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This is one that's going to be at odds with most peoples' opinions but whatever. New X-Men #20-#46 by Craig Kyle & Chris Yost (and various artists, mainly Mark Brooks and Skottie Young)  Most people seem to like this run and if its your first exposure to the characters or anything then I can kind of get that. But for me, just as a personal thing, I hate this run and for me it's honestly worse than a thousand Havoks threatening to piss on a thousand Icemen. I've said it a thousand times but I seriously got into comics with New Mutants v2 by Nunzio DeFilipis and Christina Weir. It was super cheesy teen soap opera poo poo and I ate it up. Is it going to go down as one of the best runs ever? Nope, but just personally it's always going to hold a special place for me and I'll always enjoy re-reading it and I like the characters. So I wasn't too thrilled with the original writers getting booted after House of M in favor of X-23's creators, especially because it was a kind of last minute thing (as the original ones were still working on post-HoM plans) but still I'd give it a chance. What I got was one of the most miserable comics I've ever read. Wachter talked about how Blackest Night was the embodiment of a lot of DC's worst trends and a lot of that same stuff can be applied to the Kyle/Yost run on New X-Men as well: victories are pyrrhic, characters are tortured and murdered and put through the emotional wringer and never really seem to come out on top. It's two years of the writers seemingly trying to find new ways to poo poo all over a bunch of teenagers as some kind of horror version of a growing up analogy. There's light moments here and there (Rockslide and Anole) but even a lot of that is just done in some kind of eh gallows humor manner of "ho ho, we're all gonna die". If there's a way to try and ruin a character emotionally, physically and both it's probably attempted. The opening arc is really the worst of it with kids on a bus being blown up, Wallflower (who was my favorite character) getting shot through the head while her boyfriend with Super Healing Powers is standing right there, Quill gets shot in the face, probably others I'm forgetting too. Also Winddancer's written out so the writers can immediately begin doing a bunch of relationship teasing/drama with Hellion and X-23. It never really gets any better though and the whole thing just comes off as nihilistic and mean-spirited and I think it wound up leaving those characters/that generation of kids in a worse state. Not necessarily due to how the characters THEMSELVES were written but a lot of subsequent X-Men writers have just taken the tone and applied it to the characters as a whole basically making them fragile wimps who flip out and/or cry at the first sign of trouble while massively regressing most of them in terms of personality (Hellion and Surge got it the worst). That's not to say the writers are bad: Yost's become one of my favorites and Scarlet Spider is probably my favorite book either of the Big Two is putting out but that doesn't really change the fact I think that their New X-Men run is a miserable, cynical turd pile. Still not as bad as Avengers Arena or the last few years of pre-Nu 52 Teen Titans (which could be their own posts probably) in terms of horribly written Teenage Misery Comix but still.
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Jul 31, 2013 03:44
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It's minor but the thing that gets me about the JMS Civil War story in ASM is people gushing over the Iron Spider costume. It's hideous, I don't understand it. It's a terrible story and on top of it you've got one of the ugliest Spider-Man costumes ever created.
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Jul 31, 2013 04:34
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The Gehenna thing was the point where I figured Blackest Night wasn't really going to amount to anything good. I tried a few more issues but I don't think I completed it. It's also poorly written in that it's Johns throwing a bunch of "cool moments" at the reader that ultimately have little or no payoff or are just kind of tossed in the background quickly. The Black Lanterns show up and then in a few issues they kind fo just go away sort of in favor of Nekron who turns a bunch of resurrected heroes into Black Lanterns as a cliffhanger. You've got dudes like Animal Man, Aquaman and loving Superman as Black Lanterns and nothing's really done with that either to make them seem special. Then you get the back-up/emergency Lanterns like Scarecrow to end the issue, then like halfway through the next it goes away without ever having accomplished anything outside of being a Cool Moment. Blackest Night was such garbage, goddamn.
