A selection of some of the funniest, most interesting and strangest quotes from the past week:
“It’s normally MODOK, with the final letter standing for Killing. They said, ‘You can’t have him kill because it’s all-ages.’ So what I did was go with the spelling that originally substituted a C, for Mental Organism Designed Only for Computing. Of course, that didn’t seem scary enough, so we’re not using Computing, but Conquest.”
“Well, one thing I noticed when I looked at what had been done with the character recently was that it seemed like they tried to draw Captain Marvel into the DC universe and make him conform to the rules of modern comics. He started to look, to me, like a bad imitation of Superman. You know, he’s kind of got the same powers and everything. But when you make him a serious superhero, and you make him — I guess they like to say Billy’s like 12 or 15 or something — and then he says, ‘Shazam!’ and he’s a 25-year-old man, and yet he’s supposed to have a brain of a 12- or 15-year-old boy, you just kind of end up with a mildly retarded Superman.”
talking about DC’s Captain Marvel
“Why fight super-villains when you can watch attractive ladies take their clothes off in the privacy of their own homes? Our little Irredeemable Ant-Man has got it made! That is–until he realizes that the current subject of his perverted voyeurism is none other than CAROL DANVERS …”
for Irredeemable Ant-Man #7
“First of all, fairy tales, at their inception, when they were an oral tradition, were not meant for kids. They were oral folk tales, and they were mostly told to adults. And it is really quite later, when they are collected by the Grimms and so forth, that they started being read to children at all. You can read the texts by [Bruno] Bettelheim or Vladimir Propp or any of the people that truly enjoy and have cataloged fairy tales and their function in our society, and most of them agree — as do I — that fairy tales are sort of spiritual parables that allow the kid to understand the world. And children need the darkness. That said, Pan’s Labyrinth is not intended for kids, but all the fairy tales of yore, when you emasculate them, you are really creating a false sense of the world for the child. When everything has to be sanitized to the point of making Disney look tough, that’s doing the children a disservice, you know? Because really, by today’s standards, Disney is a tough guy! Everything has been emasculated to the Teletubby level, and I really think that fairy tales help to prepare the kid for the harshness of the outside world.”
“The idea behind the show is what happens to these characters and their lives. Season one posits an apocalyptic event; we will deal with that in season one, then season two will have another story attached to it. There won’t be a central mystery with the show, so we don’t have to deal with a large complicated storyline.”
during the Television Critics Association press tour
“The 89th issue of Marvel Comics’ Strange Tales is released in 1961. It features the discovery of an ancient manuscript detailing the history of Fin Fang Foom, an intelligent, powerful dragon from the alien world Kakaranathara. The story of Fin Fang Foom evolves in the Iron Man series: Foom and other Kakaranatharans leaves their home world in search of other planets to conquer, crashing their ship in China. They use their shape-shifting powers to assume human form, save for Foom, who is lulled to sleep with a special herb. Before long, the slumbering dragon awakens.
“Names have power. Fin Fang Foom, Chapel Hill’s preeminent post-rock band, named themselves after Marvel Comics’ giant green dragon on a lark. They had no way of knowing that the story of Fin Fang Foom would become a fitting, even empowering metaphor for their struggles. This is a story of adventure, tragedy and redemption. It’s the story of how, in a town where bands are lucky to last a year under ideal conditions, this group has managed to persevere through their 20s, weathering trials and travails, becoming a local institution.”
in North Carolina’s Independent Weekly, about Chapel Hill band Fin Fang Foom
