f13.net

... time bullets (http://www.examiner.com/x-13887-Dayton-Comic-Books-Examiner~y2009m7d1-Captain-America-Reborn-1-it-makes-you-say-huh) ranks right up there. Captain America was shot with time bullets so he didn't die and is just lost in time.

Hello, Batman. (http://www.filmfodder.com/comics/archives/2009/12/more_odd_comic_moments_of_the.shtml)

I guess they don't want to let go of their original frat boy. I mean Rodgers was supposed to have been a super soldier in ww2. The guy would be in his 50s minimum by now. Why they cant leave dead people just be dead I'll never know.

But yeah Time bullets. I guess those are standard issue for bad guys now   :why_so_serious:

TIME BULLETS
TIME BULLETS
TIME BULLETS
TIME BULLETS
TIME BULLETS


Oh holy god fuck you Marvel.

Was this written by Russel T Davies ?

Actually, I think the worst thing about all this is that they realized that they'd need an extra issue to finish the story, but that the extra month that would take would go past the start of Siege, Marvel's next big crossover that nobody other than Bendis fans gives a shit about.  They figured that this would be a problem since people might get confused as to who was in the Captain America suit in Seige so they worked out a compromise... which is that they'd release the Epilogue issue of Captain America Reborn (sub-titled Who Will Wield the Shield or something to that effect) the month before Captain America Reborn finishes.  So they've essentially already given away the end of the mini-series despite there still being one issue left.  Way to plan ahead guys.

Sound like Ages of Apocalypse. Due to scheduling problems all the parts of that were release out of order IIRC. So it was a story told across different books except half the books were delayed and the chronology was completely random.

Yeah, the big reveal of Captain America Reborn was at the end of an Iron Man issue. This was dumb but wouldn't have actually been as dumb if they'd made some remarks about it at the time (shot with a weird gun, etc.) rather than just suddenly changing from 'he dead' to 'he stuck in time'. It also makes that moment when Steve's ghost appeared to Thor seem really fucking odd. What's also weird is they've gone for almost the exact same thing as Batman's death (lost in time) which, even if it was planned before that came about, was revealed afterwards and just looks like Marvel copying DC.

Time bullets. Holy Christ. :facepalm:

I think everyone can agree that the time bullets she used had to be dum dums.  :why_so_serious:

WTS Time Bullets 5000gp cheaper then on the AH!   :oh_i_see:

Time bullets would be a lot cooler if you used them to shoot someone and they actually killed the target X years in the past.  Like shoot the Hulk with a couple of time bullets and they kill Banner dead when he's like 20 years old, before he became the Hulk.  :grin:

These though...  why would someone even invent them again?  :facepalm:

The stupidest part of the whole idea is the target - it's not like he's invulnerable, or even really more than an exceptionally well-conditioned Olympic level athlete. His costume may be a type of chainmail, but it's not invulnerable to bullets. Why would you need to invent anything other than a fucking hollowpoint to kill him, especially if you were able to get the shooter to be someone who could get close to him with a gun that he wouldn't suspect? Answer: You fucking wouldn't, but they had to come up with some idea for how they were bringing him back.

Best explanation for a resurrected character IMO was Kevin Smith's Green Arrow. He didn't explain it at all. The character was just alive again one day. Though I think Infinite Crisis made that a part of the continuity punches that Superboy-Prime threw later on, but Smith can't be blamed for that. Still, even continuity punches are better than TIME BULLETS.

Whenever you guys talk about comics it all sounds so fucking retarded and childish I can't even fucking believe adults are into this shit.

And every time you post I can't believe that you've outlasted similar rejects like Dash and Broughden, but that's life I guess.

I'm not talking about one-off graphic novels that tell a story.  I'm talking about the serials that go on for 50 years and have told all the same stories and fought all the same battles and have been riddled with so many continuity changes and story resets that they don't even matter anymore.  And somehow numb-nuts like you keep lapping it up. 

