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Author Topic: Useless comics news, discussions, and recommendations  (Read 202481 times)
Khaldun
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Reply #455 on: November 03, 2016, 02:22:43 PM

The Original Sin stuff was just bad storytelling on several levels.
Fordel
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Reply #456 on: November 03, 2016, 02:58:52 PM

Frankly, the way things are now in the comic-book Marvel U., you'd think people would love mutants compared to Inhumans--the idea of a cloud of mist suddenly flowing through your neighborhood and changing you into a freak who is supposed to respect some monarchy you've never had any relationship to before would be vastly more terrifying and infuriating to most human beings than the idea of mysteriously changing at adolescence, when you change anyway. Terrigen in the current mythos is like toxic waste: the citizens of the world should have long since demanded that the entire hierarchy of Attilan be attacked by a UN military force and detained for crimes against the world. The way the story's being told at the moment, that wouldn't be bigotry, it would be righteous retaliation for a war crime.


The main differences are the terrigen cloud as far as the general population (and like 99% of the inhuman one) was a horrible accident/tragedy due to Thanos' invasion at the time and the Royal family/Inhuman nation is doing it's best to mitigate and work with the affected countries and populations. The Inhuman nation is taking in any willing 'NuHuman' but it's not forcing them to fall in line with their monarchy. Even if/when the truth comes out, it wasn't an action by the Inhuman nation, but rather the individual action of one man who has since been removed from power. Another factor is the terrigen cloud is something you can avoid (or seek out), where mutation just happens. One of the general plots of one of the inhuman books currently is about a official response team that follows the clouds around helping anyone who is changed and working with the local governments and populace to mitigate any fallout.

On the mutant end of the spectrum you either have extreme radicals hell bent on wiping out baseline humanity or on the 'better' end you have child soldiers waging a secret war and using their vast resources to manipulate multiple levels of government and industry to their advantage.  why so serious?

Like sure, the Marvel Worlds in-universe hatred and racism towards mutants is down right comical at times, but it's not that hard to see why the Inhumans might be better received then Mutants would.

and the gate is like I TOO AM CAPABLE OF SPEECH
Sky
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Reply #457 on: December 13, 2016, 09:19:55 PM

Member Meltdown? I member!

« Last Edit: December 15, 2016, 09:47:42 PM by Sky »
Sky
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Reply #458 on: December 15, 2016, 09:47:31 PM

Apparently when I'm lazy I sketch Logan.

Sky
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Reply #459 on: February 14, 2017, 12:40:26 PM

I have a free month code for Unlimited for someone who isn't currently subbed. Also I've done a few more Marvel arts that are much better than those above :)

Sky
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Reply #460 on: February 16, 2017, 09:34:43 AM

Alex Ross is so good.

palmer_eldritch
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Reply #461 on: July 31, 2017, 11:51:36 AM

I'm reading X-Men vs Inhumans on Marvel Unlimited. I'm three issues in.

Am I missing something or are the Inhumans just totally wrong? You've got this poisonous cloud that's going to kill every mutant but also turns some ordinary people into Inhumans.

So if you destroy the cloud then some humans continue to live normal human lives without superpowers. Or if you don't destroy it, thousands of people die but some other people get superpowers.

The answer seems pretty obvious (the one that doesn't mean thousands of people die (actually I don't know how many mutants are in the world at this point but even if it's just dozens)). I don't care about the Inhumans as a group but the storyline is bugging me because a couple of characters I do care about, Johnny Storm and Ms Marvel, are all in favour of the genocide without any apparent qualms, and they're meant to be good people. And I like Ms Marvel.

Maybe it gets resolved later in some way?
HaemishM
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Reply #462 on: July 31, 2017, 12:23:10 PM

Just take as gospel that any big Marvel event in the last 10-15 years is going to be fucking stupid, make no sense and require established characters act completely against type in order to foster conflict with other heroes. If it involves the X-Men, expect that it will be even more dumb than the baseline because that franchise has been almost totally bereft of good ideas since 2008, with very few exceptions. Marvel has been trying to shoehorn the Inhumans into prominence likely because they don't have the X-Men movie license, and though I like some what they've done with the characters, it hasn't worked very well in terms of the larger universe.

