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Is Jeph Loeb still writing comics?
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Dec 30, 2017 19:59
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Spider-Man v. Batman rogues sounds awesome in an extremely dumb way (Batman v. Spidey rogues seems Extremely Bad, largely because Spider-Man works in basically any situation you put him in but Batman only really functions in a world that accommodates Batman. By that, I mean Batman has to fight The Worst People Ever and still win, and a lot of his stories are built around the idea that him and the people within his employ are the only ones able to prevent Gotham from turning into even more of a shithole than it already is. There's obviously stories with him not in Gotham (notably most-to-all JL stories) but a story of him fighting like the Vulture in Earth-616 don't seem to really work because it ignores that Spidey doesn't get help mostly because Spider-Man's villains don't really rate. Most of them are total losers (in much the same way Spider-Man is kind of a total loser), they're mostly all B-list or worse, and a LOT of them are sympathetic and most of them are empathetic. In contrast, again, Batman's villains are the Worst People Ever, and he's the only one who can effectively fight them because of the way that Gotham is structured, neither of which are problems present in Marvel's Manhattan.) It also helps that Spidey is basically the most flexible hero probably of all time, so he can fight anyone, basically, and it's believable that he would. In contrast I would argue that Batman is almost as flexible but there's a sense of him being an overt, in-world A-lister (especially how DC's heroes are painted more as gods who walk among us, which Bruce partially dodges but not completely) and he'd be slumming it fighting the fuckin' Hobgoblin or some poo poo. You can see this especially whenever there's a story where the Big Bad is some Z-list Batman villain and the conceit of the story is "Z-list Batman villain decides to tire Batman out by sending in the Real Threats and getting the killshot on Batman". Either way yeah it's indicative of Jeph Loeb's complete inability to write more than one story. But, gently caress, Spider-Man fighting like Clayface and The Penguin loving sounds cool.
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Dec 30, 2017 20:06
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Roth posted:Is Jeph Loeb still writing comics? Not really. There's not really a tactful way of saying this, but back in 2005-ish his son Sam died at 17 from bone cancer, and this tailspinned Loeb into a dramatic creative downturn even for him. He kept getting work on bad comics largely because people wouldn't say no to him for obvious reasons, and he kept trying to memorialize his son in increasingly hamfisted and extremely uncomfortable ways - there's one story where a kid named Sam literally makes Clark Kent decide to be Superman and it's exactly as poorly executed a concept as you think it would be. Anyways that creative period continued for like 5 years or so until he came up with the idea for the newest Nova for Marvel, Sam Alexander, which is weirdly enough probably the best thing Jeph Loeb's ever done. He wrote the first arc of the new Nova series and despite it being most overtly Jeph working through the feelings he has for his dead son besides the Superman thing, which is just loving regrettable, it all works really really well. Anyways after that he was doing Marvel comics off and on until Marvel Entertainment signed him on for their television division, which he currently is a VP of. If you watch any Marvel show you see his name in the EP bylines which probably means he gives overall nonspecific creative advice, which is probably the best position for him to be in anyways. For reference, he apparently came up with the idea behind the story "Must There Be a Superman?", one of Superman's best Silver Age stories and stories in general. He's really good at articulating a high concept and less good to outright bad at constructing an actual narrative around it.
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Dec 30, 2017 20:19
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Lick! The! Whisk! posted:For reference, he apparently came up with the idea behind the story "Must There Be a Superman?", one of Superman's best Silver Age stories and stories in general. He's really good at articulating a high concept and less good to outright bad at constructing an actual narrative around it. quote:When I was about 20 and starting to write Superman I had made friends with a younger kid, young Jeph Loeb of whom you no doubt know. Jeph and I were apparently talking at some length one day about Superman, and Jeph seems to have come up with an idea called, 'Why Must There Be a Superman?' which he later wrote down and kept in a drawer somewhere. Meanwhile, weeks or months later, I had a plotting session with Julie Schwartz in which I threw out maybe half-a-dozen ideas the last of which was about Superman screwing up human social norms, a story which became 'Must There Be a Superman?' That was the idea Julie flipped over. He called in Denny O'Neil from out in the hall to kvell over it while I sat there. And then there was the story.
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Dec 30, 2017 20:28
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The Night of Owls crossover isn't great. The main story in Batman is dynamite, but the tie in issues are forced and bad. It just shows how much better the smaller crossovers that DC is doing are a better model. Having started in on Snyder's main run now. It is good. Much better than the stories in Detective.
