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Back around 1990, there was this guy named Michael Higgins who, as far as I can tell, had a picture of someone important at Marvel Comics participating in a donkey show. Even when I was in full twelve-year-old mode, unable to really criticize much of what I was reading, Higgins's work struck me as awful. He's probably slightly more famous for getting to write an Uncanny X-Men Annual during the Atlantis Attacks crossover, which makes him one of the only writers, if not the only writer, to do a fill-in on Claremont's original UXM run. It features a bodyswap between Dazzler and Diamondback that takes place before the book even starts, Diamondback receiving the dick-seeking missile characterization that people would rake Chuck Austen over the coals for fifteen years later, and Colossus acting like he's fresh off a Russian farm. I've blocked most of it out. What I'm really here to talk about is Power Pack. At this point, Power Pack had sort of been limping along for a while. Louise Simonson was long gone, and Jon Bogandove had written it for years as kind of a weird combination of an After-School Special and a fairly typical superhero book. By the end of his run, he appeared to be going slightly insane, such as when he introduced a cosmic figure who was basically Whoopi Goldberg's character from ST:TNG right down to having her face. Higgins took over the book with #56 and immediately and blatantly started trying to kill it. This became famous in the larger community as the arc where Alex Power slowly began to transform into a horse, due to some kind of Kymellian mindmeld nonsense. In the end, sales cratered so hard that Higgins didn't even get to finish the arc. Simonson and June Brigman actually came back for a one-shot "Holiday Special" where they fixed things up after Higgins's run, restoring each character's powers to their original holders (which is why Alex just has the gravity powers in current issues of FF), and then left again. Still, for all-out plain old terrible comics, you can't go too far wrong with Power Pack #56-61. I'm convinced it's why you don't really see Jack or Katie in current comics; the two of them haven't had either the writer push or the characterization revamp you'd need to restore them to a usable state. Katie in particular would be terrifyingly powerful if she wasn't five years old in the original comics.
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Jul 30, 2013 22:49
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Nipponophile posted:That's twice now that Larry Hama's name has popped up in this thread. Y'all are trying to make 10 year old me feel bad for loving G.I. Joe, aren't y'all? No, Hama's G.I. Joe is not only decent but is about ten thousand times better than it has any right to be for being an '80s comic about toys. It's better early on, the art suffers near the end of its Marvel run, and the characters get sillier as the toys got more over the top, but somehow Hama managed to sneak a lot of talk about Vietnam and honor and being a soldier in with the rest. E the Shaggy posted:Power Pack's parents discover their secret identities and it drives them insane, like not just angry, but literally unable to function, drooling on the floor insane. Then an alien or something shows up and convinces the parents that Power Pack are actually clones of their children and not actually them, instantly reverting them back to normal. Yeah, Jon Bogandove's run as writer/artist has some pretty crazy poo poo thrown in, like a super-powered street gang or the Pack being involved in the god drat Morlock Massacre plot in any way, and "Inferno" in general caused some pretty crazy storylines to happen all over the place. All of it pales next to the sheer destructive stupidity of Michael Higgins, though.
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Jul 31, 2013 01:32
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bobkatt013 posted:No it was an illusion. It was a plot to make Nightcrawler pope and then reveal to the world that the pope is a mutant and then cause the rapture with exploding communion wafers. Thank you very much Chuck Austin. They ran with Nightcrawler joining the priesthood for at least a little while, without/despite Austen's involvement. I remember it was why he broke up with that Cerise chick from Excalibur.