Khaldun
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Reply #463 on: July 31, 2017, 12:37:22 PM

The pushing of the Inhumans for the last five years or so has really been awful. And yes, they're roundly unsympathetic in this case--their only answer still seems to be "But Terrigen is sacred to our people!" Look, the Pope can say that the Sistine Chapel is sacred, but if the Sistine Chapel suddenly got fusion engines and a Murder AI controlling it and it was going around the world killing orphans, I think maybe the Pope would have to modify his views.
jgsugden
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Reply #464 on: July 31, 2017, 01:06:29 PM

The pushing of the Inhumans for the last five years or so has really been awful. And yes, they're roundly unsympathetic in this case--their only answer still seems to be "But Terrigen is sacred to our people!" Look, the Pope can say that the Sistine Chapel is sacred, but if the Sistine Chapel suddenly got fusion engines and a Murder AI controlling it and it was going around the world killing orphans, I think maybe the Pope would have to modify his views.
Yeah - modify them to explain why the 'sacrifices' are a necessary part of the faith. 

2020 will be the year I gave up all hope.
Khaldun
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Reply #465 on: November 28, 2018, 09:23:37 AM

Is it just me, or is the current wave of Marvel stuff on the Unlimited really bad? It feels like this was a bad moment for the company as a whole. I just got to the most recent relaunch of Avengers (with the Celestials, where Ghost Rider is a member) and it's really tedious.  A lot of the ideas they have for most of their characters on their own books feel either tired, bad, or slavishly tied to the films.

I also can't read most of the Star Wars comics because of the extremely off-putting reliance on tracing character faces from the films. It's not as pornographic as Greg Land but it's still really icky.
HaemishM
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Reply #466 on: November 28, 2018, 09:35:29 AM

I like Greg Land.

But yes, I stopped my Unlimited sub because there are few books worth slavishly following. Every time a creative team gets a good groove going, the book ends and they reboot the whole goddamn thing. It's lucky if there are 12 issues in the book before that happens and then we're off on a completely different direction. And unlike the '80's and early '90's, all the books are using this very deconstructed narrative style where 1 story takes 6 issues so a creative team may basically be writing one or two graphic novels before fucking off to something else, at which point the character or characters you've been interested in get rotated out to some other different approach you may not like as much.

Khaldun
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Reply #467 on: November 28, 2018, 02:01:48 PM

Yeah. I really don't enjoy the way they do that. The Doctor Strange that just ended on Unlimited is a good example. I didn't care for the whole "magic has gone away" and the "Doctor Strange and Famous Other Magicians" and all the rest, and he's my favorite character, but ok, keep going from there. Instead, nope, time to reboot the book, redesign his costume, relaunch his supporting cast, reinterpret his powers, etc., after only two years of story-telling. It's really disruptive.


You like Greg Land? Tracings of porn models doing their O-face instead of actual drawings of characters who look like themselves?
HaemishM
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Reply #468 on: November 28, 2018, 02:16:48 PM

You got a problem with O-face?  why so serious?

I get the criticisms of Greg Land, I just happen to like his compositions. And tits.

Khaldun
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Reply #469 on: November 28, 2018, 03:25:22 PM

I have a problem with Kitty Pryde and Storm o-facing (often with the same woman's off-model face for three panels, and then another off-model face from another woman) while they're just having conversations, fighting, eating breakfast, yelling orders at Wolverine, etc.
Velorath
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Reply #470 on: February 19, 2019, 03:13:12 PM

So I've read the first few issues of the Age of X-Man story that just started up and it's... actually pretty interesting so far. I didn't read the 10 issue "X-Men Disassembled" run-up to the event as I heard it was pretty abysmal but I read through some summary stuff to get the gist of it. Obviously this is meant to be an inversion of the Age of Apocalypse storyline and the format is the same as well with an Alpha issue leading in to all of the minis. This is more like a pocket universe kinda thing though that most of the X-men (current and past) have been sucked into by X-Man (Nate Grey who originated in the Age of Apocalypse). It's supposed to be more or less of a Utopia where everyone is a mutant and the X-men generally seem to spend their time helping out in the occurrence of natural disasters or when a mutant's emerging powers cause large-scale problems.

