Comments on: Here We Go Again

By: Ed (Jack Norris)

Ed (Jack Norris) — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 22:38:20 +0000

Yeah, I thought the “Here We Go Again” was going to be about the whole “pointless retcon screwing up a perfectly decent character yet again” thing.
And I had no big problem with a mere Psychiatrist building the Cathexis ray in the first place; with Marvel universe scientific education standards being what they are, the Sentinels, complete with the freaky advanced “Master-Mold” production system, were first developed by a freaking ANTHROPOLOGIST, don’t forget.
I aways thought that an interesting take on Samson (say, in a future Hulk movie, if one ever does well enough to get a sequel) would be to make him a sort of freaky/crank-ish neo-Reichian, and the Cathexis Ray a sort of super-science expansion of the Orgone Box (only, you know, really working, because this is a freaking Super-Hero movie).

By: BPK

BPK — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 00:01:10 +0000

Get it together Marvel… can’t believe you make the same mistake with both Jericho Drumm and Leonard Samson.

Interestingly, it is possible Samson is using some terminology that has some importance in Freudian theory. I know at least the “cathexis ray” is from early Samson/Hulk stories (cathexis being important to Freud), and he is also talking in this panel about energy and drives; Freud was interested in “drives” (in the noun form) and what supplied the “energy” for drives, and how this energy was attached to something else (”cathexis”).

Marvel had a good thing going with a non-evil psychiatrist who could be a device for character exposition, in order to have a metahuman character reveal out loud some of his/her inner motivations within the panels of a comic book (e.g. Hulk, X-factor). But they decided to make him evil just like every other comic book psychiatrist.

Well, I suppose there’s still hope they could have someone magical say “no more gamma” or make a deal with Mephisto and undo this butchering of the character.

By: Joe

Joe — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 14:46:19 +0000

I like how “an invention that could draw off energy from one person and drive it into another” is “a simple idea.”

They cover that in psychiatry residencies, right? Or is that more of a PsyD area… see now even I’m confused. I guess we can’t blame Loeb/McGuinness.

By: Bryan L

Bryan L — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 14:15:37 +0000

And, let’s be honest, it’s Jeph Loeb. Yeah, I went there. If he can’t be bothered to make his plots coherent, he certainly can’t be bothered to Google “psychiatrist.”

@Harvey: That cracked me up.

By: Jon

Jon — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 09:07:14 +0000

Clive James described Arnold Schwarzenegger as looking like ‘a condom stuffed with walnuts’. This guy is a condom stuffed with coconuts!

By: Harvey

Harvey — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 21:04:13 +0000

@Sean

That is how everybody looks in the McGuinness-verse. There, Jarvis and Aunt May are each bigger than Lou Ferrigno.

By: Sean Duggan

Sean Duggan — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:26:05 +0000

*blink* That’s more impressive musculature than I remember him sporting in prior incarnations…

By: Metz77

Metz77 — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:09:14 +0000

Silly. We’ll never be done with the whole psychiatrist/psychologist thing.