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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Seven Soldiers is surely his best DC work. Uhhhhh you better be not counting Animal Man on a technicality or some poo poo. This thread reminded me of the Captain Boomerang subplot in Identity Crisis and you know what, I actually liked that part now that I remember it. I liked bits of Civil War too even though as a whole it was pretty lame and had an awful ending. It's easier for me to list the event comics that I did like, which are basically Crisis on Infinite Earths, Infinity Gauntlet, Annihilation, and if they count some of the X-Men crossovers like X-Cutioner's song and Age of Apocalypse.
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Jul 16, 2014 03:08
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Zombie Samurai posted:Now I get it. Final Crisis is not a DC event. It is a Grant Morrison event. Which is probably why I love it so much 
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Jul 16, 2014 04:28
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OldTennisCourt posted:Well Identity Crisis will always have the Sue Dibney rape hanging over it. Civil War had a lot of problems, but I can't recall anything close to THAT level of bad in it. I honestly wonder if that scene had been taken out and replaced with something else to ignite the mind wipe of Dr. Light then Identity Crisis would be more fondly remembered, at least a bit more. To be clear, I don't think the rape of Sue is an inherent problem. Sue's a light character, and it's weird to have her raped. It's like a step up from Minnie Mouse being raped. But the fact is that a lot of people including children are survivors of sexual abuse. So, it also seems wrong to say that dealing with sexual abuse should only be done in serious, non-genre, adult literature. Hell, I could actually see the current Archie comics tackling a survivor character while still maintaining the expected tone. The bigger problem is how she is disregard, mind-wiped, her feelings never considered, and ultimately used as a prop. And on principle, the same thing happens to Goliath. Bill is just a cheap prop to make a point about poo poo getting real. Bill and Sue both don't matter. The key difference is that at least that dude died fighting Clone-Thor. That's a ridiculous and dumb comic book thing. Rape is a whole other thing that deserves respect and nuance. Instead rape itself is just a prop. It's meaningless. It's just A BAD THING. I wonder how many times Rags Morales stopped while drawing those two pages and asked himself, "What the gently caress am I doing?"
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Jul 16, 2014 04:52
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Archyduke posted:For all the very justified griping in comics discourse about big, fleeting plot shake-ups, they can introduce a lot of smaller, more satisfying changes, or gesture out towards other events-- at their best (and I think Dark Reign might count here, if you consider it an "event comic") you get the spectacle as well as the satisfaction of following that spectacle's trickle outwards, in other titles, to unexpected, interesting places. In that sense, AoU felt self-contained in a bad way. It wasn't just boring (as, I felt, the main Fear Itself title was), it felt like it didn't matter-- that is, out of the two big things I expect from a really good event comic, it neither provided a satisfying story in itself, nor spun off interesting stories elsewhere. Yeah, the closest thing to an interesting thing AoU generated, in the end, was moving Galactus over to the Ultimate Universe for one story (which I liked but a bunch of people didn't) and bringing Angela to 616. And now she's about to go from a dimensional anomaly to Thor's long-lost sister, so hey, you didn't even really need time to break for that one! The other kicker of AoU is that nobody did anything cool. I mean, when you think about it. There were some tie-ins where people fought Ultron drones and that was neat, but in the main series, here is a list of moments when cool things happened in this story of what is supposedly superheroes fighting a robot overlord. Possibly cool/interesting:
Oh and I guess the Avengers' final battle vs. Ultron after all the time travel poo poo gets sorted out is kinda neat, but it's pretty much literally rehashed from Avengers 12.1, only at the end, Pym calls Stark and goes "Hey I have a virus to kill Ultron upload it and save the world please" and Stark goes "Cool thanks". Here's a list of boring/lame things that happened in AoU:
The bad just vastly outweighs the good and the good really isn't that good to begin with.
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Jul 16, 2014 05:56
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Captain Marvel goes out like a badass.
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Jul 16, 2014 13:57
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TwoPair posted:. Is this how we're getting LadyThor? Or is this possibly a lead-up to the 2015 limited Maxiseries ThorWar?
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Jul 16, 2014 19:42
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FilthyImp posted:Is this how we're getting LadyThor? No, Angela is Thor's sister. Lady Thor is a different woman.
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Jul 16, 2014 19:44
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:Uhhhhh you better be not counting Animal Man on a technicality or some poo poo. Better than Animal Man, not better than Doom Patrol. Kurui Reiten posted:Basically, it seems to appeal to people who really really find the entire exploration of the meaning of narrative and "experimental" storytelling and metafictional and metatextual analysis engaging. For people who just want a coherent, satisfying story, it basically goes "No, gently caress you. COMICS!" Good.
