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bobkatt013 posted:He did some great stuff in the Avengers and Marvel. His reign as editor in chief was pretty great. If you hate on people for being fan boys I guess you should also hate Mark Waid Really? I remember his Avengers as being average at best when I read it a few years ago, and his later stuff like his Avengers West Coast and Infinity Inc runs were awful. Everything you'd never want to know about old and forgotten characters. The self-indulgant continuity wank gets pretty bad to deal with. I'm also confused about calling his run as EiC good, since the early 70s was a pretty bad time for Marvel overall. They drat near went under, with the only thing saving them being the Star Wars license in the late 70s. It's odd because I'm also not much of a Waid man, but love Busiek. Avengers Forever does need to die in a fire somewhere, though-- not one sentence of it was required, and the easiest solution to the mess of The Crossing is just give it the Ms Marvel pregnancy treatment. Stick it in a corner and never mention it again. That series is the kind of thing that this thread should be about, because it has all the earmarks of being a cool story with a good writer, art team, and set of villains. Yet it fails at drat near every turn to not be a rap up of every dumb story you never cared about from the 70s. rkajdi fucked around with this message at 01:01 on Apr 30, 2014 |
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Apr 30, 2014 00:59
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rkajdi posted:It's odd because I'm also not much of a Waid man, but love Busiek. Avengers Forever does need to die in a fire somewhere, though-- not one sentence of it was required, and the easiest solution to the mess of The Crossing is just give it the Ms Marvel pregnancy treatment. Stick it in a corner and never mention it again. That series is the kind of thing that this thread should be about, because it has all the earmarks of being a cool story with a good writer, art team, and set of villains. Yet it fails at drat near every turn to not be a rap up of every dumb story you never cared about from the 70s. I love Avengers Forever, and I love me some good continuity porn. 
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Apr 30, 2014 01:04
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prefect posted:I love Avengers Forever, and I love me some good continuity porn. As mentioned before, good continuity porn is stuff like Thunderbolts. That series actually built something new with the old, and did it's best to actually involve itself with the rest of the comics coming out at the time. Avengers Forever exists only to answer questions nobody ever cared about to begin with. It didn't matter in the end at all, and had piles of extra exposition that served no real purpose except to "fix" stories that only the most obsessed fans even cared about anymore. It's that kind of stuff that gives comics the impression of being completely up its own rear end.
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Apr 30, 2014 01:15
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Yeah, what an rear end in a top hat, caring about the continuity of the things he writes and edits.
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Apr 30, 2014 01:16
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Lurdiak posted:Yeah, what an rear end in a top hat, caring about the continuity of the things he writes and edits. Yyyyyyep.
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Apr 30, 2014 01:20
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rkajdi posted:I'm also confused about calling his run as EiC good, since the early 70s was a pretty bad time for Marvel overall. They drat near went under, with the only thing saving them being the Star Wars license in the late 70s. Marvel (and the post-newsstand mass market, pre-direct market comics industry in general) didn't have its really bad years until Thomas jumped over to DC and Marvel went through Wein/Wolfman/Conway/Goodwin before getting to Shooter in like 4 1/2 years so I'm not sure why you're pinning that on Thomas. Especially because at the nadir of Marvel's fortunes, Roy Thomas was responsible for two of the only things working for them (he pushed for both the Conan and Star Wars licenses, and wrote Conan forever when it was a top selling book). Not that this makes any of his worst 1980s work any less awful, though I was surprised to look back and see that one of the most Roy Thomas-est stories I ever saw (the West Coast Avengers bit about Hank Pym's FIRST wife and a bunch of no-hoper cold war villains not seen since the early 1960s like The Voice and El Toro) was actually a Steve Englehart joint. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 01:28 on Apr 30, 2014 |
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Apr 30, 2014 01:26
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rkajdi posted:Really? I remember his Avengers as being average at best when I read it a few years ago, and his later stuff like his Avengers West Coast and Infinity Inc runs were awful. Everything you'd never want to know about old and forgotten characters. The self-indulgant continuity wank gets pretty bad to deal with. I'm also confused about calling his run as EiC good, since the early 70s was a pretty bad time for Marvel overall. They drat near went under, with the only thing saving them being the Star Wars license in the late 70s. The skrull Kree war was awesome, and so was the original stuff with Vision forever was also awesome and one of my favorite avengers story
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Apr 30, 2014 01:34
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prefect posted:I love Avengers Forever, and I love me some good continuity porn. Avengers Forever is as much Roger Stern as it is Busiek; they co-plotted the lot, but I'm fairly sure it's Stern's scripts from the third or fourth issue on. Anyway, the ultimate example of continuity porn creating an indisputably brilliant story is The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck.
