Daddy, Deadest, Dearest: Why Pa Kent is so Unimportant

The next super dad

After a few weeks of no one really caring, Kevin Costner has signed on to play the father of Clark Kent in the upcoming franchise reboot Superman: Man of Steel.  Most Superman fans recognize Jonathan Kent as the old guy in whose house Superman grew up in, but hardcore critics consider the guy to be a the flaming torch of American masculinity who guided a super powered alien into a blue unitard and a retarded cover story.

wholesome=boring

In the past Pa Kent has stood somewhere between Wilford Brimley and Paul Newman, old enough to give you stale advice and creepily virile, dropping hints that when you left he was going to be ploughing Martha’s field. The Kents showed Clark that even though he could drive a person into the ground like a rail road spike it didn’t mean that had to. Jonathan and Martha were supposed to be the only thing that stood between humanity and a super powered sociopath.

Smallville's answer

Even though the casting of Costner is a little awkward it does give away a lot about the direction the movie is likely to go in. Costner will likely be taking a prominent role meaning the film it is either going to be a long and diluted biopic, that will eat up time like a slow cancer (two hours of Smallville) or we will see superman dealing with his dark side.

But for every Jonathan Kent there is a super dad that accidentally or intentionally or callously turns their child into a walking ball of murder and discontent. So here is a list of characters that are much more relevant to the comic book narrative than the stale Mr. Kent and reasons why his story is barely worth telling.

Odin

Odin, Thor and Loki’s father, was locked into screwing up his kids from the beginning. First of all Thor is a planned bastard, the product of Odin and Gaea. The plan was for the boy to be as tough as his parents on both earth and Asgard, but when he looked at the kid Odin knew the little omnipotent crumb snatcher would be a problem. 

So to balance things out he beat the giant Laufey to death and “adopted” his runt son Loki to even out the crazy in Thor, meaning that for every problem he tried to fix Odin made another one that was shit tons worse. This one eyed old man’s timing sucked. When his son stepped out of line he would repo all Thor’s powers, usually when some super powered jackass had his foot on the thunder god’s neck.

John Custer

Easily one of the biggest bad asses in the bunch is the father of a preacher man. John Custer’s dad fought in the pacific theater so when John was old enough he enlisted and landed “in the shit” of the Vietnam War. While he was there he smoked some weed, tried not to get killed, blew up a corrupt commander in a latrine, and carried his wounded friend over 10 miles through enemy territory, getting himself blown up and winning the medal of honor.

When he got back to the States his future wife spit in his face before calling John a baby killer. He charmed her with blank silence she apologized and they fell in love. They married and later Jesse “The Preacher” Custer was born. John taught his son to be kind to those who deserved it, respect women, love John Wayne, and never to give up when you have to make a point.

Later, his wife’s twisted relatives kidnapped John Custer and his family beating him neither to death, sparing his life only when they found out he was Jesse’s father. The relatives tried to brain-wash the Custer family, but John waited and made a doomed escape attempt and just before he was shot in the head he told his son, "You gotta be a good guy, Jesse. You gotta be like John Wayne: you don't take no shit off fools, an' you judge people by what's in 'em, not how they look. An' you do the right thing. You gotta be one of the good guys, son, 'cause there's way too many of the bad." 

Howard Stark

Howard Stark is the type of rich dad that turns a trust fund into a noose. The elder Stark was basically Tony Stark-boring. An alcoholic over compensator who developed massive stock piles of weapons that came back to bite the entire free world in its collective ass. He rode his son like moped with a bullet hole in the gas tank, and essentially fed into the future Iron man’s stupefying narcissism.

The worst of the relationship started when Tony turned out to be smarter than his father, but much more prone to not giving a crap. Howard decided to continue grilling his son while making money off of the killing machines the younger Stark’s genius mind produced.

The Hulk   

The Hulk is an example that shit parenting has a way of spreading. After being beaten like Kanye West at a Toby Keith concert for years, along with his mother, the young genius Bruce banner lost it and retreated and as a defense mechanism created alternate personalities, one of which was the Hulk.

Well eventually, after the earth had had enough of the hulk bulldozing things and a group of heroes launched him into space. The Hulk landed on a planet as violent as he was, met a nice queen and fathered two of the most destructive beings Marvel had ever seen.

What happened with Hiro-Kala and Skaar is pretty much an example of what you get when daddy isn’t around. The longer The Hulk was out of their lives the more the universe suffered.

