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Also stories where nothing ever changes and there's no character development would get boring very fast. Not just for the reader, but the creators as well. It's honestly that kind of thinking that holds comics back from being considered literature in a lot of cases.
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Dec 20, 2018 17:29
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FoneBone posted:Re: extermination—what about that story from a few years ago where the original X-Men returned to their time but found out they couldn’t go back because “the timeline” or whatever had already replaced them? Did that get retconned? I think some writer or another wrote another story where those were just the evil future X-Men from Battle of the Atom in disguise
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Dec 20, 2018 18:51
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Android Blues posted:Yeah, "Bobby can't have been openly gay in the past" seems like a weird line to draw in a franchise that once declared its most famous storyline had actually happened to a clone simulacrum generated by an underwater ocean pod, and the character everyone thought was dead was actually in the ocean pod and she's alive, but she has all the memories of the evil clone and also the magic powers related to the evil clone and everyone still acts as if she died, but she's back, don't question it. "Bobby can be out but Angel can't avoid Apocalypse nonsense and Jean can't prevent
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Dec 20, 2018 21:40
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The idea that a mental block from Teen Jean is going to persist through two whole resurrections for herself and, like, six brain rewrites for Warren strains belief, just a tad bit.
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Dec 20, 2018 21:59
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howe_sam posted:I'd love to see a Spider-Girls ongoing. I enjoyed the dynamic between Mayday and Anime.  I would also except a Spider-Girls spinoff movie of Into The Spider-Verse. Throw in Peni if you need someone from that. DivineCoffeeBinge posted:Spider-Geddon killed off Spider-UK and Spider-Man Noir in the opening act and then no one else in the entire story
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Dec 20, 2018 22:59
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TwoPair posted:I think some writer or another wrote another story where those were just the evil future X-Men from Battle of the Atom in disguise
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Dec 20, 2018 23:14
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Yvonmukluk posted:
To be fair, comic book noir was nothing like movie noir.
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Dec 20, 2018 23:16
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and isn't the Marvel Noir universe dead? the last Noir series was 8 years ago
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Dec 20, 2018 23:28
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Edge & Christian posted:I didn't think Bendis's stay in the X-Men side of things was particularly good, but in this case Bendis introduced the concept of "they can't go back, you've been replaced in the timestream" in the first few issues of his All-New X-Men run, then revealed that the 'replacements' were the evil future X-Men less than a year into his run in the Battle for the Atom crossover so while I know that he's a piece of poo poo hack rear end in a top hat that may have been something that was actually planned instead of some writer or another retconning thing. Pretty sure you’ve got this one mixed up. The imposters in the past didn’t show up until All New by Hopeless. Bendis didn’t have them go back because in his story time travel was broken and blocked. The imposters were revealed and resolved in X-Men Blue. X-O fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Dec 20, 2018 |
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Dec 20, 2018 23:37
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Cnut the Great posted:Yeah dude, why do you think that happened? It happened for a lot of reasons but one reason was the poor decision to primarily target the increasingly more loyal adult readers and leave the more transient youth readers behind. That meant increasingly fewer kids getting into comics, which meant increasingly fewer adult readers down the line, which meant that the new target audience would increasingly shrink and become more and more destructive to the industry as that small, older, obsessive audience continually demanded changes to make the books even more adult and more inaccessible. The idea of this need for drastic progression in the universe and its characters is also what's responsible for the build-up of all this burdensome history and continuity which makes comics even more impenetrable to new readers, whereas in the past any given comic could be a new reader's first comic, because the dedication to the preservation of a core status quo despite the "illusion of change" meant that there was never too much meaningful history for a new reader to get caught up on before understanding what was going on. It's largely a self-fulfilling prophecy, and if there's really no getting back to the oh-so-crazy idea of superhero comics being for kids, then that's not something that just happened for reasons beyond anyone's control. Kids obviously love superheroes. They may not be reading as much today, and there may be more entertainment sources competing for their attention, and the direct market may have killed easy access and impulse buying, but I think the industry could at least try to find some ways to move more back in that direction, because otherwise it's doomed. It's just a matter of time. With the advent of digital comics and ubiquitous tablet readers, I think something approximating the old model--at least as far as easy access goes--is ripe for making a comeback, and so all that remains is to start targeting a younger audience again. (Maybe they've actually started doing this now, I don't really know, I've been out of superhero comics for a while.) See now I see the problem you have a very defined idea of what SM is and you conflate success with that. Your ideal SM hasn’t really existed for most of SM history and it’s one the highest sellers. Comics have issues but Batman, SM and Superman are fine
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Dec 21, 2018 00:08
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X-O posted:Pretty sure you’ve got this one mixed up. The imposters in the past didn’t show up until All New by Hopeless. Bendis didn’t have them go back because in his story time travel was broken and blocked. I forget why they could have theoretically gone back in that event after they 'couldn't' prior to that.