Well, the thing is, the bullets weren't meant to kill him, just to lose him in time so the Red Skull could take over his body or whatever. Anyway, it's uninspired, but guys, this is what serial fictions of ALL KINDS do. Bitch about this and you might as well dump on Sherlock Holmes, Star Trek, what have you as well. Some resurrections are better handled than others, but all of them are inevitable. It's like a law of cultural thermodynamics. The point is never that there are contrivances, the question is whether the contrivances lend themselves to a halfway decent story. On this point, the specific Captain American Reborn book is pretty ho-hum, but Brubaker's work on the main Captain America book has been pretty good.

Siege, actually, is kind of interesting to me. Dark Reign has been handled a lot better than I would have guessed.

If Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a story where Sherlock Holmes was shot with time bullets and sent through history so that Professor Moriarty could take over his body, then I would invent a real life time machine just to punch Doyle in the face, sir.

This isn't about comics being stupid - they can be and have a long history of being so - but about how modern Marvel has handled one of their key characters in an event everyone knew would happen. Captain America was coming back someday, so the trick became how to bring him back in an interesting way (particularly since his death was made to be a big deal and there have been consequences from it e.g. Bucky / Winter Soldier becoming CapAm and apparently being interesting in doing so).

Instead we've got a retcon that apes exactly what happened to Batman - sent through time - and one that makes several other stories completely wrong in retrospect. And it's comics - you can pull off some insane stuff in them and people will go, "Cool". Time bullets are lazy, bottom-of-the-barrel writing. Hell, a secret clone of Rogers released by the Red Skull / SHIELD who overcomes his programming to be the 'real' Rogers is more interesting than time bullets.

He made a fair point.

Time bullets pale in comparison to frankencastle.

See, I think Frankencastle is amusingly whacko. It's not as if it's less credible than a criminal-hating serial killer who has somehow survived endless violent confrontations with armed men. Or a man swinging on spider webs who doesn't pull his arms out of his socket, super-strength or not. Or...you get the point. The superheroic form, at least in comics, is full of crazy shit that doesn't hold up for a second if you choose to ask questions about it. It's not about the nuttiness of the contrivance, it's about the storytelling that goes on around it. Jason Aaron's current run on Ghost Rider has a bad angel taking over Heaven, an Antichrist who has a portal into Hell through a failed super-villain's stomach, a villainous motorcyclist who wears a laser-shooting giant eyeball on his head, an order of gun-wielding nuns, and so on. And it's awesome. Captain America Reborn is not awesome, but not because time bullets are involved, just because it's dull and bland and no efforts were made to really set it up cleverly at the time of the original story.

They've got Punisher MAX to tell good Punisher stories now, regular Punisher can thus join the craziness that is the rest of the Marvel universe. Also I want to second the decent opinion of Dark Reign. Compared to the shit that was Civil War and the Skrulls this has actually been pretty solid and an actually interesting idea. I just wish it wasn't ending with total insanity and Osborne literally doing something bugfuck stupid. The only downside to it really was screwing with the awesomeness that Thunderbolts had been (the only comic with actually intelligent, self-preservation centred henchmen). Resurrections have been happening in serial things for ages, pretty much ever since authors decided they wanted to end things/editors realised deaths can boost circulation/viewers and have then wanted to use popular characters again. Sometimes they get done well but Cap was fucktarded simply because they must have known they were bringing him back and could really have set something better up. Either change the set-up or change how he's coming back, don't got with two halves that don't seem to fit together.

Punisher MAX is all I ask from comics. The rest of its shit and TIME BULLETS can go to hell.

I think its the contrast between MAX and normal that really brings out how shit the normal is.

I don't even read comics but really, time bullets?

People wonder why the industry is going downhill and this is all the evidence I need. When people get this lazy, you can't expect anything less.

I'm still waiting to hear about the wonderful past moment in the history of superhero comics where everything was plotted tightly and there were no contrivances.

It happens. There are good runs by creative teams, that are usually fucked all to hell by hacks like Bendis retconning Skrulls in for no good goddamn reason.

The good runs are still good. I still enjoy Simonson's Thor. You don't want to take continuity so seriously that later bullshit invalidates previously good stuff.

