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Gripweed posted:Wait, how can Dr. Manhattan have time travel powers? That doesn't make any sense. His Before Watchmen mini series revealed that he had always had them, he just locked himself into a single timeline(the canon version of Watchmen) after every other possible timeline apparently resulted in Nuclear Armageddon, he starts using them again in Doomsday Clock cause when he makes his way to the DC multiverse it ends up being a lot more mutable in nature and he wishes to discover why it's so different from his home reality
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Feb 23, 2020 00:55
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drrockso20 posted:His Before Watchmen mini series revealed that he had always had them, he just locked himself into a single timeline(the canon version of Watchmen) after every other possible timeline apparently resulted in Nuclear Armageddon, he starts using them again in Doomsday Clock cause when he makes his way to the DC multiverse it ends up being a lot more mutable in nature and he wishes to discover why it's so different from his home reality That suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks
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Feb 23, 2020 00:57
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He's like "Oh hey can I look back at the time I got fragged and make it so I don't get fragged?" And he Quantum Peeks at that divergent timeline, followed by a butterfly effect of oh no everything sucks! It isn't a *bad* idea, just an unnecessary one. The Nite Owl one was at least worth half a poo poo by finally giving Silhouette some development other than "Dead Lesbian"
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Feb 23, 2020 02:03
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Gripweed posted:That suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks Just like every non-Moore Watchmen thing ever made. FilthyImp posted:It isn't a *bad* idea Agree to disagree.
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Feb 23, 2020 02:08
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The entire point is that even knowing what happens he's still destined to take that path and is resigned to it.
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Feb 23, 2020 02:16
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I apologize to DC fans, but I read more Marvel. So please, DC, make Dan Slott your new publisher. Give him Batman, Superman, Flash, a loving Creeper ongoing because why the hell not. https://twitter.com/DanSlott/status/1231363943958040579?s=20
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Feb 23, 2020 11:20
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I can't even groan hard enough.
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Feb 23, 2020 11:24
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Rhyno posted:I can't even groan hard enough. I'm trying to imagine what a Dan Slott Batman run would be like, and beyond "terrible" I can't really think of anything. There was an episode of Batman Beyond where Ra's Al Ghul tried to take over Bruce Wayne's body. Maybe this time it works and we get a Superior Batman for 3 years.
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Feb 23, 2020 11:34
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Well according to EVS AT&T is closing DC Comics down so I don't have to worry about it.
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Feb 23, 2020 11:35
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FilthyImp posted:Wait wait wait. IMAGE was so creatively bankrupt they did "Xmen" and called them Nu Men? With a Nu gene? That wasn't even the first the X-Men rip-off Image made, or the second one, or the third one..
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Feb 23, 2020 15:44
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I'm wrapping up the January 1995 books that Rob Liefeld published. Some of you may be going, "That's an odd way to phrase it. Why not just say 'Extreme Studios'?" I'll get to that soon. I've also reached the end of the index I've been using to make sure I don't miss anything. From this point on I'm relying on house ads and a few different queries at comics.org to keep me on track. This has also resulted in me finally looking ahead at what I've got waiting for me between now and the end of the project and there's several things that made me go  . So there's still some fun yet to come!Black and White #3 - I'm glad that this miniseries is coming to an end. After two totally incoherent issues about two awful characters I'm ready for it to be over. So the cliffhanger at the end of the last issue was that White had been shot and then a bomb exploded twenty feet from them completely demolishing the building. How do they get out of it? Well, Black just stands up out of a pile of rubble and then as he's dealing with a cop, White jump kicks the cop in the head. So they got out of it by completely forgetting the cliffhanger. So now on the run from the cops, they split up and agree to meet at the abandoned airport outside of town. The town they're in being Hong Kong, where the technical term for "outside of town" in 1994 is "China". From the sign, it's the Maltese International Airport which just makes it wrong on multiple levels. The big thing that Chang's been after is a secret World War 2 robot factory that Germany built under the brewery. Why Germany built a robot factory in Japanese controlled territory is unclear and why World War 2 era robots would let someone conquer the world in 1994 is not explained. Black and White just go to where Chang is somehow and they've already foiled his evil plan off panel by having someone else do the work for them. White takes out Chang by punching out the robosuit he's wearing and they all live happily ever after. It's legitimately impressive how this comic cannot maintain a consistent plot point for more than a few pages. It also gives me an incredible headache. The absolute worst part of this comic is White's characterization. I think they're going for "badass, brash warrior woman" but she comes across as psychopathic and suicidally stupid. She attacks everyone regardless of if it makes any sense for her to do so. Guy taking a nap? Attacked. Eight guys holding assault rifles on her from across a twenty foot gap? Charge them and attack. Police officer investigating the scene of a crime? Attack. She's a complete shithead and there's no lesson that she learns or growth; at the end of the comic she's just as much of a shithead and should have killed Black a dozen times over with his