Matt D

And against someone on the ascent, even a Big E.

In the meantime, we’ve gotten Arn note on record specific spots and finishes he came up with in Cena’s matches. Just saying.

All I want from anyone else is enough proof and specifics to have an actual conversation. I require more from myself, mind you.

I tried to rationalize not rating Virus so high because my number for him was absurd on paper and I felt like I really had to justify it but the footage won out.

I don't think you can compare Austen's run (I liked the single mother/Havok stuff and maybe Juggernaut, sure) to the current X-runs where people nitpick specific things. Austen was basically Vince Russo. As for the change in status quo, it's not a healthy way of looking at things. With Marvel, the way they work over the last fifteen years, or so, is that they do thought experiments that last a couple of years. Superior Spider-Man was a thought experiment. Captain America: Secret Empire was a thought Experiment. Jane as Thor was a thought experiment. The Fantastic Four in Space/FF being the Allred team was a thought experiment. That's the model from now on. They'll run a story for a year or two, shake up the status quo, explore the consequences, and then go back to the middle with some impact/changes that work into the next status quo shake-up. I think it's a pretty effective way of doing things, to be honest. It lets a writer really explore things deeply while not breaking the toys. Long runs still happen occasionally. Jason Aaron has long runs. Slott has long runs. Spencer has long runs. Bendis obviously did. A lot of it is that the writers don't want to do it since they would rather own their own properties and spiral them off to Amazon/Netflix/Whatever.

I still feel like we're not there, so we'll keep hammering at it. The pool is definitely not asking anyone to ignore charisma or character. I went on plenty of nonsensical rants about Mark Henry's use of "negative space" where he was taking his time or jawing with the ref or the crowd or his opponent or being methodological about going from one spot to the next and the sort of effect that could create. Or Mocho Cota being a malignant goblin with his facial expressions and celebratory arm motions or taunting dances. One of my favorite examples of anything ever is the crowd chanting boring while Bock had Martel in a hold and Martel shouting at him like the most amazing heel in the world "You're boring them!" It's not just toeholds and dropkicks. It's anything that a wrestler does within the confines of a pro wrestling match, from the way he stands to the way he moves to what he says within the confines of the match and what he does within the confines of the match. You want to count Cena visibly calling spots against him? Fine. You want to give Cena credit for the various way he uses the You Can't See Me gesture to move the crowd one way or another? Also fine. You want to hold the STF against him? Sure. You want to call him loosening it up because his co-workers were complaining a clever way to ensure that people would work with him well? I mean, I don't know, sure, I guess? But that's still all in-ring things.

There's scope and scale though. If someone's talking about drawing and promos and we're talking about what someone brings to the table in-ring, even if our metrics are different, it matters. You and I would be talking about the same thing in different ways and focusing on different areas or values of that same thing. Not so hypothetical third person would be talking about something else completely.

You're not just ranking people for toeholds and dropkicks. You're ranking them for how they use the toeholds and dropkicks, how they sell the toeholds and dropkicks, the effect they get from using the toeholds and dropkicks, when they decide to use a toehold instead of a dropkick, when they decide to use neither a toehold nor a dropkick, if they utilize the toehold and dropkick differently in situation A as opposed to situation B, all of which is way more interesting than how many times they main evented MSG. It's not just about technique, it's about craft. For me, technique is a pretty small part of it, but it's still almost completely about in-ring pro wrestling. The "pro" is using the physical motions in the ring to create effect and narrative. I'm not going to tell you how to do this, but if you're coming at this from a wildly different direction than the rest of us, it's going to be dissonant to say the least, so I will try to show you both why that may be problematic and the richness that can still be found in a purely in-ring footage based approach. Also, it would never be the Danny Hodge project because we don't have the Danny Hodge footage.

Good is tricky too. That's one thing about the current X-Men books. They're competently written. They have big ideas. People can (and do) complain about individual character decisions but they're all done with care and thought through. When you're dealing with decades of complex backstory, there are a lot of valid takes on these characters. But a lot of it is inward looking and circular. But that's what the X-Books are kind of supposed to be. For instance, I liked this week's issue of Cable a lot, but I also am not sure it's objectively good, so I was going to explain why I liked it but I got two sentences in and decided it just wasn't worth it to set things up for everyone. But it's exactly what I'd like to read about: Cable doing what he might do logically in tracking down a character by going to six other characters in order, some of which are fairly obscure or interface with obscure elements of their own backstory; it didn't have much of a plot but it was useful in closing off all other avenues to get him to a more desperate point as a character. It was functional but probably could have been dealt with in a page with each scene being a panel, but was enjoyable to long-time X-Men readers because it really was enmeshed in the bigger world of the characters and answered a lot of those "Well, why didn't he do X first?" questions in a fun way. I wouldn't suggest it to any of you going through old issues of Micronauts or whatever really though, but I would hype it to my pal George who's bought every Marvel comic in the last 30 years but is usually about six months behind reading his new ones, or to the guys I talked to about X-Men comics in the 90s on Prodigy that I still talk to.

