Useless comics news, discussions, and recommendations

[Khaldun]

Hawkeye is starting to feel too meandering to me.

I like the new She-Hulk book. Nice tip of the hat to Slott's first 30-ish issues of his version of the title.

One thing that interests me is how difficult Fantastic Four seems to be for current Marvel. It does make you wonder about whether that's being slighted due to film rights, but then you realize they're doing some really interesting, edgy things with Spider-Man AND that the Avengers-related titles are not exactly playing it safe.

[HaemishM]

the Avengers-related titles are not exactly playing it safe.

They ain't exactly good either.

[Velorath]

So the new Moon Knight book is actually pretty good so far. (Well, one whole issue.)

It's ok. From any other writer I probably wouldn't go out of my way to look for the second issue unless I heard really good things about it, but it's Ellis so he get's the benefit of the doubt for now. Some of it had a slight Fell vibe, but that just made me want more Fell.

[Khaldun]

I'm not wild about Hickman's Avengers writing but I appreciate that it is not just mindlessly commercial. The books featuring the core Avengers are having some of their best runs ever right now, particularly Thor and Captain America.

I don't think Marvel is just tying their comics to the movies, is the key point. Though they've found a way to make Nick Fury black and to introduce Coulson, etc.  I'm just interested at how in the middle of a lot of fun, interesting and daring work, Fantastic Four just doesn't ever seem to click. Hickman more or less wrote it as "The Adventures of Reed Richards, his kids, and a few of his other relatives" and that was ok, but he so palpably didn't know what to do with Sue, Johnny and Ben that it was painful. Before that, I don't remember the last time the book was good. It's been a long long time.

[CmdrSlack]

She Hulk is doing a good job of handling the law without getting it terribly wrong.

I wonder how long that will last, as it does seem to focus pretty heavily on her legal practice.

[HaemishM]

I'm actually going back and reading Fantastic Four starting right after the "Heroes Return" debacle (yes back to 1998 FFS). I'm in the midst of the Claremont run and he has some decent character ideas but like everything he did after his first run on X-Men, the villains are all really forgettable. Plus, he falls into that old school style of writing comics, that is to say, OVERWRITING comics with lots of unnecessary exposition in captions. While I certainly miss thought balloons and captions, there is a middle ground between the minimalist approach most writers take today and the novels written in the past.

[Velorath]

With one issue left of Superior Spider-man, I finally got around to reading the first 30 issues and really enjoyed it. Slott managed to give Otto just enough moments of not being a complete douchebag to make him a character you can kinda sorta root for (he's a lot like Fixer/Techno from the Thunderbolts in many respects, or later Thunderbolts era Zemo for that matter). Next up, I've got to read through Superior Foes of Spider-man.

[Khaldun]

Superior Foes is just great.

[CmdrSlack]

Seconded on that. It's like Hawkeye, but with bad guys.

[palmer_eldritch]

I'm making my way through Infinity and all the tie-in books now on Marvel Unlimited and I'm really enjoying the epic, space operary feel of it.

[Ironwood]

She Hulk is doing a good job of handling the law without getting it terribly wrong.

I wonder how long that will last, as it does seem to focus pretty heavily on her legal practice.

The writer was a lawyer too, no ?

[CmdrSlack]

She Hulk is doing a good job of handling the law without getting it terribly wrong.

I wonder how long that will last, as it does seem to focus pretty heavily on her legal practice.

The writer was a lawyer too, no ?

Didn't know that. But if that's true, then I guess I always have a fallback job. I mean shit, they gave Alyssa Milano a comic book.

[Merusk]

Your rack isn't as mesmerizing as hers.

[CmdrSlack]

Truth.

[Raguel]

Yeah, Bendis still sucks. Interesting turn of events in Uncanny Avengers, although I can understand upon reflection why you guys think it's dragging, etc.

[Ironwood]

She Hulk is doing a good job of handling the law without getting it terribly wrong.

I wonder how long that will last, as it does seem to focus pretty heavily on her legal practice.

The writer was a lawyer too, no ?

Didn't know that. But if that's true, then I guess I always have a fallback job. I mean shit, they gave Alyssa Milano a comic book.

http://comicsalliance.com/she-hulk-1-review-charles-soule-javier-pulido-marvel-comics/[/url]

Lawyered.

[Margalis]

Man, I can't stand the art on a lot of modern comics. It seems like there are some really weird styles out there that are like a hybrid of anime and cartoon network shows or something.

[Raguel]

The current CA arc is a bit unfortunate, given the movie. I wonder if the writer knew what was going to happen in TWS before doing this arc.

[Ironwood]

What's it about ?

