Irredeemable by Mark Waid

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Irredeemable by Mark Waid

Post by une »

Has anyone else been reading this comic? If you haven't, here is a link to the wikipedia article on the series.

I've really been enjoying this series. It's been a great deconstruction of the Superman mythos and I'm curious to see where Mark Waid goes from here. I especially enjoy the way that the series has, up to this point at least, been composed of stand alone stories. There are, of course, sub plots and such that tie everything together, but the three issues I've read thus far have all been complete stories on their own. A welcome change from the decompressed stories that dominate the market now.

At three issues, it might be a little bit early to name a favorite issue, but #2 has been my favorite so far. It was an interesting examination of the Superman/Lois Lane dynamic.

Issue #4 just hit the stands this week and although I haven't read it yet, I hear it's pretty good.

Anyone else a fan? Anyone else have any opinions on this comic?
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Re: Irredeemable by Mark Waid

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Sounds like it could be good. I'll have to give it a try when they put it out in a collected form.

It reminded me that Waid was responsible for Empire which was essentially a book about a super villain who didn't
fuck up his plans for world conquest. At least not completely. There were some unexpected hiccoughs along the way. :)


I also like Garth Ennis' The Boys because it's an interesting take on what if "superheroes" were pretty much like everyone else, in it for themselves. To have sex, make boatloads of money. Everything but really doing any heroics. It's also amusing that one of the good guys is intentionally drawn to look like Simon Pegg.
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Re: Irredeemable by Mark Waid

Post by une »

Tsyroc wrote:Sounds like it could be good. I'll have to give it a try when they put it out in a collected form.

It reminded me that Waid was responsible for Empire which was essentially a book about a super villain who didn't
fuck up his plans for world conquest. At least not completely. There were some unexpected hiccoughs along the way. :)
If you liked Empire, I would definitely recommend picking up Irredeemable. They have very similar themes and ideas, just approached from a different direction. The one thing that I think Irredeemable has over Empire though, is that Empire was intended to go on for much longer than it did. Thus, there a lot of loose plot threads and unanswered questions in Empire. Irredeemable, on the other hand, is a bit more compact. At this stage at least.

I also like Garth Ennis' The Boys because it's an interesting take on what if "superheroes" were pretty much like everyone else, in it for themselves. To have sex, make boatloads of money. Everything but really doing any heroics. It's also amusing that one of the good guys is intentionally drawn to look like Simon Pegg.
I like The Boys as well. I think it has kind of slowed down a bit in recent issues though. Have you been reading the new mini series, set in The Boys universe, Herogasm? I think the art is horrible, but it is saved by Garth Ennis' writing.
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Re: Irredeemable by Mark Waid

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I haven't read Herogasm. I'll have to keep an eye out for that one.
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Re: Irredeemable by Mark Waid

Post by 18-Till-I-Die »

I've yet to read this series, but I've heard good things from my brother, who being more of a comic whore than me (and that's a feat...) has read many more obscure books. From what I've heard it's pretty well done, the art I've seen doesn't thrill me but, say la vee (yea I spelled that wrong on purpose :P ). I asked my brother and he says it's kind of in a similar vein to Warren Ellis' Black Summer, which I have read, in that it's about a superhero who snaps and goes all Funny Games on the human race. Not a huge fan of Mark Waid, to say the least, but it still sounds like a good idea. I'm wondering, for those who have read it, are there any other superhumans on Earth besides the main character, or is he some kind of lone hero archtype like they do in most of the Marvel movies. It'd probably be interesting to see who all would have to team up against him to take him on; that was a problem I had with Black Summer, it seemed kind of weird that no one else had ever developed "Gun" (read: posthuman cybernetics) technology other than the Seven Guns, the heroes in that universe. The government had their own elite supersoldiers but it wasn't the same, you would think such technology would proliferate quickly. Seemed kind of a cop out.

