I saw my first trailer for this yesterday before The Martian, and it looked godawful—flat and boring with cruddy special effects. I'm a big fan of those old haunted-house atmospheric flicks, too.

Wow, your argument about someone getting screwed is that other people get screwed more than that, therefore no one's getting screwed?

Yes, of course, and the details never matter, which is why black slaves and their owners were equal in the United States… they were all involved in "business" and "that's business"…

I think that might mean that they can switch out actors for superheroes more readily than other characters, especially if it's something like The Hulk where there's been no movie franchise to save or ruin in the first place.

My impression from working with men who were in turn working with women entertainers is that the men thought the women should silence themselves so they wouldn't waste the short window in which women are considered viable headliners before they age out. The backwards thinking this took made my eyes water. I watched…

It never really occurred to me to "choose a side" since the books were never very clear on what the fictional law meant in the first place. That was more of a tagline from the ads, I think.

You've kind of proven my point. Those things that you don't think are more popular because they sell more toys - they actually are more popular, but it's not the traditional way to think about them so you doubt it's true. It is true.

I was a hold-out and stuck with it for quite a while, but that business where they grabbed the characters from the great Osborn mini and assigned them new superpowers and looks as needed for Bendis to re-tell a story he'd already told, that may have soured me on Bendis books for good.

Toy sales? The bloated, inflated, over-hyped cinematic perspective?

Comic book sales don't say much about the popularity of a superhero in 2015. That's my point.

I remember that Iron Man super-fans went apeshit on Straczynski after his version of Iron Man during Civil War, but I also remember that Straczynski, who is far from my favorite writer, was maybe the only writer to bother presenting Iron Man's case at all. Millar's story in the main book was just about how stupid…

And that New Avengers run got me back buying Marvel - and then it became clear that Bendis had a couple stories in him that he liked to tell over and over and over with different characters, except he wouldn't bother changing the characters' voices, personality or motivations from story to story to match.

I think that might be what we're all used to thinking. I'm not sure if it's still true. (And Deadpool more popular? Probably not. Selling more comic books has little to do with the popularity of a superhero character in 2015.)

I can probably name about 50 more awkward Marvel gambits than what they did to shoehorn Fury's movie look into the books, but it's still painfully awkward and funny how they did it.

I don't think he's bumping Batman just yet, but since 2008 he's been pretty big news. "Original" has nothing to do with that, really; Batman himself is a pastiche. Superhero comics have almost always been a game of trying to roll up as many then-current pop media cliches as possible into one cheap product.

I never much liked the pointy-headed cap until the books reinvented Jan as a high-fashion mogul who liked to dress on the edge. That sold it for the current books, at least when good artists were involved, but I'm still not sure the thing fits with the SWAT look adopted by Marvel superheroes in the recent movies.

This character was ahead of its time in its realistic portrayal of a self-centered, self-absorbed nerd.

I thought the whole idea was that Mr. Terrific just called himself "the third smartest man" so that evil nerds wouldn't bother him in the squabble over the top spot, rather than some real hierarchy among DC characters.

And any decent version of Animal Man would have as its premise the absurdity of the character. Otherwise, DC's tossing out the whole reason for using the character at all, that is, its unexpected revival as a mind-bending "meta-fiction" story.

When I've see this show mentioned, I've always thought, They are gonna have to work to justify that title to people. I wonder if they can even sell the character without McDuffie, who was perhaps the last person to express overt awareness of the powder keg sitting underneath a black female "vixen" whose power is…