Hiro-Kala destroyed his home planet, poisoned a galaxy, drove Galactus insane, and went about murdering worlds to send his father a message. Skaar who was a little less malicious, butchered his way to earth nearly crippling the Silver Surfer and being one of the few folks in the universe to spit in the face of creation. When Skaar finally hit terra firma he levelled the place until his father showed up and tried to kill him.

Not that Banner/ Hulk was absentee father of the year. When her found out Skaar was on earth and his kid, he resigned himself to the fact that he might have to kill the boy.

Brian Banner

But Brian Banner, Bruce Banner’s father, was an old fashion model of mean, who routinely tried to beat the monster out of the child he never wanted. He was the cause of the crazy which created the Hulk, making him one of the most destructive men in Marvel history by proxy.

He killed his wife when she tried to stop his “correction” of little Bruce. When Brian found his son at his mother’s grave the older banner started a fight that ended getting his neck broken on his murdered wife’s tombstone, the first step in Bruce growing as a person.

Wolverine 

Wolverine would have probably been a decent father if he hadn’t been screwed by fate so frequently. The first kid (Daken) was supposed to have been murdered in Japan. In response this tragedy Wolverine did what any good father would have done, slipped into psychotic catatonia and murder his way out of Japan. The second kid was a clone daughter (X-23), built with a homicide trigger who Logan didn’t meet until she was about 17.

                                                                           

Both of the kids were used like weapons, Daken was turned precise assassin, while his “sister” X-23 was more like a hand-grenade. Wolverine stepped in, and in both cases and tried to talk/beat the killer out of his kids to varying degrees of success. X-23 was trained past being just a killer and joined the X-men, while Daken decided to focus on killing people who deserved it, namely anyone who crossed him.

Thomas Logan 

Even though we never heard about the guy until recently Thomas Logan is the archetype for all the shitty things a father can do to his children over the course of a half life time. Thomas spent the latter years of his life drinking and beating his first son Dog at regular intervals out of drunken boredom. His second son James Howlett (Wolverine) was generally ignored by him because the boy was the result of an affair Thomas had with Elizabeth Howlett, and lived on a large estate being raised as John Howlett’s son. But after years of feeling slighted Thomas forced Dog to help him rob the Howlett house, murdering the only decent father figure Wolverine ever knew. A few seconds later when the young boy that would be an X-man slipped into his first blind rage, Thomas Logan became the first person Wolverine ever killed.  

Thomas Wayne

Thomas Wayne is probably the best argument for money not ruining people, and proof that all other characters who have let cash wreck their kids are just bastards. He was supportive, doting, and before he died catching bullets with his chest to protect his son, he made enough money to finance the Batman.

Magneto      

Even if you think that the master of magnetism has gotten a raw deal on the sliding scale of good to evil he is still an awkward fit as a daddy under the best cases and a neglectful ass in most others. For the past few years he has manipulated his son Quicksilver into leading a terrorist group on at least two occasions, and then ducked out on the job whenever he felt itchy and leaving poor Quicksilver holding the bag. 

In an effort to reclaim his relationship with his daughter The Scarlett Witch, Magneto decided to use her as a living nuke, sabotaging  her marriage and perhaps causing not only to the deaths of his own grandchildren but the near eradication of mutant kind.

Professor X                 

In the worst case continuity irony Marvel’s greatest father figure has managed to develop one of the worst paternal relationships in Marvel history. His son Legion was genetically predisposed to insanity thanks to his mother own mental illness. So as a consequence one of the most powerful mutants in the world was born bat-shit crazy.

Legion's mother neglected to tell Xavier about his son until the boy had began his own crusade against mutant oppression...I mean until he started murdering random people. At first Professor X tried to get the young man under control until he realized it was best if Legion just stayed in a coma of Xavier’s design.

So looking at this list should help you realize how irrelevant and unimportant Jonathan Kent really is, Just like Waterworld, and how focusing attention undermines Superman. Other characters either had a paternal figure with more blood on his hands than Genghis khan or a plan to eventually give their offspring a dirt nap for the greater good. If they were “lucky” their parent died before they were old enough to have their first wet dream. Considering this odds watching Jonathan Kent will feel like slow brain rot.

Aquaman Lives Again!: Useless Superpowers and pointless resurrections

I'm sick to death of DC's prick tease death sentences because I finally felt like I put Aquaman behind me. He was the ex- that tried to have sex with my best friend on my bed just so we could talk on the phone. A character that defies all levels of likability, power and anything like allegorical relevance. Aquaman as a character is the appendix of the DC universe and it looked like they had finally had the appendectomy.

Then one day I was looking for some back copies of The Walking Dead when I traipsed passed the spandex section of my new favorite comic book store and there he was. Well FU very much DC for opening old wounds!

