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How about the time David Anthony Kraft based an entire three part Defenders storyline, 58-60 on Blue Oyster Cult references? There's a villain named Vera Gemini, leader of the Cult of the Harvester of Eyes, who are served by Agents of Fortune and Reapers of Souls. Presumably you are not to fear the latter. They were trying to bring back a demon named Balthazar (all praise) though stealing Dr. Strange's amulet - harvesting eyes.   The stories are called "Agents of Fortune", "Tyranny and Mutation", and "The Revenge of Vera Gemini", all songs and the last is where Gemini originates from. BOC themselves appear in issue 59 to play a game of "Dominance and Submission" (another song) against Gemini herself.  It's also the first appearance of Devil-Slayer, who was an escaped member of the Cult and stuck around as a Defenders character for awhile. Jim Shooter said that Kraft wrote this "ripoff" but "he thinks he did nothing wrong" whereas Kraft says he was backstage at a BOC concert when he talked to Eric Bloom, the singer and guy with the sunglasses, beard and poofy hair, about it. Bloom was a big Marvel geek, dug the idea and even visited Marvel's offices. There was PR about it in music media (that I can't find) I believe Kraft over Shooter. Madkal posted:If I am not mistaken I think Barda was based, personality wise, on Kirby's wife. So let that add an extra stink for you. Her physical appearance is based on Lainie Kazan though. Lightning Lord fucked around with this message at 08:34 on Nov 5, 2015 |
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Nov 5, 2015 08:30
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Were any cities set on flame with rock and roll?
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Nov 5, 2015 09:32
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Did Godzilla show up?
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Nov 5, 2015 17:40
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No, they said he had to go.
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Nov 5, 2015 17:43
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Wheat Loaf posted:Were any cities set on flame with rock and roll? Probably. I just noticed on the page there's references to the songs "The Red and the Black", "Astronomy" (Nexus of the crisis) "ME-262" (Heavy metal fruit) and "The Golden Age of Leather" (Last crusade and final outrage) as well. Kraft really went all in. There's probably a reference to veterans of some kind of psychic war somewhere in there too. There always is. BTW I know they're mostly "That cowbell band" now but BOC is one of my favorite bands. Unmature posted:Did Godzilla show up? Marvel actually had the license to Godzilla at this point so it was a possibility.
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Nov 5, 2015 17:58
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How off limits is Manga in this thread? I picked up a series probably 5 years ago that just blew my mind in how aggresively stupid it was. The only reason I'd think to include it in here is because it focuses on America (and is wrong in basically every way possible) and was Written by the guy who wrote Lone Wolf and Cub. It is also not generic "Moe blob" bad, it's, well... The phrase "I need you to pee in my eyes to get the blood out," is involved, and it's done dead-pan with no humor involved.
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Nov 5, 2015 18:12
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RandomFerret posted:But first, a little backstory. See, the thing about the Transformers comic and the GI Joe comics from the same time is that nobody wanted them to be successful. There was a law at the time that toy commercials couldn't be more than 50% animation, they had to actually show the toy being played with by kids. That law was interpreted as applying to saturday morning cartoons as well, arguing that they were commercials more than they were entertainment, which was almost certainly true. The law didn't apply to print works so Hasbro approached Marvel to produce comic books. Then they could say the cartoons were adaptations of the comics, and everything was hunky dory. 1) There *were* regulations about toy advertisements during children's programming and how you had to mostly show the actual product rather than fantastical drawn/animated/filmed interpretations of the product. The loophole that Hasbro/Marvel came up with was advertising the GI Joe comic book, which was "literature" not "toys" and therefore they could throw a bunch of the cartoon into the ad for the GI Joe comic book that they could not into an ad for the GI Joe toy line. 2) This was all moot very quickly in the 1980s because Ronald Reagan appointed Mark Fowler as the new head of the FCC in 1981. He proceeded to pretty much ignore any sort of complaints for two years, then in 1983 did a whole deregulation thing that got rid of these rules. The only time anyone ever mounted a successful complaint along the lines of "this television show is just advertising toys to my kid!" was actually Romper Room in the 1970s, and then a Hot Wheels cartoon was under investigation but got canceled before any action was taken. 