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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:EDIT: my favorite 'crossover' had no actual name or anything, but when the Cask of Ancient Winters was opened in a Thor storyline and covered the world in winter, just about every other Marvel book that month had at least one panel where the main characters remarked on the 'unseasonable weather'; it wasn't so much a crossover as just a good bit of coordination between editors, but still, I really got a kick out of it I had that Thor storyline growing up, along with issues of X-Men, Spider-Man, and Avengers that happened concurrently to it (IIRC X-Men was just kicking off the Dire Wraiths arc at that point), and thought that was a neat touch. Simonson's run on Thor was just so good. That said, my favourite crossover-as-such is probably the original Secret Wars, simply because, as mentioned earlier, it's entirely self-contained. You can read Secret Wars on its own if you like even if you haven't read most (or any) of the individual series converging in it, and you can read those series without picking up Secret Wars and everything still makes sense. I absolutely hate the modern crossover approach of "everything is crossing over with everything else all the time, so if you want to follow what's going on you absolutely need to be reading these other six series and these two limited-run miniseries"; it's what made the otherwise excellent Loki: Agent of Asgard a lot less enjoyable for me. (This is not helped, I think, by the fact that superhero comics seem to also have moved away from narration boxes and the narrator having a voice at all; those boxes instead contain the character's thoughts, replacing thought bubbles, with the expectation that the character's words and internal monologue, and the art, are enough to carry the story. When this works, I prefer it, but it's not a good fit for things like "bringing the reader up to speed on all the bullshit that happened between the start of this issue and the end of the ostensibly previous one".) ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 23:21 on Apr 24, 2020 |
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Apr 24, 2020 23:17
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IUG posted:This isn't new. I'm reading the original New Mutants again, and every other issue is telling me to read a Fantastic Four to see the origin of Karma, read the Magick mini series, read Uncanny X-Men to see when Xavier went to space, etc. This is true, but "check out this other issue to see a cool thing that's relevant but not necessary to this storyline" is significantly different, at least to me, from "between the end of the previous issue and the start of this one, these characters have had an entire story arc that dramatically changes everything -- and no, we're not even going to try to summarize it, good luck". And yes, I realize that's basically what Secret Wars did, but they did actually fill you in as necessary even if you hadn't read it, and the changes were a lot easier to summarize (Spidey has a new suit found in an alien lab, She-Hulk is part of the FF while Thing is on sabbattical, Colossus broke up with Kitty Pryde, etc). Edge & Christian posted:So maybe it's Stockholm Syndrome or PTSD that makes me not really mind the 1980s style of "mention that a character had an origin story in a different book" 'crossing over', or even some of the more modern "you don't actually have to read the other books, but know that Norse villains are invading the Earth" Events. It beats what was going on in the 1990s. Story time! As a kid I spent many a happy hour going through my parents' box of comics, which collected nearly complete runs of X-Men, Thor, Spider-Man, Avengers, West Coast Avengers, and Iron Man from the early 80s to 1988-89 or so. Among other things, that meant I had most of Simonson's legendary run on Thor, the Hobgoblin and Venom story arcs in Spider-Man, and the Brood, Starjammers, and Dire Wraiths in X-Men. (And the Dark Phoenix arc, since they had the trade of that.) The other three didn't grab me as much, although I do have fond memories of the Avengers/Spidey team-up at Project Pegasus. My dad was even able to borrow Secret Wars from someone at work so I could read it! And I loved them! It's what got me interested in comics, and since then I've gone back and re-read a bunch of my favourites and, for the most part, they still hold up. And while there is a fair bit of "as seen in [other series]" or "continued in [other series]", you could pretty much always follow what was going on, and if you really needed to know the helpful narrator would fill you. Around the mid-90s I had completely exhausted my parents' collection several times over and decided to start buying some comics of my own. So I took my allowance in hand and went out to my friendly local comic shop and grabbed a few recent issues of Spider-Man and X-Men. I knew I'd be picking them up in the middle of a storyline, but, well, I'd done that already with my parents' collection, sometimes multiple times over if there were gaps in the collection, and figured I wouldn't have any trouble getting back into them now, either. After that I basically ignored long-run superhero comics for two decades, sticking to webcomics and limited-run stuff like Planetary, Nextwave, and The Red Star. I'm only very recently starting to get interested in them again (largely due to lurking in this forum), and even then I'm avoiding the main series and sticking to relatively self-contained stuff like Squirrel Girl, Gwenpool, and Agent of Asgard (which turned out not to be nearly as self-contained as I had expected, oh well).