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Dec 30, 2017 20:46
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Lick! The! Whisk! posted:Spider-Man v. Batman rogues sounds awesome in an extremely dumb way (Batman v. Spidey rogues seems Extremely Bad, largely because Spider-Man works in basically any situation you put him in but Batman only really functions in a world that accommodates Batman. By that, I mean Batman has to fight The Worst People Ever and still win, and a lot of his stories are built around the idea that him and the people within his employ are the only ones able to prevent Gotham from turning into even more of a shithole than it already is. There's obviously stories with him not in Gotham (notably most-to-all JL stories) but a story of him fighting like the Vulture in Earth-616 don't seem to really work because it ignores that Spidey doesn't get help mostly because Spider-Man's villains don't really rate. Most of them are total losers (in much the same way Spider-Man is kind of a total loser), they're mostly all B-list or worse, and a LOT of them are sympathetic and most of them are empathetic. In contrast, again, Batman's villains are the Worst People Ever, and he's the only one who can effectively fight them because of the way that Gotham is structured, neither of which are problems present in Marvel's Manhattan.) This post makes no sense at all. You can easily take any of Spider-Man's villains and make a good Batman story with them. Their universe and city being different isn't an excuse at all.
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Dec 30, 2017 20:56
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There was already a Batman/Spiderman crossover with Bagley on art. From what I remember about it, it was pretty bad and had Carnage gushing and fanboying all over Joker and Joker not giving a gently caress about Carnage.
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Dec 30, 2017 21:14
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Edge & Christian posted:Even that is kind of weird, according to Maggin: Is that story in Superman #247?
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Dec 30, 2017 21:16
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Batman has plenty of sympathetic and/or empathetic villains, in fact I'd say he's noted for it. Almost every Batman villain has some kind of tragic backstory and fatal flaw. Even the worst of them, like Scarecrow, Croc and Joker, are often ameliorated by the fact that they have debilitating mental health issues. The list of major Batman villains that truly are just unalloyed evil is pretty short, I think. Black Mask, Zsasz, Hush, Joker? Maybe Professor Pyg? At least three of those are still mentally ill, but they're also consistently portrayed as being a cut above the rest in terms of nastiness and are often lucid and unrepentant. Killer Croc literally eats people and he's still been consistently portrayed as a bullied child suffering from progressive mental degeneration for the past thirty or so years of comics.
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Dec 30, 2017 22:03
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Open Marriage Night posted:This post makes no sense at all. You can easily take any of Spider-Man's villains and make a good Batman story with them. Their universe and city being different isn't an excuse at all. Loeb can't. His stories are just action figures smacking each other, not even in interesting ways.
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Dec 31, 2017 02:49
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Madkal posted:There was already a Batman/Spiderman crossover with Bagley on art. From what I remember about it, it was pretty bad and had Carnage gushing and fanboying all over Joker and Joker not giving a gently caress about Carnage. There were two, that one (I liked Joker and Carnage deciding to team up only to have it all fall apart before they do anything because, well, Carnage doesn't give a poo poo about theatricality and Joker thinks mindless murder is super lame), and the second with Kingpin and Ra's al-Ghul. Neither are great, really. Kinda wish we got to see Batman take down Mysterio though.
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Dec 31, 2017 03:29
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Harper Row is good. Does she appear in other books besides Snyder's Batman?
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Jan 1, 2018 00:23
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Mr Hootington posted:Harper Row is good. Does she appear in other books besides Snyder's Batman? She's in both of the Eternals, and has popped up in the current Detective run.
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Jan 1, 2018 00:28
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Mr Hootington posted:Harper Row is good. Does she appear in other books besides Snyder's Batman? Do not read Batman Eternal. Do read Batman and Robin Eternal.
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Jan 1, 2018 03:25
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BnR Eternal's worth it just for the Genevieve Valentine written issue where Harper and Cass go to the ballet and beat up all the dancers.
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Jan 1, 2018 03:31
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Lick! The! Whisk! posted:Do not read Batman Eternal. Do read Batman and Robin Eternal. I have both!
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Jan 1, 2018 04:20
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Creature of the Night 
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Jan 1, 2018 05:03
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Man oh man. "Death of the Family" was really, really great. How are the tie ins? I might pick that trade up too.
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Jan 1, 2018 16:31
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Mr Hootington posted:Man oh man. "Death of the Family" was really, really great. How are the tie ins? I might pick that trade up too. iirc the one outstanding tie-in was the Gleason & Tomasi Batman and Robin, because it went big on DotF's horror visuals and it worked in some neat callbacks to the last time Damian and the Joker met
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Jan 1, 2018 17:01
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I would say all of them except Tomasi's B&R were really bad but then I thought the main story was really bad too, so who the gently caress even knows.
