Olantern

I've noticed this, too, and I think it's due to two factors. First, Steel Canyon's design in terms of game environment design is more primitive that some of the newer zones. Cities in games at that time weren't as realistic as they are now, even in other parts of this game.

Second and more importantly, how close the buildings are depends on which "major American city" you mean. In the East and some places in the Midwest, where streets were laid out before the automobile era and much of the growth took place in the first half of the 20th century, when universal automobile ownership was just beginning, the buildings are indeed fairly close together. In cities that had their growth spurts after World War II, during the age of automobiles, streets were laid out with larger traffic in mind, and buildings were set further back. This is particularly noticeable in California ... where the devs live and work. There's a strong Californian ambience to a lot of the zones, particularly the Imperial City. (It's also apparent in the materials used in the buildings and their shapes, some of which couldn't hold up well in a harsher climate.) This architectural and urban planning style is all right for Praetoria City, which seems to be a newly built city located in a mild clime, but it's less appropriate for Paragon City, which has been around in one form or another for more than a century in a much harsher one.

I've also long felt that Nova Praetoria resembles Washington, D.C. (as befits a government town), particularly the area tagged "Penn Quarter" in the last few years.

This is one of my favorite subjects, and I could go on much longer, so I'll close now.

Before Issue 11, an image of the then-new Ouroboros logo was revealed. Many forumites argued* that the image meant the new issue would be about a 5th Column moon base. The most popular argument for this was based on the shape of the rivets on the logo. Now THAT's obsessive "decoding." This is why I now refer to player speculation based on single images as "5th Column Ouroboros Rivet Syndrome." Say it with me!

* I typed "arguated" here by mistake on my first attempt. I've long felt internet fora needed their own term for "argued."

Now you have convinced me to watch the new TRON! (Look up the "All Things Building Art" thread for a long post of my holding forth on how Deco architecture should appear in Paragon City.)

That was a really interesting article (the other links were interesting, too). It's also nice to see an IP specialist commenting on this sort of thing.

Seconded. (Though I gave the same caveat early on and got my head bitten off for saying so.)

Dangit, I always get those two names flipped.

For more on Reeves, see the movie Hollywoodland.

For more on the whole subject of this thread in general, read the book Superman vs. Hollywood.

By the way, has anyone read Larry Tye's history of Superman yet? I just picked it up but haven't looked at it yet.

Right. This also explains one reason (aside from the desire to given the people and entities involved in working on the thing some reward for their effort) why something like this is unlikely to be flung out into the wilds of the internet for anyone to use for free.* It'd open the process's developers to tremendous potential liability if third parties start using to create (and, practically speaking, sell) items that infringe another person or entity's trademarks or copyrights. At least, I imagine that's one major concern.

*Not that it isn't likely to end up there in one way or another, sometime down the road.

Not only is this correct, but it's shaped every subsequent performance, too. (I'm sure that's also a result of the fact that most men of the right age to play Superman these days grew up, like me, with the Reeves Superman as "the" Superman to them.) I think this is the real problem with Brandon Routh's performance in Superman Returns. When I see it now, knowing what I know about the film, he seems like Routh playing Reeves playing Superman, rather than Routh's own interpretation of Superman. Trying to duplicate someone else's performance is never going to work out as well as doing something original; that's why we have actors in the first place.

Put another way, if Mark Hamill's Joker had just been a repeat of Jack Nicholson's Joker from the Tim Burton Batman film, I doubt it would be as remembered today, even if it hadn't lasted as long as it has in so many media.

It told him to post a lot today.

Just be glad the little bird isn't telling him to "kill."

Venture moves on to a costume redesign for a prominent Vindicator?

I think this is correct. More importantly, many players think the same way Waid does. There's a strong current in geekdom in general and RPG's in particular (where players are very attached to the characters they create) that wants to see authority torn down, see its feet of clay exposed. In the CoH comics, this is represented by Waid's arc. In player discourse, it's represented by people claiming letting their loathing of Jack Emmert bleed into loathing of Statesman or people arguing that "all heroes are hypocrites" (this last was from an old comic creator discussion).

I argue that a group like the Freedom Phalanx doesn't need feet of clay to serve its purpose in the story. The Freedom Phalanx exists to represent "proven heroes," not "power." The idea of "feet of clay" is fulfilled by other groups, ranging from villain factions (Crey springs to mind, at least in theory) to supra-villain plot entities (the entire story of the Praetorian factions is about exposing weaknesses, whether moral or military) to particular characters (there are several tips about Longbow troops or named heroes going bad now).

Ultimately, I think this is really an issue of the devs (and some players) falling into the mode of other MMO's or games, where "factions" are less blatantly moral than ours, and each faction has a leader. The signature heroes are not there to represent "leadership of blueside" and all the potential flaws that "leadership" can possess. Rather, they're supposed to be ... heroes.

A discussion of signature villains is beyond the scope of this post. I'm not quite sure how to approach them myself; even after all these years, I'm still trying to wrap my head around the idea of a game where you portray the bad guy in a genre that's almost essentially about bad losing.

Yep, that's about the size of it. I think the challenge is that it's harder to make a good Superman movie than it is to make an equally good movie about some other characters. I'm convinced it can be done; it just takes some work.

I see this argued, especially by comics writers (I'm looking at you, Dennis O'Neill), but I don't think the reason for Superman's decline is "people want violent heroes who kill a lot."