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Apr 30, 2014 01:39
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Edge & Christian posted:Not that this makes any of his worst 1980s work any less awful, though I was surprised to look back and see that one of the most Roy Thomas-est stories I ever saw (the West Coast Avengers bit about Hank Pym's FIRST wife and a bunch of no-hoper cold war villains not seen since the early 1960s like The Voice and El Toro) was actually a Steve Englehart joint. I'm a What If? addict and continuity nerd and I can't help but like Roy Thomas just fine, for reasons better articulated above. I think he gets a lot of unwarranted trickle-down disdain. I also like Steve Englehart a lot, though, but yeah, there was a period that it seemed like his entire M.O. was gently caress all y'all. Still, I specifically remember The Voice as a member of the Red Skull's crew, and it wasn't for years and years that I discovered that The Voice was a rehabilitated throwaway, and I thought that was super-neat.
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Apr 30, 2014 01:57
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Lurdiak posted:Yeah, what an rear end in a top hat, caring about the continuity of the things he writes and edits. No look, you see if you care about continuity that means you're a fanboy! And we here at BSS are not like THOSE fans! Honestly I've got no problem with someone being a continuity nerd. There's a difference between people like Thomas, Waid and Busiek who were able to use continuity to fix things and/or enhance stories or pull in some obscure character and update them and someone like Dan Slott who writes comics like a typical message board poster because he indulges in the worst of fanboyish tendencies.
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Apr 30, 2014 02:12
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Mark Gruenwald was the king of continuity porn. He could find some obscure character long forgotten and spin gold out of it. His run on Quasar is one of my favourite runs of all time.
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Apr 30, 2014 02:26
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Am I the only one who liked Geoff Johns? I thought he was fairly good in the late 90s when he was working on JSA and I felt his work didn't start to go downhill until he started on Titans and Green Lantern.
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Apr 30, 2014 03:21
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CopywrightMMXI posted:Am I the only one who liked Geoff Johns? I thought he was fairly good in the late 90s when he was working on JSA and I felt his work didn't start to go downhill until he started on Titans and Green Lantern. I think most people liked Geoff Johns at one point or another, it's just a matter of when you just think he totally lost his touch. Everybody seems to have their own personal opinion of "[x] is when Johns lost his ability to write" (my X is right after Blackest Night)
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Apr 30, 2014 03:39
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Johns just ended up with too much pull and too much ego and his work suffered from nobody being able to shoot down his less then stellar ideas that he now thinks are gold, it happens all the time.
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Apr 30, 2014 04:12
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For me, Johns went down the shitter after ending his run on GL. Everything he has done on JL after that it has been awful. Lots of things and set ups that go nowhere and are retconned at the tip of a hat. Honestly, I'm just waiting for Forever Evil 7 to drop so I can write my rant about how awful the whole thing was in this thread 
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Apr 30, 2014 04:27
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TwoPair posted:I think most people liked Geoff Johns at one point or another, it's just a matter of when you just think he totally lost his touch. The second Hal came back. Inertia and goodwill helped for a while, but tunnel vision had kicked in and there was no turning back.
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Apr 30, 2014 04:28
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I don't think Johns has written anything half decent since some of the throwaway character re-imaginings in Flashpoint (not the story overall which is of course abysmal), the guy has wayyyy too much reverence for all the big toys to write them well in continuity, which is ironic since he'll be leaving the entire superfriends gang in the sane creative cul-de-sac he ditched Hal Jordan.
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Apr 30, 2014 04:34
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JSA is one of my favourite things ever. When it was coming out, I didn't mind his Teen Titans stuff (probably because I'd never read Young Justice) but I don't know if I'd like it if I gave it another go. Never read his Flash stuff and his GL stuff I generally didn't mind, but I could probably take it or leave it. His Justice League stuff looks awful. I've heard he's also a colossal manchild who's prone to throwing a wobble when you beat him at video games, but that doesn't really factor into it.
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Apr 30, 2014 09:20
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For me the blush came off the rose near the end of Johns' Teen Titans run when he went back to the well of "look, it's Evil Titans" several times. I thought that might have been an aberration, given that not long afterwards we got the Sinestro Corps War, which was awesome... but it became rapidly apparent that that was going to be the high-water mark for Geoff Johns. I think Johns is one of those writers who can be really very good... if he's got a strong editorial presence to pull on the reins and keep his more obnoxious tendencies under control. His JSA run was excellent, but the quality of his stories has gone down as his popularity has risen - that is to say, once he became a Big Name and was able to tell editors 'no.' Now, of course, given his current position, he has virtually no oversight at all, and it shows. This is hardly a problem unique to Geoff Johns - there are many, many comic creators who became terrible once they became 'stars' - but he's a very prominent example of it... and the culture at DC these days seems to be rewarding, rather than discouraging, that kind of behavior.