I will say I'm not really sold on it mainly because of the "deconstruction" thing. Not really a fan of that concept, in any medium. It seems to me to be the fall back maneuver of the terminally unoriginal, since you're basically taking the materials someone else has created and playing Bizarro World...the good guys are bad, the bad guys are good, the cops in LA aren't racists. You know, reverse everything. Basically that's what "deconstruction" is, taking tropes and cliches and subverting them. Not my thing. But I've seen it done well before so it's not inherently a bad idea, just not one I really like in any genre. It's kind of become a cliche or trope on it's own by now though...you'd think someone would try a "reconstruction" at some point. Like start out as a deconstruction and then subvert the deconstruction cliches...the good guys are truly good, the bad guys are truly evil, cops in LA are still racists. You get the idea.
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Re: Irredeemable by Mark Waid

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18-Till-I-Die wrote:I will say I'm not really sold on it mainly because of the "deconstruction" thing. Not really a fan of that concept, in any medium. It seems to me to be the fall back maneuver of the terminally unoriginal, since you're basically taking the materials someone else has created and playing Bizarro World...the good guys are bad, the bad guys are good, the cops in LA aren't racists. You know, reverse everything. Basically that's what "deconstruction" is, taking tropes and cliches and subverting them.
Or play them as 'realistically' as possible. Neon Genesis Evangelion is a prime example of a Deconstruction of the Super Robot genre, but you have to really know your old school mecha (Mazinger, Getter Robo, etc) to get it.

Hell, NGE does it for all of Anime when it comes to the characters:

"If you were abandoned by your father soon after your mother died, wouldn't that fuck you up royal?"
"Why is that one girl so clingy and extroverted?"
"Why does this other girl drink so much and put on an air of "everything's alright"?"

Etc.
Not my thing. But I've seen it done well before so it's not inherently a bad idea, just not one I really like in any genre. It's kind of become a cliche or trope on it's own by now though...you'd think someone would try a "reconstruction" at some point. Like start out as a deconstruction and then subvert the deconstruction cliches...the good guys are truly good, the bad guys are truly evil, cops in LA are still racists. You get the idea.
Alan Moore, the guy who deconstructed comics in the first place, shares your opinion and created Tom Strong as a counterbalance.

Man those stories were fun.

But no one payed attention to any of the Reconstructive elements.
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Re: Irredeemable by Mark Waid

Post by 18-Till-I-Die »

I never read the ABC line, but yeah I heard it was supposed to be a "deconstruction of deconstructions" as my brother put it. I was kind of waved away by my genuine dislike of Alan Moore's previous works, though my brother has a few of the Tom Strong comics I may read them yet.

I think a series more in line with what I'm saying, as opposed to just deconstructing the concept of deconstruction, which is what ABC is as I understand it, would be Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.

It's an anime series made in the wake of NGE by the company that made NGE, that openly spits in NGE's face at every turn. It takes every concept NGE deconstructed and not just builds it back up, but plays them all arrow straight to the very end, no questions asked. The fact it's one of the most popular animes in years no doubt must make Hideki Anno cry bitter tears in his pillow at night. I'm kidding, but only just. :)
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Re: Irredeemable by Mark Waid

Post by Majin Gojira »

Why do you think my main complaint towards mainstream comics these days is "Needs More Gurren Lagann."

The Recent Blue Beetle and Nextwave are the only things that come even close to that.

However, since Gainax did both NGE and Gurren Lagann, I doubt Anno is cryin' to much ;).
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Re: Irredeemable by Mark Waid

Post by 18-Till-I-Die »

I actually really enjoyed the new Blue Beetle, and I thought I probably wouldn't because it came out at the same time as a lot of the more blisteringly stupid DC ventures. But it turned out to be pretty cool, and yes surprisingly upbeat considering the trend towards GRIMDARK in almost all media today.