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Jul 31, 2013 05:36
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Clip-On Fedora posted:As for terrible runs, I like to think of JMS's run on superman where some lady yells at him for not saving her son/family member/I forget because he was too busy fighting dudes in space/saving the universe from galactic threats. Superman's solution? Walk across America and get in touch with the common man. At least, I think that was JMS's intention anyway. What his run is really about is Superman walking around and being a smug, condescending douche to anybody unfortunate enough to cross his path. This run is not only JMS at his worst, but Superman at his worst outside of the old superdickery comics. Grounded and Superman's lovely attitude in it makes a lot more sense when you realize that JMS is a Ron Paul supporter.
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Jul 31, 2013 08:45
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E the Shaggy posted:Joe Quesada's Spiderman This reminds me of one of the most annoying aspects of JMS: his ability to spin himself as the victim of evil Marvel and Joe Quesada. OMD wasn't HIS fault, it was all Joe Quesada he even took his name off the issue in protest! Sins Past wasn't HIS fault, it was all Joe Quesada! He didn't WANT to leave Thor, it was because of Marvel! Guys, he's such a victim; the little guy and true creator hosed over by the big, nasty, mean corporation. Ignore the fact that Marvel bent over backwards for him most of the time going so far as to let his mediocre protege do fill-ins on his ASM run as well as launch her own series (Araņa) or the fact that he got longer than the run they originally agreed on for Thor. Also ignore the fact that he was down with OMD barring the mechanics of how it'd happen or that Sins Past was still his idea bar Norman being the father (so he should receive all the blame for those stories being garbage), it's totally not his fault at all!
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Aug 1, 2013 03:49
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Nipponophile posted:How about Chris Claremont's run on Exiles in Vol. 2? Didn't just about every arc of that series involve an Evil Sue Storm (except when it didn't and involved an alternate universe Sue Storm)? And then he threw in Psylocke and Sage and alt versions of Kitty and Rogue and ugh. Note too that the run was so bad that its awfulness permeated outwards like nuclear fallout giving Jeff Parker's run terminal cancer before it ever had a chance. This was also the worst run in a series that also included a Chuck Austen run (which, iirc, was actually fairly readable for ol' Chuck outside of being a dick and killing Sunfire).
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Aug 2, 2013 04:50
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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. They basically decided "we need our own Lex Luthor. Osborn is the arche-enemy of our most popular character and is a businessman in a suit therefore...". Like a lot of things in Bendis' Avengers run, especially late, it's taking a square peg and mashing it into a round hole. He's got a role he needs filled so he'll just scan through the Handbook until he finds a semi-obscure character that works on the most base of base levels. Need a superpowered crime lord? Use the Hood despite the fact it being a complete 180 shift in character. Need a Ms. Marvel equivalent for our new Dark Avengers? Have noted misandrist Superia dress in a skimpy outfit taking orders from a man with no problem; she's got super strength so it works!
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Aug 16, 2013 03:33
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cisneros posted:It has Noh Varr, it has kinda Kid Loki, it has a Hawkeye. Young Avengers has everything. Did it get good writing because I couldn't even make it through the first arc. It was trying to be some kind of superhero slice of life thing except nothing about it was entertaining or interesting enough to make that concept work.
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Aug 17, 2013 23:07
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So there is/was a large thread on 4chan's comic board about how awful Byrne is with a lot of creepy-rear end poo poo he's written. Anyway going by something someone mentioned in that thread... John Byrne did an OMAC miniseries where OMAC went around saving human villages in exchange for being able to have sex with their underage teenage girls?  I mean if that's the case I think we've found The Worst Run.
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Oct 15, 2013 09:23
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Small Frozen Thing posted:Edit: He hates anywhere that isn't his forum though, to be fair. He hates his own forum too.
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Oct 16, 2013 08:39
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Saoshyant posted:Byrne's worst sin in my opinion was how he stared at a whole decade of PAD-written Hulk and said "gently caress that". It ruined the character and his supporting cast in such a way that nobody had a clue on what to do with the Hulk afterwards until Greg Pak came along. Pretty sure Byrne's worst sin is the fact that for some reason creepy poo poo involving adult men and young girls happens to keep showing up in his work.