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Dec 21, 2018 01:06
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lol if you can concentrate on that wall of text
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Dec 21, 2018 02:41
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Nodosaur posted:It fixed Ben, is clearly undoing one of the worst received deaths from Spider-verse, had Miles getting to be the big hero, changed the status quo for all the web-jumpers, gave Otto character development and put him on speaking terms with the other 616 spiders, and had good moments for Takuya, Mayday, and a good number of other characters, while closing the book on the Inheritors in a much more final way at the same time. I agree with the good points; I wish they had used something else instead of the Inheritors but at least it wasn't as long as Spider-Verse. Also, what happened to Spiders-Man and what's the deal with Osborn Spider-Man at the end?
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Dec 21, 2018 04:39
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Uhh spidersman and Osborne Spider-Man went to the destroyed loomworld to get some trans dimensional webbing, spiders went off on his own to another dimension to eat people and Norman, well he's an rear end in a top hat so he's plotting to be an rear end in a top hat somewhere
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Dec 21, 2018 04:44
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Osborn Spider-Man? Surely his name is Glider-Man?
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Dec 21, 2018 04:45
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TwoPair posted:I think some writer or another wrote another story where those were just the evil future X-Men from Battle of the Atom in disguise seriously? and the story in question is only ~18 months old
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Dec 21, 2018 05:16
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Yvonmukluk posted:
I'm fairly certain this is the almost-100% rumor. Along with heavily featuring the women of the Spider-Verse, it'll introduce Spider-Woman as well. I imagine the only reason she wasn't in this one is because a character like her warrants more time than could be given in Miles' origin story.
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Dec 21, 2018 05:40
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El Tortuga posted:I'm fairly certain this is the almost-100% rumor. Along with heavily featuring the women of the Spider-Verse, it'll introduce Spider-Woman as well. What I've heard is the film will be about Gwen, Cindy Moon and Jessica Drew, but nothing about Mayday or Annie.
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Dec 21, 2018 05:57
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howe_sam posted:What I've heard is the film will be about Gwen, Cindy Moon and Jessica Drew, but nothing about Mayday or Annie. Those three are kind of perfect. You get teenage Gwen, in her twenties but with stunted development Cindy, and thirties, just barely holding her poo poo together single mom Jessica. The dynamic works great in the comics with them together and I fully expect it to be good in the movie as well.
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Dec 21, 2018 06:40
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Skwirl posted:But characters do age and change. Reed and Sue got married and had two kids. Rogue and Gambit are married. Spider-Man was married for 20 years, he's been unmarried for only half that time. Tony and Carol quit drinking. Superman is married and has a preteen kid (that I think they're aging into a teenager). Rogue and Gambit are married and I'm betting the only way that bell gets unrung is by killing one of them. You're really not understanding. The premise of Fantastic Four is that it's about a superpowered family. Reed and Sue getting married and having kids doesn't alter the premise, and if anything it may improve it. The Fantastic Four equivalent to Spider-Man getting married and having kids would be if Reed and Sue permanently divorced. The Fantastic Four need to stay a family just like Spider-Man needs to stay a young man trying to figure out his place in the world. The Fantastic Four is all about family and that's what makes it stand out from other comics. But if all the characters grow up, start families, and have kids like all the adults reading these things seem to want them to, then it just starts homogenizing the characters so there's nothing to differentiate them other than their powers and costumes. This is why fans of comics shouldn't be the ones determining the direction of comics. They don't actually understand what makes them work long-term. They only understand what they want them to be right now, as adults still reading superhero comics. It's how we get Spider-Man turning into Iron Man. People read Spider-Man for Spider-Man, not Iron Man. People read Iron Man for Iron Man, not Spider-Man. It's not complicated. TwoPair posted:So what's your solution? Just move back to the Silver Age and have every story be a wacky one-and-done? Or move to the Gold Key model and just republish old comics up until about the 80s then start over? That's not what the Silver Age was like. Most of the best stories Marvel ever told were in the Silver and Bronze Ages. You can't seriously tell me Marvel is putting out higher quality comics now than it was then. Vince MechMahon posted:Also stories where nothing ever changes and there's no character development would get boring very fast. Not just for the reader, but the creators as well. It's honestly that kind of thinking that holds comics back from being considered literature in a lot of cases. Except that's not what I'm saying. If you read the comics over a period of a few years, say five to ten, especially as a kid, the characters do grow