[Raguel]

What's it about ?

[Ironwood]

Oh Dear.  That's bad timing.

[Margalis]

Marvel does an awful job of tying the movies in with the comics.

Actually...I'm not if that's true. Maybe the philosophy is just that the comics and movies are separate and only inform each other indirectly. That may be a better long-term strategy that allows for higher quality comics and movies, rather than trying to aggressively tie things in.

[Khaldun]

Indirectly is better, I think. In fact, they don't really have any choice, because the comic-book Marvel U is crawling with characters who aren't in the movies and will never be in the movies but who probably have value as intellectual property in some fashion or another. Plus trying to tightly rein in the continuity so that it fits the movies would keep the really interesting creative folks they do have on staff from creating characters and telling stories that might at some point be incorporated into adaptations.

[HaemishM]

I've finally gotten to the point in my Fantastic Four catchup that I'm in the very beginnings of the Johnathan Hickman run.

What... the... fuck?

The Mark Waid run was good. It was fun, had plenty of adventurous feel, plenty of humor mixed with darkness (Doom sending Franklin to hell was a good touch along with the Doom mystic armor change). It was Weiringo's best work in years.The JMS run was ok - a little too heavy handed and felt like he recycled some B5 stuff but decent. The McDuffie "Black Panther and Storm are part of the FF" run was ok but forgettable. Then Mark Millar comes on - the poor man's Gratn Morrison. Those were some really poor stories, especially the one about "Doctor Doom's mentor." That was some stupid shit. Here's a villain that has destroyed countless dimensions and versions of the Fantastic Four without breaking a sweat, but this one creates the problem. Yeah. Ok.

The Hickman stuff is just fucking weird. The whole Council of 1000 Reed Richards thing? What... the... fuck? And all through it, it seems like none of the writers since Waid even has clue one what makes the Fantastic Four an interesting group, or any idea who the characters are and what they would or would not do. Especially Reed Richards. This guy has gone from being the most brilliant yet humanistic scientist to an aloof twat who builds pocket universes (complete with life and civilizations) for fun only to watch them die. And it's become a group that time-travels for vacations. Really?

I hope it gets better from here because this is some stupid shit.

[Khaldun]

The Hickman FF is more or less "Reed Richards and his Amazing Pals". It has some interesting stuff but it's trying really too hard to create scale and significance via time-travel, alternate realities and so on.

I'd say the best pieces of the run are the relationship between Reed, Valeria and Doom--there's some interesting things in there and a much ballsier writer might have decided to do something like move Doom past his obsession with Reed Richards and in the process make him actually a much more dangerous person. (E.g., Doom's psychological hang-ups are demonstrably the reason he gets defeated again and again; what if he resolved out the obsessions while still believing that he was entitled to dominate the world/universe)

Almost nothing interesting gets done with the Thing, which is a sign that a writer doesn't fully "get" the FF--Ben Grimm is the straw that stirs the drink. Sue also, mostly. There's a late attempt to give Johnny some new gravitas which has been promptly forgotten afterwards. And Franklin goes once again through the repeated cycle of being made all-powerful and then being essentially depowered which was old the first time it was done and is now just annoying as fuck, since Franklin always turns out to be the reset button every time the FF is in an impossible situation. (Valeria is now just contributing to that somewhat.)

[HaemishM]

Well, they've started the whole stupid kid cycle over again with Valeria being super-duper smarter than Reed at age fucking 3 - which basically means every child this couple ever has will be some goddamn omega-level mutant yet no one is coming to take them away like they do with Hope in X-Men. And yes, so far the Hickman stuff has been Reed Richards and these fucking idiots he travels around with for some reason but he isn't even getting the Richards characterization right. Every writer since Waid has tried to highlight the creepy/dark aspects of having that much intelligence without realizing what made the character and the book interesting was that he could do all these things but knew when to stop. It's the same shit they did with Tony Stark with the Civil War shit. It's like they decided that these guys having a conscience wasn't interesting so fuck it, we'll just turn them into pantomime villains with no real good explanation why their current behavior clashes so badly with the previous 30+ years of continuity.

[Khaldun]

Hickman (and actually before him Dwayne McDuffie) were trying to do emergency characterization surgery on Reed Richards after Mark Millar more or less tried to ruin the character for good. Shit, Millar even gave fucking Hank Pym a bit of sympathetic breathing room, but Reed Richards he more or less wrote in as the Edward Teller of the Registration Act who was responsible for all of the most indefensible stuff (Clone Thor, the Negative Zone prison) without even a trace of doubt.