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Oct 16, 2013 13:32
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Gavok posted:The fact that Way was writing Deadpool's series during the character's most popular era was salt in the wound. Also, considering there were so many Deadpool comics being written at the time, Way's stuff really felt far from spectacular in comparison. Part of the reason Way's Deadpool run is so bad, too, is that it basically completely got rid of his supporting cast. Weasel showed up a bit but as you said Way did his best to ruin that relationship for cheap comedy. I can't remember if Blind Al showed up at all and I don't think Sandi and Outlaw appeared either.
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Oct 31, 2013 00:03
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Don't forget that after Willingham DC felt it was a good idea to hand the reigns over to noted bad writer Marc Guggenheim. I actually never read his run because gently caress reading a Guggenheim comic but I'm sure it was terrible. All I really remember is that it gave us this monstrosity after Alan Scott broke his neck or something.
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Nov 2, 2013 23:14
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redbackground posted:It's really amazing that the headline JUSTICE LEAGUE title back then was as far from what we today consider a JL title should be. It was super low-key, full of characters nobody knew about, and stakes that I guess were kind of high, on a good day. If the words "Justice Leauge of America" weren't on the cover, you would never know. The fact that it took until 1997 for DC to realize that "Oh hey, we should put the Big Guns in one book!" is sort of crazy. It really seems like, just by the line up, it would've been better served being called the Global Guardians but there's no way you're going to sell books with that name. Of course with that line up and whatnot I doubt it was pulling great numbers anyway.
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Nov 5, 2013 19:28
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Metal Loaf posted:I've also quite enjoy what I've read, which admittedly isn't a huge amount, of Kelly's run on X-Men post-"Operation: Zero Tolerance" (though you might as well call it the Kelly/Seagle run, given how closely intertwined it was with UXM while Seagle was writing it at the same time). It's an overlooked period in the X-Men's history but I think it stands up to some of the post-Heroes Reborn relaunches that were happening concurrently. Well there is a thread about underrated runs and stories... Like I said over in that thread I really like the road trip arc in X-Force that was happening around the same time. Good, goofy fun with at least two really nice one-off issues: the Burning Man one and the issue with the government cover up town in New Mexico. The latter was a fill-in issue written by Joseph Harris and I remember hearing good things about his Fury of Firestorm run on here after Simone/Van Sciver left. Well until DC decided that the best idea to revitalize the book was move away from the interesting "Firestorm as a metaphor for nuclear proliferation" approach and go with Dan "Blandest Writer In Comics" Jurgens. The Simone/EVS Fury of Firestorm run with its hamfisted liberal vs. conservative set up could probably go in here from everything I've heard/seen about it.
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Nov 6, 2013 04:32
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In Kirkman's case IIRC it's because he had no idea when his run was ending. It was supposed to be a filler run until Bryan Singer's run started but Singer's run never happened so it just kept on going with no real plan.
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Nov 8, 2013 19:53
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I mentioned it in my Kyle/Yost New X-Men post but it's at the end and I feel confident enough in saying that Avengers Arena firmly belongs in this thread. Originally this was intended to be simply an arc as part of a broader Braddock Academy ongoing. However Axel Alonso and Tom Brevoort zeroed in on the part where Arcade tries to put them in a death match in Murder World and I guess figured "hey that Hunger Games thing is pretty hot right now, let's make that the whole book". So take a few established characters (Chase/Nico from Runaways, Hazmat/Mettle/Reptil from Avengers Academy, X-23 from the X-Men and AA, and solo heroes Darkhawk and Red Raven), add in some new ones, add Arcade and hype it up as some kind of controversial book and you're good to go. This book loving sucks. From its concept on down to its execution to even its art (Walker's a good artist generally but he definitely deteriorates and things start getting a little wonky as the thing goes on) it's a piece of poo poo. The very first sentence in the book is a A veritable treasure trove of bad writing indicators are in full bloom here. Deaths lack any emotional punch because they tend to happen in retarded, almost throwaway at times ways or to characters you don't care about because they all have about as much personality as cardboard here. Does a character suddenly start getting focus and their backstory expanded after having neither for like the previous 3/4 of the series? They're going to die. The characters entirely serve the plot and there comes a point where you have to think most of the characters are some of the mentally stupidest people to ever grace the medium as contrived, yet