3) Marvel was totally in bed with Hasbro for both the GI Joe and Transformers lines, Marvel editors and writers created a lot of the lore attached to both toy lines. Marvel Productions was behind both animated series. Larry Hama retooled his "Fury Force" SHIELD vs. Hydra pitch into what became the basic concept of GI Joe versus Cobra. Why would anyone want these books to fail? They were all on board together. 4) As mentioned earlier, the regulations were out the window by the time either cartoon series launched, and there were plenty of toy line cartoons that either had abortive comic book runs (Inhumanoids, Robotix) or no comic book series at all (Pac-Man, Pound Puppies, Teddy Ruxpin). The cartoons were adaptations of the toy line in the same way as the comics were adaptations of the toy line, and they frequently had very little in common storywise. quote:Hasbro paid Marvel up front to produce the comics because they needed them to run for as long as the show was on the air, so it didn't matter how well they sold. This lead to some interesting things happening. Marvel gave the editors on these books free reign to come up with their own stories, and they would often act as a springboard for promising writers and artists who didn't have the experience to land big titles. Larry Hama ended up taking GI Joe and using it to write personal stories about his own experiences as a Japanese immigrant in the US, and Simon Furman wrote page after page of dense mythology and backstory for Transformers, basically turning it into his own version of New Gods. quote:Having achieved the kind of cartoon villainy that they couldn't even air in their own cartoons, Hasbro still wasn't satisfied. If they wanted to sell their new toys like Campervan with Flames On It That Makes It Cool Right or What Is This You Just Painted The Old One White And Put It in a New Box, they had to keep kids from seeing Optimus Prime anywhere, including the comics. They sent a new editorial mandate to Marvel. Optimus Prime must die. Not to say that the Transformers comics weren't baffling and frequently terrible, even to a child such as myself.
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Nov 5, 2015 18:20
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Having read the Marvel UK Transformers comics at the time, even as a 7-11 year old the US reprints were lazy hackjobs with frequently lovely art compared to Furman's UK produced stories. They tended to flick between US to UK in it about every 6-10 weeks depending on storyline, but once Furman got a hold on the animated movie storyline he wrote around it and incorporated 2 different timelines in (Target 2006 onwards), whereas the American storylines just kind of plodded on with some boring poo poo with nobody characters generally involving Spike, GB Blackrock or some other humans no kid gave a poo poo about because transforming robots should be fighting all the time, people should be collateral damage or incidental. Although funnily, the back up strip was Larry Hama/Frank Springers GI Joe, which was all it was worth reading for when the US TF strips were the main strip.
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Nov 6, 2015 00:37
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Anora posted:How off limits is Manga in this thread? I picked up a series probably 5 years ago that just blew my mind in how aggresively stupid it was. 
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Nov 6, 2015 05:42
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One kind of comic that always fascinates me is wrestling comics. Namely the official comics. There's always something completely bizarre about them. First you have Valiant's WWF Battlemania in the early 90's. Ran for five issues and while it wasn't very good, it was at least smart about how to make the concept work. Each issue was two self-contained stories about wrestlers getting into fights outside the ring. They never mentioned Hogan once, even though he was champ at the time, but I imagine it was because of the whole Marvel/"Hulk" situation. The strangest part of the book is that Steve Ditko drew half of the stories. If you've ever wanted to see Ditko draw Big Boss Man fighting the Undertaker, this is the book for you. Dwayne McDuffie wrote an Ultimate Warrior story that's actually decent too. Then Marvel did a 12-issue run of WCW. It was an ongoing story, which was a really, really bad idea. See, it takes a long while for a comic to be created and released and wrestling is very fluid. Guys simply vanish from the book completely due to leaving the company, including WCW Champion Lex Luger. He simply stops showing up and they