Marvel's Jessica Jones

there are a few articles explaining how Patsy Walker, which was an actual long-running comic, got pulled into the Marvel universe as a superhero

really enjoyed that being integrated into the show as Patsy being a child television star

sorry, Trish :)

Patsy Walker is, I think, the MCU character who's existed the longest aside from the golden age-era Captain America characters.

Future Mad Magazine cartoonist and "Fold-In" creator Al Jaffee wrote and drew most of the early issues, several of which included Mad founding editor Harvey Kurtzman's highly stylized "Hey Look!" one-page humor strips.

If nothing else, this has led me to find out Al Jaffee is still around and drawing fold-ins.

btw for those unaware, I was describing the setup for the new Hellcat solo title upthread

The way they made the 'It's Patsy' theme music kind of perfectly irritating was one of my favourite little things in this.

Does this get better? I made it to the episode (episodes?) where the mind-control bad guy keeps sending randos on the street to assassinate the good guys, and it was super hokey, like an early Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode or something

Finished up with Daredevil last night - avoiding spoilers for DJP and anyone else still on the go with it, but I agree with people who've been saying that the last few episodes feel padded out. Also feel that it stuck the landing in the very last episode pretty well though. If I had to compare the two shows, I'd say that notwithstanding the padding, DD was slightly (but only slightly) more slickly put together in terms of plotting and dialogue, but JJ inspires slightly (but only slightly) more ~deep thoughts~ in me. Wouldn't want to pit one show against the other though as obv I thought they were both excellent.

One thing that's been going round and round in my head in regards to JJ in particular relates to Scott's comments way upthread about how he was fed up with a certain brand of darkness that had become popular in comic/superhero related stuff post-Frank Miller and at times he felt like an over-reliance on darkness had ruined the whole genre. I feel that in certain critical circles that's quite a fashionable, almost right-on stance - that a cliched ~Dark and Gritty~ style has developed and kind of overwhelmed superhero-genre stuff - and it's a way of thinking I'd probably fallen into myself: I probably overemphasised my naviety/inexperience upthread but obviously like anyone not under a rock I'd seen plenty of the big comic-book adaptation movies over the years, but generally I'd just come to accept the view that modern comic/superhero stuff is all D&G cliches and therefore not worth paying much attention to.

JJ kind of threw me for a loop in that regard, because although it's obv dealing with some really heavy stuff and although a lot of the time it feels like a very angry show (which I like), the tone and also the moral values of it come across to me as a million miles away from stereotyped ideas of D&G. It definitely doesn't remind me of Frank Miller at all. (DD is a bit closer to what I would usually associate with D&G, and at times feels a little Miller-esque, which I guess is inevitable given that it's partly drawing on stories/characters written by Miller - but it still doesn't feel like it's just accepting D&G tropes uncritically).

OTM. The anti-D&G line is very fashionable with critics like Anthony Lane who think superhero comics are fundamentally just silly fun and should be adapted for the screen accordingly.

but generally I'd just come to accept the view that modern comic/superhero stuff is all D&G cliches and therefore not worth paying much attention to.

Actually that doesn't quite capture it - it's not so much that I felt that all contemporary comic-book related stuff was D&G related cliches, because obviously that's not even remotely true, but more that when works in that genre attempted to do anything self-consciously serious or mature, then they would inevitably fall into D&G, not really having any other language available for that purpose. Both of these shows have established to me that this was a daft assumption.

Also I'm obviously not meaning to have a go at Scott personally here - like I say, his posts are an example of a wider view that I've encountered before and at times shared myself.

Sorry for navel-gazing and Aspie monologuing - will ease up for a bit.

I feel like the Frank Miller school circa his Daredevil and Batman work started with a nod toward the realistic repercussions, personal and societal, of vigilantes and criminals beating on each other and stabbing victims in alleyways and very quickly became this gritty noir thing where the people involved in this world were vicious and amoral, even if they had a moral code on the surface. Very black and white definitions of who is in the right, with lots of grey in the day-to-day actions and no indication it was as Dredd-like parody.

It took no time at all for the Daredevil/Batman stuff to be parodied by the Cerebus and TMNT comics of the day, but comics as a whole (and a lot of movies in the vein) embraced the roughness.

Now we're post-D&G and can have actual human characters that aren't embracing that darkness, that live in a violent world but aren't sociopaths gleeful that they're caving in heads. And there are characters who are unrepentantly violent and they're these pill-popping maniacs who are seen as threatening or even worthy of pity.

I think that's the angle I was missing when I was trying to determine why some latter-day writers can be enjoyable but I never completely get into it because at the root, they're coming from the fallout of the late 80s and their base angle is "violent sociopaths are fun"

see: the work of Mark Millar

As a reformed Frank Miller fanboy, I'm still a little annoyed that Alan Moore's hand in grim & gritty is underplayed, but that's an aside!

As for the way DD and JJ embrace that particular aesthetic, I do feel the former is a largely more generic standard example, but is it done right; it's easy enough to do something violent and dark, but where JJ pwns DD is how it's able to use gallows humor consistently and its main characters tend to be competent and generally avoid stupiditis (which increases the sense of danger when they get in over their heads).

xps

I will say that I was tickled with DD's scenes between Foggy and Karen.