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Jul 31, 2013 20:52
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Metal Loaf posted:I liked "the 24-hour news cycle goes after the Avengers" angle a lot better when Kurt Busiek did it, myself. Don't be this guy. muscles like this? posted:Frankly I never really liked the whole "Dark Reign" direction in the first place. Mostly because the whole bit with Osborn's rise to power never made any amount of sense. Dark Reign is a pretty good example of a couple of different things. One is that Bendis has a habit in his superhero work of wanting to do something and then doing it without paying too much attention to the necessary legwork. He'll go on a slow burn for a half-dozen issues then wrap everything up in six pages. It's like a guy who's on a pretty even keel six days out of the week and then on Friday drinks enough Red Bull to kill a yak. The other is that Dark Reign in general suffers from the traditional superhero-universe perspective. We know, as readers, that Norman Osborn is a murderous sociopath on the best day of his life and that every bad thing a superhero says about him is completely true. We know that putting Norman in charge of anything more powerful than a taco stand is going to end in tears. The thing is that we got a lot of that from the protagonists and we got a lot of confirming information from the villains, but we didn't see anywhere near enough of the man-on-the-street perspective. Remember, we live in a nation where Oliver North is provably guilty of treason and yet managed to parlay that into a reasonably successful career as a talking head and author. Modern Americans are both cynical about our leaders and yet very easy to mislead. Osborn is crazy but he's also undeniably charismatic, which is a thread in his characterization going all the way back to the Stan Lee days, and I found it all too easy to believe that he could go on television and carefully media-manage his way into a position of authority. Then he manages to turn the Skrull invasion into a personal PR bonanza and it's onward and upward from there. It's not as well-told a story as it could be but there are elements of plausibility within it. The issue is that we never saw Osborn's rise to power from the perspective of someone who didn't already know he was a loving lunatic. The closest we came is arguably Victoria Hand in the original Dark Avengers run, and she saw him--by his deliberate design--as a smart, driven guy in a position to do some real good if he could get around his issues long enough to do it. Remember, in the period of time when Osborn was leading his "Dark" Avengers team, they were arguably more successful in fighting genuine threats and taking out villains than any of the actual active superhero teams were at that point.
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Aug 15, 2013 22:12
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Random Stranger posted:The problem with that is Norman Osborn has been so publicly evil and insane that there isn't anyone who would care and wouldn't be aware of this. Imagine if Donald Trump tried to run for office again and his running mate was Sarah Palin. Now multiply that by a thousand. That's how the public should be reacting to Norman Osborn. On 616, Richard Nixon killed himself after being revealed as one of the leaders of the Secret Empire. Aliens are real. Tony Stark was the Secretary of Defense for a while. You have to figure the MU's tolerance for batshittery is higher than ours. Norman going on a talk show with an understanding interviewer who's been briefed to only throw him softballs would do a lot to turn around his image.
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Aug 16, 2013 00:11
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404GoonNotFound posted:The best/worst part is seeing neckbeards on social networking rage on it due to THE GAY AGENDA Conversely, if you go on Tumblr at the right times, the best/worst part can also be lady neckbeards rage on Young Avengers because it dared to introduce some small element of drama to the beautiful, flawless, sexless perfection of Billy/Teddy.
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Aug 17, 2013 18:39
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PupsOfWar posted:I mean Marvel is still bad about it in a lot of cases since it's still, you know, mainstream superhero comics, but costume design is an area where one company is taking baby steps forward while the other is actually regressing from where it was 25 years ago It seems like a few years ago, both Marvel and DC realized at once that they had some non-trivial number of women reading their books. DC reacted by trying to push them away and Marvel reacted by slowly trying to make the books more appealing to them. This is not to say that anyone at DC ever consciously decided to alienate the female demographic, but I think it comes hand in hand with that "our average customer is a 45-year-old white man" thing they have going on.
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Jan 2, 2014 19:36
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Ghostpilot posted:This came along in the mid-late 90's, after he became somber, self-loathing and You know, to this day, I would pay good money for a Bamf doll. Say Nothing posted:Well, Reed's douchebaggery in those two can be explained, he was doing it to snap Susan out of Malice's mind control... I think Yeah, I remember that issue. Hate-Monger was tapping into some doubts Sue had about the entire FF thing and used it to turn her into Malice, who was better at using the force field offensively than Sue ever was. When they figured it out, Reed decided the best way to snap Sue out of it was to get her even angrier so eventually she'd break the conditioning and come out the other side. It was part of Byrne setting it up so Sue would ditch the Invisible Girl moniker and use Invisible Woman instead, and is kind of the start of the gradual evolution Sue went through in the '80s that turned her into the FF member you least want to gently caress with. Wanderer fucked around with this message at 01:22 on Jan 15, 2014 |
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Jan 15, 2014 01:18
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. Because early on and for a good while, he had plush dolls (Bamf dolls) of himself that he'd give out. 