I think the worst moments in comics generally come from writers that come up with an interesting/hackneyed story they want to tell and set about retconning previous stuff to better fit with what they want to do rather than make the effort to actually tell their story in line with continuity. Fuck there's a million ways that they could have brought Steve back that involved him being actually shot and killed but they decided to go with Time Bullets. It means having to claim that shit like Steve appearing to Thor was some Asgardian hallucination or some shit which would be fine if there was any reason beyond 'it doesn't make sense with our odd and slightly tenuous story telling choice. A nerdier example would be DC's decision to have Maxwell Lord have been dedicated to wiping out and discrediting superheroes the whole time he was running the Justice League. They could have gone with 'good man slowly driven to madness' type thing but instead just decided to rewrite him as a straight up villian for no fucking reason. The fact that a number of times this gets done involves fucking around with continuity that defined characters and was put in place by good writers just makes it even more of a kick in the crotch.

Hold on now.   I agree that the time bullets stuff is shit, but from the restart of Cap's series, going through the Winter Soldier stuff, Cap's death, and Reborn, this has all been Ed Brubaker's story (and I'd say about 90% of it has been good).  You can complain about the time bullets, but the fact that it conflicted with some stuff some other writer did in Thor sounds like an editorial oversight more than any fault of Brubaker's.

That's Marvel in a nutshell under Joe Quesada - editorial oversight. But when your Editor in Chief openly states that continuity doesn't matter, I suppose oversight is the nice way of saying they don't give a fuck so long as it sells comics.

Sadly, he might actually be right in some respects.  Pissing in the face of Spider-man continuity with One More Day has actually had positive long-term effects on Amazing Spider-man which has been getting good reviews on a near consistent basis since then.

The point about Brubaker's run on CA is pretty much what I'm saying. If I said, "Oh yeah, Bucky actually wasn't killed by a point-blank explosion, he just lost an arm and was fished out of the ocean by the Soviets and brainwashed into being a secret assassin who was kept in suspended animation except when on missions and nobody's ever mentioned him before despite the fact that he and the Black Widow were screwing as Soviet agents and he was doing shit all around the Marvel Universe for decades and now Captain America has fixed it all with the Cosmic Cube and oh by the way Bucky wasn't just a kid sidekick back during World War II, he was a deadly commando who did all the dirty work that Cap couldn't do"...people would go, "wow, that's totally contrived". But Brubaker wrote it really well, it works, and so I have no problem with perhaps the most sacrosanct comics death being undone.

Teams do seem to cycle through a lot faster than they used to, and editors are more willing to let each new team kill off characters, bring back old characters and change the tone of the book to whatever they want.

I think that model really took off during the early Image days where everyone was chasing hotshot artists. Hey, Jim Lee wants to draw such and such character, let's make it happen! Rather than being stewards of a long-running brand editors shifted more towards getting hot creative teams.

It's always been the case that new teams brought along pet changes but the scope and frequency of those changes seems larger to me than it did in older comics.

Depends on the team.  Brubaker, Bendis, Pak, Johns, Peter David, and various other writers all have a habit of doing long runs on books.

No, that would be wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey bullets.

too bad one couldn't shoot oneself with these and go back in time to kick the writing team in the jimmy

I have to agree in principle with douchematic here. Near every thread I browse in this section of f13 makes me wonder how otherwise-intelligent seeming people can read that horseshit. I dunno. Comics seemed decent when I was a kid/teen reading them on a regular basis, but it really seems like since I stopped buying/reading them that they've declined into a massive clusterfuck of retcon and "let's shake things up" stupidity way beyond anything from when I was a kid reading them.

I just wiki'ed some of the stuff based off of this thread. Franken-Punisher? Wolverine's evil son? Norman Osbourne aka the original Green Goblin (wasn;t he dead like 25 years ago?) now leads the Dark Avengers while dressed up as Captain Iron America Man?

Fuuuuuuuck.

This shit be more fucked up than Star Wars and Lucas. Or Michael Bay's Transformers.

