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Author Topic: Secret Wars (2015)  (Read 58665 times)
HaemishM
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Reply #70 on: January 14, 2016, 08:04:31 AM

Fuck's sake, that sounds terrible. But it goes back to something I've been saying for a while now, all the top writers at Marvel FUCKING HATE Reed Richards with the white-hot passion of the sun. They clearly cannot stand the character and it shows in their writing.


It's pretty sad because I've been reading just about all of the Secret Wars "What If?" books and there's some good stories in there. However, all the good is completely invalidated by that thought in the back of my mind that says "This book is going to have about as much effect on these characters' futures as a fart has in a windstorm." You know any good book you like out of there is going to be wiped away. Squadron Sinister in particular has been really good but you just know we won't get anything about these characters in this setup again.

And that's not even going into the macguffin that allows Doom to somehow have enough power to put multiple copies of insanely powerful characters like Silver Surfer and Hyperion into multiple different Battleworld regions, or to create and control the Thors. Honestly, if it was Molecule Man's powers that allowed him to do all that, it makes everything done with Molecule Man for 40 years make no sense, including his problems at the end of Secret Wars 2.

jgsugden
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Reply #71 on: January 14, 2016, 11:27:03 AM

Coming to Theatres in 2024?

2020 will be the year I gave up all hope.
eldaec
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Reply #72 on: January 14, 2016, 11:31:41 AM

Kind of surprised they didn't use this to finally wall the mutants off in a separate continuity.

Apart from the MCU issue, they have never really made sense in the same world as the Avengers.

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HaemishM
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Reply #73 on: January 14, 2016, 11:57:20 AM

They made sense back when they were a really good allegory for racism and then later for homophobia. But these days? Yeah, making mutants hated and feared while Spider-Man drops armored trucks on Rhino in Times Square is really kind of dumb.

Fordel
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Reply #74 on: January 14, 2016, 12:30:48 PM

Fuck's sake, that sounds terrible. But it goes back to something I've been saying for a while now, all the top writers at Marvel FUCKING HATE Reed Richards with the white-hot passion of the sun. They clearly cannot stand the character and it shows in their writing.

I think it was the exact opposite problem with Secret Wars and all it's lead up. Hickman hijacked the entirety of the Marvel Universe to attempt to write a love letter to Reed Richards 'superiority'.

If you weren't named Reed or Doom, your characterization, plot lines and stories were all thrown out or put on hold or twisted to serve the Reed/Doom hate-fuck.

and the gate is like I TOO AM CAPABLE OF SPEECH
Khaldun
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Reply #75 on: January 14, 2016, 01:33:01 PM

It's not quite as bad as you'd think,
« Last Edit: January 14, 2016, 02:33:36 PM by Khaldun »
Fordel
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Reply #76 on: January 14, 2016, 03:23:32 PM

They're laying out the new cosmic in the Ultimates book, with Panther, the Marvels and Chavez.

and the gate is like I TOO AM CAPABLE OF SPEECH
Khaldun
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Reply #77 on: January 14, 2016, 03:47:38 PM

Yeah.

The more cynical position on the whole thing btw would be to say  "Hey, Fantastic Four, we're parking you in Limbo until we get the rights back. Except not the Thing, because he's too much fun."
HaemishM
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Reply #78 on: January 14, 2016, 03:57:33 PM

I like my explanation better. None of our new grim-dark-y focused star writers like or know how to create good Fantastic Four stories so suck on this, old fogies. Also, movie rights.

Velorath
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Reply #79 on: January 14, 2016, 04:04:06 PM

It's not quite as bad as you'd think,


Khaldun
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Reply #80 on: January 14, 2016, 06:23:27 PM

HaemishM
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Reply #81 on: January 14, 2016, 08:33:04 PM

Thing is, where do you go with the characters (Reed and Doom) from here? That was the problem with Hickman's FF stuff. Once you've gone and created a council of 1000 Reeds doing transformative works in other dimensions and fighting and killing insane Celestials, anything you do with the character after that is pedestrian. And you can't get much more over the top than God Doom. How do you ever even have a good comic story with the character after this? It would probably work a lot better as a What If mini series than as the tone-setter for the next 5-year arc of an entire comics line.

Which has pretty much been the problem with every single one of their "status quo changing" crossover events. They are so over the top, going back to monthly comics seems pedestrian even though the stories in them are much better.

Khaldun
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Reply #82 on: January 14, 2016, 08:57:13 PM

Well, yeah. The only way to make Reed Richards ever work again, for example, is going to have to involve him surrendering his universe-making duties and some kind of amnesia/forgetting to follow it.