The twist to this alternate reality is that much like X-Man, everyone in this reality is now grown in labs, romance/sex is now forbidden, and Apocalypse is at the head of a rebellion trying to convince people that it's ok to love and to procreate the old-fashioned way. There's 6 minis which are all 5 issues each, which will then lead into the Omega issue so there's still plenty of time for this to completely collapse but this is a promising start to it so far.

I should note that I loved Age of Apocalypse as well, but not any of their subsequent attempts to duplicate it like Age of X or any of the times they returned to AoA.
Khaldun
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Reply #471 on: February 19, 2019, 04:37:00 PM

The current X stuff in MU is trying SO HARD to make the characters interesting again. I appreciate it. But they kind of missed a chance with Grant Morrison, where he really wanted to change the status quo on the characters rather than just do more of the same/do a weird sideline. His ideas were good about the mutant idea. Actually others have done it too; the problem with the X-Men is once they really pushed the whole "they are humanity's future; they are discriminated against" there's no way to back down and just make them five dumb teenagers; no way to really protect the rest of Marvel from it either. (Like, how does any norm know why Thor or Cap or Spider-Man isn't a mutant? It's stupid once you've gone there.)
Velorath
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Reply #472 on: February 19, 2019, 04:59:49 PM

I haven't really been reading any of it as the impression I get is that the status quo seems to change too frequently and creative teams often hope on and off without being there long enough to really establish a run (except for Bendis who hung around too long with shit like the time displaced original X-Men).
HaemishM
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Reply #473 on: February 19, 2019, 05:40:18 PM

I stopped reading any of the X-Men titles with the latest relaunch after that idiotic Inhumans v. X-Men story. They were just so bad, so ordinary and trying so hard to recreate the feeling of the Claremont/Byrne X-Men stories including all the stupid baseball games and shit. It felt like someone trying too hard to emulate something without really understanding what made it great in the first place. The Bendis time-displaced X-Men thing was just brutally bad. The last good X-Men book was Wolverine and the X-Men written by Jason Aaron. Nothing after that has been worth a shit.

Velorath
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Reply #474 on: February 19, 2019, 05:50:14 PM

The good thing about alternate reality stories at least is that I don't have to be invested in the regular continuity to get into it.
Velorath
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Reply #475 on: July 03, 2019, 02:51:04 AM

My brother started picking up the War of the Realms crossover stuff and seemed to like it so I decided to check it out. First though I had to catch up on a couple years worth of Thor comics through Unlimited. I'd read the early bit of Jason Aaron's run but stopped when the Original Sin stuff hit with Thor becoming Unworthy (felt like a good stopping point at the time although I intended to continue on at some point). I just burned through all the Jane Foster Thor issues, Thor's return, and Aaron's current run on Avengers and for the most part it's pretty good. I don't think his Avengers book particularly interesting and he doesn't have a handle on all the characters, but it's only of minor importance to War of the Realms anyhow so that's fine. The Thor books are really strong though, and The Mighty Thor (the Jane Foster series) is pretty great.

Unlimited hasn't quite caught up to War of the Realms yet though so I've been reading those issues through other means. I'm only a couple issues in so far though which is mostly action and setting up the premise for people just coming into the crossover. There's a pretty good tie-in issue of The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl though which makes me want to go back and start reading through the series (I read the first couple issues but didn't stick with it).
Khaldun
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Reply #476 on: July 03, 2019, 06:25:34 AM

I'm really disliking the current stuff on Unlimited (which is what, a year ago or so)? The movies are really cannibalizing the comics now in bad ways, tonally and narratively. I can't really think of anything in the current issues on Unlimited that I actually like. Dr. Strange is crawling back from the really bad run of a few years back, I suppose. I loathe the new Avengers book. I suppose West Coast Avengers is kind of fun, but I know cancellation is in its near-term future.