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Jul 16, 2014 20:42
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Better than Animal Man, not better than Doom Patrol. GMo's Doom Patrol was DC's best event.
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Jul 16, 2014 21:42
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OldTennisCourt posted:Well Identity Crisis will always have the Sue Dibney rape hanging over it. Civil War had a lot of problems, but I can't recall anything close to THAT level of bad in it. I honestly wonder if that scene had been taken out and replaced with something else to ignite the mind wipe of Dr. Light then Identity Crisis would be more fondly remembered, at least a bit more. Sue Dibney rape, Deathstroke owning the Justice League, Jean Lorning going loving CRAZY for no reason in "accidentally" murdering Sue and setting her corpse on fire, Villains being mind wiped, BATMAN being mind wiped turning even more grim dark. I cannot possibly fathom how Identity Crisis could be fondly remembered in any way, it's a terrible who dunnit, and just piling on rape to further set the tone is tasteless.
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Jul 16, 2014 22:25
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Timeless Appeal posted:They do kill off a Black superhero. Then his funeral involves him being wrapped in a big tarp and thrown in a big hole. I get why Miller and/or McNiven thought that was an effective image. But it just makes everyone involved seem like a huge rear end in a top hat to the point where the Black Panther tie-in involved T'Challa offering a proper funeral to Bill's mom because seriously, nobody can figure out how to shrink him down? I think it's a bad concept from the start. You can handle rape in a comic well not but magical retcon rape. Revealing a lighthearted character was raped offscreen by a joke character is never, ever, going to work. No matter how hard you try, no matter how good your intentions, it just isn't going to work. You devalue both characters, you devalue the concept, you insult the writing even if you put a lot of time and effort into it, because the innate idea is so loving ridiculous and offputting. Familiarity with the characters doesn't make it 'hit harder,' it just drives home how ridiculous and sickeningly exploitative it is. You can handle touchy subject matter in a comic but not like that. The innate concept is so broken and flawed that I don't think the most talented writers in the business could pull it off.
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Jul 16, 2014 22:31
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It's such a fanfiction-y, TV Tropes idea. Like the whole premise of it is "imagine there is no such thing as taste".
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Jul 16, 2014 22:39
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Better than Animal Man, not better than Doom Patrol. Oof, c'mon man. I like Doom Patrol but Animal Man leaves all of Morrison's DC stuff in the dust. I'm really an animal person tho and in my experience that does it.
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Jul 16, 2014 22:53
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One that I rarely hear mentioned but I've been interested in hearing about is Millennium. It's a very early DC event, the second after Crisis on Infinite Earths. The one right after Crisis, Legends, was a pretty decent event that didn't really do anything earth shaking but was still a fun and interesting event. I bought both Crisis and Legends off Comixology but I can only find lovely used copies of Millennium on Amazon. It sounds weird, the Guardians just decided to fly off with their new wives I guess, is it terrible or just bland and therefore forgotten?
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Jul 19, 2014 16:58
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How was Legends? It had a decent enough creative team and led to JLI so I figure it can't be that bad but i never hear anything about it.
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Jul 19, 2014 17:31
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:How was Legends? It had a decent enough creative team and led to JLI so I figure it can't be that bad but i never hear anything about it. It led to JLI AND Suicide Squad. Co-written by Len Wein and John Ostrander with decent John Byrne art, it really drops you into the post-Crisis DCU and shows you how everybody is faring, setting up the status quo for the mid-to-late '80s. Plus, you have Darkseid's minion Glorious Godfrey as the villain: a rabble-rousing, mind-controlling, anti-superhero demagogue calling himself "G. Gordon Godfrey."
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Jul 19, 2014 17:54
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:How was Legends? It had a decent enough creative team and led to JLI so I figure it can't be that bad but i never hear anything about it. Like I said, nothing really BIG happens in it, I read it because I was planning a marathon of all the DC events. The best description would be it's the new DCU stretching it's legs after Crisis. Darkseid decides to destroy Earth by having the population turn on the heroes. He does it by having Glorious Godfrey go on TV and use his ability to turn people to his will by ranting about how evil the heroes are. Captain Marvel thinks he kills a villain so he stops being a hero for much of the series. The weirdest part is Phantom Stranger just sort of showing up to chat with Darkseid because the writers needed someone he could bounce ideas off of. It's a fun little cheesey event that ends pretty predictably. No one dies if I recall right. Lou is correct in that it just sets up the pieces for the new DCU afer Crisis had swept the board clean.
