TheRedFear

@punyparker: Have you ever actually watched Whedon shows? With the exception of Firefly(Oh glorious Firefly....sigh.), all Whedon shows have had mediocre first seasons. Buffy. Angel. Dollhouse especially. In fact compared to the first seasons of any of those shows Agents is actually pretty good. It's always in the second season where Whedon shows really find their feet and take off running. Assuming all the fan-wangst doesn't kill Agents before it gets that far, it's gonna be awesome given more time.

Even if we ssume that Gotham is a magically sentient city that will somehow "punish" Batman for killing Joker(why the hell Magic Sentient Gotham never punishes Joker for mass-slaughtering thousands of it's other inhabitants we'll never know), that is comicbook logic. Batman is not Deadpool, and thus remains blissfully ignorant of the chance that comicbook writers may give him an even worse villain in direct response to his killing of Joker. Or just flippantly bring Joker back from the dead laer.

So we come back to silly notion that Batman is allowing Joker's ongoing atrocities against the citizens of Gotham City for no other reason than to deny Joker a symbolic victory.

I'm sure the widows and orphans Joker creates on a nightly basis will take great comfort in knowing that though their loved ones may be gone from their arms forever, but at least Joker didn't win symbollicaly. That knowledge will surely be of equally great comfort to whoever he tortures, maims, and kills tomorrow. Take heart, hapless victim. Your torture, terror, pain, and grisly demise are a small price to pay for the satisfaction of denying Joker his afterlife bragging rights.

This, more than anything else, is the reason I can't enjoy Batman comics anymore. Batman is every bit as responsible for Joker's victims as Joker himself is at this point.

I agree with most of what you say, but you do Cap's skill a serious disservice. Everyone acts like knowing 127 fighting styles is so awesome...somehow failing to apprecciate that so many of those styles are extremely similar to each other, to the point of being redundant. There's not that profound a difference between a Tae Kwan Do roundhouse kick, and a Karate Roundhouse Kick. So what's smarter? Spending a decade or two mastering 127 fighting styles? Or mastering the five or six fighting styles which...between them...give you all you need to defeat the other 122? that's how MMA fighters do it, and we've seen how devastatingly effective it is. It's the old Jeet Kun Do philosphy taken to it's next evolutionary progression. Use only what works. Discard the rest. Why did Bruce Lee come up with such a philosophy? Because there was alot of useless stylistic crap in most fighting styles that got in the way of the actual fighting. When it comes to fighting skill, Batman may take the edge in quantity, but Cap takes the edge in Quality. And of course, Experience.

When Batman was training in Kung Fu, Cap was putting his skill to practical application in the field of battle. Learning in the heat of combat presicely what works, and what doesn't work. When Batman was training Tae Kwan Do, Cap was putting his skill to the life and death use against Nazi zombies, killer robots and other insane crap like that. When Batman was stumbling his way through Year One and Year Two, Cap was Judo-Flipping the Hulk. And yes, I'm aware that technically Batman wasn't even born yet during most of that. Familiarize yourself with the concept of "rhetorical device".

The point is Cap brings a massive resevoire of experience to the fight that edges out Batman's experience, and a skill set that is more than diverse enough to deal with any combination of Batman's 127 fighting styles, while being narrow enough to get more focused potency out of them.

While Batman was preparing himself for real fights, Cap was winning real fights.

I find myself wondering if Gail is even going to mention the Rape Tents, or the Public Defecation. I have a sneaking suspicion "The Movement" is just about indoctrinating the young, inexperienced, and uninformed with a silly ideology.

Thankfully, that means it's gonna bomb bigtime. All hail Capitalism. Tough tamales Gail.

And almost two years to the day(close enough) I necro the thread again! Bask in BT's glory!

@ HexThis I guess you're just going to ignore the other three names I dropped since they counter your argument. That's five male characters in comics off the top of my head who fight in nothing but their underwear. They would BEG to be allowed to wear as much clothing as psylocke wears into combat. Those were just off the top of my head. If I wanted to, I could come up with dozens more. But I don't really want to spend my afternoon imagining scantily clad muscle men. I'd rather surf the web for lesbian porn quite frankly. And skintight bodysuits are every bit as stripperiffic as bikinis, if not moreso. Bikinis are pretty common place nowadays. Skintight bodysuits just SCREAM fetishwear.

Newsflash: Men are every bit as sexually objectified in comics as women, if not moreso. Namor spent most of his life fighting in a speedo. To this day Kazar, Tarzan, Savage, and others run around in loin cloths. Rarely do X-Men writers miss a chance to have Logan run around shirtless. Ye gods I can't even begin to count how many shirtless workout sessions Bruce Wayne has put on for Alfred's benefit in the batcave. In Summary ladies...get over it.

So if you don't read comics with female leading characters, it's because you're such a weak-willed wussy boy that imaginary females with power intimidates you....OR...it's because the mysoginistic comicbook industry promotes the male characters better?

Here's an alternative for you to consider, that doesn't instantly render me a mysoginist, or a simpleton.

When I read a comic, I like to get a breif vicarious thrill by imagining myself as the title character. I like to imagine myself as the one who punched Darkseid's lights out, or it's me who just reignited the sun with my heatvision.

I don't much care to imagine myself in a battle-bikini, swinging my Double D's all over the place. So while I enjoy scantily clad comic women when they appear in other titles, they are not the primary reason I buy comics. I buy comics for a breif moment of fantasy escapism.

Now i'm sure there are more than a few men in the world who enjoy imagining themselves as women. That's between them and their psycho/sexual-therapists.

I...and I assume, a majority of the buying public...do not.

Incidently, that's probably why the overwhelming majority of comic heroes who are minorities don't sell well either, though I think that's a tad more inexcusable. It's hard for you to imagine yourself in an opposite gender role, but it shouldn't be such a leap to imagine yourself in another skin color role.