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The issue of Spawn where Dave Sim and McFarlane collaborate on a story of Cerebus guiding Spawn around a dystopian hellscape while musing how awesome it is to be wholly creator-owned characters is pretty special. It comes complete with a scene of unlabeled big-two superheroes reaching through the bars of their eternal prison as they cry for a freedom they will never possess. I mean, I get where they were going with it, but the whole thing is breathtakingly self-indulgent.
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Apr 29, 2014 05:50
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SALT CURES HAM posted:I mean, on one hand it is kinda self-indulgent, but on the other hand my understanding is that they (along with the rest of Image) pretty much opened the indie-comic floodgates and without them we probably wouldn't have stuff like Saga, Stray Bullets, Fatale, or Manhattan Projects. If that's the case, I can't really hate them for championing that cause. Image definitely turned itself around by being a more organized, useful place for independent creators to market their books on a national level while still remaining independent and retaining creative control. Early Image, however, was like injecting the worst creative decisions of the 1990s directly into your eyes, and holding up Spawn as a model of the benefits and inherent worth of creator-owned characters, especially in issue #10, is a bit like using homemade horror movies as proof of the value of independent filmmaking. I'd also argue that the "indie-comic floodgates" were more opened by the rise of the Internet as an aid in self-publishing; the well-publicized success of independent creators like James O'Barr, Terry Moore, and particularly Eastman and Laird; and the general reevaluation of creators' rights that came in the wake of Jack Kirby's death. If Image hadn't stepped up to the plate, I'd imagine a lot of the same books would have appeared as webcomics or gotten marketed through IDW or Dynamite or Boom. This isn't to take anything away from Image, of course, but independent comics on the present scale were going to happen one way or the other. Wanderer fucked around with this message at 20:30 on Apr 29, 2014 |
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Apr 29, 2014 20:27
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It seems to me that it was a confluence of things. TMNT definitely paved the way for a lot of independent creators to start making at least some money when they hadn't before. There's a funny strip Evan Dorkin did in the early '90s about how he got a call from a Hollywood studio about the TV options for "Milk & Cheese," which they wanted to turn into a kids' show, despite the actual comics being about as kid-friendly as a spitting cobra. Apparently if you had a self-owned comic book in the early '90s somebody wanted the film option, even if your circulation was two drunks and the vicar's cat. The big impetus towards creator-owned stuff, in my mind, starts up with the Kirby family lawsuits after Kirby's death in '94, followed by the first Blade movie conquering the known universe and exactly none of that money going towards Wolfman or Colan. Right about then you have guys like Warren Ellis questioning the entire concept of work-for-hire and of superhero genre dominance, and that's when you see the early 2000s move towards genre diversification: Casey and Morrison on X-Men, post-9/11 Captain America, Casey's corporate WildCATs, the Tsunami line at Marvel, Ellis's "widescreen" superhero, etc. It probably didn't hurt that Gareb Shamus made a concerted, obvious effort to start sucking off the indies around then in the pages of Wizard magazine, which was really blatantly because he was starting up whatever the hell doomed enterprise he was (Black Bull?). Wizard may be poorly regarded these days, but it was influential enough in its heyday that I feel fairly confident saying that books like Preacher wouldn't have been as popular as they were without it. It was a gateway drug for mainstream fans from superheroes into a few select indies.
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Apr 30, 2014 00:28
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I don't know, Waid and Kurt Busiek are basically how you do continuity porn "right," and I'd draw a pretty straight line between Busiek's Avengers and Thunderbolts output and the way modern Marvel treats continuity. Busiek did write the biggest Roy Thomas-style fix-it of all time in Avengers Forever, but it quietly exists off in its own little corner and you don't have to have read it.
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Apr 30, 2014 00:35
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