and develop and change. If you read for longer than that (at the point when you're probably entering adulthood and either moving on to other things or altering the way you approach your childhood favorites) then you start to realize that despite all these seeming changes, things always eventually return to the status quo. Stan Lee called it the "illusion of change" and it was a winning model for Marvel for more than twenty years, in the period when they were at their creative peak. That's the way the medium works best. The fact that you're even worried about serialized superhero comics being held back "from being considered literature" highlights the problem. Superhero comics aren't "literature." They shouldn't be literature. They're escapist power fantasies for children. Marvel introduced a dose of realism and human weakness into the formula, but it didn't stray from the central idea that books about superpowered men and women in tights who run around fighting people are fundamentally an adolescent form of entertainment. That won't change no matter how many navel-gazing "decompressed" pages of photostatted talking heads the latest writer deemed to be "reinvigorating the genre" fills their comic with. At the end of the day, the books aren't going to stop being about wrestlers with stage names beating people up to save the world. They always go back to that, because they have to, because it's their only reason for existing. The flagrant insecurity about this fact on the part of the adult fans both reading and writing these things is currently what's driving the creative decisions being made today. It's like a bunch of drunk adults hanging out on a playground and angrily screaming at any child who comes near until they run away. CharlestheHammer posted:See now I see the problem you have a very defined idea of what SM is and you conflate success with that. Your ideal SM hasn’t really existed for most of SM history and it’s one the highest sellers. Comics have issues but Batman, SM and Superman are fine Books that are considered super duper high sellers now would have been unceremoniously cancelled back in the day. Good luck basing the health of the entire industry on three of the most popular superhero characters in history who are just barely hanging on. There's no excuse for this state of affairs when Marvel has an entire stable of characters who have literally never been more well-known and broadly popular among the public. TwoPair posted:So what's your solution? Just move back to the Silver Age and have every story be a wacky one-and-done? Or move to the Gold Key model and just republish old comics up until about the 80s then start over? It would be incredibly easy to put Peter back in grad school so he's a student again and just ignore any references that stated he was older than his early twenties. Cnut the Great fucked around with this message at 13:18 on Dec 21, 2018 |
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Dec 21, 2018 13:02
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Cnut the Great posted:It would be incredibly easy to put Peter back in grad school so he's a student again and just ignore any references that stated he was older than his early twenties. Unless I’m misremembering Peter currently IS in grad school going for a doctorate since his previous one was voided (since it was Otto that went for it)
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Dec 21, 2018 13:15
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Happy Noodle Boy posted:Unless I’m misremembering Peter currently IS in grad school going for a doctorate since his previous one was voided (since it was Otto that went for it) If true, that's good! They should keep it that way. Peter being in grad school is great because it allows writers to explore stories of Peter in a school environment if they want to, but it also allows Peter to work at any of a variety of part-time jobs so writers can explore those kinds of stories if they want to. It allows for a maximum of storytelling flexibility so writers can go in a bunch of different directions and shake things up, but without permanently losing access to certain kinds of stories that may be useful to writers in the future. That's smart policy. I might actually start picking up Spider-Man again. (Unfortunately I'm poor, because I actually am a loser in my late twenties and haven't figured out a way to retcon it yet.) And you know, this kind of thing applies to Aunt May too. You don't kill off Aunt May. Why? Because Aunt May is a useful character! If for whatever reason you as a writer don't want Aunt May around, you can just contrive an explanation to send her away for a while. (IIRC Dan Slott actually did this at one point, which was perfectly fine.) But if you kill Aunt May, no one can ever use Aunt May ever again, unless you come up with some contrived explanation involving a secret plot by a resurrected Norman Osborn. Remember when they killed Aunt May back in the 90s? It was a great story, but then what happened afterwards? The writers eventually realized, "gently caress, now we don't have Aunt May!" If you want to do a story where Aunt May dies, just do it as an out-of-continuity story. Then everybody's happy. You get to tell your great one-off story, but you don't have to deal with that great one-off story negatively affecting the long-running series that has to continue on indefinitely afterwards. That's what What If? stories used to be for. Now all the What If? stories are just normal stories told in-continuity which always eventually require implausible solutions contained within terrible storylines (One More Day) to un-do. The reason this changed is because the short-sighted corporate bean counters who call the shots at Marvel now started realizing that telling the What If? stories in-continuity generates more publicity and creates (temporary) sales bumps.