So you stopped reading comics, wiki'ed a bunch of storylines people here have been making fun of, and come to the conclusion that comics are shit?  I guess if I stopped reading books and then wiki'ed summaries of the Twilight novels, I could safely come to the conclusion that all novels are shit?

I've kept in touch with Marvel comics on and off over the years, but whenever I have had the slightest interest in picking them up again and check them out before dropping a bunch of money on them, I see something fucktarded which puts me off them. Again. This forum only serves to reinforce that.

It might be that whole "rape of my childhood" thing that people who get upset over the Transformers films and Star Wars prequels have happen.

This doesn't equal a hatred for all comics, by far. After my years of Marvel Superhero comics stopped, I still I read Sandman and Hellblazer for years, and got quite into a number of Vertigo and Dark Horse books, including Preacher. Things like Batman one-shots and company crossovers were fine since they fit into a self-contained non-continuity. Things like Ronin, Watchmen, are as good as they ever was. And Carl Barks' (and Don Rosa's) Duck books are timeless. I kept picking up the latest Punisher books as well, and much preferred the more gritty, possibly-feasable aspect of the character and his stories rather than the silly superhero stuff (which sadly includes some of the Ennis/Dillon stuff as well). I'm sure Hellboy is still good, along with Dredd, Grendel and a bunch of other things I've never heard of. Many of which are probably still coming out of Vertigo and Dark Horse.

On the other hand, mainstream superhero books appear by all accounts to be more fucked up than they ever were. And looking back, they weren't the world's smartest reading fodder even back when I was reading them, so that's saying something.

 

The emphasis with most of the mainstream, big name superhero books lately has been one long series of event comics, which have required ever more torturous twists of logic to make them seem bigger than the last event. Marvel has been especially guilty of this, starting with Avengers Disassembled and continuing through into Dark Reign. It doesn't help that most of the overall stories have been written and conceived by Brian Michael "I Can't End One Story Without Setting up a Shitty Mystery for my Next Story" Bendis, with editorial direction from Joe "Never Met a Whoring Opportunity Pass Me By" Quesada.

But then DC had the dead awful Countdown series recently, after having such narrative success with Infinite Crisis and 52, and of course, the scatterbrained Final Crisis.

Yeah, I never reallly followed DC heroes in any kind of regular way (Vertigo imprint notwithstanding) so while I'm sure they're also involved in fucktardery, there aren't any titles for me to "go back" to. I did tend to buy most of the Batman crossover books, and things like Year One and TDKR, but not the ongoing series.

Eh, the Frankenpunisher thing really was more a radical response to the fact that the character really wasn't doing anything. Punisher MAX was providing a really good series for Punisher doing all the sort of stuff the original character should be doing and in the main universe he simply wasn't relevant. Personally I think that would be a better reason to quietly dump him until there was an actual reason to use him in a story but it isn't totally fucked in the sense that if you actually liked the character you'd already be reading MAX instead.

The Dark Reign storyline is one that I've thought has worked better than most of the previous Marvel event stories, Osbourne is a big enough combination of charismatic character/insane evil douchebag that it's kept things on edge and entertaining (barring the occasional timeline/continuity fuckup between different titles). Of course Marvel's greatest storyline over the last few years has been in spaaaace with the Annihilation Wave thing which was actually an enjoyable and well written event. The problem with writing comics off based on some stupid (and some stupid sounding but actually workable-with-good-writing) stories is that they do also put out some good stuff. There's a lot of trash stuff but there's enough good stuff or stupid but fun stuff that I really wouldn't write off the big 2 and certainly not comics in general.

So what's Punisher MAX supposed to be these days? Punisher in the real world/not the Marvel Universe version of the reality of Earth with no Heroes or something?

See, if you want to say that the majority of Marvel's superhero comics suck, I can get behind that.  That's not how your initial post came across though.  Plenty of good comics have been discussed here, although not so much lately (largely because the mainstream stuff is the only thing read by enough people to generate a discussion).