hyperagressive cognitive impairment. Black and White ends here but they get a second series eventually and there was a kickstarter for a revival of it though from what I can tell the book was never made. Legend of Supreme #2 - As a reminder, this is the Supreme miniseries that Keith Giffen is handling that makes it clear that Supreme is a monster. Supreme goes to Joliet Illinois State Prison which looks like a 666 from above. It's also high in the mountains of Illinois, because I guess Black and White isn't the only Image comic to be completely bonkers about its geography. At the prison, Supreme keeps quoting the Book of Revelations as he breaks all the super criminals out of their cells on death row and then executes all of them with his heat vision. Meanwhile in 1938, the project that is creating Supreme is doing it by killing him over and over again; each time Supreme revives he comes back stronger. In the present, an evil corporation has cloned Supreme and the government wants to use the clone to stop the other Supreme. The clone has all the memories of the original including the religious mania which they know is a major problem with their plan, but decide to go ahead with it anyway. As for the reporter uncovering all of this, Supreme breaks into her house while she's in the bathroom and leaves a manifesto on her computer. So this is a flawed book, and I've got a bad feeling that it's going to be resolved with both Supremes being clones so we can't trust any of the information we've been getting. I kind of would rather the series continue with derranged Supreme going forward since in this comic they're very aware of how terrifying Supreme and his behavior is. I kind of feel like "This is what would happen if Superman went bad!" wasn't as played out in 1995 as it would be by 2005. Badrock and Company #5 - This issue of Extreme Two-In-One has Badrock teaming up with Grifter from WildC.A.T.s. I know nothing about Grifter except he wears a bandana for a mask and carries guns around. I read some WildC.A.T.s books and that's still all I know about him because that's Image comics from the 90's for you. Badrock and Grifter are parachuting into the middle east. After encountering some resistance, they steal a jeep and head to Mecca. At this point I go, "Oh no. They're really going to do this, aren't they." Badrock's mother has been kidnapped by the Covenant of the Sword, weird cult like villains who have had their story changed about three times so far while they have yet to actually do anything in any of the comics they've appeared in. Grifter is the "only man capable of infiltrating their base" so Badrock hunts him down. Grifter agrees to help after seeing her picture. Turns out he proposed to her and she turned him down. So I guess Grifter is about 40 years old then? In Mecca, yes really, Grifter and Badrock dress in burkas to break into the Great Mosque. Once inside they smash through the floor to the hidden base below and beat everyone in three pages. The script in this comic is insane. "If there's one thing I hate more than being a sitting duck--- it's duck hunters!" "I would shoot him but that would endanger the mission and I'm too much of a professional to do that. And this time it's personal." "Pikers!": a line that comes from the mouth of American teenager Badrock. Badrock "non-lethally" throws a car full of people over a mile into a body of water. Battlestone #2 - It opens with a flashback Battlestone's only Youngblood mission in which he killed one of the men under him. In this comic it takes place in Kuwait though the other time we saw it the mission was in the jungles of Vietnam. But that's not a big deal; that actually was one scene in a comic two years previous and the location wasn't a significant part of that story. It does make me wonder why Battlestone was on a mission to 1988 Kuwait which would be like sending a military expedition to current Dubai. In a flashback to his court marshall later in the issue, we find out that Battlestone was totally justified in murdering his own soldier because there was a discipline problem. The mission that the military abducted and brainwashed Battlestone for was they want him to kill Cartwright, an old guy who lives by himself in the mountains. We don't get told why they want this or why they needed Battlestone for it. Cartwright was the guy who trained Battlestone so he tries to talk sense into Battlestone during the fight. At the end, Cartwright is dangling off a cliff and Battlestone grabs his hand so that one more heartfelt speech can be delivered. But Battlestone says, "I agreed to hear you out, I didn't agree to pull you up!" and throws Cartwright down into the water below. The end. I'm at a bit of a loss on why this miniseries exists. My best guess is they wanted to reboot Brigade and try to spin Battlestone off along with exploring his character. At the end, however, he's just as much of a cypher. I know events that happened to him and I know that he's a violent weirdo which are things I knew before. There's nothing that makes Battlestone interesting as a character. This comic has a story by Rob Liefeld credit, something that there hasn't been a lot of lately. And that wraps up the Extreme Studios books for January 1995. It doesn't end the January 1995 comics, though. You see, Rob Liefeld had a "brilliant" idea: if he got all that attention from launching Extreme Studios, why can't he launch a second comic book publisher? He would even be able to keep all the money himself instead of paying some back to keep Image up and running. And so Maximum Press was born. It's not another imprint or group under the Image comics banner, it's a totally separate publisher. Now I know what you're thinking. "Rob's already a publisher at Extreme Studios. Isn't starting a second publisher to compete with yourself incredibly unethical?" And the answer to that is, "gently caress yes it is." Ads for Maximum Press books have been appearing in Extreme Studios books for a while now which should have been an enormous red flag. From interviews with Liefeld, he was also moving some of his books from Extreme Studios to Maximum Press. This is the beginning of the end of Liefeld. For reasons obvious to everyone except Rob himself, a lot of people were pretty angry with him over this. It'll take over a year for this to shake out, though. Warchild #1 - This was the first comic out the door from Maximum Press and it's a perfect example of what was happening. Created by and story by Rob Liefeld, scripted and edited by Eric Stephenson, art by Chip Yaep. So Extreme Studios's owner creating the character and giving his "story", Extreme Studios's editor and just