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Jul 19, 2014 17:56
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DC seems to have a decent number of late-1980s/early-1990s crossover events that have sort-of fallen by the wayside. I guess it's because they weren't part of the whole "Crisis" continuum and didn't really shake up the universe that much. I guess the same is true of Marvel, but I get the impression more people would remember, say, Acts of Vengeance and Inferno than Invasion or Cosmic Odyssey. There's one DC did in the late-1990s which I know very little about - right in the middle of Morrison's Injustice Gang story in JLA, one issue ends with Superman, Batman, Aquaman and a couple of other guys in a city, when Oracle chimes in to warn them that something big is coming towards Earth (I think it was some kind of energy wave) and in the next issue, they're back to fighting the Injustice Gang. Does that ring a bell for anyone?
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Jul 19, 2014 18:38
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Metal Loaf posted:DC seems to have a decent number of late-1980s/early-1990s crossover events that have sort-of fallen by the wayside. I guess it's because they weren't part of the whole "Crisis" continuum and didn't really shake up the universe that much. That was Genesis, and it had something to do with a "God-wave." I just remember the house ads and a fleeting mention in Starman.
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Jul 19, 2014 19:19
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ImpAtom posted:I think it's a bad concept from the start. The whole ordeal was definitely worse for Dr. Light's characterization. I mean what they did to Sue was insulting, but Sue was still Sue. Rape was Dr. Light's main characteristic until he died. I'm reading through Suicide Squad right now though, and that more masterfully deals with what it means to be a loser-joke villain in a pretty dark but mature way. In the end, the rape doesn't really regard either character. It's just a BAD THING to explain that all those old lighthearted comics were a lie. I really appreciated the moment in Final Crisis when Libra is telling Lex Luthor that he can be the first one to rape Supergirl. And Lex is uncomfortable and skeeved out as gently caress.
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Jul 20, 2014 01:44
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That Spider-Man story was in a PSA ABOUT abuse though that's the major difference between it and IC. The rape was done in that comic for the sole purpose of justifying the mind wipe. They were never planning on dealing WITH her actions after it or how she dealt with it.
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Jul 20, 2014 02:10
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I'm a DC guy and have read through a lot of bad DC events over the years. Even the bad ones I can find something good about them. Zero Hour at least gave us a nice Legion reboot, and I loved the idea of Hal Jordan as Parallax. Invasion opened up the DC universe to more alien races and to the Dominators, and also gave us L.E.G.I.O.N. I also loved Identity Crisis, mainly for the reunion of the 80s JLA and the characterizations. The Ralph Dibny story lead right into 52 and the Tim Drake story I thought was well handled too. And Final Crisis was pretty good, if confusing at times. I'd nominate Genesis for worst crossover event. I can't think of a single redeeming event or even anything memorable coming out of it. The premise was that all superpowers come out of a Godwave, coming from the Source. It gets interrupted by Darkseid, who tries to reboot time to take control of it, or something. The big series that came out of it was New Guardians, which had no characters that weren't poorly constructed, some even pretty offensive. The comic was cancelled after about 18 issues and the characters were mostly killed off in other comics.
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Jul 20, 2014 03:32
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Psychlone posted:I'd nominate Genesis for worst crossover event. I can't think of a single redeeming event or even anything memorable coming out of it. The premise was that all superpowers come out of a Godwave, coming from the Source. It gets interrupted by Darkseid, who tries to reboot time to take control of it, or something. The big series that came out of it was New Guardians, which had no characters that weren't poorly constructed, some even pretty offensive. The comic was cancelled after about 18 issues and the characters were mostly killed off in other comics. Ahem. That means it gave us Snowflame, and that makes it the best event. WickedHate fucked around with this message at 04:34 on Jul 20, 2014 |
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Jul 20, 2014 03:52
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Psychlone posted:I'm a DC guy and have read through a lot of bad DC events over the years. Even the bad ones I can find something good about them. Zero Hour at least gave us a nice Legion reboot, and I loved the idea of Hal Jordan as Parallax. Invasion opened up the DC universe to more alien races and to the Dominators, and also gave us L.E.G.I.O.N. I also loved Identity Crisis, mainly for the reunion of the 80s JLA and the characterizations. The Ralph Dibny story lead right into 52 and the Tim Drake story I thought was well handled too. And Final Crisis was pretty good, if confusing at times.  The New Guardians were created as a result of Millennium, not Genesis. Admittedly it is hard to tell all those lovely late 80s/early 90s event comics apart sometimes....
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Jul 20, 2014 04:33
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Selachian posted:
Ah crap, you're right. I got my events mixed up. Millenium was pretty crap too...