What I think was interesting is that The Dark Knight was kind of this, only more subtle, but for movies. It starts out straight deconstruction in the genuine Watchmen vein but in the end the real moral of the movie is "Moral relativism sucks, people are genuinely good inside, and nihilists like the Joker can sit and spin".

Or more precisely:

"This city just showed you, that it's full of people ready to believe in good!" says Christian Bale through gritted teeth.
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Re: Irredeemable by Mark Waid

Post by une »

18-Till-I-Die wrote:I've yet to read this series, but I've heard good things from my brother, who being more of a comic whore than me (and that's a feat...) has read many more obscure books. From what I've heard it's pretty well done, the art I've seen doesn't thrill me but, say la vee (yea I spelled that wrong on purpose :P ). I asked my brother and he says it's kind of in a similar vein to Warren Ellis' Black Summer, which I have read, in that it's about a superhero who snaps and goes all Funny Games on the human race. Not a huge fan of Mark Waid, to say the least, but it still sounds like a good idea. I'm wondering, for those who have read it, are there any other superhumans on Earth besides the main character, or is he some kind of lone hero archtype like they do in most of the Marvel movies. It'd probably be interesting to see who all would have to team up against him to take him on; that was a problem I had with Black Summer, it seemed kind of weird that no one else had ever developed "Gun" (read: posthuman cybernetics) technology other than the Seven Guns, the heroes in that universe. The government had their own elite supersoldiers but it wasn't the same, you would think such technology would proliferate quickly. Seemed kind of a cop out.
Plutonian, that's the name of the Superman like character, isn't the only super powered character in the book. He's just the first and the most powerful. Spoiler
As part of his rampage the Plutonian has been killing other super-heroes. The story is told from the perspective of the remaining super heroes who are trying to stop the Plutonian and piece together what drove him crazy in the first place.
I didn't like that aspect of Black Summer as well. That's part of why I thought of Black Summer as quite a let down.
I will say I'm not really sold on it mainly because of the "deconstruction" thing. Not really a fan of that concept, in any medium. It seems to me to be the fall back maneuver of the terminally unoriginal, since you're basically taking the materials someone else has created and playing Bizarro World...the good guys are bad, the bad guys are good, the cops in LA aren't racists. You know, reverse everything. Basically that's what "deconstruction" is, taking tropes and cliches and subverting them. Not my thing. But I've seen it done well before so it's not inherently a bad idea, just not one I really like in any genre. It's kind of become a cliche or trope on it's own by now though...you'd think someone would try a "reconstruction" at some point. Like start out as a deconstruction and then subvert the deconstruction cliches...the good guys are truly good, the bad guys are truly evil, cops in LA are still racists. You get the idea.
I can see what you're saying. If you're not into deconstructions then this might not be the book for you. Because it is just a very good deconstruction of the Superman mythos.
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Re: Irredeemable by Mark Waid

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Hope it's not unacceptable necro-posting but the series is ending this month. Anyone still reading?
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Re: Irredeemable by Mark Waid

Post by Lonestar »

I've been reading the TPB.

To be honest I prefer Incorruptable more.
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Re: Irredeemable by Mark Waid

Post by Tsyroc »

Lonestar wrote:I've been reading the TPB.

To be honest I prefer Incorruptable more.

I've been reading this and Incorruptable. I did not know that Irredeemable was coming to an end, but then I've also been reading the TPB.


Another book I've been reading, The Boys is supposed to be ending fairly soon too IIRC.
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Re: Irredeemable by Mark Waid

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I've heard that Astro City is a big Reconstruction after things like Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns were Deconstructions of superheroes.
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Re: Irredeemable by Mark Waid

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I'm sorry. What does that even mean?
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Re: Irredeemable by Mark Waid

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I will be going through incorruptible next.

Thoughts on irredeemable -- overall I love the concept but I think it probably should have wrapped up a while back, pretty much before the whole Vespa thing.