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Dec 21, 2018 13:37
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Cnut the Great posted:
You know what? Yes I can. This'll probably get brushed off as a hot take but I think on the whole comics are better today. I mean those old comics are classics and they'll always be classics, no one's arguing that they're bad. But, as much as we complain sometimes, we're in an all new all different age where comics have new, more diverse casts, with a more diverse bunch of writers and artists, than they've ever been. It's great that Jack Kirby could draw and (depending on how much of a hack fraud you think Stan Lee was) write half of Marvel's output. But by today's standards those comic book characters don't talk like real people at all, and it's better that we try to tweak the formula for the better.
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Dec 21, 2018 14:31
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I think it's honestly a pretty even distribution of quality between old comics and new. There were plenty of awful unreadable rags being put out by Marvel in the 70s and 80s alongside the classics, and there are plenty of bland, quippy decompressed snorefests coming out now alongside the great comics. The nature of the medium has changed a lot, but I don't think the average quality of the fiction being produced is all that different. The argument's baffling, though, because a large part of what makes those Silver and Bronze Age comics great is that the characters did change and experience giant status quo shakeups. The weight of continuity was less then - Spider-Man had fifteen years of history instead of nearly sixty, so telling stories where things drastically changed for him was not yet at odds with the character's long-term sustainability. Audiences expected characters to grow and change, because the problem of, "well, won't Spider-Man die of old age soon?" was not yet looming, and the sliding timescale was a foreign concept. You could have Magneto reform and that became the new, definitive version of the character rather than a temporary gimmick before the throwback to the "real" Magneto. There was a little bit of time compression, but people generally accepted that Peter Parker was growing up and would continue to, that the X-Men were introducing new team members as old ones settled down and started families, etc. It was only in the 90s that we started getting the first footfalls of the sliding timescale, with characters being radically reinvented, deaths and marriages being undone, and "classic" status quos returned to keep things fresh for the new decade. The Bronze and Silver Age were rife with continuity.
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Dec 21, 2018 15:01
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Anyone who holds up 70s Marvel overall as a paragon of quality comic books is not to be trusted. There were good comics but there was also a lot of dreadful schlock and for the most part the editorial paradigms were geared more towards a consistent output of mediocre comics than fostering innovative talents-- those all mostly emerged accidentally. That we got Gerber and Starlin and Claremont and Moench was a fluke no matter how loudly Marvel's house hagiographers toot its counterculture horn. Setting aside outliers in either direction readers in 2018 most definitely have access to better comics than readers in 1974. They have access to more comics by women, queer writers, and writers of color, and if they aren't straight white male readers they have an astronomically better chance of being able to find and enjoy a comic starring someone like them. If you don't see that as a tremendous net gain for the art form then I don't know what to tell you. Also the "superhero comics shouldn't be literature" line is bullshit. It's placing artificial and arbitrary limitations on a form, because what it really boils down to is "superhero comics shouldn't challenge me, personally." I'm a literature professor, whatever that really means, and I'm saying with the marginal stamp of academic approval that superhero comics already are literature by any meaningful definition, and if what you really mean by literature is "high literature" or "high culture" than you should say what you mean instead of reifying literature-as-such for a rhetorical point. This isn't to say that superhero comics, especially as they're produced by the big two, aren't subject to editorial and market-driven concerns that often undercut their pretensions to unmediated artistic expression, and that to a certain extent determine the kinds of narratives they can generate as well as the kinds of narratives they can generate well, but thats an entirely different set of claims. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Dec 21, 2018 |
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Dec 21, 2018 15:42
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The very last thing comics need to do is get even more nostalgia based then they are now. You can argue one of the problems with comics is they can’t move past the 70s and 80s.
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Dec 21, 2018 20:58
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I don't trust anybody who thinks the phrase "Back to basics" is a good thing.
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Dec 21, 2018 21:10
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Zub's been hinting that viv is gay for a while but i thought it was gonna be her and snowguard
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Dec 22, 2018 21:40
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Who put her in cargo pants?
