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The best use of Hypertime was Mark Waid deciding an coloring error of Wally's eyes meant he was a Wally from a different hypertimeline and turned it into a whole story.
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Jul 3, 2023 16:14
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Why don’t they just do it like Marvel where everything was 5-10 years ago? Mr. Fantastic and Ben Grimm killing nazis in WWII? Five years ago. Punisher in Vietnam? Five years ago. Spiderman saving Jimmy Carter with the help of the original cast of Saturday Night Live? Five years ago. Spiderman teaming up with Obama? Five years ago.
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Jul 3, 2023 17:04
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DC needs a sliding timescale with made up problematic poo poo too
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Jul 3, 2023 17:16
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I AM GRANDO posted:Why don’t they just do it like Marvel where everything was 5-10 years ago? Mr. Fantastic and Ben Grimm killing nazis in WWII? Five years ago. Punisher in Vietnam? Five years ago. Spiderman saving Jimmy Carter with the help of the original cast of Saturday Night Live? Five years ago. Spiderman teaming up with Obama? Five years ago.
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Jul 3, 2023 17:22
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Look, it’s easy. Captain America was frozen for 75 years because he disappeared during World War II. Magneto is like 60 because he was a kid during World War II. Red Skull and Baron Zemo are like 45-50 because they’ve been hiding out since World War II. Ben Grimm is an ace pilot because he did all those missions in World War II while taking a break from college.
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Jul 3, 2023 17:23
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I AM GRANDO posted:Look, it’s easy. Captain America was frozen for 75 years because he disappeared during World War II. Magneto is like 60 because he was a kid during World War II. Red Skull and Baron Zemo are like 45-50 because they’ve been hiding out since World War II. Ben Grimm is an ace pilot because he did all those missions in World War II while taking a break from college. Magneto was also turned into a baby at one point.
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Jul 3, 2023 17:30
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So based on the fact that outside of some small corrections on Hypertime and Final Crisis, I'm basically right?
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Jul 4, 2023 00:04
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Cornwind Evil posted:So based on the fact that outside of some small corrections on Hypertime and Final Crisis, I'm basically right? The run from CoIE to Zero Hour was basically NO CRISES WE'RE DONE. That's why Elseworlds and Hypertime were a thing, because you can still kind of have fun with the toys but not really change anything significant. Sure, there's a Batman from Steampunk Londotown running around. Hypertime. But for the most part, it let the 'world' of DC stretch its legs a bit and grow. You got the legacy heroes that stuck around since, well, we had the 4 superguys running around and can reuse them so why not. ZH was a softboot that was meant to fix some continuity errors from CoIE (because they let some stories run through despite the fact that everything was new-- seems to be an endemic problem at DC). And also introduced a kind of sliding timelike where *X years ago Krypton explodes* instead of *explodes in 1914. Then the run from ZH to Infinite Crisis is just teasing remembering the Multiverse. With Superboy Prime's REALITY ALTERING PUNCHES AGAINST THE WALL OF PARADISE being the retcon wave that replaced Hypertime as the reason for fucky continuity. Iirc, Skeets flayed Waverider in 52, pretty much killing off any talk of Hypertime in DC for a minute. Then we get the limited return of a kind of multiverse. Post-Flashpoint merged the Wildstorm and DC verses. There was a macguffin called Pandora? Convergence was the band-aid crossover they pulled out of their rear end because they were moving from NYC to Burbank, CA and yeah. Doomsday Clock went so stupidly late that Dark Knights: METAL was kind of a dumb thing to throw out and serve as a little interlude while the Doomsday Clock poo poo got worked out. Except.... turns out people loved the dumb Batman who Laughs. And Doomsday Clock isnt really coming out anytime soon anyway. So they went whole hog into the BATMAN WHO LAUGHS evilverse and threw the prepetua thing into it and gently caress it who cares about Doomsday Clock anyway (aside from mentioning a metaverse/omniverse and teasing an eventual DC/Marvel teamup proper). 5G/5th Gen was supposed to push aside the old guard heroes, let them age, and drop us in to a DC with new legacies. The Yara Flor's of the world. And IIRC there were 1G,2G, etc stories that would be told that would get us caught up. Except that this scared off the suits because how can we launch a DCverse of films if people pick up Batman and it's some black guy?! Or if Wonder Woman is an amazon from The Amazon?! So ever since they broke the seal on the multiverse thing in the 2000s, we're stuck in an ever-escalating Crises with more antropomorphized Cosmic Entities that serve as the *real* architects of *points to mess* A kind of narrative crisis, if you will.
