Welcome to Atop the Fourth Wall, where bad comics burn. In this episode, Linkara completes his look at the awful "Cry for Justice" mini-series!
ORIGINAL INFO: Don’t cry for these comics. They’re already dead.
Originally uploaded January 24th, 2011.
RUMINATIONS: If you’re building up a villain to be a threat, you need to JUSTIFY that build-up.
Hell, you need to ACTUALLY build up that threat. You can’t have them come right the hell out of nowhere and suddenly blindside your heroes. You also can’t have him go beyond the limits you’ve already set about. Lord Vyce is the main example for both - at this point in the storyline, I have been setting up Lord Vyce for MONTHS. From Linksano’s departure to his ability to restore Mechakara effortlessly to his machinations with the Vohrsoth and his reputation as a conqueror that gods and monsters are afraid of. We showed the kind of power he exhibited by simply plucking Linkara out of nowhere and having an army of robots on his side. We saw him manipulating Linkara from afar in the Silent Hill reviews. We saw him upgrade Mechakara to the point where he could survive a direct hit from the BFG AND stop Pollo from hacking him, both things utilized to defeat him previously.
Simply put - Lord Vyce is supposed to be taken seriously.
So imagine if instead of the curb-stomping he delivers to Linkara, Linkara just shoots his gun once at him and BOOM, threat over. All that build-up, all that suspense, all that drama and hype and it’s a bunch of crap. It might be funny for a second, but really it’s more like a middle finger to the audience and just narratively unsatisfying. And so we have Lord Vyce giving not a damn about Linkara. Will Wolfrgram, who was the suit actor for Vyce, has some martial arts and theater-fighting training, so he kept asking if I wanted him to do anything more extensive in his moves, but I kept turning him down. The thing is that Vyce is supposed to be SO strong that he doesn’t take the fight seriously. He walks right through anything Linkara throws at him because the dude fights GODS. Linkara is just in his way and he’s putting up with his bullcrap so he can get on with his job.
Of course, the problem with that is you then need to find a way to convincingly take down someone that strong, which is why the flaws in Vyce are mostly in his personality - he’s arrogant, superior, and honestly doesn’t think anyone else is capable of defeating the Entity (and we finally get the Entity’s presence explained! And yes, describing it as a “glitch” in the Universe was deliberate). As such, he’s worried that if he dies, all of existence is doomed. After all… he sees himself as the real hero here.
The Champion thing is not and is never meant to be a “chosen one.” Linkara is not all THAT special any more than one red blood cell is more special than another - it’s just the universe naturally predisposes towards certain people to act as antibodies to threats. I wanted to make it explicitly clear that Linkara is NOT the only Champion in this universe and not even the only Champion on earth. It’s just in this case, Vyce identified him in particular as being the domino he needs to push over to conquer this world and he didn’t want to reveal his presence to the Entity since he was so close, so he decided to try the subtle tactics previously until Mechakara was defeated and he felt he needed to handle things himself. And yeah, this is just another example of me trying to justify why a universal conqueror who fights the worst, most hellish monstrosities ever devised in our nightmares… is bothering with some asshole who reviews comic books on the internet.
19 окт 2014