Well, DC, if the reasons you are resurrecting skid marks like Arthur  Curry to fill your roster is because you're out of ideas, here is a list of abilities you can use to draft some new talent.

1)Facial follicle Telekinesis

2)Mineral ingestion

3)Oral defecation

4)Gravy sweat

5)Turning speech into white noise

6)Blinking genitals

7)Eyes on your balls

8)Eyes on your feet

9)Three extra annoying copies of your own personality

10)Mouth siren

11)Everything you touch turns to poop

12)Turning your tongue into rock salt

13)Turning you skin into paper

14)Highlighter flesh

15)The inability to get drunk

16)Being burned by any liquid

17)Growing ridiculous eye lashes

18)Sporadic vomitus

19)Summoning a swarm of bees that only attack you

20)Farting out you nose

Williinham and Whedon's Angel: Twilight begone!

There's not much that can't be done with a vampire lately. Thanks to Joss Whedon they won't all be stories about glow worm pretty boys. Before Twilight the gaming shops and comic book stores were divided into three categories of fang fandom: Whedon Fan's, Buffy Fans, and angry fan boys who hated having their asexual sanctuaries invaded by troublesome oestrogen. But the hardcore fans recognized quality. They saw Fire-fly, some lost their virginity and others decided that having girls in the fort was an okay thing.

Recently, Bill Willingham has stepped into write the next story-arc for the broody avenger. Before starting his work on Angel Willingham distorted folklore with Fables. Willingham turned things around for those who were frustrated with Civil War or kind of let down when Bruce Wayne bit it. Whedon's arc opens with Angel missing and the members of Team Angel dealing with the absence. Connor has become the demon messiah , Spike is annoyed because no one is talking about him, Illyria is annoyed because everyone is talking, Gunn is washing the blood off his hands, and everyone in LA is trying too star f**k their way into the back story.

Even though the Cast of angel may be more distilled than what Willingham is used to working with, he manages to take the Angelverse into familiar places: a vampire that can't make relationships work, while reminding us that you can't trust anyone when you keep jumping in and out of hell and half the people you know have died twice.

Willingham is reinventing the broody, abusive, undead teen heart throb with an actual plot. After reading several issues I can say that Stephanie Meyers is a cultural bowel obstruction to the vampire mythos. A big ball of waxy hair clogging up the works. Willingham is our pepto-bismal.

Sam Rami drags Alison Lohman to Hell!! YAY

Drag Me to Hell is a movie that comes to the public and gives them what they want to see when they need it, even if they don't know. Citizen Cane let America simultaneously envy and pity a rich tycoon during the end of the great depression and and the beginning of WWII, Rocky 4 made gave us a Microcosm of the cold war just as silly and costly as the real thing, and Soul Plane prepared black America for the depression, disgust, and devastation that would come with Hurricane Katrina. This film is all about finance in terms of both story and in terms of production. It was written well before Rami made his three spider man films which the untainted mainstream film fans will think of when the here his name. Rami wanted to make the film earlier but couldn't afford the director he wanted and ended up having to wait to see the film completed. The film gets pretty physical with bodies flung across the ceiling and possessed zombie puppets.

The plot revolves around a desperate bank employ trying to make her bones on a Gypsy at a time when the world hates bankers much more than Gypsies. An this film is a s messy as we would hope any thing from Rami could be. If you ever seen Evil Dead, Evil Dead 2, or Army of Darkness then you've been suffer for the last 17 years for fly witches spew slime and and guts from every orifice like decapitated sprinklers and cryptic and eerily accurate references to gypsy folklore that made the Roma scary even to the Nazi's thought they had to go. Alison Lohman is believe as the amiable but self centered loan officer. She gives you someone to route for while Rami pummels with glass blizzards and rancid old lady sputum. Lohman's torture is tinged with Schadenfreude as the world spins out of control due to the economic hell-storm caused by bankers like her character so seeing one thrown through a window or hunted by hell beast is more than cathartic. The effects were adequate but I expected more from the man who created the invisible hollowing forest demon from saga. But then can any thing really hope to stand up to a beast so horrifying that it permanently chiseled an WTF look on Bruce Campbell's face? There are three lessons you can take away from Drag Me To Hell; one: in movies gypsies are hot when they're young and beat when they're old, two: old people are not to be trusted, and three: bankers can sometimes get what they deserve if you know magic. Learn magic!

Best Line of the movie: "Did it get in my mouth?"

