This week a (steadily-declining) aggregator listicle website that I used to love touched on comic-book style topics, and, as always, my blood pressure started to rise. It’s a common problem on the internet, where a factoid about a character becomes passed along telephone-style to become part of the background radiation of the truth. Was Wolverine supposed to be an evolved wolverine? Not according to his creator. Was Swamp Thing a copy of Man-Thing? Not exactly, and moreover, both characters owe a heavy debt to Hillman Comics ‘The Heap.’ And what’s the deal with Wonder Woman and bondage? (That’s a really fascinating story that has much more heart than the prurient murmurs seen online. Seriously, look it up…) Of course, the kicker is the hundreds of little issues swirling around the Teen Titians, especially post-New 52, but if I go into that, I will probably explode, leading to today’s half-truthy query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) also hates when people refer to homage characters like the Squadron Supreme as “rip-0ffs”, both because it’s not true and because they sound like Beavis, asking: What’s the worst of the misconceptions about your favorite pop-culture?
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Usually when people say “comic franchise X is just a kids franchise”. Sure, a lot of comic book properties are adapted to kids cartoons, but the source material is usually deeper than they give it credit for. Similarly, it really irritates me when clueless parents complain that a comic or movie is “too violent for a kids character” just because their kid watches the cartoon version.
Similarly, I can’t stand it when people assume all animated works are strictly for kids. Animation is just another medium like comics, novels, radio, movies, etc. and it seems very limited and closed minded to assume it can ONLY ever be used to create something only children can enjoy. They don’t have to like animated works, but at least accept that there might be stuff created without the intent of entertaining a toddler (and also, please READ THE RATING BEFORE BUYING IT FOR YOUR KIDS OR LETTING THEM WATCH INSTEAD OF COMPLAINING AFTER THE FACT! Same goes for video games!).
The persistent misconception that the 2012 Dredd movie is some how a rip off of the Raid. I love both movies and their use of the well worn “small number of good guys fight a small number of Bad guys” plot but to say Dredd is a copy is just plain wrong.
Dredd wrapped their shoot months before the Raid started filming and the complete script of Dredd leaked online in 2010. It’s impossible for Dredd to have been influenced by the Raid but commentators still insist that it is derivative even when they should know better.
I got a few in different areas of pop culture:
#1 Superman is a boring character because he’s too powerful.
Wrong. Superman is boring because most writers don’t understand or want to understand him. Grant Morrison does, that’t why we got All-Star Superman. Also, there are plenty of characters in DC Universe who are either as strong or probably even stronger than Superman, how come they aren’t boring and too powerful? Stop this, its bullcrap.
#2 Smart people can’t enjoy professional wrestling because it fake.
Nope, on the contrary. Every single one of the people I know who watch pro wrestling or have watched it with me and appreciated it are those with high education. Some have Ph.D., others are engineers and such. Pretty smart guys, I’d say. It has nothing to do with intelligence.
#3 Blizzard created Warcraft and Starcraft worlds from scratch all by themselves and everyone else has ripped them off.
Not true. At least 50% of the ideas for Warcraft and Starcraft worlds came from British Games Workshops Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 universes. They were established first in early to mid 80’s, way before Blizzard released their first Warcraft game. Just go look at the designs, specific features in races etc. and it’ll be obvious.
I always laugh when people use that pro wrestling comment. By their logic, they might as well say only idiots enjoy classical theater because it is also scripted.
When I was going through chemo in the 80’s, a couple of my doctors would come in on the weekends on their own time and watch old WWF broadcasts with a few of us (one even got us kids some autographs every time they had events in the area).