easily predictable, plot twists happen to keep things going and a lot of the fighting basically happens with Arcade going "GO ALONG WITH IT" and characters essentially "durr, okay" more or less. And then there's the ridiculously handwavey explanation for how all of this happens. How was Arcade able to capture these kids from the X-Men, Avengers, SWORD, and other places that should theoretically have top of the line security tech? With super-duper-totally-better teleportation tech duh! How does he have godlike powers? Super nanites everywhere. How come someone like Nico doesn't just end things immediately or get them all out of there? Super nanites everywhere thus her magic is hosed. The answer to everything is basically super nanites, super tech, and LMDs or some poo poo all courtesy of Arcade's previously non-existant hyper-competent girl friday sidekick. It also, I think, effectively ruins Arcade. Before he was a fun and goofy villain who trapped people in giant pinball machines and poo poo. He was the comic bookiest villain whose deal was if you win, hey you win because it's all a game to him. Now he's not because he needed to be super-serious and badass and it's the most exposure the character's gotten in a long, long time. It might be a bit of hyperbole but congrats Marvel, you now have your own Doctor Light except replace rape with killing kids I guess. It's an awfully written book with an ultra-cynical, utterly repugnant concept that exists solely to glom onto something popular while completely missing the entire point of that popular thing. Suben fucked around with this message at 06:43 on Nov 26, 2013 |
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Nov 26, 2013 06:35
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It was announced in September of last year and presumably it would've been in the works before then so it's not at all inconceivable to think the pitch came around the same time the movie came out (which was in June) and it was zeroed in on for that reason. The first few covers were homages to "teen death match" or whatever you want to call it stuff too (the first few issues also had Lord of the Flies and, surprise, Hunger Games homage covers; maybe a few more I'm forgetting). And the death thing is just really bad in how they have no emotional punch whatsoever. Take Red Raven. Sure she's an obscure character with only a handful of appearances, definitely Z-list, but Hopeless apparently had more plans for her but had to wind up cutting them so instead she's killed unceremoniously in the second issue by flying up, hitting the ceiling, and breaking her neck after falling to the ground while nobody reacts. Or look at Juston/ He seemingly has an entire story arc about fighting on his own, injured and I think paralyzed, and the entire thing happens completely off page until he shows up with his Sentinel converted into a giant pilotable robot and he's in quick order unceremoniously tossed from the thing which kills him so Apex can rampage around it and kill (until her revival) Nico. And then by the next issue it's done with too. It's like Hopeless just kind of went from plot point A to plot point B to plot point C like he was marking things off on a checklist. There's just no emotional investment to be gained from anything. Why should I give a gently caress when the Atlantean girl dies (in a confusing death, I'm still not even sure HOW she died she just kind of did) when she's spent most of the series barely being a character? If I'm a new reader why should I care about the deaths of Mettle, Red Raven or Juston when I'm never given any indication to care about who these people are? If they made me feel anything it's annoyance that some decent characters (Mettle and Juston mainly) were taken off the table (because face it, they're all C-list or lower which means they're not on the fast track to coming back) and that it wasn't even done well; just in a shlocky, shock value manner.
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Nov 26, 2013 07:35
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Something just ripped it out of him because I guess that can happen. It's no like Hopeless really did any kind of proper research on the characters it seems. I mentioned it earlier but Hazmat's "I've always been a hater" line is a real good example of that. Hazmat's deal was that she was a nice, normal girl with a perfect life who got it ripped away from her when her powers developed and over time this turned her into a bitter, cynical and angry person and then over the course of AA she winds up working through her issues and, while still kind of bitchy, is definitely in a way better place than she was at the start of the series. That line basically tosses all of her character development in the garbage (while pretty much ignoring her backstory as well) to turn her into a one dimensional caricature of how she was in Academy. Haha that reminds me that I really love how the first person killed in the book is Mettle who's (half) black. The black guy literally died first.
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Nov 27, 2013 02:55
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The Flash would be way better if he was called Speedy Fastboots.
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Dec 31, 2013 23:31
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Eckertmania posted:It's Kyle, and it was the only part of Countdown that I enjoyed. You mean you didn't like Swole Dog jumping at (and murdering) one of the Triplicate Girls with a knife?