In the meantime, reading the Dark Knights: Metal stuff over at the DC app and...it has interesting moments but damnit, it's waaaaaay over-complicated and getting this literal about Barbatos and Batman and all that seems like a really dumb, bad idea--and a weird attempt to apologize for the bad ideas of the New 52 and the Snyder Murderverse, I think.
Velorath
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Reply #477 on: July 03, 2019, 10:12:36 AM

Unlimited is generally 6 months behind, but I almost never read current stuff. I'm reading the Age of X stuff on a... less reputable site, but aside from that the most current Marvel comics I'd read was going through Dan Slott's whole run on Spider-man which I enjoyed. I also just started on Immortal Hulk, which is Hulk done almost as a horror book (going back to his roots a bit but even darker) which I'm only three issues into so far but I'm digging it. I might catch up on Runaways and Squirrel Girl at some point when I get a chance, and I'll check out the new Conan stuff Marvel is doing. I read the first issue of Savage Avengers (an "Avengers" book with Conan in the present day MU) and I'm not at all sure what to make of it or why it's an Avengers book since the cast in the first issue is Conan and Wolverine with Punisher apparently showing up in the next issue, and Venom is in there as well.

Most of the mainstream Marvel books don't hold a lot of interest for me, but I've also been slightly outside the loop on comics in recent years so maybe there's some highly acclaimed current books I'm not aware of. Prior to getting into War of the Realms, I was reading through Tomb of Dracula so current stuff is clearly not what I've been using Unlimited for.
HaemishM
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Reply #478 on: July 03, 2019, 12:25:33 PM

The Jason Aaron run on Thor was just great, especially the whole Jane Foster Female Thor series. Beautiful art and a really great story. Most of what I've read by Aaron I really like (he did the last good X-Men series, Wolverine and the X-Men, the first volume - the second volume was not by him and was pretty terrible).

I think the biggest problem with Marvel books these days is that no creative team stays for very long and unlike the old days, Marvel editorial thinks that a new creative team should mean either 1) a new book with new renumbering (I fucking HATE this) or 2) such a drastically different direction that it feels like a new book, including taking good supporting cast and removing them from the character's life completely for no good reason. The New 52 to DC Rebirth books had this same problem and it really gets on my tits.

Trippy
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Reply #479 on: July 03, 2019, 12:30:15 PM

Can never have too many #1 issues.
Velorath
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Reply #480 on: July 03, 2019, 01:01:33 PM

Aaron seems to have some strange Bendis-like tic with Avengers where some of the characterization seems insanely off. Like in one issue Dr. Strange is completely surprised by the existence of the Eternals. I mean, maybe it's a result of something that happened in a Dr. Strange or Eternals comic, but it seems a bizarre thing for him to not know, especially since one of the biggest villains in the MU is an offshoot of the Eternals and since Sersi was an active Avenger for quite a while.

Creative team shifting is a pretty big issue and has been for years. On the flip side, there are runs like Aaron's Thor which has been going for about 7 years now and Slott's Spider-man which concluded after 8 years. On the not quite as epic level, Immortal Hulk is on issue 20 which is a pretty solid run so far by today's standards. Further out on the periphery stuff like Unbeatable Squirrel Girl has also been going on a few years with a consistent creative team (one artist change about a year or so back apparently) and only one renumbering.

The X-books in particular though seem to have the biggest issue with creative team shifts, new directions, relaunches, and renumbering. That whole line continues to be a mess, with the latest new direction starting this month with Hickman's House of X and Powers of X.
Khaldun
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Reply #481 on: July 03, 2019, 07:20:13 PM

I'm with Haemish. The whole "Oh, Jason Aaron (or Mark Waid or whatever) is done with this title, so we have to have a completely new team, complete renumbering, completely new concept of the character, etc." just shakes me so loose from the whole damn thing. I don't want to read any more, because what used to keep me going was, "What happens next?" If the answer is, "We forget everything that's every happened and rethink the character completely as if he's in a different universe", I'm like, fuck this shit. "Magic now causes cancer, so Wong has a whole set of Tibetan victims who get cancer so that Stephen Strange can keep on doing magic!" No, no, no, fuck off. "Magic is all gone now so Stephen Strange has to scrounge for artifacts like a bum in a dumpster. Plus he's a cynical wiseass and everyone hates him." No! "Wait, actually, he's going to get in an alien spaceship and rip off aliens and meet a hot alien chick so he can forget the already forgettable hipster woman who was doing his library eight issues ago. Also there's a ghost dog." Wait, wait, no! "Ghost Dog and Wong have to save Strange from Hell! After the Avengers become demons! We don't even know what the rules of magic are now!" Fuck OFF.

Every time you like a run, they fuck it hard the next time someone goes off it. That used to be really bad form--people complained about John Byrne aggressively fucking everything every previous author had ever done. Now it's completely expected. I hate it so much.

