rkajdi posted:Image was a lot of the early 90s issues IMO. They were a huge part of the inflation of the collector bubble, which is what nearly killed the industry in the 90s. Wasn't that really mostly Liefeld's fault, though? My understanding is that what specifically made the industry go boom was Death Mate failing, which was almost entirely on Liefeld because he couldn't turn in a book to save his life.
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# ? Apr 27, 2014 16:07 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 06:48 |
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It wasn't *just* Deathmate's fault. Spawn was consistently a top five comic in that period, and its shipping was pretty irregular. code:
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# ? Apr 27, 2014 16:54 |
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SALT CURES HAM posted:Wasn't that really mostly Liefeld's fault, though? My understanding is that what specifically made the industry go boom was Death Mate failing, which was almost entirely on Liefeld because he couldn't turn in a book to save his life. That's like blame a house fire on the match instead of gasoline soaked house. Something was going to cause the house to crumble. The issue was setting up that house in the first place, which all of the original "style" over substance Image artists were a huge part of. Personally, I also tend to give Liefeld a bit more of a pass because he's the Ed Wood of comics-- horrible at them but utterly interested and inspired by them. He's just missing that Glen or Glenda moment where you really get a look into his inner life. As far as being bad at something. I'd rather have ten Liefelds over the cynical shits like Spenser or most of the New 52 hacks.
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# ? Apr 27, 2014 19:22 |
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SALT CURES HAM posted:Wasn't that really mostly Liefeld's fault, though? My understanding is that what specifically made the industry go boom was Death Mate failing, which was almost entirely on Liefeld because he couldn't turn in a book to save his life. The 90's collector's bubble was doomed from the start. On the one hand you had doofuses (doofi?) who hoarded mint #1's in their mommy's basements in hopes of getting rich ten years from now. On the other hand, every single comic company whatsoever tried to cash in, by releasing SUPER DUPER COLLECTOR'S EDITIONS with 83 different holographic glow-in-the-dark foil-embossed covers (collect 'em all!) Obviously, since a bajillion people were collecting every title there was, none were ever worth anything. EDIT: I like the Ed Wood comparison there. ^^^^^ Liefeld is the world's worst artist, and he's not exactly Shakespeare either... but he tries. Gynovore fucked around with this message at 20:24 on Apr 27, 2014 |
# ? Apr 27, 2014 20:18 |
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rkajdi posted:Personally, I also tend to give Liefeld a bit more of a pass because he's the Ed Wood of comics-- horrible at them but utterly interested and inspired by them. He's just missing that Glen or Glenda moment where you really get a look into his inner life. As far as being bad at something. I'd rather have ten Liefelds over the cynical shits like Spenser or most of the New 52 hacks. If Liefeld is Ed Wood, does that make McFarlane Uwe Boll?
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# ? Apr 27, 2014 20:30 |
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rkajdi posted:Personally, I also tend to give Liefeld a bit more of a pass because he's the Ed Wood of comics-- horrible at them but utterly interested and inspired by them. He's just missing that Glen or Glenda moment where you really get a look into his inner life. Hrrmm, has anyone ever actually seen Liefeild's feet?
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# ? Apr 27, 2014 20:35 |
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Yeah, the 90's collapse wasn't "mostly" Liefeld's fault. He contributed to it, but the Marvel and DC marketing departments, and Diamond and Cap City's distribution changes that made it look like there was more growth than there really was were both far more responsible than one dude not hitting deadlines.
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# ? Apr 27, 2014 20:36 |
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Edge & Christian posted:3) Perhaps coincidentally, Marvel starts deciding to privilege artists over writers, giving McFarlane (then Larsen) a solo Spider-Man book after neither man got along with David Michelinie, letting Liefeld take over New Mutants/X-Force after not working well with Louise Simonson, and apparently siding with Jim Lee over Chris Claremont for the last two years or so of X-Men stories before Claremont quit and Lee took over writing officially. The inside was so much worse. I read this in a newsstand at the mall and immediately realized comics were dead. It took a couple of years for the body to hit the floor, though.
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# ? Apr 27, 2014 20:42 |
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I believe Brian Cronin actually suggested that comic - or more accurately, the fact that it sold like a bazillion copies despite McFarlane have almost zero prior writing experience - was a big part of the reason Bob Harras decided to side with Lee and Liefeld over Claremont and Simonson on the X-books.
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# ? Apr 27, 2014 21:08 |
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Forums Barber posted:
I read that just recently. I didn't think it was horrible, though it just sort of ended, but man, as I read it I couldn't help but think, "McFarlane really wants to write Batman." I mean, just look at that tagline. "The Legend of the Arachknight?" I don't think he ever wrote for DC, either. He did the art on Batman/Spawn, but other than that I don't know if he ever got any closer to doing what he obviously wanted. Also the alternate covers in the back were hilarious. Every one was exactly the same, the webbing was slightly different colours, and they had to have a little note telling us that this cover was the gold foil variant, and this one was the silver foil variant, and this one was the platinum foil variant...