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Apr 25, 2020 13:52
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How Wonderful! posted:Yeah there are a lot of really fun continuity easter eggs (I was delighted by the Henry Hellrung mention in the latest issue) but it's also a super accessible tour of the Marvel universe if you're coming in fresh. Like Skwirl said, all you need to know is that she's a master thief who has a complicated romantic past with Spider-Man, and it might not hurt to know that she's had a variety of bad-luck related powers over the years. Maybe it would help to be aware that the Black Fox is another thief Spider-Man has come into conflict with whose gimmick is just being debonair and old, but that's about it. If you have a general awareness of people like Wolverine, Iron Man, etc.. (Wolverine's a tough piece of poo poo with claws! Iron Man is a rich pervert with flying armor!) you may be able to skim a few captions too. Which run is this, Jed Mackay's run starting in 2019? I always liked Black Cat back in my Spidey-reading days but didn't get to see much of her.
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Jul 2, 2020 23:22
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bessantj posted:What is probably the worst retcon of a character or event? Who is the worst "retconner", someone who constantly makes everything worse with their retconning? It's certainly not the worst and it's probably not even in the top ten, but the one that personally annoys me the most is the Phoenix Force retcon, because Dark Phoenix was a formative comics experience for me and that retcon shits all over it.
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Oct 7, 2020 16:42
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So I was recently struck by a nostalgia for the Buck Rogers in the 25th Century trade paperback I had as a kid. It turns out this is the Quick Fox edition which collects the first few storylines by Lawrence & Morrow from the 1979 comic series. My question is, was there ever a digital release of this? I can't find one, but perhaps I'm looking in the wrong places. It looks like in 2013 there was a hardcover reprint of that era as Buck Rogers: The Gray Morrow Years in 2013, but it doesn't look like that was ever released in digital format either. If all else fails I have a document-feed scanner now, so I could buy a hardcopy second-hand (the family copy got read to death many years ago), unbind it, and digitize it myself, but if there's already an official version I'd rather buy that than go to all that trouble.
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Feb 6, 2021 21:12
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Dawgstar posted:Power Pack is fun, especially early going, but I do warn if you're using Marvel Unlimited it's missing great chunks. Maybe you're lucky and it's missing the chunks where Marvel handed it off to a different writer who went completely off the rails 
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May 27, 2021 15:23
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So, this tweaked a memory -- a while ago, I think mid-2020s, I was looking up some stuff about older Marvel comics and ended up at a website (with a predominantly yellow colour scheme, IIRC) where someone was reading (had read?) basically everything Marvel, in chronological order, with plot summaries and reviews of each issue. It wasn't just a reading order guide, although you could use it as one; and in particular it was great for getting an idea of what the gently caress was going on with one of those crossovers from the 80s where you only have one of the three comic lines it involved or the like. Does anyone have any idea what website I'm talking about here? E: and of course 30 seconds after posting that I'm able to find it, it was this: http://www.supermegamonkey.net/chronocomic/out-of-scope.shtml and it's blue, not yellow wtf, brain ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 16:49 on May 27, 2021 |
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May 27, 2021 16:44
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site posted:both don't toy with me like that 
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Sep 16, 2021 13:18