aren't even allowed to talk about it. Then guys start randomly shifting alignment to catch up with what's going on with them on TV. The main story was about Sting's old, broken-down trainer selling his soul to Satan to become the Ghoul. For a little while, he had Sting brainwashed and made him destroy a cancer-ridden child's birthday cake. Mid-90's WWF tried to do a comic called WWF Krozor. It was only shown in a preview in an issue of WWF Magazine and it's SO BAD. No hyperbole, it's the worst comic I have read in my life. The art is atrocious on so many levels. The writing is just as bad. The plot is a bunch of insane bullshit about the Undertaker having an alien civilization's invasion warning beamed into his head. I'll post the comic in full later because it needs to be seen. They never made the full comic and the world is better for it. In the late 90's, Chaos Comics did a bunch of WWF stories. Mainly an Undertaker ongoing, a Steve Austin miniseries and some one-shots for the Rock, Mankind and Chyna. Again, they were about their adventures outside the ring. Undertaker's had him fighting demons and poo poo and involved Kane's half-sister Jezebel, shown conceived in a flashback via Paul Bearer raping a woman. WCW and Marvel UK were going to do a new series based on an action figure line of WCW wrestlers as superheroes fighting monsters. Nash, Goldberg, Sting, etc. Even though they released an 8-page short comic to go with the figures with an ad to get a subscription to the eventual ongoing, it wasn't to be. One of the main characters, Chris Benoit, just left WCW for WWF. Whoops! In the 00's, Titan Comics did WWE Heroes, which was completely batshit. In it, Triple H is literally Cain from the bible reborn (the Firstborn) and it turns out Abel was really evil all along (The Shadow King), so Cain was the good guy in slaying him. They've been reborn again and again through the history of man and the Firstborn settled into life as a wrestler. Then the Shadow King has his followers take everyone hostage during Wrestlemania and... it's just weird. It ended right before giving us a story about John Cena as a time-traveling gladiator. Probably because Chris Jericho was supposed to be involved and he was gone from the company at that point. Then there's the most recent WWE Superstars by Papercutz. It was done in three completely separate stories that had nothing to do with each other. First was a four-issue story about Titan City where all the wrestlers were reimagined as crime noir characters. John Cena was a cop arrested for a crime he didn't commit, Randy Orton's the corrupt DA, Paul Heyman's a mob boss with Brock Lesnar as his muscle, Rey Mysterio is a masked vigilante, the Shield are corrupt cops, CM Punk is an anarchist voice of the people, Daniel Bryan is a crazy V for Vendetta type, etc. It wasn't that bad and had moments of being clever, but during the last issue, there were several pages of fill-in art that were atrocious. The second arc had to do with CM Punk, Daniel Bryan, Mysterio and Hornswoggle blacking out and finding out that they practically destroyed everything behind the scenes before Raw. They have a couple hours to get to the bottom of what happened or they're fired. On paper, it would've been fine and delightfully silly, but that fill-in guy from the previous arc does all the art here and it's HORRIBLE. Constant reused art and terrible expressions. I should point out that many months prior to this, CM Punk left the company in really bad terms, yet they still had him star in eight issues of the book. The end of the "Rawshamon" story had a scene between him and Bryan that was meant to be a touching farewell to Punk as he left the series and company in general. Later, they announced that they would be rereleasing the trade with CM Punk completely replaced. I don't think that's happened yet, but holy poo poo if they finally get around to it. The final arc was called the Secret Raw and it rules. It's about wrestlers from various time periods being thrown into a Battle Royale situation on an alien planet with Bryan and 1980's Roddy Piper teaming up to figure out what's going on. I believe the villain is Bobby Heenan's brain. The story included a clone army of Composite Hogan/Cenas as well as a Composite Dusty Rhodes/Trish Stratus. It ended with a cliffhanger of Shawn Michaels being abandoned on the Battleworld planet and supposedly they're going to give us a graphic novel follow-up. But that's probably not happening.
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Nov 6, 2015 07:53
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Which one did Mick Foley write? And how about those homage covers? Did you leave out the Warrior book for its own post? Now that was some crazy poo poo.
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Nov 6, 2015 08:55
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I like the idea of a bad guy being "the Brain" in Bobby "the Brain" Heenan.