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# ? Apr 27, 2014 21:23 |
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catlord posted:I read that just recently. I didn't think it was horrible, though it just sort of ended, but man, as I read it I couldn't help but think, "McFarlane really wants to write Batman." I mean, just look at that tagline. "The Legend of the Arachknight?" I don't think he ever wrote for DC, either. He did the art on Batman/Spawn, but other than that I don't know if he ever got any closer to doing what he obviously wanted. He drew Infinity Inc. for DC (Roy Thomas and him deserve each other), but I think that's as close as he got.
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# ? Apr 27, 2014 22:00 |
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I think McFarlane also did a few covers for some of the Batman titles.
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# ? Apr 27, 2014 22:04 |
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Gynovore posted:The 90's collector's bubble was doomed from the start. On the one hand you had doofuses (doofi?) who hoarded mint #1's in their mommy's basements in hopes of getting rich ten years from now. On the other hand, every single comic company whatsoever tried to cash in, by releasing SUPER DUPER COLLECTOR'S EDITIONS with 83 different holographic glow-in-the-dark foil-embossed covers (collect 'em all!) I think Liefeld got famous too early in his development as a artist and just kinda stagnated as a result. There's other artists who drew in similar styles around that time who developed into good, respected artists over time.
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# ? Apr 27, 2014 22:25 |
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Dacap posted:I think Liefeld got famous too early in his development as a artist and just kinda stagnated as a result. There's other artists who drew in similar styles around that time who developed into good, respected artists over time. I'm sure everyone's heard the Liefeld art class story, right?
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# ? Apr 27, 2014 22:27 |
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Mr. Maltose posted:I'm sure everyone's heard the Liefeld art class story, right? I have not
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# ? Apr 27, 2014 22:42 |
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Dacap posted:I have not He enrolled in art college but when the teacher found out Liefeld already had a job drawing comics he said "Then what are you even doing here?"
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# ? Apr 27, 2014 22:53 |
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SirDan3k posted:He enrolled in art college but when the teacher found out Liefeld already had a job drawing comics he said "Then what are you even doing here?" Christ, what an rear end in a top hat. The guy wanted to improve his technique, what would have happened if he'd been encouraged to pursue it? The guy's pretty consistently regarded as one of the nicest guys in comics. If he'd actually improved his technique, he might have been one of the greats. I hope you're happy, art school teacher guy.
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# ? Apr 27, 2014 23:10 |
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It was a bit more politic than that. The teacher said that the class was focused on amateur art and that Liefeld probably wouldn't get much out of it, if I recall correctly. Presumably this was before Rob turned in any assignments. EDIT: The reality is probably somewhere between the two extremes, but I doubt we'll ever honestly know. I'm reminded of Frazetta's story of being told to learn anatomy, which prompted him to copy out a medical text and come back to work the next day saying he'd learned anatomy much to his superior's amusement. Mr. Maltose fucked around with this message at 23:30 on Apr 27, 2014 |
# ? Apr 27, 2014 23:26 |
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catlord posted:I read that just recently. I didn't think it was horrible, though it just sort of ended, but man, as I read it I couldn't help but think, "McFarlane really wants to write Batman." I mean, just look at that tagline. "The Legend of the Arachknight?" I don't think he ever wrote for DC, either. He did the art on Batman/Spawn, but other than that I don't know if he ever got any closer to doing what he obviously wanted. He did get to draw Bat-man, though. Peter David and Todd McFarlane slumming it in What The--?! for two whole pages.
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# ? Apr 28, 2014 07:24 |
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Metal Loaf posted:I think McFarlane also did a few covers for some of the Batman titles. redbackground fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Apr 28, 2014 |
# ? Apr 28, 2014 16:38 |
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Forums Barber posted:
Despite his limited writing abilities I always liked the way McFarlane drew Spiderman.
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# ? Apr 28, 2014 17:55 |
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redbackground posted:He drew most of Batman: Year Two after Alan Davis peaced out after one issue. Really? I've wanted to pick that one up for a while. Everybody talks about Year One, but Two and Three got pushed out of canon and so don't get discussed much.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 00:36 |
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catlord posted:Really? I've wanted to pick that one up for a while. Everybody talks about Year One, but Two and Three got pushed out of canon and so don't get discussed much. edit: McFarlane's Batman cape--check that baby out: redbackground fucked around with this message at 04:31 on Apr 29, 2014 |
# ? Apr 29, 2014 04:27 |
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rkajdi posted:(Roy Thomas and him deserve each other) Maybe I'm missing something or not all up on my history or whatever but what's so bad about Roy Thomas?