The biggest question I have is with Tony's psychology. I know the premise is "what if superman wasn't up to the job emotionally?" That part makes perfect sense. The boy scout persona is a fraud. He's saying all the right things because he knows that's what's expected of him. He's got all these hero fantasies and both wants the love of people and hates them for not only what he suspects they think but what he knows they say. You're not paranoid when you know what people are saying behind your back.

His whole rampage is a giant murder-suicide. A father loves his wife and family and yet will kill them before he kills himself. But given his super status, it goes on and on.

He's delighting in the cruelty. He's showing humor, creativity, and joker-style whimsy. Killing someone to protect a secret in an act that destroys him inside, that's one thing. Gleefully torturing someone to death is quite another.

I think what makes the extended telling get a little weak is the cycle of humanizing him and then having a moment of bastardry. The "he just wants to be held" angle played against glee-kills is hard to reconcile.

While I really like the Qubit character, I wonder I'd he might have the idiot ball in his back pocket the whole time. There comes a certain point at which you can't rehabilitate someone who's gone rogue. You may not be happy about it but you must kill him and kill him quickly, before more people die.

Overall, I feel like the first two trades really kept up the wham wham wham effect with revelations and action coming one after the other. The issues after that meandered into bringing in new material tangential to the main theme of the series and not in a way that enhanced the experience.

His series Empire was shorter and I think benefited from brevity. But that's the question in all storytelling, isn't it? How big is your idea? Is it a short story, a novella, novel, twenty book series? How do you differentiate a delightful digression from needless padding? How do you tell perfectly succinct from rushed? It's a toughie.
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Re: Irredeemable by Mark Waid

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Crazedwraith wrote:I'm sorry. What does that even mean?
Ah, okay. Deconstruction is basically taking a body of work, in this case superheroes, and showing why it wouldn't work. Superheroes would be crazy people in real life, or they would have to deal with the worst that the world has to offer, or they would lose and terrible things would happen. It literally means, to take something apart. And that's why works such as Watchmen are so great, they show us why superheroes would be a bad thing in the real world.

But Reconstruction, the putting the thing back together, is the step after deconstruction. We like superheroes, and we know that there are problems with the general idea, so let's acknowledge that and make this realistic, but still keep the fun of the fantasy of people in tights and capes fighting crime.

As an example, Kick-Ass, the comic book, is a blatant deconstruction of how superheroes would be in the real world, of how dangerous it would be, of how much pain you would get, while the movie deconstructs things about superheroes, while also keeping in the things we love about them and showing how we like the idea of good triumphing over evil, or a teenager becoming a superhero, or watching a bunch of mafia people getting their crap kicked in by a teen sidekick.

For another example, think of the Alex Ross work Justice. It's basically the Superfriends, which starts off showing all the flaws in the premise of the work, how the saving of the world could go, what superpowered people could do to help the world by having the villains do it, and then we see that's it's a scheme by the villains, why superpowered team-ups are great, why superpowered people can't do everything, and we go into the superheroes vs the supervillains, just like in the old Superfriends cartoon.

For a non-comic book example, look at the Scream movies. Throughout the entire series, it pokes fun at all the problems of slasher movies. Why do the women always go up the stairs instead of leaving the house? Why is it that the virgin is the one who lives? Why don't they call the cops? etc. But it shows why we love slasher movies. We have interesting characters who we love to watch, so we don't want to see them die. We see plenty of humor, so when the horror strikes, it strikes well. When we do come down to the final girl, we are invested enough in her character that we do hope to see her win, as her story has been driving the plot of the whole movie.

So, while deconstruction is the ripping apart or parodying of what's wrong with a genre or story, Reconstruction is the putting it back together new and improved.
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Re: Irredeemable by Mark Waid

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This is... kind of a TVTropes version of "deconstruction." More generally, from what I understand, "deconstruction" is a pulling-apart of ideas, an overturning of hierarchy and pithy sayings. In short, make the world and the language in which it is described out to be immensely complicated, show all the ambiguities and gray areas and irony and silliness and conflicting interpretations of what's going on behind the scenes.