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Jul 20, 2014 05:28
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Psychlone posted:Ah crap, you're right. I got my events mixed up. Millenium was pretty crap too... Really? What were the problems with it? As I stated before, I was trying to do a run of all the DC events and it seems to be nearly forgotten.
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Jul 20, 2014 14:32
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OldTennisCourt posted:Really? What were the problems with it? As I stated before, I was trying to do a run of all the DC events and it seems to be nearly forgotten. From what I recall, the biggest problem with Millennium is that it was sold as an incredible, world-shaking story on the order of Crisis ... and all we really got from it was the New Guardians, who were terrible from soup to nuts. The idea that one member of every superhero's supporting cast was a secret Manhunter agent could have been interesting, but as I remember most writers were unwilling to shake up their comics for the event, so they resorted to using meaningless throwaway characters.
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Jul 20, 2014 14:57
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Event book in the past were mostly the all-star games of comics. Lots of characters without much individual voice and often very little consequence afterwards or lead-up. While you did have Crisis on Infinite Earths, you also had both Secret Wars and all the Infinity series. None of those "mattered", which I guess was a turn off to people. So we got events like Infinite Crisis and Zero Hour, which matter but are equally dumb. At least in my experience, people tend to like event books on the level that they are attached to the lead-ins. I like House of M thru Siege because I was reading and liking the Avengers stuff at the time, which is where all the action and most of the consequences happened. I loved Final Crisis because I thought the lead in stuff (basically all of Morrison's DC stuff) was excellent. You also see less hate for events that don't step on the toes of semi-related books, hence why even people who didn't like Final Crisis don't hate it like people do Infinite Crisis or Blackest Night.
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Jul 20, 2014 15:19
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Selachian posted:From what I recall, the biggest problem with Millennium is that it was sold as an incredible, world-shaking story on the order of Crisis ... and all we really got from it was the New Guardians, who were terrible from soup to nuts. Follow the normal event rule-- only bother with the books involved in the lead-in or written by the event author. You might miss some good comics, but they still won't be at all related to the main story.
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Jul 20, 2014 15:21
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Selachian posted:From what I recall, the biggest problem with Millennium is that it was sold as an incredible, world-shaking story on the order of Crisis ... and all we really got from it was the New Guardians, who were terrible from soup to nuts. The only tie-in I've read is Booster Gold, which almost worked but really didn't. The idea was that his slimy agent -- who has been there since the first issue -- was a Manhunter all along, embezzled Booster's fortune to make him poor and desperate, and tried to use that to lure him to his side. Booster fought against him and the series ended with Booster considering time traveling and opening up the same superhero/fame con again until Blue Beetle (who wasn't even really his friend yet) bitched him out. Thing is, the agent being a Manhunter didn't make any sense when you consider the previous issues. For one, they established he had a daughter. Okay, maybe she was adopted, but why? It was pretty blatant that Jurgens just decided to make him a Manhunter without thinking it through. Then the guy was brought up again in Extreme Justice where the writer decided to completely ignore the Manhunter aspect. He was just a human who embezzled Booster's fortune and Booster took it back from him.
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Jul 20, 2014 18:16
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How was the Valiant/Image crossover Deathmate? It has the most 90s Image Comics name ever so I suspect it was garbage..?
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Jul 20, 2014 21:14
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I've not read it, but I've read about it. It's meant to have killed Valiant as a company. There's a story that Liefeld fell so far behind with the pages he was meant to contribute that they didn't get done until Bob Layton (then editor-in-chief for Valiant) went round to his house and refused to leave until they were finished.