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Jan 2, 2014 22:02
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That's Superboy-Prime. Superman-Prime was during that period where they couldn't use Superboy because of the lawsuit (IIRC) so they aged SBP up and he destroyed worlds in Countdown while screaming about how he'd "kill you to death".
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Jan 2, 2014 22:33
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Dark_Tzitzimine posted:That happened to pretty much all the arcs on Countdown, my guess is than the writers only knew the general outline of FC and started building to what they thought would be the Status Quo on FC. Once than they realized Morrison would be doing his own thing they sloppily pedaled back on the developments. The way I've always heard it is that they were not only working from a vague outline of Morrison's ideas but from an outdated outline at that because Morrison basically kept his actual plans very close to the vest (which is, imo, kind of a lovely thing to do if you're working on the tentpole event comic of a shared universe but whatever).
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Jan 3, 2014 00:23
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Oh sure, and that's not a defense of Countdown either since it would've been editorially driven crap full of half-assed ideas (Forerunner) even if they had Morrison's most up to date plans.
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Jan 3, 2014 00:29
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Teenage Fansub posted:All a character needs to become relevant and interesting is to have an author who cares enough to make it so. Cyborg not being compelling at the moment has nothing to do with accumulated backstory. The problem is that Cyborg has like three decades across multiple reboots and various outside appearances (i.e. cartoons) of being a really loving boring character. It says a lot when the least boring he's ever been was a cartoon where he really didn't have much of a personality beyond a one-dimensional Slightly Goofy Black Guy Who Shouts "Aw yeah" deal.
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Jan 6, 2014 02:49
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I think/assume Lobdell stepped down because of workload or something since he left in the middle of the Operation: Zero Tolerance storyline leaving James Robinson to spend the next three issues finishing it up with Bachalo (whose art at that point had become really generically manga influenced with big eyes and everyone drawn in a vaguely SD style). A lot of Generation X was made up on the fly too with no real roadmap of where they wanted to go but Lobdell and Bachalo worked well enough together that it at least remained fun and enjoyable. It was also its own brand of weird and madcap and I think what Hama was trying to do was keep the general tone going... it's just that he was loving awful at it. How were Cable, X-Man, and Excalibur during the late '90s pre-Counter-X? Faerber and JFM were doing well (maybe not spectacular but perfectly readable and enjoyable stuff) on Generation X and X-Force before Ellis and his co-writers came in to boost sales. I know around the same time the main books had the aborted Seagle/Kelly runs, Alan Davis, and then Claremont's lovely return.
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Jan 12, 2014 23:03
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I know it was a big part of Kelly's run on Deadpool with two characters from it (Zoe Culloden and Montgomery) being fairly important supporting characters. I don't think either of them has shown up in a comic since Kelly's run though. Edit: Mondo being a traitor was Lobdell close to the end of his run. Faerber then did a story like 30 issues later where Mondo returned and it was revealed that the one that Generation X knew was a plant-based clone created by Black Tom while the real Mondo had been living under the care of Black Tom the whole time and was thus a villain. Suben fucked around with this message at 23:59 on Jan 12, 2014 |
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Jan 12, 2014 23:55
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Skin was pretty cool and I wish he was still around.  He never really came off as "oh woe is me" about his appearance so much as he was already a kind of cynical dude so it was just one more lovely thing thrown on him. It always came off as less "oh woe is me" and more resignation that yep, this is how things were whether he liked it or not.
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Jan 13, 2014 06:21
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Remember how Claremont jumped on Exiles and the first thing he did was bring in Sage, Psylocke, versions of Rogue, Kitty, and Mystique and then had I believe multiple arcs about some version of an evil Sue Richards (or maybe it was just the one and my brain is stretching it out) and it was so bad that it's forever ruined the Exiles name? Of course I think it had kind of been going there anyway with World Tour being boring. A big part of the fun of Exiles, IMO, was that it would do worlds that you wouldn't expect (say a world taken over by the Transmode Virus where Mary Jane is one of the premiere heroes) using alternate versions of generally lesser/more obscure X-Men characters (a powered version of Mariko Yashida, alternate versions of Changeling, Mimic, Thunderbird, etc.). The World Tour kind of changed it to basically visiting a bunch of places we've already seen plenty of times and then adding a character from them which took away part of the appeal of the book. Pre-World Tour it felt like there were basically endless possibilities for worlds and characters and that seemed to leave during/after it.