So I appreciate that they either had to say, "Civil War never happened, we're just going to go right back to having Reed be the Professor from Gilligan's Island" or they had to try and go inside his mind and explain how he talked himself into being a super-villain.

[Raguel]

This current convo makes me glad I stopped reading comics when I did. 

The only thing I hate is that Uncanny Avengers talks about stuff Wanda allegedly did that clearly NEVER HAPPENED.

[Velorath]

Read through all of Marvel's Battle Royale homage Avengers Arena yesterday. I remember seeing a lot of criticism surrounding it in reviews back when the first issues came out, but it seemed that by the time it finished up opinions had turned more positive. I normally read stuff based on the creative team or if a book is getting really positive word of mouth, as opposed to following particular characters. A lot of writers tend to be hesitant to use more recently created characters though, who might still be perceived as being heavily tied to their creators, like the Runaways are with BKV to some extent for instance, so I was initially interested in this book because characters like Chase, Nico, and former Drax the Destroyer sidekick Cammi were in it. Of course in a book about young superheroes being forced to kill each other off, these characters along with Darkhawk and X-23 also felt fairly safe in this scenario which also left a lot of the other characters feeling expendable.

Good book overall though. Writer Dennis Hopeless admits in the back of the last issue that this isn't the book he wanted to write. He had pitched more of a teen drama, and the editors he had pitched it to focused in on a story arc he had planned where various MU "schools" would get forced into a death match against each other and told him to make the book about that. Obviously the Battle Royale setup is very conducive to teen drama though, and Hopeless does a good job at making you care about a number of the new characters that were created for this book. Towards the end though it makes you feel like even most of those characters are fairly safe due to the writer getting attached to them.

I guess maybe it's not a horrible thing that ultimately the majority of the characters make it through the story. It maybe makes for an odd Battle Royale homage, but it's still an entertaining read and also one of the few times I've seen Arcade used to decent effect as well. Overall the book reminded me a bit of Kyle and Yost's New Mutants book in that it's a fairly well written teen superhero comic with a bit of a death count. The surviving characters are now in a new book called Avengers Undercover which is only a couple issues in right now.

[jgsugden]

And now it is time to kill Wolverine?  *Sigh*

[Nevermore]

Don't worry, there will still be evil mohawk Wolverine and hot Summer Glau Wolverine running around.  Unless they've died recently, too.  I don't really keep track.

[HaemishM]

I finally caught up with all the Fantastic Four's available on Marvel Unlimited, including both runs of FF and the reboot written by Matt Fraction. Holy shit, what the fuck happened to these characters? Mark Waid's run was the best since John Byrne's and everything else has been... well, inconsistent in quality to say the least. The Hickman stuff really makes me think his Avengers/Infinity stuff is only going to get worse (and it's not good to start with). Way too many unbeatable cosmic level entities like the Celestials involved along with really bad characterizations of Reed Richards. Johnny Storm's entire "I died and am thus more serious" transformation is completely forgotten.

The Matt Fraction run is even worse and it kind of highlights a problem I'm having with Marvel's entire editorial style. They want a shared universe with these huge events affecting all their titles but they don't want to maintain continuity (or be constrained) by it. So we get weird shit like the Fantastic Four just bounding wily-nily through time but then at the end of Age of Ultron we get the "WE BROKE TIME!!!!!" shit. Meanwhile, the Beast goes back in time and brings the original X-Men to their future (his present) to give Scott Summers a guilt trip. All of those things contradict one another and makes anyone who is reading multiple books confused. Plus you get things like Doctor Doom being stuck in Hell one minute then returned no worse for wear with his old armor back a few months later when a different writer comes on.

And I find out that Fantastic Four has rebooted AGAIN? What the fuck? Why are these long-running books getting new #1's every 16 months or so?

[Fordel]

To give new readers a stepping in point and allow them to re-brand things with their Marvel NOW tag. Also allows clear transitions between arcs, including writers and artists if need be.

[Khaldun]

I am actually fine with the serial reboots. They are openly going with the "Hey, are you new on this title? Are you a cool and interesting writer and/or artist? Do what you want with this character(s). Just have some good ideas. Go to it."

This is way better than, "Fix what Mark Millar just broke, because THE CONTINUITY is our Lord and Master."

Sure, does it create some broken stuff? Yeah. So? The next guy doesn't have to fix it, he just has to say, "So here's my thing." I think this is so so so much better.

[Margalis]

The idea of breaking runs into separate volumes with their own numbering is fine.

However I do think it's a problem when there is an absolute glut of #1 issues. The implication is that most series are extremely short-lived. My impression from reading comics websites and listening to podcasts is that every month half of all comics are new #1s and most of those series are cancelled after a few issues.