about sole writer doing the same thing there, and Extreme Studios's most prolific penciller doing the art. And as one final capper, the business manager for Maximum Press is Cheri Liefeld, Rob's sister, who is the business manager for Extreme Studios. If there was any faint possibility that Maximum Press wasn't just Extreme Studios dodging Image, that's gone instantly. Warchild is Liefeld's attempt to do a fantasy/Star Wars style epic. That means we've got a lot of ripoffs and cliches filling these pages. It's also a bit of a mess in terms of storytelling. I thought about trying to make the summary kind of linear but that doesn't work. So hang on. It opens with a guy in a red robe doing something to get champions for his cause. A guy in a black robe with lots of spikes growing out of his head shows up. Black robe was red robe's former apprentice and they get into a wizard fight which mainly consists of black robe shooting panel filling speed lines and red robe putting up shields. Black robe wins but not before red robe does something about black robe's brother. Red robe becomes a pile of empty clothes after he dies. In Los Angeles, Sword, a tough guy in a 90's Liefeld designed outfit with lots of weapons strapped to him, is accompanying Stone, large cyborg warrior guy, and Merlyn, a young girl in red robes that rides around on Stone. They're after Sword's sword which is in a museum. Sword is originally from a fantasy world where he was an orphan who got bullied by all the other children except his childhood sweetheart Gwendolin. Jump ahead ten years where Sword has to leave and Gwendolin gets fridged in front of him. Back to the museum in LA where Sword's sword is a sword in the stone. Back to fantasy world where as Gwendolin is dying she makes a deal with death to stick around: she has to kill six people every time "the moon changes" (I don't know if that means phases or months or what) and her soul is trapped in the sword. The sword which has been stuck in the stone for a while so I guess she hasn't been holding up her end of the bargain. Back to the museum where a fight scene happened off panel where Stone beat up all the guards, and then the guards turn into the monstrous henchmen of the Black Knight which is where the cliffhanger for the issue is. So there's a lot of things that happened, but none of it was really significant or interesting. And it all leaned heavily into stale cliches. I have to point out that Stephenson's script for this issue is written in the style that bad writers think is serious and portentous. It's the stuff of the lovely self-published fantasy trilogy, terribly overwritten with grammar that's twisted up in knots. Tip for writers: don't give your character a name that is a common noun and have that thing also be a MacGuffin in the story. Sword's sword made the dialog even more confusing than it would have been. I'm reading the collected edition of Warchild and Liefeld's foreword is amazing... ly bad. It's like he knows that he's supposed to talk about the inspiration for this comic but it's uninspired so it's a lot of cliches about fulfilling childhood fantasy. Also, he says he couldn't do this comic until he founded Maximum Press because it wouldn't fit in other places, but it's exactly like everything else. The forward was written before Liefeld left Image, so he might have still been trying to put up some small defense of his actions. Black Flag #1-2 - Black Flag originally appeared in one of the Extreme Studios mail away anthology books but that was sixteen months of comics ago so I don't remember them at all beyond the the gorilla. There were two issues of this comic released in January so let me hit both of them. It's a bold decision to start your comic out with a nine page dream sequence that doesn't connect to anything else in the book. It's even bolder to have two such dream sequences in your first issue. There's two kids who are raiding the treasures of a demon king and have trouble escaping. That turns out to be a dream. Then there's the purple gorilla who is about to be put through military training when he suddenly starts talking and escapes. Then there's Sniper who dreams of being killed by his arch enemy Black Rain. That was a dream induced by Geisha, a woman whose only other task this issue is hanging onto Sniper seductively in a graveyard where all the tombstones have other Image people's names and studios on them. And then there's Raiden, a mystic who sees everybody else and goes to talk to Sniper. That's the first issue and I don't know why anyone would want to read this. In issue two, we finally start to see an outline of what the plot will be. The kid has the power to make fantasies reality which he accidentally does with a character from Mortal Kombat. The gorilla on the run is hiding out in his treehouse and the evil corporation the gorilla escaped from shows up. Then the rest of the Black Flag team shows up and Sniper kills all the people from evil corporation before everyone alive leaves together. Apparently there's a character named Rascal who has yet to do anything on the team, too. Two issues in any we've reached the point that would be fine at page six for issue one. Nothing has happened. I'm curious to know if Geisha will ever do anything in the comic other than pose sexily. So far the answer to that is no, but I'm going to keep an eye out for that. I genuinely do not know what Black Flag is yet. They're a superhero team but I don't know why or what they do. They're just another superhero team that exists because that's what superhero teams do. I still have some time today so I'm moving up to get started on February 1995, especially since there's a few odds and ends I want to talk about. One wrap up of the crossover, and then the new number ones Extreme/Maximum released that month. Youngblood Strikefile #11 - "Extreme Sacrifice: Part 0 of 8!" In true Extreme Studios fashion, "Part 0" was released a month after the crossover and is intended to be read after it. It contains the backstory of Demon Lord Chapel. Upon awakening in the afterlife, Chapel immediately demands to be a Spawn. The gatekeeper there shows him the future where Chapel is the fifth horseman of the apocalypse and Chapel's response is, "I'm here to be a spawn -- not some damned horseman of the apocalypse!" So I guess he doesn't seem to grasp that guy who's leading capital-D Death is a bit more important than footsoldier for a demon. We get told that Chapel loops in time back and forth and that the Newborn will kill him. Then he takes on his demonic mantle and Crypt pops his head in to say, "Hi! I'm here too!" This is basically all the necessary backstory for