Doom I think you could go either do a good five or six years of him trying to basically be a good ruler and decent man and getting constantly fucked with by fate--sort of like an old What If? they did years and years ago or you could have him be like the washed-up quarterback who won the Super Bowl once, which would eventually give him the motivation to turn back to the dark side of things.

Or, I could imagine something really balls-out. Like, what if Doom became Iron Man for a while? Or vice-versa, he became the CEO of Stark Industries and Stark/Iron Man became an actual bodyguard for once? I dunno, I could see something in there that would be a bit like the Superior Spider-Man/SpOck, bringing Doom for a while onto the side of the good guys but with a lot of tension about just when he'd lose his shit.

But they need to put "cosmic power" off limits for all their characters for a while and keep things relatively low-key. I think a lot of Marvel's stories need to get back down to Earth, so to speak.
Velorath
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Reply #83 on: January 14, 2016, 10:49:53 PM

I think Doom, when he wasn't being written as an over-the-top evil villain was a perfectly good character that didn't really need a reworking. "Gains ultimate power just to subconsciously realize he doesn't really want/deserve it" is just a retread of Thanos.
Khaldun
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Reply #84 on: January 15, 2016, 04:23:52 AM

True enough, though Marvel forgot about that pretty quick. There was an interesting little bit in the miniseries when Thanos more or less said as much to Doom.

I do like it when villains have a bit of movement in their character arcs. Magneto's evolution was pretty inspired. It makes for more interesting stories when the villain actually has some sympathetic or vaguely righteous dimensions. It's what makes Loki in the MCU far more interesting than the old comic-book Loki, even when better writers like Simonson were working with him.
jgsugden
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Reply #85 on: January 15, 2016, 08:22:44 AM

I think Doom, when he wasn't being written as an over-the-top evil villain was a perfectly good character that didn't really need a reworking. "Gains ultimate power just to subconsciously realize he doesn't really want/deserve it" is just a retread of Thanos.
And Emperor Doom.

2020 will be the year I gave up all hope.
Khaldun
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Reply #86 on: January 15, 2016, 10:45:26 AM

Well, right, that's my point--he's actually done this schtick before quite a few times, and it's almost always the same. On at least three occasions, he's gained control of earth through mind-control and he's sometimes used mind-control of some kind against individuals as well. And he almost always backs away or gives it up. But there's a pretty crucial difference between Doom and Thanos in this respect.

Thanos gains power so he can impress Death, and then typically throws it away because he either realizes there's nothing he can do to impress Death, or because he ultimately finds the almost abstract universal perspective of a godlike being to be too intangible--that the closer he gets to Death herself, the less motivated he feels about living.

Doom gains power because ultimately he wants people to admire and respect his talents and abilities. He wants people to let him be in charge because he's the best at leading and doing and making. He doesn't want to be a god, really, he wants to be a unanimously elected king. But mindcontrol is a short-cut and dishonest and he knows it. Doom has a hang-up about honesty and honor underneath the surface. He's read his Machiavelli and knows that the quicker way to power is to be feared rather than loved, but he'd rather be loved--without having to be loveable. So I don't mind that he does this schtick again and again, because it's deeply rooted in the character. But I do like the idea that one day he'd just completely run out of excuses because he had it all and still couldn't have the courage to take a chance on others, to depend on others, to come clean and earn respect rather than use some power or technology to steal it.

(The Red Skull, on the other other hand, tends to drop the ball because he's too much of a petty sadist--he gets hung up on wanting to grind his enemies faces into the mud to pay attention to the demands of ultimate power.)
HaemishM
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Reply #87 on: July 14, 2016, 12:06:53 PM

Unlimited finally got the last issue of this. It did not disappoint in how disappointing the whole thing was. The ending might as well have been "We don't have film rights to the Fantastic Four so fuck them. Also fuck Reed Richards, he's a dick. And let's remove all the interesting bits of the Future Foundation too because we made them all too goddamn smart and powerful and don't know how to justify them anymore. Also did I mention fuck the Fantastic Four? Those guys are super lame-o."

Such a shame that 1) Ribic, a fantastic artist, was wasted on such a piss poorly written series and 2) some really interesting story ideas are basically fart in the wind What If stories now.

Khaldun
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Reply #88 on: July 14, 2016, 12:59:42 PM

I really liked it up to issue #5 and then it just went all to pieces. It was at best a tight character study of Richards and Doom, not a gigantic event that could support all sorts of shit going on.
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