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Dec 22, 2018 22:02
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Teenage Fansub posted:Who put her in cargo pants? Adventurers get to wear cargo pants, I should think. They have a reason to have giant pockets everywhere.
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Dec 22, 2018 22:08
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Viv and Riri would be hell of a power couple. Withdrawn genius + incredibly smart android with emotional problems is actually a remarkably good fit when you think about it.
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Dec 22, 2018 22:27
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Also I really like Riri, I really like how one of her main struggles as a character is just that she's bad at socialising and pushes people away and finds it difficult to connect with them. It's really rare to see a character written like that who isn't also a dark brooding anti-hero. Riri doesn't push people away for grim 'n' gritty reasons - her trauma in losing Stephanie and her step-dad does inform that behaviour, but that's super subtle and she never talks about it, and as much it's about her being socially awkward and/or feeling alienated from others because of her intelligence. Her first solo sort of fell off the rails after the Latveria plot, when she started having to share space with Doom's storyline, but her personality was always super well developed. I'm glad people are still using her.
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Dec 22, 2018 22:35
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Android Blues posted:Viv and Riri would be hell of a power couple. Earlier in the issue they save the day by becoming a crystal gem fusion 
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Dec 22, 2018 22:46
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I'm confused about Spider-Geddon. In one of the issues of Vault of Spiders, the Uncle Ben Spider-Man that teams up with the young Peter had a story where he was upset over young Peter's death in Spider-Geddon. I assumed it would happen later in the storyline but now that it's finished, I realized they didn't kill him. What the heck?
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Dec 22, 2018 23:23
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Spacebump posted:I'm confused about Spider-Geddon. You’re talking about Edge of Spider-Geddon #3 with Spider-Pete and Spider-Ben. That issue never really tells you how and where Spider-Pete dies so I’m guessing it wasn’t during Spider-Geddon.
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Dec 22, 2018 23:59
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Seems like I should be catching up on Champions.
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Dec 23, 2018 00:10
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can't remember which thread the presidents talk was in, but it looks like 616 united states went from hydra cap to electing trump ps vulpes the second ghost panther was very good site fucked around with this message at 02:48 on Dec 23, 2018 |
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Dec 23, 2018 02:45
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site posted:hydra cap to electing trump Aside from opposite body types, I don't see much of a difference. Except that we're outright saying "immigrant children" instead of "Imhuman".
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Dec 23, 2018 06:11
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Cnut the Great posted:
This is by far the shittiest opinion. The entire marvel method literally relies on characters evolving as their story grows. I don't want to read 90000 issues of Peter still having highschool issues, and it's because of poo poo like Brand New Day where rampant nostalgia on behalf of a really lovely person grabbed the entire story that I have been reading for 20 some years and chucked it in the garbage that I've largely stopped following the series. The story of Spider Man isn't the story of a child struggling to become a man, it's a the story of a man who's struggling to balance a real human life against the responsibilities he's forced upon himself due to a childhood mistake, he's the story of the Everyman who just happens to have powers and how his life often spirals out of control due to those powers. Anyone remember the pregnancy scare with MJ (Guest starring the Beast)? I Found that to be one of the most touching spider man issues. Now he can't remember it because children like you can't handle progress. Peter Parker's most famous and best (And some of his most touching) story beats have all occurred after his highschool years, why the gently caress do you keep wanting to go back to them? I don't even get it. EDIT: I'm still salty as gently caress about killing off the marriage between Peter and MJ to save Aunt loving May of all people. Honestly killing off Aunt May for real would have added some interesting pathos to the story that probably could have carried several years of spider books. But sure, lets just make him a high schooler again, maybe we'll have him graduate when Miles Morales is on Medicare and they need a new Spider Man to take up the mantle. Rhymenoserous fucked around with this message at 09:13 on Dec 23, 2018 |
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Dec 23, 2018 09:07
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I bought the trade on the Sentry by Jeff Lemire. That loving ending, am I right? Where do you go from there? Bob Reynolds has reconciled himself with the void and is now one entity. He has the power of 1 million exploding Suns and it looks like he's become an ends-justify-the-means person who does mean well. He's kind of a force of nature now. A benevolent but unsympathetic God. In the hands of the right writer, that can be very interesting. The "I have split personality disorder" stuff was getting really old, especially since it wasn't handled the best.
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Dec 23, 2018 17:28
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