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Jul 5, 2023 19:32
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Cornwind Evil posted:All right, let me see if I can make sense of the DC Comics fiction world since the inmates started running the asylum in the early 2000's. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 04:57 on Jul 7, 2023 |
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Jul 7, 2023 04:55
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The one thing I'd like to add is that Convergence did have one lasting effect that rippled into DC Rebirth. Nobody was well served by New 52, but Superman got it particularly hard. He got his marriage erased, his supporting cast was scythed, he drat near stopped being Clark Kent. (Not in a conscious decision made by the character, just that side of him got almost no writer attention). So when Convergence came out, one of its "hey everybody remember that thing you liked before we took it away? Here, have an alternate Earth where it's back!" offerings was one where Clark and Lois were still married, and, in fact, Lois was pregnant with a son. She gave birth and they named the baby Jon, and if you're up enough on current DC continuity to being going "wait a minute"... yeah. That's Jon Kent's first appearance. I guess DC knew ahead of time that that would be very popular with the fans, because unlike all the other alternate everybodies featured in the event, Clark, Lois, and Jon survive the event and escape to New 52 Earth, where they've now canonically been living for nine years, laying low in Kansas and raising Jon while letting the other Clark handle being Superman. Rebirth handled his by revealing that, actually, there weren't two Clarks and two Loises, Mr. Mxyzptlk had split the real Clark and Lois in half, and now they had to re-merge even though New 52 Lois was dead, shut up it still works, look just go look over there and pretend this all makes sense okay, we're doing the plot band-aid now. End result is that Clark and Lois got their ages adjusted to mid-30s (from New 52's early 30s and Convergence's early 40s), they'd never been laying low in Kansas, they'd been working at the Daily Planet and the whole supporting cast had known Jon his whole life, they'd just been living in Kansas for a year or so because SHUT UP and now they were moving back to Metropolis, okay, marriage is back, kid's in continuity, we good? Good. Let us never mention this again.
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Jul 7, 2023 21:56
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why don't comics just do one-off stories or fun mini-arcs disconnected from a sense of broader continuity? why keep trying to do this?
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Jul 7, 2023 22:00
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Then the kid gets aged up like seven years by Bendis.
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Jul 7, 2023 22:01
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Mister Olympus posted:why don't comics just do one-off stories or fun mini-arcs disconnected from a sense of broader continuity? why keep trying to do this? They do, but sometimes editorial wants a change and it's usually to make a character younger and hipper
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Jul 7, 2023 22:06
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Mister Olympus posted:why don't comics just do one-off stories or fun mini-arcs disconnected from a sense of broader continuity? why keep trying to do this? They do. The problem is when they do really well they get so popular that DC/Marvel want to move them into mainline. See: The Killing Joke, Age of Apocalypse, Old Man Logan, etc
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Jul 7, 2023 22:06
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Mister Olympus posted:why don't comics just do one-off stories or fun mini-arcs disconnected from a sense of broader continuity? why keep trying to do this? They’re doing a mini series right now called “Clobbering Time” about The Thing that I don’t think is main continuity. It’s been enjoyable. Deadpool is always in these types of comics too. Edit: beaten
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Jul 7, 2023 22:07
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You also have stuff like Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, which is in continuity but only so it can take potshots at the concept of continuity, like Squirrel Girl refusing to take part in the current summer mega-event because "it'll get handled, everything will be changed forever except not really" and she'd rather do computer science problems in the Savage Land. Is USG's reformed, helpful version of Kraven ever going to show up again? Nope. Does it matter? Nope, comic's still good and it even makes a winking reference to the fact that yeah, everyone's going to ignore all of this forever in its finale.
