes find myself yearning for the age of campy marvel movies every summer, because at least it was something. At least there were studios with resources. Now, it is extremely rare to see anything good come out. I am looking forward to the James Gunn Superman movie, honestly. It looks decent and I’m glad we are done with the gritty stuff, but we’ll have to wait and see.