the start of Extreme Sacrifice that I didn't get in Extreme Sacrifice. It's only the backstory, though, so this is just pages of exposition with nothing happening. Cougar's story is picked up in the second half of the book as he goes to Africa to save mother. Once there he gets into a fight with the same cat woman he fought the last time he was in Africa. She's his half-sister. The king of cats interrupts the fight to resolve things and that's all there is to it. This was a real wet fart of a conclusion for a story that started great and then slid into "Okay, I guess" before winding up here. This is the last issue of Strikefile so at least it's over with. Youngblood is now on hiatus for several months with the main series and this one ending, Team Youngblood stopping for a while. There will be a relaunch and a few comics about members of the team in the meantime. Speaking of which... Chapel #1 - Chapel is pretty much the worst character. He's a guy with guns who kills indiscriminately and then killed himself so he could make a pact with the devil. He's a shithead of the highest order and not even an entertaining shithead. He should be the villain and these comics make him another macho tough guy. So after the total lack of extreme sacrifices in Extreme Sacrifice he's come back to life and gets his own series. This issue is a flashback to when Chapel went on a mission to Central America with Billy Zane and Jet Li. The mission is to go after a Colonel who was sent into the jungle and went a bit crazy. They take out a jungle patrol and then a Contra base before getting attacked by an anaconda. So what we have here is a war comic that's stripped the message out of Apocalypse Now and is instead about how awesome it is to blow things up. The art is a bit of a mixed bag on this one. There's some pages, especially toward the front of the issue, that are just a mess from someone aping Rob Liefeld's stye. The there's some pages toward the back that look close to something Jae Lee would do and those actually don't look half bad. It makes me kind of curious to see the next issue; I'm sure the story will be garbage but I think there might be some of the nicer looking pages. Knightmare #1 - There were actually two comics coming out titled "Knightmare" at the exact same time. Over at Antarctic Press, they started publishing their Knightmare in late 1994, right about the same time as house ads for Rob Liefeld's Knightmare started showing up in Extreme books. Both series ran until May 1995. I have no idea if there was any litigation or threats over this in either direction. At a big dinner for the mob, a guy in armor breaks in and kills everyone. Everyone including two five-star generals who were meeting with them (I'm not sure how they thought military ranks work). The armored guy was a mob enforcer but then his family was killed and everyone thinks he's dead. Now he's gone a bit crazy and is killing all the mobsters while giving hard boiled narration. Over in the White House, Bill Clinton demands to know why generals were killed with a bunch of mobsters and his underlings plot to kill him if he learns too much. And in Japan, the yakuza already know that the generals were there to buy nuclear bombs from Russia using the mob's money, and they're sending an assassin of their own who "will reunite them with their ancestors, as is the yakuza way!" So it's Punisher except he has a suit of armor. And he's even less interesting than the Punisher is. There's a bit at the beginning where it could have been something as he's plotting how he'll take down the mobsters since he knows which ones are threats and which ones aren't. Then it turns out that his armor is invulnerable to assault rifles so that was completely unnecessary. It makes this a pretty bland book over all. Knightmare was created by Rob Liefeld and this issue gives him a story credit, but once more Liefeld has come up with a character concept and then handed off literally everything else to other people. Bloodwulf #1 - The cover has Bloodwulf saying "Eat crap and die, filthy stinking maggot!" so you know this is going to be a great book. Bloodwulf is Liefeld's Lobo knock-off who first appeared in Darker Image #1 (there is no #2) back in 1993 and hasn't been seen since. He looks like Lobo if Lobo had red hair that went straight up. It kicks off with breaking the fourth wall as a character says that two panels are just "just like in Watchmen!" and identifying the word balloons. Bloodwulf leaps out of his tub in a "splash page": do you get it? That's the level of humor I'm dealing with throughout this comic. We get to see Bloodwulf's home life where he's father to a dozen children and has three wives. Domestic bliss is interrupted when a spaceship falls on his house where two robots get out. Do you understand where this is going? The robots have a secret message for "Ogo Kanefee", a mysterious monk of the "bond", asking that he help fight back against the empire. Bloodwulf decides to help because the person who sent the message was his mother. After a bit of hijinx, Bloodwulf takes off with Ogo to fly to another planet, but it turns out that Bloodwulf's motorcycle doesn't protect people in space and Ogo explodes. If you like flat references as jokes, this is the comic for you! The weirdest one is when Ogo takes off his cloak and he's wearing Sean Connery's Zardoz outfit under it. The closest a joke comes to landing for me is when Bloodwulf needs to do his hair, he sticks a finger in a light socket. But this is the comics equivalent of those _______ Movie films. Avengelyne: Deadly Sins #1 - I have to mention this even though I'm not reading it yet. You see, the indica and most sources on the Internet put this comic at February 1995. But Avengelyne first appears in May 1995 which is a bit of a contradiction. After going through a lot of headaches because nobody seems to keep track of this stuff well, this comic was definitely released in 1996; that's when Diamond has sales figures for it (it was the twelfth best selling comic of that month). So I'm not skipping this series, it just has to wait for its correct time and place.
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Feb 23, 2020 20:11
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https://twitter.com/socialaskan/status/1231603755038187525?s=20
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Feb 23, 2020 22:42
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This is just one of those things that you don't think too hard about until it hits you from a weird angle, but has Bendis ever said anything about why he would create a black character and name him Jefferson Davis?