The DC stuff at least they're trying to figure out how it all ties together, even Watchmen, which is the worst idea ever. But bless their hearts for trying. The Marvel people feel like a bunch of cowering underlings waiting for corporate to tell them what to do next--in an era when corporate is winning the universe by adapting what Marvel writers did back in the day when nobody thought movies would ever happen.
« Last Edit: July 04, 2019, 06:19:28 AM by Khaldun »
Velorath
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Reply #482 on: July 03, 2019, 08:31:05 PM

Maybe I'm part of the problem because I don't really care about the "What happens next?" part when a new creative team comes on these days. That's usually the jumping off point for me (or the jumping on point if I've heard good things about the run and now want to read through it since it's concluded). I'm kinda ok with vastly different takes on characters, provided they're good of course. That's how we get stuff like Superior Spider-man, Mighty Thor, or Immortal Hulk (or Planet Hulk even). I know at this point I'm not going to be following a particular title for years through multiple creative teams so I appreciate stories that have some sort of conclusion and then the next people take over. I don't want to see the team the follows Aaron's run on Thor trying to carry one what he's doing.

Actually my biggest takeaway from looking Marvel's current and upcoming lineup, is who the hell was asking for a massive Carnage-focused event?
HaemishM
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Reply #483 on: July 04, 2019, 09:46:03 AM

My problem with the drastic shifts in characterization is twofold.

First, the runs aren't long enough on most of these things, so I get really invested in a character and status quo and then BAM, it's done and everything is forgotten and it's usually because of some goddamn shitty crossover event that changes the entire universe's status quo. The Dennis Hopeless Spider-Woman books were some of the worst examples of this. I say worst because I absolutely fucking LOVED what Hopeless did with the character, especially the pregnancy and having a kid. Over time, he built up the character of this shitty Z-grade villain character, The Porcupine, into a fully-fleshed out character who had an important role in both her and the baby's life. Then the book ends and Spider-Woman gets relegated to second banana in Captain Marvel stories.

Second, the biggest problem I have with ditching directions based on creative teams is that it feels like Marvel editorial wants to have their cake and eat it too. They want to have this vast, interconnected universe where big things impact all the books (which is the definition of continuity) but then have the books being written with little to no regard for how they affect the greater whole of the universe because fuck continuity. Like I said above, the negative effects of that shared universe concept way too often cause radical shifts in individual book status quo's that are unwelcome, or worse, are completely ignored until you see this character pop up in another book and it feels completely disjointed.

I actually put most of this at the feet of Quesada as EIC. He hates the very concept of continuity being a constraint on creativity, but has to keep some lip service to it because Marvel IS a shared universe. And it feels like lip service, because it's clear he really wants each run to be like it's own separate manga.

Velorath
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Reply #484 on: July 04, 2019, 03:07:56 PM

But the thing is, if Hopeless isn’t going to write Spider-Woman any more, either because the book gets canceled or he moved on to other things, do you really want another creative team trying to be a Hopeless cover band and attempting to write those characters in the same tone Hopeless did?

A case could be made that I suppose that some of these books aren’t being given enough of a chance and that Disney could afford to publish them at a loss if needed considering how many millions of dollars some of these ideas could generate when it comes to the movies.
HaemishM
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Reply #485 on: July 04, 2019, 06:59:47 PM

But the thing is, if Hopeless isn’t going to write Spider-Woman any more, either because the book gets canceled or he moved on to other things, do you really want another creative team trying to be a Hopeless cover band and attempting to write those characters in the same tone Hopeless did?

Yes.  why so serious?

Here's the thing. Hopeless didn't create Spider-Woman or the Porcupine. He just did a damn good job with the characters. I view this kind of thing through the lens of branding/marketing. If I as a creative person choose to work on one of the big two's established characters (or even any other established character), I owe that existing brand some loyalty to its history. These aren't the characters I created (though there are obviously some characters each creator does create), so there has to be some of my individual wants given up to play in someone else's playground. That doesn't mean my stuff has to suck, nor that it can never push the boundaries. There have been plenty of runs where those boundaries have been pushed but not so far that the character becomes unrecognizable. Comics on existing properties in established continuities aren't just individual slices to me, they are all to be considered as part of the greater whole.