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Jul 7, 2023 22:18
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CapnAndy posted:You also have stuff like Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, which is in continuity but only so it can take potshots at the concept of continuity, like Squirrel Girl refusing to take part in the current summer mega-event because "it'll get handled, everything will be changed forever except not really" and she'd rather do computer science problems in the Savage Land. Is USG's reformed, helpful version of Kraven ever going to show up again? Nope. Does it matter? Nope, comic's still good and it even makes a winking reference to the fact that yeah, everyone's going to ignore all of this forever in its finale. I believe Kraven canonically has the Kra-van now and Cat Thor is of course very canon
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Jul 7, 2023 22:28
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Mister Olympus posted:why don't comics just do one-off stories or fun mini-arcs disconnected from a sense of broader continuity? why keep trying to do this? Marvel (and I assume DC) does do this sometimes as well, e.g. Gwenpool, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Nextwave. In my experience these tend to have two common failure modes: (1) They do well enough that editorial decrees they should be folded into the main continuity. Now that miniseries you really liked has a sequel! Unfortunately it's authored by a different team, mired in the main continuity, incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't been following comics since at least the 90s, and if you give it a year or two they'll have retconned out all the stuff you liked about the original to begin with. (2) Its print run overlaps with some mandatory crossover event that leaks into the miniseries, interrupting the main plot with poo poo you have no context for, and no interest in. The solution to (1) is to just not read the sequels. Accept the thing you liked as the stand-alone story it was originally meant to be and move on. This is what I've done with both Gwenpool and USG. The only solution to (2) I've found is to wait for the whole arc to finish, then ask someone else who has already read it how much incomprehensible crossover bullshit it contains before you pick it up yourself. This is what I should have done before getting Loki: Agent of Asgard, but foolishly did not. There's also the thing they do where an established, mainline comic settles in for a story arc with a defined start, middle, and end. This can be done well and produce a story that's a good read on its own merits, even if you're unfamiliar with that series going into it -- my parents' trade of The Dark Phoenix Saga was my intro to X-Men and while it opened very confusing because, well, I have no idea who any of these people are or what their deal is, I found my footing by the end of the first chapter and enjoyed it immensely. I think the opening year-and-a-half of Simonson's run on Thor probably qualifies as well. Even when they're done well, though, you're definitionally going to be coming in in the middle of something and hoping the author gives you a soft landing, it's pretty much always going to end with a cliffhanger or plot hook because they want you to buy the next issue even if that specific arc is wrapped up, it's probably going to have at least some cruft from having to work around decades of established continuity, and the next author to take that series is going to roll back half of it anyways.
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Jul 7, 2023 22:50
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DC has their Black Label line which is supposed to be out of continuity comics (most of the time even though those same said comics may pull things from continuity).
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Jul 7, 2023 23:02
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I just started getting the big Astro City collections that are coming out, and some of the early issues have this weird tessellation effect that I find quite distracting. Here are some examples compared with the original tpb I have from years ago:      Does anyone know what this is or what causes it? I’m contemplating getting the big Astro City hardcover that’s coming out if it fixes the problem. It can’t be anything related to cleaning up or enlarging the images, since the originals are the same size and resolution. It’s not as bad as the pixelation in the Byrne Superman hardcovers but it sucks.
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Jul 19, 2023 03:19
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honestly i'd ask kurt busiek on twitter about it, it looks like a weird artifact of how it was printed though
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Jul 19, 2023 03:24
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I don't know the technical terms, but it happens when you resize an image with a gradient. I think it can be handled with better algorithms, but I'm guessing they had the good scans for the original printing, needed a higher res for printing in the newer edition, and they were just quickly edited.
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Jul 19, 2023 03:31
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its the halftone coloring interfering with image resolution conversion to produce a moire effect. it should not be visible at all on a physical book because that's entirely a digital viewing/scanning artifact. Oh god unless they rescanned them to print for some godforsaken reason this is an explanation for it: https://brisray.com/computers/halftone.htm Synthbuttrange fucked around with this message at 08:40 on Jul 22, 2023 |
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Jul 22, 2023 07:58
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Yeah, that’s terrible. I hope it’s fixed if they go for another printing. I have another question. I’ve been looking at the prices for the digest-sized Grendel omnibus series from about ten years ago, since I bought the larger ones that came out this year. It seems like the old ones are being listed for $50-$100 each on ebay. Is there something about the old ones that makes them desirable? Should I hang on to mine?