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Feb 24, 2020 07:16
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https://twitter.com/GailSimone/status/1232003154763345920?s=20
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Feb 24, 2020 19:12
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https://twitter.com/TomTaylorMade/status/1232006955318665216
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Feb 24, 2020 19:26
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I don't know. I think the first thing that would come to mind if someone asked me, "What's the worst thing about writing Wonder Woman?" it would be the creepy fans. This actually holds true for most comic books now that I think about it. Edit: https://twitter.com/TomTaylorMade/status/1232006955318665216
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Feb 24, 2020 19:27
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Here's the rest of February 1995's Liefeld touched books. I noticed that in their monthly Extreme Studios checklist, Maximum Press books are appearing in the list. There's also a missing comic, "Mark 5", which is listed on the monthly checklist and as far as I can tell never came out. Badrock and Company #6 - It's the final issue of Badrock Team-Up and this one brings Jim Valentino in to write the Shadowhawk appearance. And this is actually a continuation of a storyline from the Shadowhawk book. This comic is told in second person narration, something that you think is always annoying when you encounter it. (I came this close to doing the entire plot description in second person. You're welcome.) Shadowhawk has been bouncing in time looking for the AIDS cure and now he lands at Youngblood HQ where Badrock is hanging out. Badrock decides to get help from his father and have him turn Shadowhawk into another stone guy. Some people attack the lab and in the process the machine that could help gets destroyed. Shadowhawk leaps again, striving to put right what once went wrong, and this time leaping to Spawn's alley. Story to be concluded back in Shadowhawk's book. Setting aside the lovely use of HIV as a plot element for the character, this is an okay story. It kind of works because it's a lot more about Shadowhawk reaching out for help and Badrock trying to do something nice before the obligatory fight scene kicks in. There's very little in the way of positive portrayals of any of the "heroes" in the Extreme Studios books, they're always incredibly toxic, angry people so a story about a good deed stands out even if it doesn't have the best execution. I could have done without the second person, though. Brigade #17 - Marv Wolfman is writing the all-new, all-different Brigade starting from this issue. I'm kind of interested to see if this becomes a top tier Extreme Studios book or if things are too much of a mess and Wolfman leaves after a few issues. It's time to introduce the new team! We have Supreme, Glory, Roman (not Namor), Troll, Vanguard (what?) , Shadowhawk (what?!), and some blue monster (Tremor according to the splash page). Vanguard is an Eric Larsen creation and Shadowhawk is Jim Valentino's flagship book. So I think this is the first time that the Image seven have lent their characters out on an indefinite basis. I've got one thing to say after reading this issue: it wasn't boring. There wasn't a lot of wheel spinning and page filling in this comic, it kept moving fast. A bunch of cult leaders who dress in very 90's armor have gotten together for some evil purpose. Their agent is a gaseous woman called the Shape whose body is poisonous and has to have a containment suit. Supreme encounters her while stopping a train crash and she knocks him out when he breeches the suit. Seahawk from the old Brigade team is funding the new with Glory's help and they send Troll off to get some information on a cult he founded thousands of years ago as a scientology style scam. The Shape attacks Tremor who drives her off after a fight. Dudes are attacking Atlantis and they run away when Roman shows up. Troll steals a book from a museum and Shadowhawk was after the same book. They fight and Shadowhawk wins but Troll shoots him in the back as he's walking away. So that's three proper fights, six major plot threads, lots of action and development. It's a shame I didn't like the comic since it's doing a lot of things that other Liefeld Studios books need to be doing. I've never been fond of Wolfman as a writer so I'm not shocked that this leaves me a bit cold. I think it's because he's leaning a bit too heavy on some really lovely cliches in this book. I didn't need the scene of Troll being a lecherous rear end in a top hat to Seahawk's assistant, for example. Supreme catching a train leans into the Superman comparison. A lot of the characters are really whiny. I have no idea what Tremor is supposed to bring to the team other than an original character so Wolfman can have something on the book. In the end, though, this is an "I don't care for this comic" situation rather than a "This is terrible and the people involved should be punished" comic which puts it above a lot of things I've been reading. Legend of Supreme #3 - We're wrapping up this intriguing but flawed limited series this time and I'm worried that everything is just going back to the status quo. So let me just read it and--  Well, it did not go back to the status quo. This issue focuses on the battle between two Supremes and the testament that one left behind. After devastating large parts of the planet in their fight, the battle goes to the moon where the Supreme that was having a religious mania focused schizophrenic episode wins by ripping the clone Supreme's eyes out, breaking his neck, and throwing him into the sun. The backstory tells us how after leaving the government project Supreme took refuge in a church and eventually decided he was a god. The reason that Supreme left earth was revealed: he murdered the priest at that church when the priest hold him that he couldn't go around murdering people. So this miniseries makes it very clear that Supreme is a bad guy. He committed war crimes, tortured people, attacked civilians, did lots of murder, and is likely a pedophile. This Supreme might have been killed in the Extreme Sacrifice crossover, but since one of his powers is that he comes back from the dead even stronger it's likely that didn't stop him. The Extreme Sacrifice issue mentioned Supreme defeating a clone of himself, though I figured that there would be two clones so they could keep going with the Supreme being an arrogant jerk characterization instead of total sociopath. I kind of hope that they keep going with this even though since I've already read Supreme #25 I know that they won't. Having one of these comics with their absolutely villainous protagonists actually recognize that the main character is the villain would be a pretty good way to move forward. Supreme didn't use mjollnir in this series which also made me think that it wasn't the Supreme from the regular series, but those same comments in the Extreme Sacrifice issue makes it clear that it is. So I don't know how that was supposed to work. Supreme #24 - Speak of the devil. With this issue Supreme becomes the first, and only, Extreme Studios comic to reach the flashforward to issue #25 that Image did last year. Sorry to spoil the fact that Brigade and Bloodstrike are doomed to end sooner rather than later. The cover tells me that "Supreme Apocalypse is coming!" and I'm already worried that it'll be another crossover. The "future city" that Supreme was dropping onto from the Extreme Sacrifice epilogue was modern day (well, 1995 day) Tokyo where he smashes through a ton of buildings and then hits a tanker truck which kills him. After he gets back, Supreme has amnesia. The crowd recognizes him, though, because Supreme was the one who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The crowd on the city street attacks him and Supreme kills off them. A corporation sends their in house super team after Supreme and Supreme kills all of them as well, including burning one of their faces off in a pretty gruesome death. The head of that division of the corporation tries to commit sepuku with a full length sword for his failure and his boss stops him so that the boss can behead the person instead. Supreme is finally approached by an American kid who goes, "Hey, you