Consider: who is the most popular character in comics, and in comic book movies, today? According to a recent survey I saw, Batman. The Batman, of course, does not kill. This has gone over being a nonexistent part of the character in the very early years (a bad guy whom Batman crushed with a giant statue suffered "a fitting end to his kind") to being one feature among many in the later '40's and '50's (as comics strove to "clean up their acts" and be more kid-friendly, the opposite of what we see today), to the defining characteristic of the character in the past couple of decades, particularly in the writing of the aforementioned O'Neill. I would argue that in many media, Batman's stance against killing has been carried to much greater extremes than Superman's, giving us scenes where Batman does bizarre things like fling his enemies off buildings to threaten them (always miraculously breaking only their limbs rather than their necks), then growls and preaches at police officers or others who merely draw their guns when facing criminals.

The example of Batman flinging enemies off buildings brings up another point he shares with Superman that's been derided in this thread as a reason Superman is "unrealistic," something I refer to as "Moral Plot Armor." With a very, very few exceptions, neither character ever performs an act that the writer (or other creator) of the character's story wants the reader to see as immoral or wrong. The difference between the two is in the details, not in their import. We're not meant to think Batman is being cruel, or potentially accosting the wrong guy, when he hangs that criminal upside down or tosses him off a building; he's just doing what he has to get the information (or whatever). Similarly, we're not meant to think Superman is being cruel or potentially accosting the wrong guys when he wraps a steel girder around a gang to immobilize them. The real difference here is that the second is a much less blatant example of overturning the conventional morality by which most of us live our everyday lives; Superman's action, viewed in isolation, seems less objectionable than Batman's. And because Superman generally takes actions that are less objectionable to begin with, while bearing the same moral imprimatur from his writers as Batman, he's come to be viewed as a "boy scout" who's "unrealistically" morally perfect. That is, Superman and Batman (and lots of other characters) are both morally perfect within the context of their stories, but Superman is more morally conventional, making his "moralness" more obvious.

So, what are we left with as the differences between the characters to explain why one is so loved and accepted as both believable and realistic by fans, while the other is criticized on both grounds? First, there's no getting around the powers. Superman is more powerful than Batman. Indeed, he's more powerful than most protagonists in any story in any medium, period. It's a commonplace of adventure story writing that the villain or obstacles the hero faces must be stronger than the hero in order to make for a compelling story. If they aren't, the hero's struggle seems trivial. If the hero is extremely powerful, it's very difficult to come up with powerful challenges for him, while if the hero is essentially an ordinary human being, no matter how competent, it's easy to put him in seemingly perilous situations. (Note the term "seemingly perilous." As Johny Butane pointed out above, Batman is just as certain to win every confrontation as Superman is. But it's possible to make an exciting story about Batman doing something as simple(?!) as climbing up a wall, while Superman could leap it in a single bound.)

That's one, and I think the most critical, reason Batman is loved and Superman scorned. It's just plain harder to create an exciting Superman story because it's difficult to create visceral action sequences that challenge him. Alternatively, the writer can challenge Superman psychologically, but this makes for a less action-packed story. If the comments about wanting to see Superman punching villains through a world of cardboard in this thread are anything to go by, people aren't going to be interested in two and a half hours of Superman moping about how no one understands.

The second reason Batman is more beloved than Superman despite their underlying similarities is more subtle but almost as important, especially for comics and geekdom devotees. It goes back to the fact that Superman is seen as more conventional than Batman. Both characters, on some level, uphold or protect the values of their communities, but Superman does it from the inside.* Batman, on the other hand, is an outsider. Within the story, people like and admire Superman, while other characters ostracize and fear Batman. Further, Batman blatantly makes his own rules. He often explicitly states that he is above the law, because in his setting, law is invariably corrupt or ineffective. Batman and his few allies are the only moral characters in his universe. Superman, on the other hand, puts himself in the service of the laws and general morality of his setting. In a typical Superman story, only the villains are immoral.

The phenomenon of Batman as outsider interacts with culture in interesting ways. There's an impulse in Western civilization in general, particularly strong in American culture, and strongest of all in comics and geekdom culture, to identify with rebellion. This impulse has grown stronger and stronger over the past half-century, to the point where, I'd argue, it's a commonplace. A reader who feels rebellious or isolated is likely to identify with a character whom he believes represents rebellion and isolation, not a character he identifies with the status quo. Thus, readers are drawn to Batman, the outsider, more strongly than to Superman, the citizen of society.

I should point out here that a lot of recent depictions of Superman, apparently including The Man of Steel, have tried to emphasize Superman's isolation in an effort to make this phenomenon work for the character, not against him.

So, ultimately, we have a character who's hard to write for who's seen as representing conformity versus a character who's easier to write for and who's seen as representing freedom and rebellion. I think it's easy to see why people tend to prefer the second.

The issue isn't, as comic writers have argued, that Wolverine, the Punisher, and Cable eclipsed the inspirational innocence of Superman. The issue is that Superman has characteristics that make it really hard to write stories about him that fans will salivate over.

* Most erudite discussions of superheroes by non-fans go on and on about how superheroes are corporate tools to enforce conformity, an attitude that would surprise a lot of fans, who consider themselves rebels. Personally, as I hope the main discussion makes clear, I think the idea of superhero as Minion of the Establishment ignores at least half of the psychology of superheroes and their place in culture.

***

I didn't mean to write an essay there. Sorry. Hope you enjoyed reading.