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Omni Man Relieves himself, and a long rant about Invincible
🕑 Added 2021-05-04 18:00:04 +0000 UTCOmniman flies to the moon to have a break after a long day spent dismembering heroes and civilians. Very deserved.
Yeah, I couldn't help myself, even if that show scared me like hell, I felt the moral obligation to give you some Omniman stuff, since more of the Rule34 artist are about anime characters. You're welcome.
And this artwork was very challenging for me, not just because I'm still not in perfect sync with the tablet (there's a function of my drawing app, Krita, that really doesn't like that tablet and creates a lot of lag, I hope they will fix it with the next update) but because…
I don't like Invincible.
I mean, I wish I liked it a lot, it has stellar voice acting, the animation is unbelievably good, and it's a superhero story that doesn't expect you to know decades worth of comic book continuity.
Even the protagonist, Mark, is likable in a very simple and effective way: he wants to do good despite inexperience and difficulties. And he has a lot of difficulties, for god sake, his battle name, Invincible, is a cruel joke about him having to spit his teeth every time he faces fucking anyone. When he's lucky.
(I guess it will be revealed that his "invincibility" is more moral than physical, the will of not quit the superhero mission even after having seen his bowels unroll on the floor more than one time.)
Because, the fuck, there's a lot of gore, while searching for references for this same illustration (BTW, Nolan Grayson is way more handsome in his cartoon instead of comic book iteration) I've stumbled on pages of the comic that still haven't been adapted, and oh fuck, they love to show smashed faces.
And I know that I shouldn't criticize something because I don't like its use of shock value, but I will do it anyway because it's something that applies to action stories that involve superpowers in general, manga included.
The solidity of the bodies.
There's no clue at any moment if some punch from a super will be strong enough to knock off the opponent in a clean PG way, or smash his skull, or shatter the arm bones of the puncher. Often in the same encounter.
Like if one of them at a certain point became Super Sayan and was suddenly strong enough to pummel through his opponent's chest. But the difference is that we have no change in hair color to signal that.
It creates an anxiety state that maybe is wanted, but doesn't operate on a consistent logic.
In one of the pages I've peeked at in my search for references, I see a character having his face smashed from another, but as far as I know, the victim shouldn't have their face smashed but blown away into vapor, like the Cell Juniors when Gohan went Super Sayan Level 2. Like, being vaporized was a too clean way to die for the author of the comic, and they opted for something more gruesome but less logical.
It's something I can't suspend my disbelief on.
The state of civilian technology.
C'mon, we had to wait for real-world corporations that actually put tablets, vocal assistants, and 3D-printers in our households to have it retroactively inserted in civilian technology of comic books. Despite having been these technologies inspired by spec-fic in the first place.
Do we really have to assume that in a world where the laws of physics and chemistry are so whacked that a high schooler can synthesize billion-dollar materials in his parents' basement, that civilian technology would be still on par with RL technology? Why there aren't skyscrapers built with reactive skeletons that prevent them from collapsing as soon as two super assholes punch each other through them?
Bad precedents.
IPs that based their market on their shock value to stand out, even if they have been good stories of their own at the beginning, didn't end well. In their public reception and also in their own narrative, if they went on for too long.
Watchmen zombified the comic book industry for years instead of rejuvenating that. The Simpsons (through Family Guy) has inspired a plethora of crass adult animated comedy with ugly designs and bare-bones animation. Evangelion should have been about criticizing otaku culture, but has produced 4channers at a faster rate than a Rei Cloning Facility. Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead became the memes of themselves. Fight club is about criticizing toxic masculinity but instead inspired the creation of actual fight clubs. Attack on Titan is using fucking nazi apology to move the story forward.
And we can just fathom the reasons why the author of Berserk doesn't want to end his manga anymore.
Not optimistic
The media market is ghoulish beast that can't be defeated. Create a successful story with a depth and a meaning where the violence serves the purposes of catharsis and to signal we're dealing with real danger and consequences, and the media market will promote it in the most blunt way or try to replicate it under thousand bastardized forms that show the shell of gore but not the core. It happened for decades at this point.
I'm very unsympathetic towards any author or dedicated reader that gasps and complains because everything that people understand about their violence-filled story is "violence is cool."
You should have seen it coming at this point.
In not optimistic about the epilogue of this cartoon series, given how heathen the fanbase of R-rated IPs can be.
And if any value has to be exploited and marketed in the mainstream culture, let it be wholesome values. At least, they can't do any harm.