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Jul 23, 2023 02:03
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I'm reading Batman: No Man's Land for the first time and I will admit that this was originally printed when I was out of comics and I slowly came back in after the event. I know that Cassandra Cain (Batgirl) was introduced in NML but I always thought that with her first appearance she didn't speak (remember reading how she was raised not to verbally communicate and thought it was only when she got away from Cain that she slowly started to talk) but in the first few issues into NML she is talking and joking and and is really confident. I am wondering if I am remembering wrong about her not being able to talk, if she was ever shy or if the creators kind of figured out her backstory and retconned her personality after the event.
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Aug 30, 2023 16:06
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Madkal posted:I'm reading Batman: No Man's Land for the first time and I will admit that this was originally printed when I was out of comics and I slowly came back in after the event. I know that Cassandra Cain (Batgirl) was introduced in NML but I always thought that with her first appearance she didn't speak (remember reading how she was raised not to verbally communicate and thought it was only when she got away from Cain that she slowly started to talk) but in the first few issues into NML she is talking and joking and and is really confident. I am wondering if I am remembering wrong about her not being able to talk, if she was ever shy or if the creators kind of figured out her backstory and retconned her personality after the event. Really? I always remember Cass communicating more or less through charades when she starts working for Babara as a runner. It's certainly a thing that she can't talk until like issue 6 of her ongoing when a psychic 'orders' her brain because she can't communicate normally and he thinks something's wrong with her.
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Aug 30, 2023 17:01
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Madkal posted:I'm reading Batman: No Man's Land for the first time and I will admit that this was originally printed when I was out of comics and I slowly came back in after the event. I know that Cassandra Cain (Batgirl) was introduced in NML but I always thought that with her first appearance she didn't speak (remember reading how she was raised not to verbally communicate and thought it was only when she got away from Cain that she slowly started to talk) but in the first few issues into NML she is talking and joking and and is really confident. I am wondering if I am remembering wrong about her not being able to talk, if she was ever shy or if the creators kind of figured out her backstory and retconned her personality after the event. I just read NML for the first time last year and thought the same, but my questions were answered by the end of the crossover.
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Aug 30, 2023 17:03
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Dawgstar posted:Really? I always remember Cass communicating more or less through charades when she starts working for Babara as a runner. It's certainly a thing that she can't talk until like issue 6 of her ongoing when a psychic 'orders' her brain because she can't communicate normally and he thinks something's wrong with her. Batgirl in a big chunk of NML is actually Helena, not Cass
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Aug 30, 2023 17:52
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So the old chestnut of Hank Pym: Wifebeater came up in the badass panels thread a day or two ago, and it was concluded that because of some writers trying to fix things and ultimately making them worse, it's now a part of Hank Pym's character. It made me think though, why only Hank? Why not Reed Richards and Peter Parker who both slapped around their significant other? Peter did it at least once (either Clone Saga or Maximum Carnage IIRC - knocked MJ into a wall), and Reed I'm pretty sure multiple times, not even counting trying to "wake her up" during her stint as Malice. With Reed, it might have been in the old "Father knows best; Sue's just a silly girl" phase, but still not OK. I'm not suggesting abuse is OK in any circumstance, or that someone needs to step up and redeem Hank. But why do Reed and Peter get passes?
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Sep 5, 2023 14:35
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Pym's never been an A-list character, and the abuse story is, unfortunately, one of his biggest arcs. He doesn't really have enough else going on to distract from it.
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Sep 5, 2023 14:59
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Angry Salami posted:Pym's never been an A-list character, and the abuse story is, unfortunately, one of his biggest arcs. He doesn't really have enough else going on to distract from it. Yeah, not unlike Tony Hank is defined mostly by his failures, the biggest of which were 'spousal abuse' and 'made Ultron.'
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Sep 5, 2023 15:06
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Peter gets a pass because supposedly the hit was a misinterpretation by the artist and because Peter hit MJ during the time he was extra lovely from Marvel trying to make Ben the new, real Spider-Man. Obviously they reversed course on that and then Marvel later went into Ignore mode for the Clone Saga overall so there was no one willing to revisit The Definitely Real, Definitely Better Spider-Man at his worst point. And I imagine because Pym already that rep, Marvel probably did not want to be known as The House of
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Sep 5, 2023 15:50
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Angry Salami posted:Pym's never been an A-list character, and the abuse story is, unfortunately, one of his biggest arcs. He doesn't really have enough else going on to distract from it. Pretty much. We don't talk about how Peter Parker yelled at anti-war protesters except to make fun of it. He's got a lot more going on so it's easy to cut around the poo poo. For Hank Pym, the breakdown story was all he had (and it's actually a decent story) and then it got compounded by no one making a great Hank Pym story and instead going back to that one event. At this point, it's probably impossible to redeem the character because everyone just associates him with beating his wife.