To me, a great example of pushing the boundaries but staying true to the brand is Dark Knight Returns. A terrible example is Dark Knight 2, which was utter shit start to finish.

If you treat them like Marvel has been doing, then you get what amounts to a series of "What If/Elseworlds" tales where lip service is paid to the greater continuity. So yes, I'd like to see someone come along and do a Hopeless cover band until he can make it his/her own. I love Elseworlds stories but I also like the greater meta narrative that is the Marvel Universe.

Khaldun
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Reply #486 on: July 05, 2019, 04:16:09 PM

I'm with Haemish. It's how you *get* interesting stories that later people work with, how you get characters who have layers. Take Strange. At this point, Wong is now basically kind of rewritten towards the films--a sorcerer who is not Strange's equal but he's not his manservant. But this voids out: Wong struggling with an arranged marriage; Wong deciding that Stephen was not nearly as loyal to Wong as vice-versa and being an almost-enemy over it; Wong being the person who teaches Strange important further lessons in humility, and much more. I get why they want to get to the character in the movies, without the baggage, but discarding the baggage is also discarding some pretty interesting story possibilities both in the comics AND in the films. All of the films are based on great narrative and visual scavenging in the giant heap of Marvel storytelling, which has a ton of forgettable garbage in it--but to build the heap took some respect for how characters accumulate narrative and dramatic weight.
HaemishM
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Reply #487 on: July 06, 2019, 08:54:50 AM

Another thought I had on the state of modern comics writing at the big 2. I think part of the biggest problem I'm seeing with both DC and Marvel is that the stories are being approached almost as movies as opposed to ongoing serials, and it's affecting the work. I really think superhero comics in branded/shared universes like Marvel 616 and DC work best when they are approached with the same thought process as a TV show, like a long-running, never-ending soap opera instead. That goes for the individual books AND the shared universe-wide series like all the crossover event things. If the writer looks at the work like this - "this shit has been running before me and it will keep running after me, I need to respect the sandbox's barriers." That doesn't mean the writer can't push the boundaries of the sandbox - most of the best comic runs do that. Miller's Daredevil, Byrne's Fantastic Four, Morrison's X-Men, Aaron's X-Men, Aaron's Thor, Bendis's Daredevil, Waid's Daredevil, Peter David's Hulk - they all expanded the parameters of the long-term narrative without totally throwing the baby out with the pram. And for the most part, they left behind a really good set of building blocks that other creators could use to push the boundaries themselves. For all its problems, Crisis on Infinite Earths, Infinite Crisis and The 52 all did the same for the universe, and even though it was kind of a crappy story, the original Secret Wars did that for the universe as well (not Secret Wars 2 or the most recent Secret Wars).

What's happening now is that each creator treats their run as a series of movies and the next guy is given the remit of "reboot the franchise again," or at least that's what it feels like. DC's New 52 suffers pretty heavily from this, and unlike Marvel, they didn't just restart the big series when they did it, they just shifted status quo dramatically. So, for instance, Scott Snyder's Batman starts out REALLY good and then midway through the 52-issue run, the whole goddamn thing takes a turn for the retarded (I don't mean the Jim Gordon as Mecha Batman thing, more the way they structured it so Batman could reset to status quo - man that was fucking retarded). Having now read most of the big named New 52 series books, holy shit did they fuck up that entire relaunch.

Khaldun
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Reply #488 on: July 06, 2019, 02:17:56 PM

I stopped reading DC entirely because of it. I'm creeping back now via the app but the thing is that most of the post-New52 comics are subsumed under a layer of bad-Grant-Morrisonesque metafiction that constitutes the world's most convoluted apology for creative malpractice (the DC Universe got dark because the Forge of Creation was poisoned by a dark batgod! The DC Universe got dark because Doctor Manhattan was curious about a more pulpish comic-book universe than his own and wanted to play with it! It's not the fault of the writers and editors and management, guys! Here's some metafiction and metaphors for you about why we got too dark! Really!"
Velorath
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Reply #489 on: July 06, 2019, 10:44:27 PM

I really think superhero comics in branded/shared universes like Marvel 616 and DC work best when they are approached with the same thought process as a TV show, like a long-running, never-ending soap opera instead.

You might want to take a look at how long-running soap operas have been doing over the last couple decades.
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