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Jul 20, 2014 21:25
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The New Guardians (Millennium version) were pretty awesome. Basically the Guardians of the Universe were reunited with the female of their species (Zamarons) and were going to go to another dimension to 'make love' and reproduce. But before they did, they were going to pick ten humans who would represent a true cross-section of humanity (as opposed to any other planet because __________________). These ten people were intended to be the harbingers of a new step in the evolution in humanity, and for some reason it was repeatedly implied (once or twice outright started) that these ten people are going to be like, actually procreating to make THE NEXT STEP IN HUMANITY. Betty Clawman, "The Aborigine" lady who is simple and in touch with the Earth Takeo Yakata, the stoic all-business Japanese executive Xiang Po, the diehard Red Chinese soldier Nikolai Latikov, the Lenin-loving Soviet bureaucrat Celia Windward, the jive talkin' West Indian from "Fascist Britain" Salima Baranizar, the meek Iranian woman afraid to speak to infidels from beneath her burqua Janwillem Kroef, the cartoonishly evil pig-faced South African Apartheid-lovin' businessman Gregorio de la Vega, the flamboyantly gay magician from Peru Tom Kalmaku, aka Pieface! Hal Jordan's ol' Inuit mechanic Jason Woodrue, aka the Floronic Man, half-human/half-plant supervillain So Salima gets murdered by an angry Moslem mob and Nikolai is interrogated and shot in the face by the KGB for having suspicious visitors. This may have been through manipulation from the Manhunters, or it's possible that Iran and the USSR are just bad places full of bad people. No effort is made to replace them. Then the racist-rear end South African refuses to join the team, and once again the Guardians shrug. Then they give all of the remaining people super-powers! Betty turns into like a discorporeal head/globe with a special link to Gregorio. She doesn't get a superhero name. Takeko turns into RAM, because computers and stuff. His body is now made of silicon, and he can... talk to... computers I think? Xiang turns into GLOSS, a sexy post-racial lady who controls dragon lines and feng shui and stuff. Celia turns into JET, who uses electromagnetic fields in a way that is probably totally different than dragon lines or feng shui or whatever. Gregorio becomes EXTRANO, who is now like a real magician, not a stage magician but still very very campy. Tom turns down the whole thing but changes his mind a few months later and doesn't have a super power. Jason turns into FLORO who is basically exactly the same as Floronic Man, also he still seemed kind of evil. Oh and then Harbinger joined them because why not? People remember Snowblind, but not enough people remember THE HEMOGOBLIN, some sort of evil vampire/goblin who gave everyone he bit AIDS.
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Jul 20, 2014 21:45
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Metal Loaf posted:I've not read it, but I've read about it. It's meant to have killed Valiant as a company. It didn't kill Valiant, but it did hit right at the moment when the house of cards collapsed. And yeah, the Image side of the crossover was absurdly late. Like eight months late. On the other hand, Image did eventually complete their incredibly lovely, incredibly incomprehensible work. I guess that makes Image United and even worse event. 
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Jul 20, 2014 22:08
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I've wanted to read Millennium and New Guardians solely because the hero turn of a villain from Alan Moore's Swamp Thing sounds nuts, but that whole thing sounds nuts. e: and neither one is on Comixology. Hardly any of the weird events between the major Crisises are represented other than the odd crossover issues in main series'. Teenage Fansub fucked around with this message at 23:59 on Jul 20, 2014 |
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Jul 20, 2014 22:10
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Edge & Christian posted:People remember Snowblind, but not enough people remember THE HEMOGOBLIN, some sort of evil vampire/goblin who gave everyone he bit AIDS. That's because SNOWFLAME is awesome and Hemogoblin was loving retarded.
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Jul 20, 2014 22:55
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I will note that there was at least one good Millennium tie-in issue: Justice League International #10, in which Superman, Martian Manhunter, Dr. Fate, the Hawks, and a handful of Green Lanterns bust into a Manhunter fortress and just wade into an army of thousands of robots. Pretty much mindless bust-em-up, but fun. (Also: first appearance of G'nort!)
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Jul 20, 2014 23:29
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Ensign_Ricky posted:That's because SNOWFLAME is awesome and Hemogoblin was loving retarded. The worst
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Jul 21, 2014 01:13
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Selachian posted:I will note that there was at least one good Millennium tie-in issue: Justice League International #10, in which Superman, Martian Manhunter, Dr. Fate, the Hawks, and a handful of Green Lanterns bust into a Manhunter fortress and just wade into an army of thousands of robots. Pretty much mindless bust-em-up, but fun. (Also: first appearance of G'nort!) ) sets up storylines each for Batman, Captain Atom, Suicide Squad and The Spectre, which ends with all 4 parties converging on a Manhunter base in the Louisiana swamp: Then, each of those issues (which came out at the same time) tells part of a complete story from each group's point of view. For example, at the end of the story, we see that it begins snowing in the summer swamp, and there is no explanation unless you read the Spectre issue. It's a fun mini-crossover that reads very well together, and it even leads to later plotlines like Batman wondering what else is going on in that swamp (he eventually learns that the Squad is set up in a prison there and leads to the fantastic SS issue where Amanda Waller becomes one of the few to win one over Batman.). I also enjoyed that Terra of the Titans was supposed to be one of the Chosen, but had died earlier and the Guardians just go "Welp, moving on!" redbackground fucked around with this message at 04:03 on Jul 21, 2014 |
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Jul 21, 2014 03:58
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So it was a proto-Seven Soldiers Of Victory? That sounds like it's worth picking up, I don't suppose you have issue numbers.
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Jul 21, 2014 04:14
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