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Nov 6, 2015 12:29
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Here's an article on the first volume, it's written better then I can do at the moment: http://subatomicbrainfreeze.typepad.com/subatomic_brainfreeze/2008/02/im-here-to-talk.html. Follow the link at the bottom for the panel about the blood in the eyes, as I had forgotten the exact wording. That said, give me a few days to write something up/have war flashbacks about the series. I saw volume 2 at a half-price books and would need to pick it up to remember stuff from that volume. Volume 2 was kind of hard to get through as it was mostly rape and racism, it's 3 on that just ramp up the stupidity though. As a preview, it involves a manhunt Vs the lead character by a bunch of Geriatric ex-cops, him buying a football team and being the lead quarterback, and a knife fight on a sinking aircraft carrier against a Native American. The only reason I read through the whole thing was because I got all of it for $20, having no idea what I was picking up, other then "hey the guy who wrote Lone Wolf and Cub did this."
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Nov 6, 2015 15:26
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Gavok posted:One kind of comic that always fascinates me is wrestling comics.  (Jokes aside WWE Heroes sounds like the best thing ever.)
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Nov 8, 2015 03:20
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Die Laughing posted:Which one did Mick Foley write? And how about those homage covers? Foley co-wrote WWE Superstars. No idea how much of it he actually wrote, though that series' problems were mostly outside the writing. Other than how "wrestlers reimagined as noir characters" got really tired by the third issue. I've never actually read the Ultimate Warrior comics. I've only read about them and, yeah, they belong here. Not even just for the weird Christmas special where he captures Santa, strips him and chains him up. The first three issues or so are some inane origin story with Liefeld-knockoff art. Then a completely unrelated fourth and final issue is released in black and white by a different artist where Warrior writes a gigantic, unreadable rant about how much he hates the original artist for screwing him over. TwoPair posted:
When it was coming out, I gleefully bought every issue of WWE Heroes because I wanted to see how balls-out insane it could get. The answer is "very." The thing that hurts it for me is how up Triple H's rear end it is. Behind all the ridiculous stories of time travel, zombies, cheetah men, biblical bastardization, Chris Jericho having a Jojo Stand, and so on, is nothing but talk about how Triple H is this unbeatable, cool guy that everyone admires. Considering Triple H is the Mary Sue of wrestling to begin with, it's annoying once you notice that that's all the comic is. One thing that's funny about it is how there's this big mystery in the first couple issues where the Shadow King knows that his brother is in the WWE, but who could it be? This John Cena person? That Randy Orton fool? Maybe the fact that Shadow King looks exactly like Triple H with half of his face burned is a big hint.
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Nov 8, 2015 17:15
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There was that time Robert Kirkman ended an issue of The Walking Dead by repeating the cliffhanger page, but having it altered so that Rick Grimes is abducted by aliens. Then there's a redoing of the coma scene from the first issue, but Rick has a robot hand. Then Michonne tells him that it turns out that aliens made the zombies to depopulate the Earth so they could steal its water. Then the aliens resurrect the Governor as a cyborg who challenges Rick to a fight. Next issue Kirkman goes "guys, I was joking", it carries on from the first ending and the aliens are never mentioned again. It's such a wierd gag that comes out of nowhere, and it's like six pages of new art, so they put effort into it.
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Nov 9, 2015 00:53
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OldMemes posted:There was that time Robert Kirkman ended an issue of The Walking Dead by repeating the cliffhanger page, but having it altered so that Rick Grimes is abducted by aliens. Then there's a redoing of the coma scene from the first issue, but Rick has a robot hand. Then Michonne tells him that it turns out that aliens made the zombies to depopulate the Earth so they could steal its water. Then the aliens resurrect the Governor as a cyborg who challenges Rick to a fight. I think that came from the letter page if I'm remember right. He made a joke that issue whatever would have aliens in it.
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Nov 9, 2015 00:55
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If you read the letters page in the comics as they were coming out, that gag was a long time coming, but I'd assume it makes NO SENSE if you read it in trades.
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Nov 9, 2015 00:57
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Lurdiak posted:If you read the letters page in the comics as they were coming out, that gag was a long time coming, but I'd assume it makes NO SENSE if you read it in trades. It's not in the trades. I guess it makes a little more sense in context then.
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Nov 9, 2015 01:03
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Here's the skinny, basically:quote:“When I pitched The Walking Dead originally, it was turned down, simply because there had never been a successful zombie book in the history of comics," Robert said. Image publishers Eric Stephenson and Jim Valentino, also in the video, felt all zombie movies were the same and wanted something new, some hook to make the story stand out in an overcooked genre. This came up again and again in the letters page, culminating in issue 75. However you feel about Kirkman's writing, that is some clever bullshitting.