can't be Supreme. Here's a copy of Supreme #25 and you don't have the hammer or anything!" I thought for one brief moment at the start of the issue that this comic wasn't going to lean into racist stereotypes about Japan. And then they went there harder than I was expecting. The silliest thing was that one of the Japanese Zero Squadron (ugh) exclaims, "Kami!" and there's a translation note at the bottom that tells people it means "gods". While that's technically true, it's definitely a situation where someone had an English-Japanese dictionary on their desk and just plugged in words. So based on this, and the fact that Supreme 25 dealt with an alternate Supreme, maybe they're going to have a bunch of alternate Supremes and that'll explain the Legend of Supreme stuff? Despite killing a shitton of people in this comic, the story presents this Supreme as a victim which tells me that without someone like Giffen going, "This guy is rotten," they're just going to lean back into the easy groove. Bloodstrike #19 - Here's something I legitimately was not expecting. We've got a whole new direction for this comic and I'm not complaining. During the Extreme Sacrifice crossover, Cabbot a.k.a. Bloodstrike broke a supervillain out of prison for The Gathering. But when he broke that guy out, ten more supervillains escaped. The government isn't arresting him since he did stop the biblical apocalypse, but his job is now to get those supervillains back. So it's become The 13 Ghosts of Scooby Doo. Considering how directionless these comics usually are, giving them a framework of any kind is an improvement. But I fail to see how this is going to fit in with Bloodstrike #25 (just kidding, Bloodstrike doesn't reach issue 25). His first job, however, is retrieving his old boss who had been driven insane by a generic time traveling warrior doing something to him during the crossover. Both the time traveling warrior and the poking Cabbot's boss in the head were so inconsequential during the crossover I didn't even mention them but apparently it wasn't just a "shutting up the government rear end in a top hat who is trying to stop them" scene. Insane boss man has gone to a secret facility where he revives the original Bloodstrike crew for Cabbot. Under the CIA, a bunch of the villains have broken in to steal an artifact and they're confronted by Cabbot's handlers when he was the assassin Bloodstrike. They don't do very well against the villains but the old Bloodstrike team arrives to save them. I wanted to call out the penciller on this issue, Karl Altstaetter. The art still has some of the 90's style problems, but it's still pretty solid in this issue. Altstaetter is one of those people who worked on Liefeld published books and pretty much nothing else in his career and I'm seeing real improvement in his work as it goes along. Bloodstrike is so weird to me since it's the book that keeps pulling itself out of the hole. It's fallen back in a few times, but then something happens and I find myself enjoying it again. I'm good with the new direction and I'm kind of hoping it lasts until the end of the series. New Men #11 - I've intentionally put this comic off for last. Yes, I know it's not the last one in the post but I'm separating out the Maximum Press books. There's no way that this comic doesn't keep going down the lovely rape apology road it's laid out for itself and frankly I don't need it. Sadly, New Men is the other Extreme Studios book that's going to survive until the end of my project so I'm stuck with it. The New Men have relocated to a remote cabin in Renton, Washington; the suburb of Seattle about ten miles from downtown. They hear a noise in the woods and while investigating find an armadillo man. A fight insues which Proctor ends by telling the New Men off since that was a person with a nu gene who would be seeking their help. Back at the cabin, Dash says that she thinks her rapist isn't a bad guy. Setting aside the rape, this feels like it should have been the starting point for the series, not issue 11. I guess in a way this is an attempt at a jumping on point coming out of the crossover, but the lesson of "Maybe don't just automatically attack people because they look weird" is something that I'd think would come up sooner. Warchild #2 - Page one of this comic tells me that someone built a giant biomechanical wizard tower in the middle of Los Angeles and nobody noticed, just calling the builder "eccentric". What I thought was a human-sized bird-man seemed to be really tiny when it lands to perch on the black knight's shoulder. But later on the knight's witch Morgana goes after the heroes with the bird-man and the bird-man seems to be the same size as the heroes and Morgana seems to be a giant. So is the black knight a giant? I don't know, could just as easily be bad art. In the museum, they fight the monsters that were security guards. We get Stone's backstory where he was a cyborg warrior in the future until the black knight killed his family. Merlyn might be the same old wizard in red robes from the first issue only reborn a young girl; there's some question about pronouns that she never comments on so I'll go with "she" until the character says otherwise. She ages herself up to adulthood and is given a suit of form fitting robot armor that doesn't do anything. Sword gets his sword back and Gwendolin's spirit comes out of it. Death reminds her that if she leaves the sword then she dies forever, which wasn't the condition given in the previous issue. At the halfway point in this series, the heroes have broken into a museum and hit some people there and that's literally everything that's happened. I'm wondering if they'll still be in that museum at the end of issue three... The best thing in this issue was that one of the monster was a demon guy who got his head split in half and then decides to just split his entire body in half and become two demon guys. The solution to this was hit him harder with a better sword, but there was a suggestion of an interesting opponent for half a second. Black Flag #3 - This issue opens with a cast of characters. This is helpful since over half the characters have yet to receive any characterization in this four issue miniseries so I had no idea who they were or what they could do. It's not part of the actual story, of course, since like all the other comics from Extreme/Maximum, it assumes that the readers are already familiar with their brand new characters. The recap page also tells me about a lot of plot events that weren't in the previous issue and made me go check if I somehow missed one: I hadn't. This issue abandons the storyline about the kid who can make fantasy reality and instead there's a monster in the sewer at the same time as a hostage crisis. Sniper and the gorilla who are now best buddies and have been for a while are searching the sewer and get separated. Sniper runs into the Abomination while in the sewer, gets beat up, and then the gorilla rescues him while growing large claws. The guy holding the hostages is after a coin and he kills a hostage who was cooperating with him to get the coin to demonstrate how evil he is. I did find out what Black Flag is finally, though: they're a mercenary superhero team who get called in by the authorities to handle villains. More evidence of bad blood between the Extreme people and the rest of Image in this issue: there's a poster in the background of a page that accuses Jim Lee of tracing other people's artwork. It might have fallen out of public consciousness as the story fades into "He's just a bad artist" but Liefeld was caught plagiarizing a shitton of his art. I won't say that Dan Fraga who wrote and drew this issue was doing it, but he worked for the number one rip-off artist in the industry so he doesn't have the moral high ground for this attack. I've got to point out that Jules from Pulp Fiction is a reporter in this comic. He's even called "Jules". There's other pop culture references which just comes across as, "Hey! Here's a thing that's popular! Did you see it?!" Geisha's actions in this issue consisted of taking a phone call for one page while posing sexily. So, still hasn't done anything. Something funny happens with Maximum press now. Though these series aren't over, they are the last comics that Maximum press puts out until May. Warchild continues in June, Black Flag has its final issue in July.