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CzarChasm posted:Peter, This reminds me of a question that's been lurking at the back of my mind for many years now: who was The Hobgoblin? As a kid I had access to most of ASM #200-#300, but not all of it, and very few issues preceding or following that, and, and at least in the issues I had, the Hobgoblin's identity was A Big Deal that was never actually resolved. At one point Flash Thompson is "revealed" to be the Hobgoblin but it quickly becomes clear that Flash was just a dupe who was brainwashed and dressed up in a Hobgoblin outfit as a distraction. At another point the Hobgoblin is unmasked but proves to be a hireling with the real Hobgoblin monitoring him remotely (who then remotely kills the hireling before he can be questioned). I don't think his identity was ever revealed in the issues I had; IIRC the last we see of him he's working with the Rose and while Spidey kicks the poo poo out of him a few more times he always escapes. I know that #300 kicks off Venom as a new major antagonist, but I don't have many issues after that, so did they ever revisit the Hobgoblin and actually reveal his identity? Did they keep doing "the Hobgoblin UNMASKED lol jk it's just another brainwashed sap" storylines until the end of time? Or did the whole character just get quietly dropped? As I type that out I realize that the idea that there is no "real" hobgoblin and it's just an endless succession of people acting as brainwashed decoys for each other, propagating some sort of infectious, self-replicating hypnotic brainwashing effect, could actually be kind of interesting, but I don't get the feeling that's what they were going for. Vincent posted:I always read it as Ilyana being the best friend and Rachel being the girlfriend (and Storm being the first crush). There are a lot of valid reads on the Kate-Ilyana-Rachel-Ororo dynamic, the important thing is that none of them are at all straight
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Oct 14, 2021 16:42
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Karma Tornado posted:Roger Stern intended Roderick Kingsley to be Hobgoblin, and apparently told Tom DeFalco that when he stopped writing Spider-Man. DeFalco didn't like that plan, and started dropping hints that Richard Fisk was Hobgoblin. DeFalco is then fired. Christopher Priest established that Fisk was the Rose, killed off Ned Leeds, who was another Hobgoblin red herring identity, and is also fired. Peter David, who had been writing Spectacular, briefly took over Amazing, and was like "ah gently caress it it was Ned Leeds the whole time, and he's dead now, bye." much later, Stern gets to do a mini that says actually Kingsley was indeed the original Hobgoblin. it's a mess.  So there was no agreed-upon plan for HG's identity, just a bunch of different writers all trying to grab the wheel long enough to drive the storyline to their preferred conclusion? That's amazing.Skwirl posted:It's a bit more than best friend. I mean They were roommates More seriously -- How Wonderful! posted:I personally used to tend to read Ilyana as asexual or aromantic because of how completely traumatizing everything that happened to her in Limbo is, and just because I don't think she's EVER been really written as being interested in other people romantically or sexually. But then of course in Hickman's New Mutants you have her asking a bunch of death commandoes to make out with her so who knows. IIRC Claremont intended Rachel Summers to be Kate's true love (with Ilyana and Storm as crushes-transitioning-to-chosen-family or thereabouts), but you couldn't actually show that on page under the CCA.
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Oct 15, 2021 02:45
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:Utopian settings are pointless if you want to tell a story, because there’s no possibility for conflict if they’re truly utopian. Attempts at utopia that fall apart or don’t work right are about as close as you can get. Miracleman probably would have ended up there if the publisher hadn’t gone out of business or if Marvel had paid Gaiman the right amount to finish it. I don't buy that all interesting stories have to revolve around conflict (or that utopias are necessarily conflict-free, depending on how broadly you define "conflict"), but stories based around conflict, especially violent conflict, are probably easier pitches at the Big Two.
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Nov 8, 2021 03:50
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The box says "EXTENDING ####Y" on it -- I can't make out the second word -- and it looks like the accessory does have some sort of internal mechanism that could, plausibly, make it extend, so figure out what that noun is and you'll have some idea.