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Nov 9, 2015 01:08
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The alien story probably would have been better than what we got. At least aliens would have changed up the formula some.
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Nov 9, 2015 01:14
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IIRC the alien stuff was also done all in color.
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Nov 9, 2015 01:23
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Lurdiak posted:Here's the skinny, basically: I don't like Kirkman but that's clever. It's like Nintendo including a lovely robot with the NES to get retailers to buy a video game system.
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Nov 9, 2015 01:24
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Len posted:The alien story probably would have been better than what we got. At least aliens would have changed up the formula some. Coulda been more like Half Life 2
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Nov 9, 2015 07:34
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Seriously, what did Kirkman do to eveyone here?
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Nov 9, 2015 10:27
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Norns posted:Seriously, what did Kirkman do to eveyone here? He wrote some really bad Marvel comics.
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Nov 9, 2015 10:28
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So basically the original pitch for TWD was Plan 9 From Outer Space?
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Nov 9, 2015 13:55
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Lurdiak posted:He wrote some really bad
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Nov 9, 2015 14:40
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Alright cool goon hyperbole. Got it
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Nov 9, 2015 15:27
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Marvel Zombies fulfilled that zombie alien thing he promised, i guess
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Nov 9, 2015 15:57
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Norns posted:Seriously, what did Kirkman do to eveyone here? I don't know about anyone else but I got tired of The Walking Dead because it just felt repetitive to me. There seemed to be a plot outline that went: A: They get to a place B: Bad stuff happens but they overcome. Maybe someone loses some humanity in the process? C: Things look like they're going to get better D: Suddenly poo poo really hits the fan, lots of people die, go back to A. I haven't read an issue in a long time though so I may be wrong and maybe it's not like that anymore. But that's why I stopped reading.
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Nov 9, 2015 16:41
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Okay that's fair. His writing gets repetitive after 100 plus issues. Understandable. It's been years since I've read TWD. I just recently read all the Outcast issues and loved them, so just really confused. Sorry about the derail in what has quickly become one of my favorite threads.
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Nov 9, 2015 17:11
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Didn't Kirkman say at one point that he hates endings, so TWD is never going to have any sort of resolution or anything? I could have sworn I saw that a while back.
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Nov 9, 2015 17:14
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The only thing I have against Kirkman is how he's know as Mr. Walking Dead and it seems like no one ever cares about Invincible. I stopped reading it a while ago because it feels like he doesn't even care about it. And also it wasn't very good when I stopped reading it, but still!
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Nov 9, 2015 18:07
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Unmature posted:The only thing I have against Kirkman is how he's know as Mr. Walking Dead and it seems like no one ever cares about Invincible. I stopped reading it a while ago because it feels like he doesn't even care about it. And also it wasn't very good when I stopped reading it, but still! Invincible used to have a nice balance of upbeat fun and "oh god there's blood everywhere" but it became too cynical over time and I couldn't take it anymore. The rape issue was when I decided I was done and I haven't looked back since.
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Nov 9, 2015 19:03
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Unmature posted:The only thing I have against Kirkman is how he's know as Mr. Walking Dead and it seems like no one ever cares about Invincible. I stopped reading it a while ago because it feels like he doesn't even care about it. And also it wasn't very good when I stopped reading it, but still!
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Nov 9, 2015 19:32
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redbackground posted:I don't think anyone actually does anymore. How could anyone possibly get tired of an endless string of disembowellings and Nothing Will Ever be the Same Agains?
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Nov 9, 2015 19:55
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redbackground posted:I don't think anyone actually does anymore.
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Nov 9, 2015 19:56
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Invincible is just way too loving depressing and cynical and it never goes anywhere but more depressing and cynical.
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Nov 9, 2015 23:06
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Isn't invincible in the middle of a reboot in which Mark's mind is back to right before he had powers, but he still has all the knowledge that he previously had. That could lead to some interesting stories and hopefully kirkman dialling back some of the depressing stuff.
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Nov 10, 2015 00:02
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