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Feb 25, 2020 03:29
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Woo! It's March Extreme Studios books! They released nine books that month and I think I'm going to keep it short this evening and just read the ones that I'm looking forward to the most. The downside is that I'm saving Bloodwulf and New Men for the same post. I'm also putting off Liefeld's last series for Image until the next post. Glory #1 - Now this is something I'm excited for. I always get excited when Extreme pulls in people from outside the studio for a book. Glory is by Jo Duffy and Mike Deodato so two creators who had extensive careers. Duffy is also the first woman to be a creator at Extreme, possibly all of Image given how few women were in the industry at the time. Deodato's are is not good, it's in the "copying Rob Liefeld mold" at this point. But I also know that he's going to improve so maybe I'll see some of that in this series. I've got high hopes on this one. This was a weird one. For most of the issue, Glory is in a boardroom for a cosmetics company where the all male board is trying to convince her to be the face of their new line and she's getting annoyed with them. When she finally turns them down, the CEO flips out because he's already announced the line with her branding, something that's not only a crime but really stupid to announce celebrity endorsement before you get the celebrity to agree to it. Then a board member tries to shoot Glory for refusing to do this and I'm going, "How does Jo Duffy think businesses work?" She throws the shooter out the window where he's caught by Rumble, a nerdy student who turns into a hunk that grows to giant size. There's also cat person Vandal and those two seem to be Glory's sidekicks. But Glory has been getting spied on by the evil Lord Silverfall back in her fantasy kingdom homeland and we know he's evil because he keeps a naked catlady on a leash. I was hoping for something different and I got it, but I would have been happy with Glory shutting down the lovely cosmetic company execs and walking away while they swear vengeance rather than trying to have a shootout in the boardroom. It's just so bizarre that it's a stumbling block for me. But I'm on board for another issue. Deodato's a mixed bag in the art department. He's much better at building an interesting page of comics than the rest of the Extreme Studios crew and most of his figures are well drawn. The problem is that Glory is the most poorly drawn character in the book, constantly warped into those boobs and butt poses with disproportionate legs and feet that are positioned more for ballet than walking. The title character shouldn't be the one making me go, "Why to they look so off?" Bloodstrike #20 - Have I mentioned that I love how goofy the Bloodstrike team is? Because I do. They're completely silly and totally self-serious. The team consists of Fourplay, a superstrong woman with four arms; Touch, a woman whose touch paralyses people and also has a rotting corpse body under her clothes; Deadlock, who is a psychotic clawed guy that might be time displaced and whose body is rotting away quickly; Shogun, generic guy in a samurai robot; and Cabbot who's just a Cable clone. We're told early on in this issue that they are no longer undead, that they're properly alive now, but that they also require regular treatments with a device powered by killing mutants to prevent their bodies from decaying. Psychic supervillain Epiphany is still after pieces of her MacGuffin and the team splits up to go after them. This issue focuses on the team going after the one held by Dr. Orpheus and after shenanigans getting into his base, they're too late and the escaped supervillains are already there. They have no luck against them and the villains now have two of the three pieces. Also Epiphany gets the magic gem that was taken into protective custody from the Louvre in the lead up to Extreme Sacrifice with no explanation on how it got from good guy hands to the villain (there is an editors note that says it's an untold story). This issue wasn't as fun as the previous one but not for lack of trying. The thing is Bloodstrike is winding down and it looks like this is the last storyline for the comic and I kind of wish that it would get crazier. It's not a lovely book, but it is one that I feel like should have been better (as opposed to certain other books I'm reading which are lovely and have no reasonable way to improve them short of burning them down and starting over). I'm with Bloodstrike to the end now, though. Supreme #26 - So Supreme #24 ended with a cliffhanger that got bizarrely meta after Supreme killed a hundred people in Tokyo. Then we go back a year to Supreme #25 which doesn't fit the continuity of the comic at all as in it Supreme still has mjollnir, it picks up from a cliffhanger that we never saw and continues storylines that we never saw, and wrapped up a storyline from the very early days of Supreme that hadn't been mentioned since. So I have no clue what issue 26 is bringing. The new, young Supreme is still wandering the streets of Toyko with amnesia when he hears someone screaming as they fall off a skyscraper. But it's a trap because the scream is coming from a robot filled with nerve gas. Supreme comes to in a high tech lab where Cortex has him in a brain monitoring machine. Supreme gets shown his biography and it just makes him more confused, so Cortex sends him off to find Kid Supreme. Of course, Cortex was behind the attacks on Supreme in Japan and he has tech powers which he uses to fax himself across the planet. in the US, Supreme gets attacked by Kid Supreme and then they find the golden age Kid Supreme. The weird cultural ignorance from issue 24 continues here where the people in Japan talk like bad 80's Japanese stereotypes. Also, the villain has kept his headless underling's body hanging around his office which you'd think would be messy. The question of who is Supreme is kind of working since it could be Supreme reviving himself or another dimensional counterpart or something else entirely. New Supreme is out of control and has swings of accidental murder and horrified reactions which makes him come across as better than he was, but could still be the total lunatic.