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Apr 30, 2014 10:22
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He did a nice story in one of the Vertigo things a year or two ago, Aquaman was good, Shazam! was great. If he can stand stepping off of the world's most vital important books and events and just got a couple of obscure solo books to craft, he'd probably do well again. e: Justice League has this aspect during Forever Evil. Half the time he's dusting off fun stuff like Metal Men and Doom Patrol (though that was more of a passing mention) instead of backing up the event. I've been enjoying those. I'd read a Johns and Doug Mahnke continuing Metal Men like the last JL issue. ee: Oh yeah. Forgot about Superman. Nothing interesting has happened to that character in Johns' New 52 work. He shelved him for two events straight, but there are a few very decent Superman stories in his past. I'm interested and hoping for the best, but Superman Unchained is by one of my favorite comic authors and I thought it was terrible, so who knows what the gently caress will ever happen. Teenage Fansub fucked around with this message at 11:24 on Apr 30, 2014 |
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Apr 30, 2014 10:31
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The thing is, Johns is one of the relatively few writers whose name is absolutely guaranteed to sell books, maybe even to a greater extent than Bendis. Almost everything he's done, for example, has been given the omnibus treatment. His run on Flash got a three-volume omnibus before Mark Waid or any of the Silver Age material; his Teen Titans run got an omnibus around the same time DC were making a complete hash of the corresponding Wolfman/Pérez collections; Brightest Day is getting an omnibus; GL and JSA are getting omnibses; heck, even Hawkman of all things got an omnibus, and I'm fairly sure that came about because it was "Hawkman by Geoff Johns". Anyway, regarding JSA, I've wondered for a while now, what was the extent of Goyer's contribution when he was co-writing with Johns (and Robinson) for the first fifty issues?
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Apr 30, 2014 10:39
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I still really like Sinestro Corps War  It was just good fun. Pity it went to his head.
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Apr 30, 2014 11:03
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Suben posted:No look, you see if you care about continuity that means you're a fanboy! And we here at BSS are not like THOSE fans! Considering you have piles of idiots posting online after every retcon complaining that they don't know which of their stories "count" now, I'm not sure this point should be brought up ironically. It's not a comic only thing (witness the people gnashing their teeth over the Star Wars EU ending) but the amount of people who can't get past "wizard did it" or whatever is being used to sweep away the cruft getting in the way of a decent story. To me this shows continuity is a huge issue, at least in the strict sense it's used now.
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Apr 30, 2014 12:26
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Metal Loaf posted:Anyway, regarding JSA, I've wondered for a while now, what was the extent of Goyer's contribution when he was co-writing with Johns (and Robinson) for the first fifty issues? This I think is the point. Johns rode Goyer just like Millar rode Morrison.
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Apr 30, 2014 12:27
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Assuming Goyer is David S. Goyer, he's not really a fantastic writer either, though.
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Apr 30, 2014 12:30
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Goyer is indeed David S. of The Man of Steel notoriety. The JSA issues Johns wrote on his own after Goyer left the book were still good, but I think it also marks the starting point of his soon-to-be-standard reliance on violence and blood to raise the stakes.
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Apr 30, 2014 12:37
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SALT CURES HAM posted:Assuming Goyer is David S. Goyer, he's not really a fantastic writer either, though. That's the same guy? poo poo, I got nothing then. I was pretty sure that Goyer was the one doing the decent part of the writing, since it seemed pretty similar regardless of who was the second writer. It's also right that JSA didn't fall off the cliff immediately afterwards, but it did start it's steady decline around then.
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Apr 30, 2014 13:05
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Honestly it kinda sounds like they're both good writers when they can bounce ideas off other people (and when Goyer can keep his rear end in a top hat "LIBRULS KILLING AMERICA!!!!!!  " tendencies to a minimum) but fall apart on their own.
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Apr 30, 2014 13:08
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SALT CURES HAM posted:Honestly it kinda sounds like they're both good writers when they can bounce ideas off other people (and when Goyer can keep his rear end in a top hat "LIBRULS KILLING AMERICA!!!!!! I'm worried about Abnett and Lanning. I hope they don't suck now that they're split up. 
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Apr 30, 2014 13:10
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SALT CURES HAM posted:Assuming Goyer is David S. Goyer, he's not really a fantastic writer either, though. He's got a pretty wide range in output, assuming you're talking about quality and not content.
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Apr 30, 2014 13:14
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Doctor Spaceman posted:He's got a pretty wide range in output, assuming you're talking about quality and not content. Little from column A, little from column B. He's only done a couple things that I've liked without serious reservations.
