Khan - New IDW mini series - SPOILERS!!!!!
- Thread starter DimesDan
- Start date
So far I am happy with the story. I got the comic on the Comixology app and there's a nice little screw up. The title says Khan, but my library filed the book under "Kahn."
I think there was a reference in the movie that placed it in the original time period.
There were plenty of references indicating The Eugenics War occurring several centuries before hand, but it wasn't specifically referenced when it actually occurred.
They mention in dialogue that NuKhan looks nothing like the known appearance of the man he claims to be. That pretty much commns them to addressing it by the end of the series, in my view.
I'm still confused as to why Starfleet has a problem grasping that he cut his hair and lost the tan.
Sheesh, no wonder people fall for Superman's Clark Kent disguise.
And on a similar note
So how long before IDW addresses the fact that Chris Pine doesn't look like William Shatner?
That was in the first Countdown issue.
That was in the first Countdown issue.
Second, actually.
Not so similar, actually. The issue with Khan is more problematical because of the change in the character's ethnicity. Despite the light skin he was given in TWOK, Montalban's Khan was supposed to be of South Asian origin. Complaining that a role has been recast in general is hypersensitive, but a change from nonwhite to white is something that people have legitimate grounds to want a good explanation for.
aka ignoring inconvient facts to ones argument since it didn't really come up then.
Depending on how much you are willing to defer to Mcgivers (who has no problem committing mutiny just to get into a 300 year old frozen man's pants), because other than her guesses about his ethnicity all we know is what area of the planet he ruled in an alternate 1990s that had interstellar sleeper spaceships and mad supermen running around and the fact that he's a product of selective breeding (1967), oh wait no genetically engineered (1982) which means he could well be man spam aka a whole bunch of different ethnicities thrown in a blender and this is what came out.
Then why didn't they bother in Wrath of Khan?
Or that fact that they went decades without explaining the Klingon's appearance change, and JJ Abrams was fine changing the look of the 23rd century without explaining it like he was dealing with children.
^Split hairs all you want, but it should be self-evident that this issue has created controversy, and has resonated with the larger, disturbing "racebending" controversy in modern movies (in the past year we've not not just Khan, but the Mandarin, Tonto, and Shredder in Michael Bay's upcoming Ninja Turtles movie). So it's naive to claim that there are absolutely no issues here beyond the issues involved in recasting Kirk or Saavik. One can disagree with the objections if one chooses, but it's simply disingenuous to pretend they don't exist at all.
Goodness.
Khan really is a psychopathic mother-fucker. Nice to see his finishing move developed so early. This certainly will be on my reading list.
That was in the first Countdown issue.
Second, actually.
I'm interested in this. I did a Google search and read some reviews, but they said nothing about this.
What reason did they give for Pine and Shatner looking different?
I thought you didn't mind the casting of Cumberpatch in the role, Christopher?
He also tortured and killed the scientists left behind on Regula I. Khan was a killer. He was probably the worst of the tyrants, regardless of what is said. There were no mass killings because the populace probably knew he was fucking nuts and would set off an A-bomb in their backyard if he even sniffed possible descent.
They likely had a very incomplete picture of Khan's rule.
They never gave a reason. They just show Nero going through a database and there's a picture of Shatner's Kirk.
That was in the first Countdown issue.
Second, actually.
I'm interested in this. I did a Google search and read some reviews, but they said nothing about this.
What reason did they give for Pine and Shatner looking different?
There is no explanation, nor was there meant to be. The issue used Shatner's likeness because they wanted readers to recognize visually that it was meant to be Kirk, and the movie hadn't come out yet so Pine's face wouldn't have been as effective a visual shorthand.
And in the movie, Spock Prime recognized the young Kirk on sight. In story, they do look the same, regardless of the actors' appearance. The difference in how Kirk was drawn in the different comics is no more a real in-story difference than, say, the difference between Steve Ditko's Peter Parker and Humberto Ramos's Peter Parker.
First off, it's Cumberbatch, okay? Not "patch," "batch."
And it's a complicated issue. I can rationalize the casting choice away, but I would've been happier if it hadn't been done, because of its unfortunate resonance (however unintentional) with the alarming recent trend of casting white actors as what should be nonwhite characters. So I'm certainly able to appreciate both sides of the question, and I'm not going to pretend that one side doesn't even exist just because I don't completely agree with it.
That's certainly a revisionist take on how the Augments came about, but I suppose it could've been done both ways.
Personally I suspect that the original intent behind "Space Seed" was that the eugenics program was a selective-breeding program that had been going on for generations. After the term "eugenics" was coined in the 1880s, there actually was quite a fad in societies attempting to breed superior humans, efforts that continued into the early 20th century until the Nazis' attempts at eugenics through extermination pretty much discredited the whole idea. I suspect the idea behind "Space Seed" was that one of those programs survived and actually worked where the others failed. Which is conceivable. The real ones all failed because they were racist and incorrectly assumed that genetic superiority meant genetic purity. Khan's people, on the other hand, were ethnically diverse. So if there had been one group of eugenicists starting in the 1880s or '90s and actually promoting genetic diversity and hybrid vigor, using good genetic science rather than racist ideology, maybe they could've produced an improved breed of human within five generations or so.
But then TWOK came along and had Khan use the term "genetic engineering" to explain his people's origin, so ever since then we've assumed that they were created in a single generation, losing sight of the analogy with old-school eugenics movements and Nazism that I believe Carey Wilber intended.