8 Movies to Die: Vocies (Someone behind you) : Crazy Korean Style

Someone Behind You mixes paranoia and the supernatural into a collection murderous instances from stabbings to homicidal arson. Poor Ka-in can't even make it through the an afternoon without a classmate clubbing each other to death over a boyfriend or a cousin bouncing off the pavement from two stories above he head. Someone Behind You mixes paranoia and the supernatural into a collection murderous instances that blaze from stabbings to homicidal arson. Poor Ga-in can't even make it through the afternoon without a classmate clubbing each other to death over a boyfriend or a cousin bouncing off the pavement from two stories above he head. Park Ki Woong is the source of all the mayhem, he's the little voices that says “You know your brother really likes your car...you should hit him with it.” as a creepy strange presence that undulates through out scenes in the movie like jaws with an awesome hair cut.

Horrorfest III: The Broken: Long Cracked and Bloody

Has anyone told you they've seen someone who looked like you walking down the street, or that you look like the parking attendant or someone famous? Well congratulations you're fucking doomed! The Doppelganger concept is nothing new. Two weeks before he was shot Abraham Lincoln was rumored to have seen his own shifty shadow riding a horse past his home. It was reported that John Donne saw his wife double in Paris on the night of his daughter's stillbirth. Then there was the creepy, but under appreciated Keifer Sutherland film Mirrors. The Broken tries to explain the idea of a ominous double without explain anything at all. This Stephen Ellis film is as sneaky as the innocuous back rub which morphs into accidental groping then into a full blown tongue knotting, that mutates into the awkward buddy hump; this movie has its hand down your pants before you realize that you've had too much to drink. Only problem is it's just too long. The climax, while explosive and messy, just doesn't measure up. If you want blood look to the rest of the the movies in the Horrorfest III collection. The movie is a tease at first, with heavy shadowed black and blues for ominous hallway scenes and black and burnished brown-reds to highlight the feeling of home and hearth during the pivotal birthday scene; a scene filled with the kind of chit chat that leaves you hoping the pay off will be immediate and gruesome. There are tons of moments like this but the ambiguity works...sort of. The inclusion of The Broken in Horrorfest is like hiring Uma Thurman to work at a meat packing plant: she comes in with really good intentions but eventually she'll just look like a model covered in entrails. The plot revolves around the events that occur after a car crash where the main character finds herself unable to remember the specifics but recalls seeing herself walking down the street when the crash occurs. What follows is a good story that's convoluted but and murky. The murk helps the suspense for a while but then it just gets on your nerves. The car crash is shown about three times i n s l o w m o t i o n. There are a lot of moments of dead space and "Why the fucks" but there is a really well developed story that could work well if the idea premise was handle a little better.

Fables: The Murky World of Bill Willingham

Bill Willingham’s Fables is the type of thing the Grim Brothers would have written if they lived in the Bronx doing bong rips while watching The Daily Show on Hulu. The book is smart because it knows that Little Red Riding-hood has more to do with hymens and patriarchy than hiking safety and taxidermy.

Willingham is not afraid of dealing with messy questions like:

how a frog is supposed to handle courtly life and executing criminals.

Why a grown man make wooden boy instead of a perfectly good set of mahogany wives?

How damaged were Hansel and Gretel after they pulled each other out of the rubble of the witches house and what was her name anyway?

In Fables the hard nosed cop's troubled past involves eating people, so Willingham puts the character next to the ones that got away and the relatives of the ones that didn't. He also makes sure that Prince Charming faces the reality of his silly name, his douchey personality, and the realization that he is just a narrative tool and that his name is on the stab and neuter list of most of Fabletown's female inhabitants.


Fables is a story of immigrants so it takes place in New York. Like any thriving ethnic group the characters of Fabletown have there own borough and they want to keep the mundys out.

Willingham includes fables from Africa, India and other places outside of the European rehash we've come to accept and regurgitate. There is a constant theme of cultural atom smashing, with character's who speak four languages and bigots both fantastic and mundane.

Like Neil Gaiman and Mike Carey, Williingham has rescued our myths from the tomb of academia and the sanatoriums rectally fixated Jungian psycho therapy. The tension and the neurotic mood of the series keeps it relevant.

People forget that the wolf ate grandma, how the witch screamed as Gretel stoked the fire, how Mowgli fought to kill Shere Khan or how Bluebeard's secret room ran red with the blood of his dead wives.

In the world of Fables we mundys are the lucky ones. We can launder our legends from a distance, wash off the blood in soapy omission. But Fables can not do that and are forced to be the interesting ones the freaks. With Fables Willingham has achieved folkloric realism.