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Jan 15, 2014 07:03
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Dan Didio posted:I really want a full-on, no bullshit Exiles reboot. I really hate the "comic books as TV seasons" thing Marvel is doing but I think if any book would benefit from that approach it'd be Exiles. You could easy have year long or year and a half long "seasons" with a specific creative team focusing on a specific team and their mission and once that ends, give it a few months, start it back up with a new creative team and new team of characters with a different mission, etc. Take the American Horror Story approach to seasons/volumes and it could work I think. Just make it a place for creators to do whatever with alternate universes and takes on characters. Have a team with a version of Havok raised by Corsair in a universe that's basically a cosmic swashbuckling film. Or, to drag out an obscure character, have a version of Network from a more upbeat world where the Avengers and X-Men are treated with similar respect and she's Tony Stark's quirky technopath protege. Have fun stories, gloomy ones, whatever. Let creators go nuts with the concept kind of like what Savage Wolverine is doing for artists and it'd work.
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Jan 15, 2014 07:25
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I Before E posted:oh my god that is the stupidest loving page. It's like something out of Fist of the North Star except without being anywhere near as cool as Fist of the North Star. Anyway I reminded myself of it so gently caress it.  Battle of the Atom Brian Michael Bendis/Jason Aaron/Brian Wood (W), Frank Cho/Stuart Immonen/David Lopez/Chris Bachalo/Giuseppe Camincoli (A) The set-up is fairly standard: Beast travelled back in time to pull the original X-Men into the present to try and change present Cyclops' mind or show him the error of his ways or something because currently Beast is a loving moron. Well the O5 being in the present means A Bad Thing happens so in order to prevent the future from coming to pass a group of X-Men from the future travel to the past to send the O5 back. The group consists of Charles Xavier (grandson of Charles Xavier), an aged Kitty Pryde, an aged Beast, Xorn (past Jean as an adult), Deadpool, a grown-up Molly Hayes, and Iceman as a mindless ice brute. Young Cyclops gets killed for a moment before being resurrected by Triage (one of Cyclops' students) and during that time present Cyclops disappears and it's debated whether or not to send the O5 back. After the arrival of the Future X-Men young Jean and Cyclops leave to find present Cyclops but the Xorn finds them and convinces Jean they need to go back. But Magik and O5 Beast and Iceman travel to the future and find out oh no the Future X-Men are really the future Brotherhood and evil because dragons assassinated President Dazzler so the real Future X-Men (which include Jubilee, a grown up version of Jubilee's son Shogo, Ice Wizard Iceman, and Colossus' Lemmy Kilmister Mustache) agree to go back and fight the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood are revealed, fighting happens, future Kitty is really Raze (future son of Wolverine and Mystique, inheritor of both their powers and the most '90s character name since Adam X the X-Treme), the Brotherhood captures the O5 but oh no they can't be sent back in time because Reasons so instead the Brotherhood hightails it to a military base and attacks the military bringing in SHIELD who deploy the Sentinels they've been developing. Both present teams of X-Men and the Future X-Men defeat the Sentinels, then the O5 engage in a really hamfisted homage to the X-Men #1 cover, and Xorn's pushes her powers past their limits killing herself but allowing the Brotherhood to escape. So now Xorn, future Beast, future Deadpool, future Jubilee, and future Steelstache are dead, the future X-Men hit 88 miles per hour except Storm and Black Panther's daughter who decides to stay in the present to help track down the Brotherhood members that are still out there (Xavier, Molly, Raze), Wolverine yells at X-Men about how everyone he's killed doesn't matter because Scott killed Xavier while possessed by the Phoenix, and the O5 are mad that it was agreed to send them back and Kitty agrees because their freedom to apparently cause time to collapse in case one of them is killed is more important than time NOT collapsing so all six of them act like babies and go join present Cyclops' X-Men and the story is done. I hate this story. It lasts two months but due to its structure (Battle of the Atom #1 and #2 as bookends, running through Wolverine and the X-Men, Uncanny X-Men, All-New X-Men, and X-Men) it seems like it takes way longer than that. Probably because the pacing is so goddamn slow that you can basically tell the story in like four issues at most. The future characters are also really poorly developed. The Future X-Men are basically there to serve as a plot twist and then none of them matter afterwards. Xavier II is obviously evil from the outset, Raze is lame and would be more tolerable if he said