Is Superman really a big blue boy scout? Or is he a deeply disturbed man who's acting like one because that's what everyone expects? How does having the power to do anything he wants impact a person who has the normal range of desires for friendship, romance, and creature comforts?

It's not that this is "what's wrong" with the genre as such. It's that a normal Superman story is about something, about Superman doing something, not about who Superman is. Most other stories are much the same- the hidden questions are hidden precisely because the story isn't about them.
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Re: Irredeemable by Mark Waid

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The very thing about deconstruction is everybody has their own idea of what it means.

Eastwood's Unforgiven is considered a Western deconstruction because the fantasy world of the man with no name is rendered realistically. It's different from just making things grimdark. He wanted to deflate the myth of the man with no name. Likewise, one could argue Goodfellas was deflating the honor among thieves bit with the mafia.

I would tend to say deconstruction is pretty much the only way to keep a tired genre interesting and reconstruction happens after the navel gazing gets old. And then you have a fresh generation of readers coming along and everything old is new. You complain about the grimdark 90's and people call you pops.
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Re: Irredeemable by Mark Waid

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What I have to wonder? What set him really off the deep-end?
Spoiler
His fiancee being a bitch about his secret identity being revealed, those kids in that city becoming undead-ish because of that Tech-Company screwing around with that device he gave them as a goodwill gesture....or his Biggest Fan finding out about it?
I mean, I guess there was also a lot of going from foster-home-to-foster-home because he kept screwing up with his powers in some way shape or form like the Spoiler
retarded foster-brother he accidently squeezed too hard, and the mother who kept getting abused by her husband and suicided herself because her foster-son was a uebermensch freak.
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Re: Irredeemable by Mark Waid

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It's sort of the same psych problem Dexter has, explaining motivation. Someone incapable of feeling emotions respects his father enough to flow his code after death. Really? Isn't respect an emotion?

Sometimes crazy is crazy and you can't explain how someone behaves. But the Plutonian at this point is a high-functioning psychopath. Now he does feel negative emotions but lacks empathy. He's faking all the good bits. He's a good study and can put on an excellent act. I wonder if at this point he's just plain crazy so that it's really impossible to try to psychoanalyze his behavior.

There is also that concentration camp guard mentality where family and friends can be loved properly and with genuine emotion but the prison victims are dehumanized to the point where empathy is impossible. Oh, I could never hurt a German child or my dog. I love them so much. Chuck this Jewish kid in the oven. I think the ability to compartmentalize so perfectly is far scarier than your usual complete monster omnicidal psycho.
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Re: Irredeemable by Mark Waid

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Yeah, I've seen all this discussed online- best bet is that there's never just one thing.
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Re: Irredeemable by Mark Waid

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I don't really frequent comic sites. Didn't find any discussions with a google search. I find the premise of the series so ripe with potential.
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Re: Irredeemable by Mark Waid

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jollyreaper wrote:It's sort of the same psych problem Dexter has, explaining motivation. Someone incapable of feeling emotions respects his father enough to flow his code after death. Really? Isn't respect an emotion?
Is it? To pursue your analogy, does Dexter follow the Code because of emotional ties to Harry, or because he rationally observed and accepted that Harry (at the time) knew way more about this shit than he did and that (as Harry explicitly stated) he has a better chance to pursue the self-serving goal of killing without going to prison if he obeys it?

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Re: Irredeemable by Mark Waid

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I would have to rewatch for specific dialogue. I think Dexter himself could be an unreliable narrator. He tells us things about himself that don't seem to be supported by his actions and I don't think this is just inconsistent writing. He seems to care about his sister and not exactly as one would value a possession. And we are used to seeing this sort of thing in psychos. Territorialism isn't the same thing as empathic love even though going after the girlfriend of the good guy and bad guy gets you an angry boyfriend coming after you.
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