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Apr 30, 2014 13:23
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rkajdi posted:That's the same guy? poo poo, I got nothing then. I was pretty sure that Goyer was the one doing the decent part of the writing, since it seemed pretty similar regardless of who was the second writer. It's also right that JSA didn't fall off the cliff immediately afterwards, but it did start it's steady decline around then. It was also at that point that John's started to go crossover crazy with identity crisis then final crisis. I still think his superman and superbly work pre 52 was great. ( superboy solo title not titans)
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Apr 30, 2014 18:52
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Personally I like Johns when he takes characters that aren't in the A-league and puts an interesting spin on them. His Aquaman has been one of my favourite comics in the nu-52. His Shazam has been fun and he had a great run on Booster Gold. Even his original run on Green Lantern leading to after Sinestro Corps War was pretty good. I don't think he does well with bigger events though. If he has his own little corner to play in he is pretty spot on, but giving a role with the bigger universe and it all falls to crap. I would be more interested in seeing him play around with some more obscure characters in the nu-52. Come on DC, give Johns a Blue Devil title.
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Apr 30, 2014 19:13
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Has anyone read the Marvel: The Untold Story by Sean Howe? I thought it was pretty informative, but I didn't know much about Marvel's history beforehand, so I'm not sure what the general opinion here is about that.
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Apr 30, 2014 19:50
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I read it over a 10hour Train journey just after Christmas, I think it's a great read, seeing as I only knew a bit about what went on behind the scenes before. Loved the detailing of how Stan Lee will stick his name on anything and what hosed everything up in the 90's. A friend who's a lifelong Kirby fan is reading my copy at the moment and he said he couldn't put it down either.
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Apr 30, 2014 20:07
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FlamingLiberal posted:Has anyone read the Marvel: The Untold Story by Sean Howe? I thought it was pretty informative, but I didn't know much about Marvel's history beforehand, so I'm not sure what the general opinion here is about that. I liked it but there are times where it feels way more like a 400 or so page screed on creator's rights disguised as a a general history of the company. Not that I'm against creator's rights or anything like that, just that's how the book comes off to me in parts is all (mainly whenever Howe makes it a point to just kind of take random asides to throw in an update on Steve Gerber no matter how little, or not at all, it's connected to anything else going on in the book at the moment). The best part of the book is easily the '90s and the speculator boom (and subsequent crash) and the crazy, "the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing" nature of that time period although the single best passage from the book is this bit about Stan Lee Media and more specifically Stan's partner in it, Peter Paul: quote:At the very least, Lee was not in the loop when it came to the inner workings of the business. "He would sit in the business meetings and occasionally say something," one friend reported. "But mainly he'd sit there and doodle, or fall asleep." He didn't yet know that his business partner, Peter Paul, had served jail time in the 1970s for cocaine possession and defrauding Fidel Castro for $8.7 million in a bizarre coffee shipment scheme that involved plans to sink a Panamanian freighter. (Paul would later claim he was working as a CIA operative.) Suben fucked around with this message at 03:27 on May 1, 2014 |
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May 1, 2014 03:24
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bobkatt013 posted:It was also at that point that John's started to go crossover crazy with identity crisis then final crisis. I still think his superman and superbly work pre 52 was great. ( superboy solo title not titans) Hard to give Johns the blame for Identity Crisis, written by Brad Beltzer, and Final Crisis, written by Grant Morrison. Just saying. FlamingLiberal posted:Has anyone read the Marvel: The Untold Story by Sean Howe? I thought it was pretty informative, but I didn't know much about Marvel's history beforehand, so I'm not sure what the general opinion here is about that. It was very engagingly-written, to the point that I've given it to non-comics fans to read and they've enjoyed it. There are segments of the book where Howe's sympathies are clearly on one side of a dispute, but I'd argue that that's almost inescapable; it is, more than anything, an oral history of Marvel Comics, and so basically everything he writes is by necessity colored by the impressions of the people that will talk to him and the absences of the people who won't. Personally I found the info on Marvel in the '60s and '70s to be informative as hell, and he does a great job making the reader aware of people who weren't exactly Big Names whose contributions to the company still ended up being awesome and important, like Flo Sternberg and Morrie Kuramoto.
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May 1, 2014 04:50
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I've only read excerpts from the book so far, but considering he's stated some rumors and discredited things as fact, I'd advise anyone reading it to take it with the same heaping of salt as you would, say, a football player's "auto" biography.
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May 1, 2014 04:58
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:Hard to give Johns the blame for Identity Crisis, written by Brad Beltzer, and Final Crisis, written by Grant Morrison. Just saying I meant infinite crisis, and how at the time of identity crisis is when all his comics seemed to be tie ins to crossovers.
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May 1, 2014 05:05
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Lurdiak posted:I've only read excerpts from the book so far, but considering he's stated some rumors and discredited things as fact, I'd advise anyone reading it to take it with the same heaping of salt as you would, say, a football player's "auto" biography. Any examples of what's in there that's outright wrong or unsubstantiated?
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May 1, 2014 05:16
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