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Jan 1, 2018 17:04
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Did you read it in the trade version? They edited out a ton of Joker flirting with Batman. I'd love to hear Snyder's opinion on that whenever he stops working for DC. https://imgur.com/a/2NLIJ
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Jan 1, 2018 22:53
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Teenage Fansub posted:Did you read it in the trade version? They edited out a ton of Joker flirting with Batman. I'd love to hear Snyder's opinion on that whenever he stops working for DC. I read the trade. That is a lot of weird removals.
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Jan 2, 2018 01:32
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I'm re-reading Morrison's run while I wait for Vol 2 of new 52 Batman arrives at my local library and just got to the "Clown at Midnight" issue again and I still can't get through it. The CG art is so loving awful. I can't understand how they published this. Couple that with the grating prose and it's easily the least readable comic I've even encountered. This is doubly frustrating considering it explains what happens to the Joker after getting thrown in that dumpster (which also confused me). I hope I'm not restarting a tired discussion but does anyone have insight on what exactly Morrison was trying to accomplish here?
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Jan 2, 2018 03:28
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I love Morrison's Batman but I will never ever read the prose Joker issue, nor re-read that internet issue with 3d art (once was enough for my lifetime).
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Jan 2, 2018 04:30
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The Clown at Midnight is unbelievably loving terrible on virtually every level, but especially with decompression, Morrison imparts like literally an arc's worth of story in the space of a single issue. He puts across the red/black poison, introduces then immediately writes out his Harley, he has the funeral, he brings up the dead Joker cronies...there's a loving ton of poo poo that happens in Clown at Midnight, a lot of it basically record-keeping so Morrison can focus on other poo poo and set up various elements of Batman RIP. That, I imagine, is how he got away with a loving prose issue, especially so early in his loving run - he is able to resolve a whole bunch of ultimately minor but necessary plot points all at once, so DC let him do his dumbass, loving terrible, purple and pretentiously written prose issue. That's the only conclusion I can gather - Morrison was pretty big before he got on Batman, but his most notable (as in generally popular) DC comic he had done before his Batman was...what, JLA? He had been on a couple of issues of the Flash, but before he got on Batman he was pretty notable for doing Vertigo-level cult favorite books like Doom Patrol or Animal Man. By the time his Batman run had started he had only done, at most, a couple of issues of All-Star Superman, which itself was, at the time, an OOC series. And he was still less than a year into his Batman run by the time 663 came out. I don't think he necessarily had the cultural cachet that post- Final Crisis-writing, Multiversity-writing, guy on Action Comics, All-Star Superman-writing Morrison now has, so it's the only way I can see him overriding editorial with this comic (because if any editor in the loving world took a look at his script and approved it in the state it got published in, they shouldn't be an editor any more). It's an extremely useful issue in the sense that it's able to resolve a bunch of plot threads all at once, and it's realistically the only way I can see an editor giving it the okay, especially with the atrocious 3d art. Or, maybe, Morrison was super behind on his scripts and basically banged out 20k words or however long that loving prose script is of some real fuckin' pablum (because, boy, is that some purple as poo poo prose that would feel like too much in a dime store noir novel) and called up some 3d artist who generated 20 3d images in Maya or something with some character models he colored white and threw into Joker and Harley Quinn outfits, got it all done in like a week, and the Batman office was so behind they signed off without a second glance. Cause either 663 was super duper intentionally written or super duper lazily written, and I literally can't tell which. People say the Internet 2.0 issue is Morrison's worst, but it's just a boring story. At least it is an issue of comics, just a bad one that wastes its conceit and the idea of Oracle as a digital Batgirl. Clown at Midnight is literally just a bad novella with worse, barely-associated images alongside it.
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Jan 2, 2018 05:39
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Morrison's first DC work were prose stories in Batman and Superman annuals.
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Jan 2, 2018 05:44
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Then man, gently caress, I dunno. Whichever editor approved that script in the state it got published in should have been fired.
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Jan 2, 2018 05:47
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Not defending Clown at Midnight at all, but going into Morrison's Batman run he had (in addition to doing cult-level books) done JLA, which really was a huge high profile book for DC and revitalized the Justice League after the book had sort of circled the drain for years post (and honestly at the tail end of) the Giffen and DeMatteis run. Off the success of that he wrote/showran DC 1 Million which was one of the few events at DC (or really anywhere) in the late 1990s that was particularly well received/remembered. Then he jumped over to Marvel and did New X-Men, which was also a big shot in the arm/revitalization of an aimless marquee book, then he did Seven Soldiers (which sold far better than a series of mini-series about D-listers could ever expect to do), co-wrote 52 (which was huge), was put more or less at the same level as Frank Miller (make of that what you will) with the All-Star line, then was given the task of revamping Batman and was allowed to give him a biological son in his very first arc. Clown at Midnight was really bad, but "arty critically acclaimed guy who has written three top-selling books for us and one at Marvel in the past decade gets to do some arty stuff that sometimes falls on its face" isn't really confusing or inexplicable. The issue itself almost is, but not the decision to give him enough rope to make it.
