andersonh1 wrote:The idea that you need to be hand-held, led to a dead body and graphically shown it to be dead and INCAPABLE OF EVER GETTING BETTER is a symptom of the problem that comic books have created, it is precisely because you are familiar with their cheap ripoff tricks that you must require proof beyond proof that a character is permanently dead in that medium, where any other media is allowed to show a chain of events that clearly leads to a character's death without graphically showing the murder and after-effects of the murder.
Very true. Which is one reason that you shouldn't assume that Thundercracker died in that sequence. You should know better than that.
Hence comic books have conditioned readers to expect cheating, and that's a failing of the medium, which was my argument to begin with.
Here's a question: suppose Ongoing #4 was written by McCarthy rather than Costa, and was actually AHM #20, assuming the numbering continued from the Coda issues. And we get the exact same story of how Thundercracker was shot down but survived. Would you consider it a retcon, or a cheat? Wouldn't it be a case of leaving a character's fate hanging, only to reveal it later on down the line? I've seen television episodes and movies that pull that same trick, some of which were written by different writers in the case of tv series. It's a dramatic device.
If he had preplanned it? That would be a cheat and shitty writing on the part of AHM 12 by putting too fine a point on the moment, making too clear an implication of execution through character motivations and actions. If he didn't preplan it, that's a retcon and a cheat and shitty writing on the part of Ongoing 4/AHM 20 for being a cheat and a retcon.
Shockwave wrote:JediTricks wrote:maybe the Starship Enterprise came back in time and beamed Thundercracker up to the TARDIS, aboard the Death Star where Harry Potter and Twilight Sparkle magically repaired him.
And then the Blue Fairy turned Thundercracker into a real boy.
Sparky wrote:Let me illustrate another example... I was watching "I, Robot" the other day that happens to have a somewhat similar scene. There is this scene were Sonny (the robot) is ordered to be destroyed for killing someone. Calvin (a scientist who works at the company that makes the robots) sets up the procedure, while the scene shifts back and forth between her and Spooner investigating an old robot storage facility. Finally Calvin applies the nanites that destroys the robots positronic brain. Little later however, we find out Calvin had actually switched Sonny with another NS-5 robot off screen, in order to fake Sonny's destruction. We're meant to think he's dead, just as everyone in the narrative does, but SURPRISE! he's not and returns to help save the day.
Or haven't you ever seen shows where a character will get a gun pointed at their face, you think they're about to get shot in the face then go to commercial? And once they come back from the commercial somehow the person who has the gun pointed at them is able to wrestle the gun away. Pretty sure practically every crime drama does something like that at some point.
Once again, this is a common narrative trick intended to make the audience think one event happened while something else actually happens within reason of those same events. It's not something conditioned by the comics industry at all.
This is a bad example Sparky. Not only are you citing horrible writing, but you forgot to FIRE the gun in the character's face right before it went to commercial, and your argument says that AHM 12 should have "come back from commercial" showing the character alive. But it didn't, the AHM story and its coda never had Thundercracker show up after those events. You may as well be arguing that the end of Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid is vague, or Thelma & Louise. If Casino had ended without showing Sam Rothstein surviving that carbomb, that'd be pretty damned shoddy storytelling. Did Cyclops survive X-Men 3 by your logic? What about Isla in Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade? We only see her fall, not die, and then we don't see her again.
I'm not actively convoluting anything here. We don't see Thundercracker when Skywarp fires his weapon, and as such we don't see what actually happens to Thundercracker in that scene. And then we find out Thundercracker did in fact survive just 4 issues into the Ongoing. The simplest explanation for Occam's Razor, given that evidence from the comic itself, is that they moved somewhat between panels. If anything, that's less convoluted than your trying to brush it off as "artist interpretation", or that Thundercracker's head was taken clean off, to which we have no evidence in the comic itself to support those claims.
That's not the simplest explanation of anything. "He moved and we just weren't shown it", how does that even sound simple to you? Because you've predetermined the outcome, I guess. But for the actual on-the-page content, nothing leads you to believe that or leads you down that path, the 4th panel shows a giant blast and no Thundercracker but that in itself doesn't say anything, the context still implies he was shot, Skywarp was executing him. If you choose to accept ambiguity as to whether Thundercracker was disintegrated by the blast or had been knocked backward, that would be consistent with the context and thus the simplest explanation. That he survived is a stretch, and that he wasn't hit at all is a stretch, so you have to back-write this "he moved" thing to justify it, and that becomes NOT the simplest explanation.
Dom wrote:But, readers reward bad behavior. I personally know readers who will actually say something to the effect of "it was aweseom when they killed off __________, and I cannot wait for them to bring _________ back." The cliche is what they want.
It is hard to blame publishers for playing to that.
I'm still going to argue that the publishers started this by making comic book death such a joke, they started the expectations that the fanboys eventually ran with.
It is actually a problem with Costa's run with the ongoing, not with McCarthy's "All Hail Megatron". (Just a clarification)
Yes, I agree that you're right. Unless you believe as Sparky and Anderson do, then that's wrong.
It is only a cheat if the author is back-writing to undo something that was never meant to be undone. In this case, Costa killed off Ironhide specifically to allow himself to bring back Ironhide. The "Ironhide" mini series was being advertised immediately after, if not simultaneously to, Ironhide's death in the comics. Costa did not have to back-write over his own stuff to make that work.
I don't know the content at all, but from what it sounds like, bringing back a dead character is akin to a miracle and miracles in fiction are cheats in my book. Because TFs have a "spark" that is more than just a hard drive copy, it's sticking to the "miracle cheat" thing for me.
It is similar to "Final Crisis". Anybody who says that Batman died in "Final Crisis" did not read the book. Morrison wrote Batman's apparent death knowing full well how he was going to reveal it as a hoax. He even went so far as to plant a few clues in story *and* to show Bruce Wayne alive and well towards the end of "Final Crisis".
I didn't read Final Crisis, COIE ruined DC in that way for me, I know better and don't partake anymore in big events. But I have read the wiki plot stuff and even there they mentioned those clues. Still a cheat, although in this case using faux-sci-fi as the cheat.
And here's a new slant on that question, if that level of violence won't kill a Transformer, why the fuck do they bother with lesser weapons in wartime? Why have they built proportionally large arms that still aren't enough to have a reasonable chance of stopping their enemies? Is the real reason the Autobot/Decepticon war lasted millions of years because they were too stupid to build more effective arms?
"Transformers are morons" was a theme in Costa's run actually.
That is fucking lame, there really should be more thought put into these things if they're going to start down those paths.
Anyway, fun's over, I'm off to visit my mom and step-dad in the hospital.
Clearly my views have changed over the past few years.
You likely originally thought that because that's what the context told you, and reasonably so, it's a clear chain of events whether or not you see the resulting wound. It's only the trope of the comic book retcon which causes one to second-guess these things down the road. If this was a theatrical play where that scene was played out, the stage went black, a gun was fired, and then no other scenes showed the victim in that scene, there'd be no question in your mind what happened; but comic books are dishonest in that way, I think.