People grow up and move on.  Distance provides perspective.  Where The Wild Things Are was awesome when you were five, then you grow up and realize it's a shitty picture book.  MMO's are cool until the whole "I'm playing with other people!" phenomena wears off and you realize they're just giant hamster wheels that have you chasing a carrot.  The fact is, the vast majority of comics were always childish shit, you just couldn't recognize that as a child. 

Okay, I think this post of yours and my followup puts us generally on the same page.



I get that. My whole point is that even with perspective and distance, I think they're actually a big more stupider than when I was a kid.

Pretty much, I think Ennis kicked it off and it's been pretty good so long as you don't mind horrible graphic violence and themes. Also comics are not any stupider now than say the '90s with pouches for everyone and lots of grimdark storylines (some of which were good, mature stuff that comics really needed to do but a lot were adult in the same way Torchwood was). They've just got a different brand of stupid.

I'm talking 'bout 80's to early 90's comics. Mid-90's was when I shifted away from most superheroes into stuff like I mentioned above.
Secret Wars/II was childish-silly, but not as fucktarded as all of this appears to be.

I'll check out Punisher MAX.

Secret Wars II was not as fucktardish as what precisely? Because seriously, that's about as shitastic as superhero comics ever have been in story, in art, in concept, you name it.

Start at issue #1 with Punisher:MAX. Every 6 issue series is great but it has its own internal continuity you'll want to respect (and it will give you greater appreciation for the events that are taking place).

SWII was really bad, no argument. But it wasn't constantly being redone and shoved back in your face. Having said, that, Civil War seems to be more retarded, for one. And I guess SWII was the forerunner for all of these endless crossover clusterfucks. So maybe it was worse. But at least it was brief.

A lot of what was wrong with Civil War was Millar's excesses as a writer, and some resulting bad or indifferent characterizations.

Conceptually, it's really a decent enough storytelling platform for a superhero universe. "Government requires superheroes to register and be trained; some absolutely refuse, seeing a long-term danger in having their independence compromised; others agree either because they think it's inevitable or because they think registration is a good idea."

Stack that against: "Omnipotent being wants to learn about being human. Many forced and painful crossovers ensue."

There's nothing *wrong* with the idea of an event being a company-wide story-telling arc that actually seems to move the general story of a comic-book universe forward in some manner. Quite aside from the atrocious art, sub-adolescent storytelling and paper-thin crossovers, Secret Wars II was really not that kind of event, nor were most of the ones that followed in its wake. (Even Crisis over at DC changed far less than it promised to change, kind of notoriously so, since three or four crossovers since have had to address what it didn't do).

The bad parts of what Marvel has done since Civil War aren't in the basic structure of the event storyline except for Secret Invasion, which was a tired riff on an old conceit. When Bendis or Millar isn't manhandling the story hook of these events to their own pet fetishes, some pretty good stories built up out of the event infrastructure have appeared. McDuffie and Hickman on Fantastic Four, for example, have done great stuff with the Civil War aftermath and Dark Reign as premises. Ellis' Thunderbolts was a fantastic follow-on to Civil War. Fraction's run on Iron Man has done a great job with Stark as a character having to eat a lot of humble pie for his douchbaggery in Civil War (while rebuilding the character as a hero to make up for the excesses of how Millar wrote him in the first place).

I cannot recall a single Secret Wars II tie-in that rose above embarassing. Maybe the story with Kurse in Simonson's Thor, but that was so barely a tie-in in the first place.

I'd actually say start with Punisher: Born, then Issue #1 forward.  Born was fucking awesome and a good intro to this universes Punisher and what drives him.  But yeah, Punisher Max should be read beginning to end, it keeps building on itself like an on running story, and is not just episodic.

Having said that, I haven't read any of it since Ennis left.  How have the stories been?  Any noticeable drop in quality?

What about when the Thing wrestled the Beyonder in the super hero wrestling league?

Anyway...yeah...

Thanks for the info.

*edit* Bored at work. Replied to an ancient post.  :awesome_for_real:

DAAAAAMN YOUUUUUU!!!