The Four Color Media Monitor

In an interview with Variety, film actor Edi Gathegi talked about his role as the 2nd Mr. Terrific, Michael Holt, who may have debuted in a Spectre story by John Ostrander in the late 1990s, and went on to be put in the role of a technology specialist superhero in the overrated JSA title wirtten by pretentious scribes like James Robinson, Geoff Johns and David Goyer. The article also tells something eyebrow raising about Gathegi's role in X-Men: First Class:

Gathegi had been down the superhero road before: In 2011’s “X-Men: First Class,” he played Darwin, a mutant with the ability to transform his body into anything it needed to survive its environment or circumstances. And yet, the filmmakers still managed to kill off the character — the only man of color of significance in the film — before he’d had a chance to do anything of importance.

I'll have to admit, if the X-Men filmmakers were just introducing a black character who could've been an original creation as nothing more than a plot device, that was appalling, and but one reason why I'm tired of live action superhero fare. But that doesn't make me any more encouraged to watch more of the same, and the way Michael Holt was put to use in the JSA series was nothing to write home about. Now, here's some of the interview parts:

Talk to me about your mask. Did it go through many iterations before you settled on the way that it ended up being on your face?

I don’t think that there was too many iterations. The template is there from the comics, so we were only ever in that space. We might have gone through a couple of iterations, just for comfortability. But in terms of design, I think they kind of had a firm idea of what they wanted from the beginning. The material that they used was molded to my face and also very pliable, so it didn’t get in the way of facial expressions. It was also two pieces — the top of the T came down to my top lip, and the second piece was for the chin.

Personally, I don't find that mask very appealing, mostly because in the comics, it looked like it covered his mouth. Seriously, it's one of the most insulting designs I've ever seen next to Kyle Rayner's Green Lantern mask shaped like a crab. Yet the interviewer and interviewee go on to say:

It’s just such a unique look that I’ve never seen in a superhero movie, so I’m fascinated by how it might have affected your performance.

I had a lot of questions when I first saw the mask in the in the comic books. I didn’t really get the design, to be honest with you, and it wasn’t until I started exploring the character more, that I understood the functionality of the mask, but also that the mask was cool because Mister Terrific was wearing it. He’s the third smartest man in the universe. Everything that that guy does, including wearing a whimsical jacket with “Fairplay” on the sleeve, is going to be cool.

Good grief, is this serious? The mask design doesn't look cool at all. It actually makes the character look silly. If the idea was to make it look like the first letter in "terrific", it's just an example of superfluous effort in costume designs. When John Ostrander originally introduced Holt in the pages of his Spectre volume, he may have been depicted as a very smart guy, but under Goyer/Johns/Robinson, he was not written very impressively at all.

The final film doesn’t provide any sense of Mister Terrific’s tragic backstory, and how enormously informative it is for his character. Was there more that you shot that didn’t end up making it into the film?

No. This is the beginning of the new DC Universe, and the focal point is Superman. There wasn’t a lot of room to delve into Mister Terrific’s backstory. If we’re lucky, we’re going to have a lot more opportunities to to dig into what Mister Terrific is and who he is. I feel like we’ve only scratched the surface.

With the aforementioned political metaphors involved, I'm not waiting up. And that tragic background the Holt character was given was just too much; yet another story where a guy loses his wife and unborn child through terrible circumstances of a car crash. At least it wasn't a story about murder.

I'll give Gathegi credit for acknowledging his character is actually the 2nd to bear the name Mr. Terrific after Terry Sloane, a character who, while he had his own story segment in Sensation Comics, may have only appeared once in the early Justice Society stories of the Golden Age. But there's nothing in these modern live action movies and TV shows to make me feel encouraged to try them out, especially when the JSA series from 1999-2006 was such a shoddy affair.

Labels: dc comics, history, Justice Society of America, moonbat writers, msm propaganda