We wanted vanilla midgets and jumping bomb angels but we needed Dusty all along. Curse you monkey’s paw!

I'd argue that Marvel's general output is about as good as it's always been. Some great stuff, some good stuff, some not good stuff, some bad stuff. The stuff that sells the best isn't always the best. There are some completely under the radar gems that are great. It's how it always is and how it's basically always has been. I'm less impressed with Cebulski as EIC than I was Alonso but even there you'd get plenty of misses to go along with the hits. Future State was absolutely dreadful out of DC, but I agree the new "Infinite Frontier" relaunch has been quite good. But you figure they'll go to gloom and doom and destroy it in two years.

BTW, if you guys ever want to get out of the 70s, I'm 9 issues in to the current run of Daredevil and it's been excellent so far. Al Ewing is such a fun writer across the MU but he's really digging in here with a lot of depth and he keeps twisting things and taking it in a different direction than you think. I've been avoiding it because Daredevil is almost always work but it's very good.

I kind of loathe the whole MMA is Pro Wrestling vibe you get from the WON Awards or what not, including the idea (be it true or not) that MMA took the late 00s Pro Wrestling Boom, BUT... I would sort of argue that what you're mentioning here as successful is still sort of the difference between Pro Wrestling and MMA. I can see everything else you mentioned as "indy wrestling" but I feel like it's even more different than that. I'd sort of say that Invincible or maybe even something not-superhero oriented but still with a similar audience like Saga would be "Indy wrestling" but the stuff you're mentioning is entirely different in everything from what was successful in past years and what's still being churned out.

I've been 98% digital only since I graduated college in 03 (don't do the math on that), with a few trades I picked up here or there after. So the collection I have, which is pretty huge and primarily 70s-early 00s, is still in my parent's house back in MA. At some point, after the crash, I stopped caring and putting things in bags, so who knows what the condition of anything is anymore, but I have a lot of issues (thousands, easily), though not a ton that I think would be hugely valuable on their own. I had a bunch of "wall comics" that are probably in better shape, though nothing too old. My favorite is probably a beat up Hawkeye first appearance. My parents ask now and again and I dodge because I don't want to deal with it and tell them they can just sell the stuff if they want. They're down here fairly often (pre-pandemic) to see the kids, but I haven't been back up there since 2013, so it's sort of out of sight/out of mind.

This company wastes everything good.

We have five years. Hopefully, we see a hundred different projects from dozens of different people in that time. I'm in a fortunate spot in that even though I've watched a ton of wrestling, I always sort of steered clear from certain things for various reasons, so I'm going through every single AJPW match in 89 (and probably 90) right now on DVDVR. After I'm done with that, I'm thinking of tracing Hashimoto's entire career which will help me come up with some NJPW 80s-90s avenues to explore, while still probably carrying Tenryu forward and exploring the rest of his career. We're obviously watching the French library chronologically on Segunda Caida. After that I'm very tempted to try to do something similar with WoS. I'm going to delve into Shocker's early 00s work and El Dandy from 89-93, and I'll learn what I'll learn about other wrestlers through that lens. I want a better grasp on shoot style since I wasn't comfortable including that last time. I'm not trying to cover every gap. I'm trying to hit wide swaths in the most enjoyable ways possible.

What agent puts together a match with two "Reigns gets out of the way" spots that happen in exactly the same part of the ring from exactly the same angle?

Reigns' selling of the kicks is just so interesting relative to how everyone else sells them.

I watched that one too. Ah well. I'm not sure Bryan's shit eating grin and bouncing around is doing Reigns any long-term favors unless he absolutely kills him in the end.

The golden glove is a nice touch. How long has he had that?

I actually don't think I have. I've seen my share of stuff like this over the years and it's as you (and I) described but maybe not this vein specifically.

Most 8mm footage that's out there is just a few moments here and a few moments there. When you're lucky, it's carried over throughout the match so you can get a sort of clipped sense of the narrative. That's probably what this would be too, right?

Edge isn't the guy. He's the guy who wrestles the guy. He's a Paul Orndorff.

That'll be my 2036 deal. I'm glad to work to clear up the blind spots pre-2000 I still have here so that there aren't guys in my 70s or 80s that I couldn't justify nearly as well. My criteria is pretty unforgiving (to me more so than the wrestlers!) and I think over the next years I can sure up most of pre-2000.