things like "Time to RAZE a little hell" or "Let's RAZE the stakes" or something but no he's just Wolverine's Evil Son. I'm not even sure why Molly is there because she does nothing but stand around and then get punked out by Magik. Everything about the story is just dumb and bad and even though it's setting up a status quo shift it just feels completely pointless because a.) I don't care about the O5 and want them gone and b.) I want the stupid loving Schism to end already. To be perfectly honest, as far as X-Men stories go (at least ones limited to the core books, not ancillary ones) this is my least favorite X-Men story ever. At least The Draco's dumb poo poo was contained to Uncanny and didn't completely derail every book in the line while having it's dumb poo poo pretty much ignored until Aaron decided he wanted to use Azazel ten years later I guess. Suben fucked around with this message at 07:25 on Jan 23, 2014 |
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Jan 23, 2014 07:23
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With MJ dying that was just another in a long line of attempts to get rid of the marriage and go back to something closer to the earlier days of ASM or at least maybe the college era (the Clone Saga was another attempt) of a single, down on his luck Peter Parker. To be fair the Peter/MJ wedding was a marketing stunt but unlike, say, the Storm/Black Panther wedding (which just felt like it kind of existed and that was it) it worked to really make both characters better but it seems like from day one somebody was trying to break it up before they'd get cold feet or reason would prevail and they'd be back together. Quesada was really just the latest person to try it and the only one bull-headed enough to make it stick. And yeah, the post-Clone Saga Mackie/Byrne stuff was easily the worst attempt at that. Suben fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Feb 7, 2014 |
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Feb 7, 2014 22:34
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Giedroyc posted:Mackie's X-Factor had the most bizarre line up of characters* that didn't work. Forge! Polaris! Sabretooth! Mystique! Alpha Flight's breakout character Wildchild! A hard light hologram version of Bishop's sister you all wanted to forget existed Shard! To be fair I don't think that line up or set up is really a problem. Carey's X-Men had a pretty oddball lineup (and even included Sabretooth and Mystique) and was really good. Carey seemed to like using lesser/overlooked characters like that considering that he also used the New X-Men kids (and not the name ones; Trance and Indra were the ones he used the most I believe) and the last arc of his run involved friggin' Ariel from the Fallen Angels mini. The road trip arc of John Francis Moore's X-Force is, well, a road trip with some very light action and is pretty fun. And I liked the pre-Yost/Kyle New Mutants/New X-Men stuff a lot. It's just that Mackie is a bad writer so while something like that can work in the right hands, the right hands obviously don't belong to him.
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Feb 10, 2014 02:54
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Didn't Invincible also pull the "well you were in space and not fulfilling my needs" thing with Amber to break her and Mark up?
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Feb 10, 2014 16:04
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Probably Magic posted:Fraction's Uncanny X-Men run was pretty bad too, but then, Uncanny seems to be the book where good writers go to die because Brubaker stunk on it too. Not as bad as Austen, of course, but it was awful compared to their work on other properties. In honesty what's the last good Uncanny run? You have Gillen's short run which was fun but aside from that, going back the last 15 or so years, you have: Chris Claremont II which gives us... The Neo. Then you have Joe Casey's unremarkable run. Then Austen. Claremont III. Bru's ultra-boring run. Fraction's exceedingly medicore-at-best run. Gillen's fun run. Now you have Bendis which some people like but I absolutely hate.
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Feb 23, 2014 19:19
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Really with the New 52 it's like they took Legion History and applied it to the entire line.
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Apr 15, 2014 03:34
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rkajdi posted:(Roy Thomas and him deserve each other) Maybe I'm missing something or not all up on my history or whatever but what's so bad about Roy Thomas?
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Apr 29, 2014 05:16
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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. 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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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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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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