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Feb 26, 2020 03:15
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How has Atomic Robo been? I stopped reading after the Spectre of Tomorrow. I got a $40 Amazon Giftcard from my credit card rewards so I decided to buy the trade of Spectre of Tomorrow and Dawn of a New Era to get me back up to date. I think I also need Raid on Marauders Island and The Nicodemus Job from the companion comic to round it out.
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Feb 26, 2020 04:10
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I bought the first three larger collections, and I'm pissed that the last three trades aren't collected in another similar volume. So I'm stuck on a pause. They're a lot like Hellboy in a way. More humor and color, but the same kind of adventure and lore.
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Feb 26, 2020 04:41
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Random Stranger posted:Woo! It's March Extreme Studios books! They released nine books that month and I think I'm going to keep it short this evening and just read the ones that I'm looking forward to the most. The downside is that I'm saving Bloodwulf and New Men for the same post. I'm also putting off Liefeld's last series for Image until the next post. So my memory might be faulty but Glory might have been drawn by one of the Glass House Studios artists that was able to mimic Deodatos style and he just did finishes on the book. Dave Campitti (again, memory is cloudy) did a bunch of this sort of thing where 2 or three artists supported a slightly bigger name. Manny Clark and Renato Arlem got some solo credits but the books were drawn by 2 or 3 others.
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Feb 26, 2020 04:51
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Has there been any news in Saga returning? I thought the book was going on a 1 year hiatus but it definitely feels like it has been way longer than that. Has Apples or BKV even talked about the book in the last year?
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Feb 27, 2020 19:19
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Madkal posted:Has there been any news in Saga returning? I thought the book was going on a 1 year hiatus but it definitely feels like it has been way longer than that. Has Apples or BKV even talked about the book in the last year? I thought it was at least one year.
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Feb 27, 2020 19:21
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Covok posted:How has Atomic Robo been?
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Feb 28, 2020 05:55
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FilthyImp posted:Did the goon that make that stop posting here? I think he went Chuddy or something? Hyperactive does not post very much anymore but I am quite certain he has not gone "Chuddy".
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Feb 28, 2020 07:08
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It doesn't take more than a quick scroll through Brian Clevinger's Twitter feed to see it's full of pro-Bernie, anti-Trump, anti-Bloomberg retweets. I mean, maybe he's a bad person otherwise (I have no reason to believe this), but he's definitely not "chuddy" by any definition I can think of. Are you thinking of the Weapon Brown guy?
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Feb 28, 2020 14:24
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He's a bad person because he abandoned us and I miss him. See also John Rogers.
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Feb 28, 2020 14:57
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poo poo, my bad. I could have sworn there was some dumb drama that took the shine off of'em but I guess that just Forums Senility kicking in.
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Feb 28, 2020 15:47
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Yeah, maybe you're thinking of Death Ray as the comics creator meltdown guy?
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Feb 28, 2020 16:43
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How Wonderful! posted:Yeah, maybe you're thinking of Death Ray as the comics creator meltdown guy? UGH. gently caress that guy.
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Feb 28, 2020 16:45
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Welp I know what I'm hitting up next on Amazon. Comics are going to be taking a back seat for a while. I have to see how this turns out. https://twitter.com/lordbeef/status/1233205767517270016
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Feb 28, 2020 17:10
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X-O posted:Welp I know what I'm hitting up next on Amazon. Comics are going to be taking a back seat for a while. I have to see how this turns out. Well I know that I want to find out what the hell was a time travelling dog doing at 9/11.
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Feb 28, 2020 17:49
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Madkal posted:Well I know that I want to find out what the hell was a time travelling dog doing at 9/11. Apparently spreading death and destruction everywhere he goes? https://twitter.com/clastowka/status/1233208814020841478
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Feb 28, 2020 17:55
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X-O posted:Apparently spreading death and destruction everywhere he goes? Me: "A dog at 9/11? Why not just have him at Pearl Harbor?" Scholastic Books: "Because he's already done that one!"
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Feb 28, 2020 19:14
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Random Stranger posted:Me: "A dog at 9/11? Why not just have him at Pearl Harbor?" Don't forget this classic Ranger adventure https://twitter.com/wiseposter/status/1233208308229660672
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Feb 28, 2020 19:45
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You know that old question "if you could go back in time would you kill Hitler?" Well we know what that dog would have done.
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Feb 28, 2020 20:12
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Madkal posted:You know that old question "if you could go back in time would you kill Hitler?" Well we know what that dog would have done. Taken a poo poo in Hitler's shoes?
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Feb 28, 2020 20:14
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Madkal posted:You know that old question "if you could go back in time would you kill Hitler?" Well we know what that dog would have done. the dog is hitler
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Feb 28, 2020 20:15
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Madkal posted:You know that old question "if you could go back in time would you kill Hitler?" Well we know what that dog would have done. If only Ranger was a pitbull
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Feb 28, 2020 20:16
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Madkal posted:You know that old question "if you could go back in time would you kill Hitler?" Well we know what that dog would have done. Don't worry, he helped out during WWII in other ways. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ScoPhJFz80
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Feb 28, 2020 20:17
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