Frank Miller, of course, eventually came at that from a different angle and ended up making straight-up noir pastiche with Sin City and his own "sociopaths are fun" comic is the ridiculous All-Star Batman & Robin which is good for all the wrong reasons

I really think the Affleck solo Bats film should be an adaptation of All-Star Batman & Robin

seconded

Are you retarded or something?

lol

No, I'm the goddamn mh!

I enjoyed JJ, particularly the amount of women and poc and how ppl upthread mentioned that it didn't feel like the show was begrudgingly enforcing a quota or w/e. Also as someone who's not too into superheros I like how the show wasn't all that superhero-y even with the special powers all over the place.

I only watched the first episode of Daredevil, nothing about it seemed particularly interesting, not sure if it dramatically picks up or not after that?

I didn't think it did, especially. It was visually neat, but it had the self-serious Darkness of, like, '90s television.

I thought it was good except for secondary character performances and all the dialogue. (DD, rather than JJ, is the one that I thought was padded out to about 3-4 episodes too long.)

Oh god, 1000 cuts.

I stopped Daredevil pretty early on, not that I didn't enjoy but certainly somewhere around - after? - the hall fight, which I thought was great, but which made me think, well, not gonna get better, is it?

The violence really amps up with this, huh?

Cliched characters, a lot of clunky dialogue and a maddeningly repetitive structure in the last handful of episodes, but overall the most thrilling and addictive piece of television I've seen for a good while. Kilgrave is an instant classic TV villain, utterly despicable and totally formidable.

I would've developed the Kilgrave plot more slowly in the background for the first half of the season though, and had some minor, unconnected cases first. They had episodes that felt like they should be the final showdown by like two thirds of the way through.

Yeah, I think the biggest mistake of the series was to make the whole season about Kilgrave, the third or fourth time Jessica faces him and he gets away again started to feel anticlimactic... Basically the reveal of her immunity to his power should've been at the conclusion of the whole story, not something that happens in episode 7. The final confrontation would've felt more satisfying if both Jessica and the viewer would've found out about the immunity only then, now it was pretty obvious how that scene would play out.

Also, because we barely saw any of Jessica's normal work during season 1, they'll have to re-establish the whole premise of the series again in season 2. And it'll pretty hard to come up with villain actors as good as Tennant was. The guy playing Nuke wasn't bad but he was too cartoonish to capture a similar vibe. Unless they're transferring him to Daredevil, since he's a DD villain in the comics?

Worst character is Malcolm, who I wondered "Why is this character in this show?" and then he gets one good episode, and then I wondered the same thing again.

me grammar bad

No, worst character is whatsername, the ginger sister of the dead kid.

Yeaaaah. Worst character and worst actress, no contest.

I guess I've encountered too many poisonous caricatures masquerading as human beings because everyone seems to HATE that character for being unrealistic and out of step with the rest of the show and... I didn't notice her presence as particularly wrong or jarring? Like yes, she was a terrible person and at points I actively wanted her to die but her spite-fueled malevolence leading her to free Kilgrave and almost dying was pretty satisfying to me plot/enjoyment wise.

I thought she was great

it took a long time for me to get into the idea of characters that make the audience irritated or uncomfortable and she does both pretty well

Yeah, I thought it was a great character and a good performance. If she irritated you and got under our skin, then they were successful at what they were trying to do, it was not bad writing or acting. And I really liked that despite the crap she did they ultimately managed to keep her sympathetic, it would've been much easier to roll with the crazy shrew stereotype.

And Malcolm was good too, I liked how they used him as Jessica's morality anchor, the one who kept her from going down. Though hopefully he'll bit a more fleshed-out in the next season when he's not under Kilgrave-induced stupor anymore.

y'all are crazy, the sister was an awful one-note character

she was overacting her face off

Seriously. I'm totally down with unsympathetic/irritating characters but hers was a little beyond the pale. She reminded me of the paraplegic brother in Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Just OTT loathsome and unnecessary. There was probably a way to do that character but that wasn't it.

eh, every time she appeared on screen I just thought to myself "I wonder which parts of that interaction she's going to put on her LiveJournal"

Ha. Fair enough.

Hang on - are some people talking about the ginger sister and some people talking about Carrie Anne Moss' lawyer?

I don't think anyone said anything about the lawyer?

Like yes, she was a terrible person and at points I actively wanted her to die but her spite-fueled malevolence leading her to free Kilgrave and almost dying was pretty satisfying to me plot/enjoyment wise.

This is pretty clearly about the lawyer.

No, the same applies to the sister too: she helped Kilgrave escape by storming into Jessica's flat with the therapy group, and that lead to Kilgrave almost killing her by hanging.

OK I concede the point.

That was 100% about the sister

gah I have to finish this series. it's entirely too dark for my wife so she barely wants to watch it. ditto daredevil.

it took a long time for me to get into the idea of characters that make the audience irritated or uncomfortable and she does both pretty well

― μpright mammal (mh), Monday, February 1, 2016 10:53 AM (Yesterday)

yes.

one of my personal favorite lowkey reactions to the series was when they first popped up in Jessica's hallway; my reaction during all of their initial appearances was "ugh I bet their sex is terrible" and after the sibling reveal I thought to myself "well no wonder their sex is terrible"