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Jan 29, 2022 15:13
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site posted:I've vaguely heard about the animorphs ending before. Did Applegate have family who died in wars or is she just with it Don't know for sure, but given that she was born in the 1950s, her parents' generation would have WW2 fresh in their minds and she would have grown up during Vietnam. Seems pretty likely. Whether she had personal experience of the consequences of war or not, KAA goes extremely hard to a degree unusual for YA, which I did not appreciate when I originally read it. The quality can be pretty uneven over the series, especially the ghostwritten volumes, but the actual content pulls no punches. She also ended up unintentionally writing a character with strong trans subtext back in the 90s, years before her own daughter would come out as trans, and her reaction to being told that was "I didn't intentionally write the books that way but I'm glad people find them relatable". Vandar posted:Considering how dark the book before it ended up, I appreciated the lighter tone of the oatmeal one. I mean, "instant oatmeal is a drug to yeerks, how wacky!" sounds light-hearted on its face, but the actual affects are addiction and permanent brain damage, and since it removes the kandrona dependency it means any yeerk sufficiently dosed with it is no longer combat effective but there's also no way to remove them from their host ever, who is now stuck with an insane yeerk in their head until one of them dies of old age, with only occasional moments of control and lucidity (and if the oatmeal is removed, the yerk will suffer constant withdrawal symptoms -- which bleed over into the host -- but dies slowly, if at all). They have a whole debate about the ethics of doing what basically amounts to chemical warfare that will leave a whole bunch of yeerks and their hosts perma-hosed even once the war is over! ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 20:40 on Jul 13, 2022 |
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Jul 13, 2022 20:33
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Big Bad Voodoo Lou posted:Was that from Warren Ellis' Global Frequency? I remember a one-issue story about a cyborg woman whose entire body needed to be enhanced through multiple painful and dangerous surgeries, just to control her arm -- very different from most of the other cyborgs in comics, who seem to walk around with cybernetic arms like it's no big deal. Global Frequency #2, "Big Wheel".
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Jul 31, 2022 20:12
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So my daughter has been interested in Star Wars of late and picked up the TBB Skywalker Strikes! from the local library's remainder bin, and enjoyed it. It looks like it's book 1 in a series of 14, set between ANH and ESB. As she liked the first one, is it worth seeking out the others? (Most of her Star Wars experience has been SW lego books from the library, but she has seen ANH and wants to watch ESB and ROTJ for our next two movie nights.)
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Nov 9, 2022 00:28
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Oh yeah, I should have mentioned -- she's 8. She's also reading well above her grade level, which makes it sometimes difficult finding stuff for her that's meaty enough to be enjoyable, but also has content that isn't too violent/scary and not wholly concerned with stuff that she has no interest in/context for. At the moment her main intake is Discworld, with breaks for Gordon Korman and Lumberjanes when she wants a snack, and the occasional Minecraft tie-in novel.
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Nov 9, 2022 19:59
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Madkal posted:Saying ultimate Spider-Man left behind narration boxes is hilarious (unless you are talking about omnipotent narrator). I'm not familiar with Ultimate Spidey, but I did notice that when reading comics in the 80s the convention was: - spoken dialogue: speech bubbles - internal monologue: thought bubbles - authorial narration: narration boxes And when I got back into Marvel stuff ~5 years ago, the convention was: - spoken dialogue: speech bubbles - internal monologue (main character): narration boxes - internal monologue (other characters): absent - authorial narration: absent and wondered when that change happened. I have mixed feelings about it.
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Jan 13, 2023 22:51
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thetoughestbean posted:What struck me is that I can’t think of a single example of something like that happening in the western, particularly American, comics that I’ve read. Are there any mainstream western comics that change the style of drawing mid-comic? My first thought was not cape comics but Calvin & Hobbes, although they are generally in the opposite direction; some of the sunday strips in have a dramatic stylistic shift from the very cartoony "default" style to something much more detailed and/or realistic for Calvin's imagination, e.g. this one.
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Feb 21, 2023 03:24
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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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For me, comics are very much a sometimes food, primarily just because they are less ergonomic than books. TPBs are large and floppy; the tablet I read digital comics on is large and rigid and has limited battery life. Meanwhile, most books I read on my e-reader, which fits comfortably in my purse and can be easily placed on most nearby surfaces and is thus basically always with me. So I'm pretty much only reading comics when I get an urge to read comics specifically, vs. an urge to read a specific genre or emotional vibe or what have you that I'm more likely to satisfy with prose. None of which is particularly useful to you, sorry. But I do think the advice to just read fun "trashy" stuff if it's what you're vibing with or what you have the energy for is good. Not everything you read has to be an intricate work of artistic genius, it's ok to go "I am tired today and want to read a straightforward story about a horrible necromancer and her even more horrible dragon girlfriend fighting monsters" or w/e.
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Jan 6, 2024 23:53
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