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Sep 5, 2023 16:16
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CzarChasm posted:So the old chestnut of Hank Pym: Wifebeater came up in the badass panels thread a day or two ago, and it was concluded that because of some writers trying to fix things and ultimately making them worse, it's now a part of Hank Pym's character. Most writers, when they come on to a new character, want to play the hits, and quite a few want to do their own take on iconic moments because they think they can do it better or they're out of ideas or whatever. Peter and Reed have tons to choose from; you can do Spider-Man No More, Galactus Comes To Earth, Green Goblin, Annihilus, Aunt May In Peril, Trip To The Negative Zone, Doctor Octopus, Mole Man, etc., etc., etc. for 60-odd years of fan-favorite moments. Hank, though? Hank hits his wife. And since they're not gonna have him do that again because they're not idiots, writer after writer makes him feel bad about it and go to Janet to apologize, which means that unlike Peter and Reed where it's been swept under the rug and allowed to stay there with an embarassed cough and a "look, that was a long time ago", for Hank it's always fresh. Hank is always the wife-beater guy.
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Sep 5, 2023 16:17
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CapnAndy posted:MGK put forth the most compelling answer to the Why Is It Only Hank Pym question I've ever read. In short, it's because Hank's never had a big arc or iconic story, and only two memorable moments: hitting Janet and creating Ultron. I think the better point they make is that "everyone wants to write the redemption arc, no one wants to write the post-redemption arc". The same way nowadays it seems like everybody wants to write down-on-his-luck Peter Parker, no one seems to want a Spider-Man that turns things around.
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Sep 5, 2023 18:29
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TwoPair posted:I think the better point they make is that "everyone wants to write the redemption arc, no one wants to write the post-redemption arc".
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Sep 5, 2023 18:35
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Don't worry, there's always the time they followed up The incredible the Immortal Hulk with... let me check my notes here... "Bruce Banner piloting the Hulk like a robot he called Spaceship Hulk." No, wait, that can't be right.
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Sep 5, 2023 19:18
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CapnAndy posted:I mean, yes, but simultaneously that's not entirely fair; Slott in particular very much seemed to want a Peter who'd squared his life and relationships away somewhat. The problem is that as soon as any writer who does want that is done, the next guy inevitably comes barreling in yelling PARKER LUCK, AMIRITE at the top of his lungs and undoing it all. I think this conversation gets confused with the way "Peter" and "Spider-Man" are used but I don't really come away from Slott's run thinking that he wanted things to be good for our hero and drat any other writer who screws it up. Spider-Man was killed (basically twice!) by one of his villains, then competently and convincingly replaced by that villain, and then came back to life not through some epic struggle but because the villain tagged him back in, and then all his apparent success afterward (as Iron Man Lite, lol) was entirely due to the villain, and all of which was torn down in a spectacular, global humilliation. Normally "the ol' Parker luck" has him scrounging for food stamps or whatever and it all seems unfair in a cosmic way, whereas Slott's run actually seemed to be more cruel than most by pretty definitively cementing, both in an in-story way and meta way, that readers will only ever see Peter/Spider-Man struggle and will not apply himself to make things better. Even before Parker Industries, Peter never had more potential than when he worked at Horizon and it was Slott who squandered that and got rid of it, not anybody who came after.
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Sep 5, 2023 19:47
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ImpAtom posted:Don't worry, there's always the time they followed up The incredible the Immortal Hulk with... let me check my notes here... "Bruce Banner piloting the Hulk like a robot he called Spaceship Hulk." No, wait, that can't be right. I almost kind of respect that, it's as if the writer realized "Anything I write is going to look like garbage coming after Immortal Hulk, so I'm not even going to try and keep things at that level of quality."
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Sep 6, 2023 06:47
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Lobok posted:I think this conversation gets confused with the way "Peter" and "Spider-Man" are used but I don't really come away from Slott's run thinking that he wanted things to be good for our hero and drat any other writer who screws it up.
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Sep 6, 2023 06:57
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