Sunday, July 13, 2014

FIRE RICK REMENDER!






This was the war cry recently due to what people thought was statutory rape by a drunken Sam Wilson a.k.a. The Falcon in a recent issue of Captain America. This, of course, turned out to be a misconception and not true so, that reason for firing Rick Remender is unsubstantiated.
Let me give you the real reasons for firing Rick Remender. There are more than a few.
I had recently gotten back into buying monthly comics again. It had been many years and I decided since my daughters both liked comic books we would make a biweekly trek to the local comic book store. The girls and I would ransack the quarter bin and then pick out some monthly titles. One liked My Little Pony and the other was a huge Daredevil fan. I saw that a new Captain America title was starting up and then, because of The Avengers film there were about fifty eight Avengers titles. I went with Uncanny Avengers because Captain America was in it. It looked like fun.
These are both written by Rick Remender.
At first I liked both titles.  Captain America in Dimension Z reminded me of the old Jack Kirby days. It was cool. The Uncanny Avengers with its meld of Avengers and X-Men was cool.
Then a few issues went by.
Captain America was still in Dimension Z. Didn’t he have a new movie coming out soon? Wasn’t it getting tiresome? Yeah, it was. And then when he did leave Remender killed Sharon Carter (Again???) and the kid that Cap had raised for years. And, since it was a pocket dimension no time had passed in the Marvel Universe. Another aspect was just the amount of torture Captain America was put through in each issue. Beaten, stabbed, brutalized issue after issue. It became numbing and I just dropped the title. I wanted nothing to do with Cap’s return to the real world, or at the very least, Marvel Universe. This was not my Captain America.
Uncanny Avengers wasn’t faring much better. It seems that Mr. Remender is only capable of long form, event stories. Sometimes those are fun. All the time, they are not.  And, after I dropped the title he apparently slaughtered a bunch of super heroes. It’s Marvel, they make a lot of money off of their heroes. We know that none of these deaths are permanent. If Frank Miller couldn’t keep Elektra dead, Rick Remender sure isn’t going to keep any of the Avengers six feet under.
I traded up for the infinitely better Avengers A.I. Of course, they cancelled that titles and I did buy The Uncanny Avengers Annual, but that was terrible. I got excited when I saw Man-Thing on the cover. Yeah, why did I think Remender would know how to write Man-Thing? Beats me.
 And the new twist in Captain America is that they sucked the super soldier formula out of him and he’s an old man. Yeah, this has been done. Steve Rogers still needs to be Captain America for two more Avengers movies and one more solo film. Do you think the money men at Disney are going to let this stick? If you don’t know how to realistically tell stories within the context of someone else’s sandbox, maybe you should go find something else to do. I hear Remender has an independent book of his own. Maybe he could do that instead of ruining characters that I have decades of history with. Writers and artists have managed to tell stories about Captain America that are funny, smart, exciting and done in one that don’t feel the necessity to shake things up.

So, fire Rick Remender? Absolutely, but not for some stupid, trumped up internet frenzy. Do it because he is terrible at his job.

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