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 05:16 |
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redbackground posted:Well, I think it was more that they were nowhere near as great at Y1. Y2 is a pretty strange beast (major art changes notwithstanding) in a lot of ways, but it's worth reading at least once. I have literally never talked to anyone or have seen any discussion about Y3, ever. I'd think getting shuffled out of continuity faster than Year One is more why they aren't discussed, rather than merely not being as great. If they were in continuity longer I'd think there'd be more discussion about them, as is they're just a weird side-note. I don't believe Year Three ever got a collection like the other two, I think that hurts it as well. I do love McFarlane crazy capes. I occasionally see some complaining about his capes, but I never really understood that. I liked that it was there (on occasion) in the (godawful) Spawn movie. Are there any notably terrible Spawn runs? I think that'd be interesting to hear about.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 05:46 |
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The issue of Spawn where Dave Sim and McFarlane collaborate on a story of Cerebus guiding Spawn around a dystopian hellscape while musing how awesome it is to be wholly creator-owned characters is pretty special. It comes complete with a scene of unlabeled big-two superheroes reaching through the bars of their eternal prison as they cry for a freedom they will never possess. I mean, I get where they were going with it, but the whole thing is breathtakingly self-indulgent.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 05:50 |
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redbackground posted:Well, I think it was more that they were nowhere near as great at Y1. Y2 is a pretty strange beast (major art changes notwithstanding) in a lot of ways, but it's worth reading at least once. I have literally never talked to anyone or have seen any discussion about Y3, ever. McFarlane would have been the ideal artist for Cloak and Dagger, since Cloak's cloak was a creeping, shifting, hungry force of literal darkness.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 11:43 |
I honestly really, really like McFarlane's art. I feel like I should hate it because of how overdone it is, but something about it just works for me.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 11:54 |
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Wanderer posted:The issue of Spawn where Dave Sim and McFarlane collaborate on a story of Cerebus guiding Spawn around a dystopian hellscape while musing how awesome it is to be wholly creator-owned characters is pretty special. It comes complete with a scene of unlabeled big-two superheroes reaching through the bars of their eternal prison as they cry for a freedom they will never possess. The only thing I remember about that issue was the end, where it said "Spawn belongs to Todd McFarlane and Cerebus belongs to Dave Sim FOREVER" in huge letters in case you missed the subtle symbolism in the comic itself.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 12:22 |
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Wanderer posted:The issue of Spawn where Dave Sim and McFarlane collaborate on a story of Cerebus guiding Spawn around a dystopian hellscape while musing how awesome it is to be wholly creator-owned characters is pretty special. It comes complete with a scene of unlabeled big-two superheroes reaching through the bars of their eternal prison as they cry for a freedom they will never possess. I was a pretty dumb and credulous kid, but that is riiiiiiight where the wheels came off my affection for early Image, and I say that as someone who was doing his level best to get into reading Cerebus ("Reads" put an end to that, speaking of worst runs).
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 12:33 |
I mean, on one hand it is kinda self-indulgent, but on the other hand my understanding is that they (along with the rest of Image) pretty much opened the indie-comic floodgates and without them we probably wouldn't have stuff like Saga, Stray Bullets, Fatale, or Manhattan Projects. If that's the case, I can't really hate them for championing that cause.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 13:22 |
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SALT CURES HAM posted:I mean, on one hand it is kinda self-indulgent, but on the other hand my understanding is that they (along with the rest of Image) pretty much opened the indie-comic floodgates and without them we probably wouldn't have stuff like Saga, Stray Bullets, Fatale, or Manhattan Projects. If that's the case, I can't really hate them for championing that cause. Wernher von Braun was a Nazi, but without him, we might never have gotten to the moon. More seriously, I've read that you're supposed to judge artists by their best work, so I'm okay with giving Sim a lot of credit for his work and even with McFarlane for his arms-and-legs-all-over-the-place Spider-Man art. It really did feel different and acrobatic in a way that hadn't been there before.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 13:26 |
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prefect posted:Wernher von Braun was a Nazi, but without him, we might never have gotten to the moon. Yeah, I agree with this. Cerebus does get pretty... ugh about halfway through and goes up and down in quality from there on out, never really getting truly good again but man,High Society and Church & State might be my favorite run in comics ever. The guy was REALLY good once but then he had to go and ruin it all.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 17:58 |
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catlord posted:I'd think getting shuffled out of continuity faster than Year One is more why they aren't discussed, rather than merely not being as great. If they were in continuity longer I'd think there'd be more discussion about them, as is they're just a weird side-note. I don't believe Year Three ever got a collection like the other two, I think that hurts it as well. Year Two was in continuity for decades and really could be in continuity now for all I know, it doesn't really affect anything other than Joe Chill dying in it. Obviously it's not discussed as much as one of the best Batman stories of all time because it's a mediocre piece of pablum that doesn't add anything to the mythos other than Batman was a pretty lovely Batman early on (hmmm sounds a lot like Batman Zero Year) and Joe Chill gets murdered by some guy never referenced before or since.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 19:34 |