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Jan 2, 2018 05:52
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I forgot about 1 Million, yeah, that's fair. Was rear end really that big early on? It wouldn't end for like three years and it's barely after that comic started that his Batman run started. I thought it took a while for rear end to become like the definitive Superman story and weren't they stressing early on how it was definitively out of continuity just in case it was a flop?
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Jan 2, 2018 06:03
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rear end was heavily marketed and pushed as like The Big Iconic Superman Book for the 21st Century and the first issue only got outsold by Infinite Crisis's second issue and the whole run had orders of over 100,000. It was pretty literally positioned as "Morrison and Quitely redefined the X-Men for the modern era, now they will do it for Superman". Whether it accomplishes that is neither here nor there, but once Morrison successfully did his big New X-Men run he's pretty much been given all of the creative clout you seem to be ascribing to other later books.
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Jan 2, 2018 06:28
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The first half of zero year withthe red hood gang isn't very good. The send half though! That was an amazing story .
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Jan 2, 2018 06:44
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Honestly even without 1 million and his Vertigo stuff Morrison was a mainstream name through New X-Men alone. There really wasn't a gamble with Morrison and Batman. Of course he decided to experiment a little too much here and there and that is how you end up with that awful issue, but it wasn't like DC gave Batman to an unknown.
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Jan 2, 2018 07:20
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Around Seven Soldiers, DC was using Grant's notes to come up with stuff like that Metal Men mini with Copper, Ryan Choi as the Atom, and the Alpha Lanterns. Also, I'm pretty sure Tomasi was his editor on Batman, and wasn't going to tell him he couldn't do a lovely prose issue with poser art. New 52 did a lot of damage to the legacy of Grant's run, but at the time it felt like Batman was never going to be the same. At least we got Damian out of it. Shame about Batman Inc, and Dick as Batman.
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Jan 2, 2018 09:40
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I dunno how much damage is done between Inc series' when it's read in isolation. It'd be interesting to see if someone who'd only been reading the saga right through really notices or minds that it's suddenly just a Batman and Robin story. Maybe in the new omnibuses they can leave a text box at the end of Leviathan Strikes going: "Also Batman was so sad about Jezebel Jett's decapitated head that he told everyone to go home, including his Batman robots. This is a job for Batman (Bruce, that is) and Robin!" Teenage Fansub fucked around with this message at 10:12 on Jan 2, 2018 |
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Jan 2, 2018 10:09
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I'm going to be wrapping up the rest of the pre-New 52 Morrison run in the next few days and moving on to the two New 52 Batman Inc series, so I guess I'm in for a good time. I remember trying to read Batman Inc. around the beginning of the New 52, but that was the literal start of my reading comics, so I bounced off it pretty hard after an issue or two.
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Jan 2, 2018 12:55
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Sleeping on it, I do not enjoy tue changes Snyder made to the Joker's and Riddler's origins. The murderous Riddler never feels right.
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Jan 2, 2018 13:37
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Snyder's Riddler wasn't all that murderous, that was more Tom King's thing. Snyder's Riddler created a blackout in Gotham to enforce some kind of survival of the fittest on the city, sure, but it made sense in the setting of his character and Snyder justified it well. Honestly I thought Snyder had a great voice for the Riddler that made him a legitimate threat without just making him a twisted killer. And it's a shame he never came back to Riddler and instead kept going back to shock value gruesome serial killer Joker.
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Jan 2, 2018 13:57
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Snyder is bad at writing the Joker, that's all. His two (huge, disruptive) Joker stories are the worst parts of his run, and the Red Hood One stuff is the worst part of Zero Year. I think Snyder buys into the mythology of Batman and the Joker a bit too much. You see it start once Bruce comes back. He'd been writing great stories with Dick as Batman, but once he got his hands on Bruce I feel like he has a chip on his shoulder about living up to the "real" Batman. Mostly I do still like his new 52 stuff but anything with his Joker is basically unreadable to me.
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Jan 2, 2018 15:21
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I like the first arc in Zero Year but that's because it's Zero Year and not because the Joker's in it. Death of the Family and Endgame are easily the weakest points in Synder's run. DotF has surprisingly little impact in the long run too.
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Jan 2, 2018 15:24
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Teenage Fansub posted:I dunno how much damage is done between Inc series' when it's read in isolation. It'd be interesting to see if someone who'd only been reading the saga right through really notices or minds that it's suddenly just a Batman and Robin story. I just miss the Batman Inc characters. El Gaucho, Batman Japan, and Cass Cain in a costume with a bat on it.
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Jan 2, 2018 16:04
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