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SALT CURES HAM posted:I mean, on one hand it is kinda self-indulgent, but on the other hand my understanding is that they (along with the rest of Image) pretty much opened the indie-comic floodgates and without them we probably wouldn't have stuff like Saga, Stray Bullets, Fatale, or Manhattan Projects. If that's the case, I can't really hate them for championing that cause. Image definitely turned itself around by being a more organized, useful place for independent creators to market their books on a national level while still remaining independent and retaining creative control. Early Image, however, was like injecting the worst creative decisions of the 1990s directly into your eyes, and holding up Spawn as a model of the benefits and inherent worth of creator-owned characters, especially in issue #10, is a bit like using homemade horror movies as proof of the value of independent filmmaking. I'd also argue that the "indie-comic floodgates" were more opened by the rise of the Internet as an aid in self-publishing; the well-publicized success of independent creators like James O'Barr, Terry Moore, and particularly Eastman and Laird; and the general reevaluation of creators' rights that came in the wake of Jack Kirby's death. If Image hadn't stepped up to the plate, I'd imagine a lot of the same books would have appeared as webcomics or gotten marketed through IDW or Dynamite or Boom. This isn't to take anything away from Image, of course, but independent comics on the present scale were going to happen one way or the other. Wanderer fucked around with this message at 20:30 on Apr 29, 2014 |
# ? Apr 29, 2014 20:27 |
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Yeah, I was going to say, couldn't you make the case that TMNT was what opened the floodgates for creator-owned stuff, because it got a bunch of movies and cartoons and presumably made the creators all kinds of money?
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 21:23 |
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Suben posted:Maybe I'm missing something or not all up on my history or whatever but what's so bad about Roy Thomas? Roy Thomas is pretty much the king of lovely borderline nepotistic continuity porn, on top of being one of the original fanboy creators. Think of him as the Geoff Johns of the 70s and 80s. I do give him props for helping a woman get her foot in the door (his wife Dann Thomas) back when it was really impossible for that to happen, so I guess I might be a little too hard on him.
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# ? Apr 30, 2014 00:19 |
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It seems to me that it was a confluence of things. TMNT definitely paved the way for a lot of independent creators to start making at least some money when they hadn't before. There's a funny strip Evan Dorkin did in the early '90s about how he got a call from a Hollywood studio about the TV options for "Milk & Cheese," which they wanted to turn into a kids' show, despite the actual comics being about as kid-friendly as a spitting cobra. Apparently if you had a self-owned comic book in the early '90s somebody wanted the film option, even if your circulation was two drunks and the vicar's cat. The big impetus towards creator-owned stuff, in my mind, starts up with the Kirby family lawsuits after Kirby's death in '94, followed by the first Blade movie conquering the known universe and exactly none of that money going towards Wolfman or Colan. Right about then you have guys like Warren Ellis questioning the entire concept of work-for-hire and of superhero genre dominance, and that's when you see the early 2000s move towards genre diversification: Casey and Morrison on X-Men, post-9/11 Captain America, Casey's corporate WildCATs, the Tsunami line at Marvel, Ellis's "widescreen" superhero, etc. It probably didn't hurt that Gareb Shamus made a concerted, obvious effort to start sucking off the indies around then in the pages of Wizard magazine, which was really blatantly because he was starting up whatever the hell doomed enterprise he was (Black Bull?). Wizard may be poorly regarded these days, but it was influential enough in its heyday that I feel fairly confident saying that books like Preacher wouldn't have been as popular as they were without it. It was a gateway drug for mainstream fans from superheroes into a few select indies.
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# ? Apr 30, 2014 00:28 |
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rkajdi posted:Roy Thomas is pretty much the king of lovely borderline nepotistic continuity porn, on top of being one of the original fanboy creators. Think of him as the Geoff Johns of the 70s and 80s. I do give him props for helping a woman get her foot in the door (his wife Dann Thomas) back when it was really impossible for that to happen, so I guess I might be a little too hard on him. He did some great stuff in the Avengers and Marvel. His reign as editor in chief was pretty great. If you hate on people for being fan boys I guess you should also hate Mark Waid
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# ? Apr 30, 2014 00:32 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 06:48 |
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I don't know, Waid and Kurt Busiek are basically how you do continuity porn "right," and I'd draw a pretty straight line between Busiek's Avengers and Thunderbolts output and the way modern Marvel treats continuity. Busiek did write the biggest Roy Thomas-style fix-it of all time in Avengers Forever, but it quietly exists off in its own little corner and you don't have to have read it.
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# ? Apr 30, 2014 00:35 |